Whats needed is a massive database showing evey e-mail sent by every body, every website visited by every person, then application of existing law (copywright, obscene publications, fraud act etc).

That way we could impreson the really bad, fine the naughty and worry the rrest.

Then everybody will realise that we a 1.watching, and 2.Responding.

Oh, hang about, we're building the databse right now.. on the grounds of "stop terrorists",

It'll all work out in the end.. <sigh>

So according to the lib dems it's OK to do this as long as it's done 'for the children'?

Glad to see El Reg sitting down and actually getting some realistic figures together. Planning a UK flight to Jupiter might be great boost for national morale and would make for some great government soundbites but once you figure out the cost in hard terms, you see just how unworkable (or 'bonkers') the concept is.

Gordo isn't dipping into my pockets to pay for this content rating scheme.

put Andy Burnham out of our misery. The man is a complete tit.

Sounds like UKGov wants to revive the original AOL idea - closed web comminities with pre-approved content providers. Well if we're nationalising the banks we might as well bring the soviet all the way back. Maybe China could send us some cultural advisers - oh and everyone's favourite search engine is good to go.

I have a simpler solution - ban children from the Internet. Children aren't allowed to drink alcohol because it's deemed harmful to them. Children aren't allowed to smoke because it's deemed harmful to them. Children aren't allowed to drive because they aren't deemed mature enough to do so. Children aren't allowed to have sex because they aren't deemed mature enough to do so.

If there's content on the Internet which is dangerous to them and/or which they're not mature enough to deal with, why is this not just the simplest solution all round? Deal with the problem at source and leave the rest of us alone.

An Internet Protection Mechanism is already available. It requires no technical knowledge to implement (so even an idiot like Burnham could do it). It's available in every household.

It's called a parent or guardian. I think it should be used more widely.

YouTube is (thankfully) a US company so would just ignore any UK laws.

We already know what would happen if these fools tried to filter stuff arriving on these shores. In the USA, certain newsgroups were thought by busybodies to be unsuitable, so many ISPs, instead of bothering to filter, just took down access to ALL newsgroups.

When YouTube is banned in the UK as the content is unclassified, can we expect Mr Burham to then complain that he can't get his political videos shown on it, a la John McCain?

they start regretting not pushing harder for a .xxx domain.

As that Britney fan might have said, LEAVE IT ALONE! JUST LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! I'M SERIOUS!

Firstly, for the NuLabour fans out there, if you want to set up a national firewall why not do it as a PFI tender? (I assume some Chinese consortium would manage the lowest bid, so we'd all get the great filtering experience that they enjoy over there.

Secondly, for those still on Planet Earth, why not encourage the general drift already occuring towards an alignment of domain names and legal jurisdictions. (The IPv4 address space is somewhat balkanised, but we could do it as part of the IPv6 migration that we ought to be doing anyway.) UK.gov could then legislate that anything within *.uk must adhere to content labelling policies (the technical details of which have been standardised for some time). This method requires no army of censors and doesn't piss off law-abiding adults.

You see, Jacqui, regulating *your* bit of the internet is not hard, but you aren't allowed to regulate the bits that don't belong to you, so the very first thing you need to do is create an algorithmic means of identifying *your* bits. To put it in IT terms, you can't authorise until after you've authenticated.

By the sounds of it, this might lead to the Web 2.0 I've been hearing about (there was an article about this on a related website with a Q in the name last week sometime).

Where the ultimate goal is to have isp ofter subscription to WEBSITES, not the world wide web and you would only have access to what the government would approve of.

So its basically means the end of free speech on the web if the government decides it doesnt like what your saying. Kind of like parliament square where your allowed to have your say as long as if you have a permit. But they can always say no at the permit stage hence you are committing a crime if you disobey them.

Not to meantion the huge effect it will have on online bussinesses, dont pay the right back handers to whatever orginasion and your stuffed up a certain smelly creek without a paddle.

And i'm sorry to say this seems to be the world we're heading for.

*\. Mines the one with "Just because your paranoid, doesnt mean their not watching you" writtern on the back.

It's all part of Labour's grand plan to add another 1 million dedicated Labour voters to the civil service payroll. Because every ISP in the land will go bust if forced to employ their own smut watchers, the government will have to do it for them.

It's none of the government's bloody business what I watch, who I talk to, what I talk about... *I* am responsible for my own viewing and for that of my family below legal age. As is every other user. Once again, yet another pointless and expensive system to prevent the use of something purely on the grounds of 'theeenk of theee cheeeldren!'

