Laurie Penny gets it.
The government’s filter, which comes into full effect this month after a year of lobbying, will block far more than dirty pictures. That was always the intention, and in recent weeks it has become clear that the mission creep of internet censorship is even creepier than campaigners had feared. In the name of protecting children from a rotten tide of raunchy videos, a terrifying precedent is being set for state control of the digital commons.
You won’t often find Penny and I on the same side of an argument, but on this she is spot on.
Every argument we have heard from politicians in favour of this internet filter has been about pornography, and its harmful effect on young people, evidence of which, despite years of public pearl-clutching, remains scant. It is curious, then, that so many categories included in BT’s list of blocked content appear to be neither pornographic nor directly related to young children.
Indeed. And none of us who were warning about it are remotely surprised. This is a feature, not a bug.
Cameron’s porn filter looks less like an attempt to protect kids than a convenient way to block a lot of content the British government doesn’t want its citizens to see, with no public consultation whatsoever.
Clang! Yup, we’ve been saying this all along. Welcome to the great firewall of China.
I refuse to activate BT’s family safeguard rubbish.
How dare they decide on my behalf to always block that which is “obscene & tasteless”?
Sometimes I want to see “The Parliament Channel…
Isn’t the problem supposedly going to be that BT are going to put these blocks on automatically – then you have to “unblock” them yourself, thus highlighting the fact (possibly recordably) that you want to download all these “unapproved-of” sites and marking you out as a potential axe-murderer/terrorist/drug dealer/porn addict/anarchist (or whatever). And they’re thus counting on the public’s fear and mistrust of “the authorities” to prevent them from allowing them onto their machines. It’s yet another way that they use the public’s paranoia to control them and keep them in line.
The best thing would be for anyone and everyone who dislikes the idea of this censorship to “unblock” their computers to allow themselves access to all and any unapproved-of material, even if they’ll never look at it and aren’t interested in it at all or even if they personally disagree with what’s on offer. If everyone did this, then these censorship/monitoring plans would come to naught. After all, they can hardly monitor, track and/or arrest the entire internet-using public. There’d be no-one left in the country to keep it running! And who’d pay all the taxes to keep the PTB in the luxury to which they have become accustomed then?
There is already an app for that (for Chrome anyway)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/go-away-cameron/ckiahbcmlmkpfiijecbpflfahoimklke
I thought she was a fan of the state telling people what to do?
Doesn’t she realise you can’t have it both ways?
Oh, I see you’d like consistency… 😉
Well… yes.
As far as I see it, she’s either lying and writing the article because she thinks it’s what’s expected and doesn’t believe a word of it.
Or she’s so utterly stupid that she doesn’t realise what she’s helped create.
I think I’m leaning toward the latter explanation.
I don’t know her personal views on the campaigns waged against ‘page 3’ or the lad mags, but her ‘ilk’ have been great cheerleaders for them. Until those people realise that those sorts of campaigns are part of the same problem as the ‘porn filter’, I’m not interested in their views on this because they’re only complaining about censorship of the things they like.
Were I to have my hands at the wheel, “Laurie Penny” and “Guardian” would be nipped, but “Laurie Penny” and “Welcoming Romanian horse cock” would go straight through.
Well we all knew Camoron was always after state censorship and this had nothing to do with porn.
I was with BT for years and always refused to use their “filters” and parental controls.
If I want to look at filth I want to do so without hassle everything these days is a blooming logistical nightmare from cutting my toe nails to trying to install crap on my pc, amd equally trying to take stuff off my PC.
I used to have a brain for it, in fact I used to be quite darn nifty but now it’s all such a trial.
If I wanted to be told what I can and can’t watch or surf for I would convert to Islam and wear a bin bag, and there is as much chance of that happening as there is of Camoron getting another stay in downing street.
Mind you Millipede is just as much of a tosser and I bet that wouldn’t go through the censorship filter either.
So I am quite sure my caber tossing viewing days on youtube are almost at an end.
…and if you feel that you really want to upset them, take a look at TOR browser.
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
It won’t play Flash, YouTube etc., but just read what it can do.
And even sweeter, it thoroughly pisses off the NSA, but ironically, it is part sponsored by the US Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
Couldn’t be better.