Bad mothers cause web filtering for the masses
I was doing my daily browse (of internet newspapers, not porn) when I saw this and I just had to laugh.
The article basically says that the Government is about to unleash a series of measures with top UK internet providers to prevent children from accessing pornography online. They intend to force an 'opt-in' service where users who want to view porn have to register that particular interest with the provider. The reasons why this is stupid and will prove almost entirely ineffective surely number in the hundreds, but here are just a few.
1) Your average ten year old knows his/her way around Google. A quick search on how to avoid these imposed limits will bring up a number of solutions, DNS workarounds or proxy changes that get your child all the porn they'll ever want.
2) One word - Torrents. When Jimmy finds out that he can download hardcore foot fetish porn the same way he downloads Hannah Montana's latest album, you can bet there'll be a few hundred gigabytes of porn lurking somewhere on his hard drive, with little room for anything else.
3) Google! You can pretty much type anything in with safe search off (Which kids will find out how to disable pretty quickly) and up pops a few thousand jpegs worth of nudity.
4) I'm not really sure how the opt-in will work, but I doubt it will be on a single user basis. Which means if you're in a normal family home with a dad or a teenager as well as your precious little bundle of joy, either Dad or the teenager will probably at some point opt in, thus unlocking porn for the entire household.
These ridiculous measures not only threaten to impose upon the public's rights, but they expose the government for not really knowing anything at all about this subject. I do not know a single adult who has been forever warped by watching porn as a child - it's an STD free way of getting rid of a perfectly natural curiosity that all people have at some point in their lives.
This is an irritation to the many in exchange for the approval of a few loud mouthed mums who don't know how to parent their children properly. News flash, Mothers' Union - if your kid is being parented correctly, he will have no interest whatsoever in porn. If you treat pornography and violence as some evil, forbidden thing, then you can pretty much guarantee that they'll go looking for it at the first opportunity. Hell, when I was eleven, Action Man and cartoons were still king in my mind, and I couldn't care less about boobs.
Why? Because I was parented properly. Because my mother didn't treat sex and nudity as some evil secret for only the 16+. It was something else that existed in the world, but at that point in my life, I couldn't care less about it, because it wasn't a taboo, and my mum would actually answer questions when I asked them. When I asked "where do babies come from?" or "what's sex?", I was told the truth in a format appropriate to my age. There was a complete lack of storks or "When a mummy and a daddy love each other very much..."
All this nanny-government farce is doing is exposing how little the government understand the way the internet works and assisting a collective of attention seeking mums in sealing away everything they don't want their kids to see. It's more than a little sinister, if the Mothers' Union wanted HMV to stop selling Marilyn Manson albums, would David Cameron wave the Tory wand and ban it from the shelves?
I'm all for preventing children being exposed to this element of life inadvertently, and later on the article speaks about inappropriate clothing for kids, which I'm all for ending, but aren't we skirting around the real issue here? Why is the government failing to take into account that the parents are the ones at fault? If you buy your son a computer, he's going to explore the internet. If you buy your daughter an underwired bra, she's going to wear it.
I'd love to hear thoughts or feedback on this subject. Comment on facebook, posterous, or email me.
-L