Bah.

Nobody makes you read anything on the net. It's your choice. If you are offended then you made the wrong choice. If you let your children visit sites that offend them, then you're a bad parent.

Words aren't frightening, *truths* are frightening. People who claim they fear words, really fear *truths*. So which truths do uk.gov want us to conceal?

Jacqui Smith is not a fit leader, her choices are not better than other people choices, other people who have opposing views are not aiding terrorists despite what Hoon says.

What risks 'she's prepared to take' is unimportant, she won't leave her home at night for fear of crime, she's not prepared to take ANY risks even in normal life, but that doesn't mean we should all live under curfew just because she's a nutjob.

She is supposed to defend the basic freedoms, free speech, privacy etc. She won't and therefore she's not fit to be in position of power.

"Ask most legislators about it..."

But it shouldn't be "legislators" that you ask. You should ask the people, and then have the legislators draft laws accordingly.

The implied notion that they are the masters illustrates perfectly how we are moving towards a left-wing statist dictatorship.

Also, the idea that lack of government intervention is in some way "forbearance" just shows the arrogance of these people. So if the government isn't controlling it, that shows restraint on their part?

Bastards

They can prise my internet smut out of my cold dead hands.

Which reminds me of a video I saw on the internet recently....

"pushing harder for a .xxx domain." fnar fnar.

I like that word. It describes UK.Gov perfectly.

amen broth/sist-er

Sounds like my ideal job - index-linked pension for watching porn 6 hours a day. Where do I apply?

"The internet considers censorship as "damage" and routes around it."

Any attempt to regulate will be met with the same answer.

http://freenetproject.org/

The Ministry for Truth and Mental Wellnes shall take care of you all.

This all makes me angry on so many levels I don't think I can express myself anymore.

It's the kind of thing that in any reasonably responsible nation would lead to someone losing their job for being at best an idiot at worst a fascist idiot.

At the end of the day stupid people die and get hurt, it's not my problem, should of used their brain. People who arn't careful die and get hurt, again still not my f-----g problem, and more often then not plain old unlucky people die and get hurt - again not my problem. Unless it happens to me, but then, that isn't your problem, it's mine.

The number of people that die and get injured from stupid f------g s--t and bad luck way out weighs the number of people murdered, wounded, and messed up by other people.

It's a shame the mainstream media are no more then establishment sock puppets (and lets face it, the internet is as bigger threat to mainstream media as it is to politicos - all those ideas and information) so they have vested interests in seeing it censored, divided, and spoon fed.

O well, I'm hungry.

Time to head into Freenet.

"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"

--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Follow the rabbit

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Sack-Ms-Smith/

Curry, concerned that there may still be some money in the UK has come up with a genius new way to spunk said money. Upon delivery of the new shiny Calvinist Internet, Curry was also pleased to boast that the UK has solved world poverty, slashed carbon emmissions by 100% and generally saved mankind.

Why doesn't the UK government save a shed-load of money by simply outsourcing Internet policing to the People's Republic of China?

I'm very unhappy about this. I just posted an off topic missal on the exact same proble as a jibe at the BBC.

I am displeased to find that the commie reprobates on here are of a similar mind.

Its a bit like on Hot Fuzz where they death cult always repeat in unison 'For the Greater Good'

Well they can stick their 'Greater Good' where the sun doesn't shine.

This proposal could almost be put forward as scientific proof that the ministers and policy-makers at the Dept of Culture are simply retarded,

Either that ot they fail utterly to understand (or even read up) on what they are talking about.

To call them Monkeys would be an insult to monkeys.

This isn't just stupidity. It's far-left control-freak stupidity, and it must not be tolerated in any way. YouTube would not hire thousands of censors to please these idiots - if forced, they'd either give up entirely or just shut off access from the UK entirely. We need to stamp them out before this gains any more traction and it's too late to fix!

I'm all in favour of the government setting regulatory bodies to stop me doing stupid stuff which might hurt me. But statistically the internet is FAR less dangerous, than, say, crossing the road - and I think we should start building this new relationship between government and citizen in the areas where citizens are most at risk from their own stupidity.

So I propose setting up a new body called OFFROAD - and this is how it works. Every time I want to cross the road, I have to call up OFFROAD, who will send out a trained risk assessor to check out the safety of the road-crossing decision I have decided to make, before I'm allowed to cross.

