5 ms·

One of the "porn" sites Newsnight tested as Reddit.

DanBC 13y ago
There is a lot of porn available on Reddit. The filter is a stupid idea. But including Reddit on an opt-out porn filter is reasonable.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  All of reddit? There is also a lot of educational stuff on there. If the filter works by blocking entire domains then this is clearly unworkable when you consider how much of the internet's content is hosted on a small number of sites.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    > There is also a lot of educational stuff on there. Not if you define "lot" by "proportion of the whole". The ratio of posts or megabytes of educational:not-educational is going to disappoint many people. Obviously the flaw there is suggesting that not-educational is worthy of blocking. The ratio of not-educational-but-not-offensive:porn/hate-speech/trolling/other-filter-fodder is much better. I guess.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      The same is really true for just about any website with primarily user submitted content. Sites like reddit/youtube/blogger have very diverse content so you have to make a massive portion of the internet inaccessible to anybody who uses the connection. If you don't want the porn you can't have /r/askscience or /r/learnprogramming either. This will be further exacerbated if more sites start switching to full HTTPS.
- timje1 13y ago
  So you need to block Reddit, imgur and tumblr... Oh and twitter, there's a lot of porn posted on there. There's a lot of porn on wikipedia too, including stuff that'd be illegal in most jurisdictions. Better block that. 4chan as well, most discussion boards. Most forums. What are we left with? disney.com?
  - davidsong 13y ago
    I think that blocking children from going on all adult or loosely moderated sites is the only logical conclusion here, calling it a porn filter is dishonest.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      The filter blocks the content for everybody who shares the internet connection.
      - vidarh 13y ago
        That's the beauty of it - anyone who insists on opting in to this filter for their family will effectively cut themselves off from most of the internet. Meanwhile their kid will get a Pay as you go SIM and "borrow" their parents credit card for five minutes to disable the content filter (just does a 1 pound charge and reverses it for most companies, so chances are they'd not notice) and get access to whatever they want.
        timje1 13y ago
        The proponents of this filter are computer illiterate 50+ year old people, the conservative base. These are exactly the people that will not know about switching the filter off. Their children will get around the filters, but these dust-covered voters will believe that the internet is a little bit more cleaned up, and a lot less useful, than it really is. If you block porn you need to block user generated content, which excludes the vast majority of blogging and web 2.0 platforms. Self-imposed irrelevancy for the computer illiterate. We'll block ourselves from being able to access these new scary things, and then pretend like we've solved a problem.
    - drcube 13y ago
      I think that not censoring is the only logical conclusion here. The government isn't your kids' parents. Keep them off the internet if you've got a problem with it, or supervise them.
- yourad_io 13y ago
  Google can also be used to find porn (removing the safe-search is trivial). Google also caches webpages, which could be used to circumvent the filtering. (I just tried this - yes, they index porn pages as well) How is this magic bullet meant to stop kids looking at porn through things like Google Cache, Wayback machine, etc?
bliker 13y ago
How about imgur. There is lots of porn there, but blocking it that does not make sense, I am just using it for sharing screenshots.

DanBC 13y ago

There is a lot of porn available on Reddit. The filter is a stupid idea. But including Reddit on an opt-out porn filter is reasonable.

jiggy2011 13y ago
All of reddit? There is also a lot of educational stuff on there. If the filter works by blocking entire domains then this is clearly unworkable when you consider how much of the internet's content is hosted on a small number of sites.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > There is also a lot of educational stuff on there. Not if you define "lot" by "proportion of the whole". The ratio of posts or megabytes of educational:not-educational is going to disappoint many people. Obviously the flaw there is suggesting that not-educational is worthy of blocking. The ratio of not-educational-but-not-offensive:porn/hate-speech/trolling/other-filter-fodder is much better. I guess.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    The same is really true for just about any website with primarily user submitted content. Sites like reddit/youtube/blogger have very diverse content so you have to make a massive portion of the internet inaccessible to anybody who uses the connection. If you don't want the porn you can't have /r/askscience or /r/learnprogramming either. This will be further exacerbated if more sites start switching to full HTTPS.
timje1 13y ago
So you need to block Reddit, imgur and tumblr... Oh and twitter, there's a lot of porn posted on there. There's a lot of porn on wikipedia too, including stuff that'd be illegal in most jurisdictions. Better block that. 4chan as well, most discussion boards. Most forums. What are we left with? disney.com?
- davidsong 13y ago
  I think that blocking children from going on all adult or loosely moderated sites is the only logical conclusion here, calling it a porn filter is dishonest.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    The filter blocks the content for everybody who shares the internet connection.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      That's the beauty of it - anyone who insists on opting in to this filter for their family will effectively cut themselves off from most of the internet. Meanwhile their kid will get a Pay as you go SIM and "borrow" their parents credit card for five minutes to disable the content filter (just does a 1 pound charge and reverses it for most companies, so chances are they'd not notice) and get access to whatever they want.
      - timje1 13y ago
        The proponents of this filter are computer illiterate 50+ year old people, the conservative base. These are exactly the people that will not know about switching the filter off. Their children will get around the filters, but these dust-covered voters will believe that the internet is a little bit more cleaned up, and a lot less useful, than it really is. If you block porn you need to block user generated content, which excludes the vast majority of blogging and web 2.0 platforms. Self-imposed irrelevancy for the computer illiterate. We'll block ourselves from being able to access these new scary things, and then pretend like we've solved a problem.
  - drcube 13y ago
    I think that not censoring is the only logical conclusion here. The government isn't your kids' parents. Keep them off the internet if you've got a problem with it, or supervise them.
yourad_io 13y ago
Google can also be used to find porn (removing the safe-search is trivial). Google also caches webpages, which could be used to circumvent the filtering. (I just tried this - yes, they index porn pages as well) How is this magic bullet meant to stop kids looking at porn through things like Google Cache, Wayback machine, etc?

bliker 13y ago

How about imgur. There is lots of porn there, but blocking it that does not make sense, I am just using it for sharing screenshots.