And if OFFROAD works well as a pilot project, we could then move on to setting up a body to reduce accidents and injuries in supermarket car-parks - which we might call OFFTROLLEY...

Well, here we go again, with Andy Burnham, a man of no known talent or experience (degree -> political researcher -> union hack -> MP -> minster) showing that under Neues Arbeit, citizens are no longer considered capable of making rational decisions about what is and is not appropriate.

Well, what should one expect from a Catholic educated English graduate who has never worked outside politics?

This is the moron, remember, who was Chief Secretary to the Treasury when Northern Rock went tits-up, despite knowing the square root of fuck all about economics.

He's now proposing internet censorship. I wonder how much he knows about the internet?

Strength through Ignorance indeed!

i mean.. with bit torrent, changing your DNS, encryption etc...

I have a suggestion or two.

1) Don't let Ofcom anywhere near t'internet. They are making enough of a mess of TV, Radio and Telecoms. Before we know it, we will all be expected to bid for bandwidth.

2) Concentrate on the stuff on the interweb that is actually illegal in the UK (which is of course almost everything these days), and not just what some Daily Mail reader thinks is immoral.

3) Parents could maybe consider keeping a watchful eye on their darling offspring. Rather than saying, "There is the worlds largest collection of pr0n, violence and Wikitruth, go entertain yourselves", maybe they could apply some parenting skills.

I don't like the idea of 'across the board' content filtering... bit too Chinese for my tastes.

Paris.... because I am sure she would be considered immoral. But not to worry... I already downloaded the video.

What surprises me is that regulation hasn't been done sooner. For the last decade & a half the internet has been associated with many terrible things, e.g. Columbine massacre, David Copeland, child abuse, etc., yet not really until the last few years has anything been done to tame the beast. Is it that the technology hasn't really existed until now? The problem is that governments can legislate themselves until their blue in the face, but it doesn't necessarily make the problem go away. This country is still awash with drugs, despite their illegality. My suspicion is that attempts to regulate the internet are more to do with money (internet piracy & the undermining of more traditional media) & politics (undermining of traditional parties, with any Tom, Dick or Harry able to get his point across to millions of people with the few clicks of a mouse). It is convenient for governments & certain businesses to try to leash the anarchy of the web. The problem is that the internet is so ubiquitous that everyone who has access, provides services, etc. has a vested interest. Some people want change, some people want it to stay the same. I think there will be a technological arms race if there are attempts to control or track internet users. People will develop tools to cover their tracks or encrpyt their traffic. Governments will find away around it, ad infinitum.

Hear, hear.

Why do they think everything has to be child-friendly? This is an adult world. Aspirez-la, chiennes!

"I have a simpler solution - ban children from the Internet".

How exactly? Its all very well to draw parallels with driving, drinking and sex. The first you can only do in public (and note please its not illegal for a 14 year old to drive on private land) the second is only regulated in public (again, a 14 year old can drink in his own home) and the last - well, the UK is only the european capital of underage pregnancy so /thats/ been successful.

IRL people 'do' the internet in private and there's no ID check before logging in. Or aer you suggesting that ?

And back in the real real world, 1000s of schools would be totally screwed with a) in-class work and b) homework. My son even submits some of his homework by email, never mind doing all the research online.

Some of the responsibility has to lie with parents. The rest has to lie with the government; specifically educating parents.

A parent that allows their child to use the Internet without supervision or filtering (that's self imposed filtering, mind) of any kind can be equated to a parent allowing their child to play hopscotch on the M6.

However, if said parent doesn't understand what the dangers are, then said parent cannot be expected to act appropriately and responsibly.

This is the only solution that stands half a chance of making any difference.

Exactly! Been saying it for ages, "da web" was designed for adults, by adults with adult content. Same as the real world. In the real world we have safe playgrounds, where we know our kids are safe, the internet has providers like AOL who will do the same. If you don't like it, then by all means feel free to complain to who is displaying it, but don't expect miracles.

I have been using it for donkey's, since 1992, only when I have gone looking for slightly iffy gear, have I come across anything dodgy. I use safe secure email addresses, get about 2 spam emails a week, haven't caught a virus or spyware for over 2 years, since I started using Linux and putting plenty of AV software on the WIn boxes. It's not hard, it's called understanding your interests and making an effort to do things correctly, a practice that seems to have fallen out of favour in our "everything in manageable chunks and at 90mph" society.

The internet just like the real world, has god places and some terrible places, wise-up or get off!

If there are immature people in your house (Daily Mail Readers, Politicians, and suchlike) there are plenty of options that you as a responsible adult can enforce.

There are many "Net-Nanny" type programs which can stop your children blundering into areas where they should not be, or you can monitor what they visit. This is all about being a responsible parent/adult.

Funnily enough we can do all this ourselves. We do not need Jaqui's stasi, Any Bumham, or any of these other losers or Buff-Hoons involved.

Two World wars etc

What next, child safe f------g strip clubs? Nightclubs? Alchole?

As we now have a "Minister for Truth" and a "Minister for Justice", is a " Minister for The American Way" far behind?

Or is that just the alternative name for "Prime Minister"?

One scary point is that when i read "Ministry of Truth" i didn't bat an eyelid... it wasn't until i read the next few words that i realized this was a pun and not (yet) a reality.

Regardless of the technical aspects to content filtering etc there is the social aspect. If they try and block the p0rn then there will be riots up and down the country. They can mess up the economy, they can mess up the schools, they can mess up everything.... but they cant take our p0rn!

You forgot one factor in your calculations: although a large part of the content on YouTube is in English, don't forget that a lot of it is in other languages. Therefore, you need to add to the 4000 employees a large number of translators and interpreters in all languages known to man (if I was a terrorist, maybe I would send messages in an obscure or extinct language), some linguists to identify whether the content is safe or whether there is any innuendo in it, etc. Plus, most people doing that sort of job in real life such as for the film industry, usually need to play border-line movies more than once and to more than one person in order to classify it properly. All said and done, sounds more like 40,000 people needed to do the job for YouTube only. Then there are all the other web sites with subversive content, like El Reg. And hey presto, we're all employed by the government watching over each other's shoulder, no unemployment anymore: result!

He was a dick then and still is now.

Why do they make it so hard, regulating the Internet would be easy. Just make a large "firewall" around all UK connections. Any UK sites have to get a license for £1000 each, evil foreign sites would have to be on a white list. I'm sure our politicians have some friends somewhere in the world to sell them the technology.

The government should concentrate on the more important things like regulating the weather, no more wet summers like 2007.

Also regulating the planets would be highly advantageous, we could control the future!

P.S. Lobby the government to ban ponds and large puddles, before we are left with no children in the country at all.

If they want people to stop committing suicide, maybe they should address the reasons why and not try to remove all instructions. It's counter productive, like the fucking morons in schools that don't want kids knowing about contraception.

RSI could be an issue; I'd love to see their risk assessment and mitigation document...

The one with the half empty packet of Kleenex® For Men in the pocket. It's Time To Let It Out (TM)

Official p0rn reviewer.

In 1996 I was working at PSINet when we received a letter from Scotland Yard, or some such, asking us to remove distribution of a set of newgroups based on their content. In order to check that the content hadn't moved to other newsgroups one of the sysadmins kindly volunteered to trawl through the other groups in the alt.binaries hierarchy. I'm sure he'd volunteer to supervise this :)

Whenever I hear a nonentity in a suit utter anything containing phrases like "...just one child..." or "...for the children...", I drift off into an increasingly frequent recurring, waking dream:

-----

Hello! You're swaying about too much. Could you just lean against that tree there? Ta.

Damn! The bloody thing's not loaded. Hold on a sec... Ok.

Want a fag? No? It won't affect your long term health, guaranteed! Still no? Ok,

Say "cheese"!

BANG!

Oops! He's down and there's all red on his chest... Better loosen his wallet then head off in case I'm somehow implicated - it was a simple accident after all, I was aiming at his head. Thank God these woods are so isolated...

-----

Then the mists clear and reality rudely intrudes and I'm I'm looking at the goggle box with the same self-satisfied turd looking pleased as punch about chipping away at our freedoms and privacy. Reach for the blood pressure pills and wonder if it's too damn early for a big whisky... Oh well, the sun's over the yardarm somewhere, probably Munich...

All this one is going to do is encourage the use of offshore VPN providers and Onion Routing networks, to obfuscate what is being viewed from where. As has been demonstrated numerous times before, the Internet has a lot of extremely clever, devious people on it who have already seen most of the filtering tricks these muppets are proposing and have solutions already in place.

The UK will then turn into a two-tier society: censored morons (AKA Labour voters) and Everyone Else.

"This proposal could almost be put forward as scientific proof that the ministers and policy-makers at the Dept of Culture are simply retarded"

If only it were just the dept of culture. Unfortunately it's UK.gov as a whole that's decided that the Internet is worthy of their attention, which is why there are three ministers so far have decided they've got to regulate it in some way or another (Burnham, Smith, and Hoon) and there'll be more to come. Probably tax evasion or avoidance will be the next reason given the state of the economy.

Another excellent article El Reg!

Keep up the good work

Mines the coat with the logo censored

It may be suprising to some to learn that the firewall teams within BT are referred to as 'Hadrian' :)

Mind you, I think this has something to do with them all being based in Glasgow (apart from the few in Edinburgh).

If a programme like 'You've been Framed' started to show videos without reviewing them first it wouldn't take long before unsuitable content was broadcast to millions of families. Then there would be a public outcry, questions would be rasied in Parliament and ITV heads would roll.

But for some reason the Internet doesn't seem to work this way. It should, of course - the arguments for stopping 10 year olds viewing hardcore pr0n are just as compelling for a PC screen as a TV screen. Do we accuse government of Nazi tendencies because the 9pm watershed exists? Or because you can't show simulated rape pr0n at ANY time of day or night on TV? Of course not.

It seems to me that the problem here isn't with the idea of regulating the internet per se, but is the fact that a) it will cost us money and b) we don't trust New Labour to do it. If YouTube need 2,600 employees to monitor its content, then that's what we have to pay for. We pay for our safety in the real world by employing hundreds of thousands of police officers, H&S regulators etc, so why not for the internet? And someone has to organise it!

I'm a liberal, and really dislike governments telling us what we can and can't do - but you don't have to be an anarchist to be pro individual freedoms. We have seen in the financial markets that the complete absence of regulation leads to chaos. The best solution is to have a genuinely objective, expert led cross-party look at internet censorship so that the rules are determined by reason rather than by party politics and personal moral agendas. I know that rationally determined policy making doesn't sound very New Labour, but someone needs to do something. A wholesale turning of a blind eye on the part of the IT community leaves many millions of vulnerable people around the world open to abuse.

UK.Gov says: regulate the internet.

Reg readers say: regulate the government.

UK.Gov says: deregulate business, regulate citizens.

Reg readers say: we're going to bury you at the next election.

And so as we say a sad farewell to Andy Pandy, Wacky Jaqui and Hoon the Loon, let us not forget the other players in this tragedy: Bonkers Broon, Mandy Mandelson, Snake-oil Blair, Alibi Campbell and the hundreds of MPs who were whipped and browbeaten into submission during this long running farce.

That post was a joke, right? I mean...please tell me that was a joke. Nobody can really think like that. It's the archetypal form of DoubleThink

Yeah - but who ........

Oh never mind - I think I'm going to take up incessant loud humming

And exactly where are these ideal people to regulate (censor) the internets?

Ahhh there arn't any becouse it's all opinion and everyones opinion stinks. If it ain't broke don't fix it, I've never met a teenagers whose f-----g killed himself becouse he's watched a hard core rape movie, but I have known of teenagers who've topped themselves becouse their parents were repressed arss holes or becouse the kids at school were made of s--t or becouse the filth persecuted them for no reason other then they shagged their 15 year old girlfriend.

The internet isn't anarchy, it isn't a governable space, it's data pure and simple and only oppressive power hungry pigs try and limit the data people can get their hands on. Hardcore porn doesn't just appear, you have to look for it, and if you want hardcore pronz that's any good you need to look rather hard.

Anyway if we're gonna start banning s---- from the internet becouse it's offensive and dangerous, I'd like to forward my list.

1. Religion (killed more people then anything else in history)

2. The Daily Mail (it offends me on many levels)

3. The NuGuv websites (they offend me on more levels then I can contemplate)

4. Anything to do with homosexual men (What you do in your own room, or clubs is your business, but I don't want to have to see pictures of it online. Lesbians are fine though, well as long as they're hot.)

5. French people (I just don't like them - I had a crazy French aupear when I was a kid)

6. First person shooters, reviews and the people that fap to them.

7. Naruto, one piece and Bleach, and the people that like them.

8. Shows/films/sites that are violent for no reason other then to be violent.

9. Welsh (the language in general, don't need it.)

10. People that like crappy romcoms, and crappy romcoms.

11. Crappy yank sitcoms.

12. Merlin.

13. Anything that annoys me at the time.

Don't like my opinion? Well F--- you, you don't count!

I think my list probably says something about allowing group A force their opinions on group B. Just becouse person a: thinks that it is a s--t corrupting influence doesn't mean everyone agrees.

Cross party? F--- that, the tories, labour and lib dems all eat from the same troth, it'd be made of "interested parties" feminists, child "protection" agencies, religious, media representives and other respectable s---faces who should be fired from a cannon into the moon. I'm pretty sure Mary Whitehouse had support from f----g psychos from all parties.

Ministry of Culture, ffs, it should just be renamed Ministy of Thougt Crime, or Ministry of Wellness. Home office is ministry of truth.

Ahhh arse.

"Ofcom may have discovered a cunning plan to find jobs for tens of thousands and banish smut"

OFCOM

could

not

find

their

own

arse

with

both

hands

and

a

map!

I think we are missing the point here.

It is obvious that this is not happening to monitor everything. It is not doable.

What this is really about in my opinion is for the government (or whoever might call the shots) to be able to "legally" shut down anything they wish on the internet. So if something is spreads more than it should, they can have a way of stopping it.

This video would probably be on the top of the "bad" content: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912&hl=en

...the west follows.

You would also need to factor in the need for counsellors or psychologists for those poor unfortunates that have to watch all the violent/pornographic crap. Or set aside a sizeable pool of cash to pay for lawsuits said people will invariably bring because they claim that their job turned them into preverts or turned them off sex altogether. On second thoughts, maybe you should keep the pool of cash secret to avoid giving ideas to these workers.

Of course, you could always take a leaf from A Clockwork Orange and force prisoners to do the filtering as a modern form of the Ludovico technique. No porno for Joe Citizen to watch. Zero recidivism from released prisoners. Win-Win!

I'd suggest Tor, but there's so much overhead that the lag is phenomenal. 2Mb line crawls like dialup.

I'd suggest Freenet, but about the only things you can find on there at the moment are terrorist manuals and "questionable" images (at least in title). Darknets are no better, as nobody has any consistent enough uptime to keep the networks alive.

I'd suggest anonymous proxies, but they aren't anonymous enough.

I'd suggest voting out the people responsible for this, but the torch will be passed.

We're fucked.

That'd cost OfCom or whoever actually does the work at least ~£83k per DAY paying their staff minimum wage. Youtube's a 24/365 operation so that's about £31Million a year just so staff can watch a lot of videos of kittens and occasionally find an exceptionally dumb Terrorist who doesn't realise that Youtube is actually under surveilance. Then add all the IT infrastructure OpEx costs (not to mention the start-up costs!) and then add staff, management, random beaurocrats thrown in, and you could probably double it.

Good move, Jackie! We can really see you know what you're doing...

Youre forgetting something. We have to rewrite history. Its full of HORRIBLE things. We should employ the unemployed to go through the old stuff, and cross out all the icky bits. I for one, do not want my children to read icky stuff. For them - its a steady diet of X-factor and High School Musical until they're 25 or so.

So government, please, clean up history for the children.

Currie should either be referred to as David Currie (if you read Ofcom's site, that is their exclusive mode), or as Lord Currie.

Lord firstname lastname is strictly for courtesy peers - sons of hereditary peers.

And for the record - I'm a yank.

Alien - because I am one (faucet/sneakers kind)

from this Stalinist government?

That's the thing that worries me more than anything on the internet.

He's still my MP and he's still a dick ...... save me !!!!!!!

Do we allow children to drive cars? No.

Do we allow children to go into pubs and drink alcohol? No.

Do we allow children to go into cinemas and watch 18 certificate films? No.

So the answer is simple, we simply ban children from the internet entirely!

I'm sure we could get the Daily Mail onside, any parent found allowing their child to access the internet should be arrested and charged for neglect and failing to protect their kiddies from all that nasty stuff, *that* should teach them a lesson!

Or (ok, I know this is a stupid idea, but...) how about we expect parents to be *responsible* for the upbringing of their children and monitoring what they do online?

Nah, that's daft and wouldn't allow our Big Brother Government to introduce even more ridiculous and unworkable Thought Crime legislation...

I think there is an opportunity to regulate the internet for children. This could be achieved through a children's internet portal. A children's internet portal would at least give a tool to parents to help prevent children from being exposed to extremism, hate, violence and pornography. Parents would have to exercise some responsibility to ensure that their children's computers, mobile phones, games consoles, etc were set up to use such a portal.

I am sure the government could easily come up with a suitably bureaucratic nightmare of system for getting sites included in the children's internet portal.

Trying to sanitise and filter the whole internet for the adult population is a step too far. However It would be useful to have a more publicised system for reporting illegal sites, so that where necessary the authorities could take appropriate legal action or follow up with the authorities who had jurisdiction over such websites. Reporting might be made easier by having a suitable reporting add-on available for Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.

Porn allows people with unfulfilling sex lives, or no sex life at all, to vicariously enjoy some approximation to a good sex life. it doesn't matter if the root cause is age, weight, appearance, an uncooperative husband/wife/partner in sin/one-night-stand, taste in sexual matters, physical incapacity or disability, or whatever: the simple fact is that without porn a lot of people would lead lives of considerably greater sexual frustration than they do with it.

What I smell in this nonsense is the Dworkian nonsense "all intercourse is rape" transmogrified into "all depictions of sex are BAD and DEGRADING TO WOMEN."

In point of fact, when some lame-brain feminist made just that assertion, someone asked, well, what about boy-boy porn? This produced a reply that it still objectified women (in some mysterious way). A real Jacqui Smith kind of reply, wouldn't you say?

All together now: PORN IS GOOD! PORN IS GOOD! PORN IS GOOD!

But what about the children, says some idiot? Maybe it's *good* for children to see depictions of adults having sex? It should produce a generation with a lot fewer sexual hangups than those that have gone before. I've yet to see any objective evidence that exposure to porn harms children.

As usual, HM govt lies about their real motives. Somebody in govt thinks porn is dirty nasty stuff so it has to be suppressed. Otherwise how can they create the truly-clean minded New British Man?

I was 12 when I found my first grumble mag discarded in some nearby woods. Not only did my kidneys not explode, neither was I mentally disturbed, corrupted or in any other way harmed - it nudged me towards the path of true happiness and enlightenment.

pr0n - for the life you've not yet had™

As for the anonymous coward way up the page who wrote:

"My son even submits some of his homework by email, never mind doing all the research online."

That's what was known ten years ago as cheating. Homework = cut&paste - done in five minutes and straight onto WoW, sweet - "research"...(cough).

Also, when he's doing his "research" can you hear what can only be described as a "smacking" noise as if a very slobbery dog was shaking his chops side-to-side in slow motion? And five minutes later do you hear the fan in the toilet come on? Followed by the sound of the toilet roll holder squeaking?

Have you done your homework son? Grin...

"Is there more rape at the equator or Northpole, these are the questions that cross my mind when the power goes out. Now I don't mean in total, as there are alot more people at the equator then the North pole. Now lots of people would say the equator, becouse theres alot of people in little clothes and alot of f---ing going on, now that's why I say that there isn't as much rape at the equator, becouse there's alot of f---ing going on. Where as the eskimo, he goes to his missus 'hey wanna get it on tonight' and his missus goes 'hell no the windchill factors 300 below!' So I recon these esqimos just build up until they can't take it anymore and they gotta rape somebody!

Now the biggest problem facing the eskimo rapist is how do you get wet leather leggings off a womans whose kicking."

To paraphrase George Carlin.

Thing is, porn, sex, smut, and f---ing make the world a safer place, everybody likes it, and everybody wants it, except maybe a few demented politicians and the filth (the filth only like it when they're using a toilet plunger on a black man - go figure) but hey ho. Welcome to the West.

It's all bulls--t - I remember coming across some Guro when I was a kid, man I didn't look at hentai for 10 years after that s---. It didn't warp me, it did give me a few interesting ideas for stories though, and it's been an image that's stuck with me ever since. I remember finding porn mags in my stepdads draw, and I found my big bros porn mags. Now days the filth would probably lock them both up for corrupting a minor or some such bull----, first thing I did when i found the smut was show it to my mates.

I knew a guy (10 years older then me) who when he was at school used to sell individual pages of porn mags to the other kids at school. Porn doesn't corrupt it just gives you something different to beat the meat too. Society needs to pull its head out of its arse and realise hot damn censorship don't fix s--t, rebuilding local communites, focusing on people having to make choices, risk taking, common sense. That's what these politicos should be focusing on, but will they? Will they f---- you can't tell the daily mail/sun/mirror/etc crowd they need to take some f---ing responsibility for the state this s----y country is in, hell no, just ban some s--- and censor some other s--- then shoot a few brown people, (if you can't find browns blacks, yellow or eastern european will do), and say you'll get tough on some fad at the time. F--- responsibility, just take the filth off the leash and get some easy points.

Grab what you can, coz we're going to hell, lets just hope the seas rise and swallow this whole sorry s--- hole killing everyone for our collective social idiocy.

Tshhh....

Surely that's the parent's job? If visiting San Francisco, would you let little B1FF & Buffy loose alone in the Tenderloin or Hunters Point? Or even Fisherman's Wharf, for that matter ... Put the fscking computers in common living space and keep an eye on your kids, FFS! It's the ONLY way of making sure that your kids aren't surfing where you don't want them to surf based on your own ethics, morals, ethos, religion, political bent, regional opinion, etc.

There is absolutely no way for any single government to create filters that will sanitize the internet in an effective manor that will make all parents certain that their kids are protected from content that the parents find offensive. It's blatantly impossible.

Besides, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (I think I got that quote right ... Latin classes were many moons ago, in a high school far, far away ... I'm pretty sure it was Juvenal, though.)

I boil over any suggestion of internet censorship but where do you draw the line? Child porn sites and instructions for bomb-making/terrorism are unacceptable, in my opinion but other sites containing perfectly legal porn, (which may not be unacceptable to some folk, but they don`t have to look at them) should not be restricted. It`s all a matter of taste, y`know! Anyway, how do you police it, without having an army of cross-eyed civil servants glued to a screen (or maybe three or four, if government can find the money for that many) all day?

Forgot to add something to my previous comment. Just how much does Joe public (non-geeks) know about all these proposed censorship/interception schemes? I don`t suppose they get to read specialised newsletters. Doesn`t seem to make the mainstream TV news or tabloid newspapers. It`s about time it did.

ID, joined up CTV, DNA, Medical Records, Uber Comms DB, RIPA ?? is there really much left once they start to licence the internet?

Uhh sorry folks - BLACK LIST = IMPOSSIBLE .... WHITE LIST = EASY

Anyone want to bet on when the white list is going to win out? Oy ..Reg - got your licence to give opinion to the plebs? Licence = be nice to NuGov (and this quango) and stop that comment section - you naughty little reds.

Difficult to believe that less than a century ago Labour were the "party of the people " - a few years in power and they are just the same waste of space wankers they threw out back then.. Oy NuGov - remember the STASI? Eric? (wall, gun - dead?)

Incidentally - 2 children have been killed on my road in the past 6 months - would you like to spend some of that 12b (couple of hundred pounds maybe ) on some kind of traffic measures because that is 2 more than have ever been killed by your terrorist / paedophile conspiracy in my world - EVER

"you are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament; I will put an end to your sitting".

V f D MFKRS

I also vote for a V f D icon BTW

That is the way to do this. And if you have a sex site block all the IPs coming from schools and universities.

What they cannot see cannot hurt them, so come on Ofcom cough up the IP numbers that you use to look at stuff, a lot of us will happily block you and tell others how to do it as well.

Trust us most of the business models that work online don't work with children or Ofcom as their customer. Their usage of these systems I would say borders on fraud, we are out to make money, not have regulators hack onto our systems reducing performance for real paying customers. A computer system is a finite resource, it is not some broadcast where it costs the same to service millions of people, there usage of our systems is unwanted and costly and we want to keep them out.

the internet is not like tv.

the internet is like the Real World (tm)

Take Responsibility for your kids, or don't have kids in the first place.

It Isn't the government's job to raise your kids.

.gov.uk is obviously impressed by .gov.au's ideas. In .au it is being pushed on the middle-to-right part of the labor gov by the far-right-religious-nut party senate member so they get his vote, as he holds the balance of power in the upper house. Don't blame it on left or right, blame it on authoritarian gov of all persuasions.

i signed the petition (nice one btw), but the count didn't change. what's up with that?

was 148 before i signed (and confirmed) and is still 148 after.. (as of this moment).

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Sack-Ms-Smith/

swtich the interweb off? After all HMG has had quite a fair whack of VAT on computing devices... not only that, it would save electric too. Nasty terrorists and rogue scientists/states/et al wouldn't be able to blow us up :D "Wacky Jacqui" (and Burnham) aren't educated (she doesn't have enough credentials in reality either) enough to make decisions like this. Firewall United Kingdom anyone?

Paris, cos she looks nice, at least.

In your posts under the heading Kraft durch Dummheit, you keep mentioning this amazing group "!Neues Arbeit." But don't you remember that "Arbeit macht frei"?

There's probably a ticket to gitmo pinned to it now.