As the New Statesman article argues the porn filter is just a digital version of drug prohibition, and just as likely to work I might add.

http://www.newstatesman.com/internet/2013/07/first-they-came-porn-stars-problem-online-filter

A minute Googling produced these. The y do require parents to take responsibility for their own children though.

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

http://www.qustodio.com/

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-free-parental-control-software-9-programs-to-keep-your-kids-safe-1140315

http://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-and-resources/parents-and-carers/parental-controls

I don't. It's up to us adults to protect children.

A free for all would be a calamity.

It's up to parents to protect THEIR children. It's not up to me to have my liberties curtailed because parents aren't able or willing to take responsibility for their own actions. Apart from that anyone who has the first clue about how the internet works knows that attempting to control it is futile. It was designed to be robust enough to withstand a nuclear war <deleted>.

How about the children that have feckless parents? We'll just abandon them eh?

Typical selfish moronic attitude, we are a society, not a bunch of individuals. You always find that it's individuals that are most vociferous about their rights that are the first to run bleating for protection when things go wrong.

the internet must be policed, it must be controlled.

May I add, there's a story circulating in the States about a paedophile ring that was bust recently, apparently 150 people arrested on the first swoop, another 500 expected. How did they bust the ring?

An American paedophile was arrested in a village two hours outside Chiang Mai, all of his electronic equipment was seized and forensically investigated by the US authorities, this led to the ring being broken.

Would you prefer that individual had the right to access child porn on the internet?

That's the logical conclusion of your absolute freedom argument.....over to you.

How can that be the logical conclusion to my argument? Child pornography is illegal. Adult pornography is not. They have nothing to do with each other.

I'm not arguing for 'absolute freedom'. I'm arguing that parents should be expected to be responsible for the care and protection of their children rather than expecting others to do it.

And as for the internet being 'policed and controlled' - good luck with that.

BTW I don't take kindly to be called selfish or moronic. You're perfectly entitled to disagree with what I say but try and be civil if that's possible.

That was civil, you replied to a post stating that a free for all would be a calamity with that ill thought out nonsense. I have now pointed out that children have feckless parents, are we to abandon them?. So let's try again.......

A free for all would be a calamity.

What say you to that?

A minute Googling produced these. The y do require parents to take responsibility for their own children though.

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

http://www.qustodio.com/

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-free-parental-control-software-9-programs-to-keep-your-kids-safe-1140315

http://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-and-resources/parents-and-carers/parental-controls

Just supposing the parents are feckless? Absent? technophobes? You get the idea......just supposing the kids are smart enough to run rings around their parents?

Just supposing the parents don't know about all the devices they're kids have? Shall I go on?

The only thing I'll say about these filters is that committed paedophiles will find a way round them. They'll end up with new obscure keywords, I have no answer for that but the White Hats will have to get to work with their intelligence.

It's up to the governments representing their constituents to act as they see fit, and if they see fit to block the sites, that's fine by me.

A free for all would be a calamity.

What say you to that?

I shall repeat it for you in case you missed it - "I'm not arguing for 'absolute freedom'"

A minute Googling produced these. The y do require parents to take responsibility for their own children though.

http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

http://www.qustodio.com/

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/best-free-parental-control-software-9-programs-to-keep-your-kids-safe-1140315

http://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-and-resources/parents-and-carers/parental-controls

Just supposing the parents are feckless? Absent? technophobes? You get the idea......just supposing the kids are smart enough to run rings around their parents?

Just supposing the parents don't know about all the devices they're kids have? Shall I go on?

The only thing I'll say about these filters is that committed paedophiles will find a way round them. They'll end up with new obscure keywords, I have no answer for that but the White Hats will have to get to work with their intelligence.

It's up to the governments representing their constituents to act as they see fit, and if they see fit to block the sites, that's fine by me.

I'm sorry but you are confusing me. Are you talking about implementing filters so that children don't inadvertently see legal porn or are you talking about implementing filters that somehow stop paedophiles from posting illegal images?

Dup.

It is all very well discussing such matters as if the Internet is a separate entity in each country or each individual jurisdiction - but this is not the case.

I can access porn from Japan (say) where the girls look to be under the British age of consent. What is the legal process here? Can we establish the age of the models? If the are legal in Japan but not in the UK am I committing an offence? What offence? Is the ISP or the search engine (say British Telecomm / Google) committing an offence? What offence?

If I access the (notional) porn site from a P2P programme similar to Pirate Bay of glorious memory, who is committing what offence?

I am very much an amateur when it comes to the Internet - I send and receive e-mails, I contact clients, discuss problems with them, search appropriate web-sites and give balanced, reasoned opinions on many technical matters within the energy supply field, but that is about the limit of my expertise.

I know enough to stay away from things like Facebook and Twitter. I once joined 'Linked-In' and got flooded with job applications from India, so I cancelled that.

But if I can see the enormous bowl of spaghetti that represents the internet, and I can see no way of laying it all out in a straight line without breaking a single strand, then I cannot see any group of politicians being able to devise a foolproof way of legislating for this. But I would very much ppreciate suggestions.

It is all very well discussing such matters as if the Internet is a separate entity in each country or each individual jurisdiction - but this is not the case.

I can access porn from Japan (say) where the girls look to be under the British age of consent. What is the legal process here? Can we establish the age of the models? If the are legal in Japan but not in the UK am I committing an offence? What offence? Is the ISP or the search engine (say British Telecomm / Google) committing an offence? What offence?

If I access the (notional) porn site from a P2P programme similar to Pirate Bay of glorious memory, who is committing what offence?

I am very much an amateur when it comes to the Internet - I send and receive e-mails, I contact clients, discuss problems with them, search appropriate web-sites and give balanced, reasoned opinions on many technical matters within the energy supply field, but that is about the limit of my expertise.

I know enough to stay away from things like Facebook and Twitter. I once joined 'Linked-In' and got flooded with job applications from India, so I cancelled that.

But if I can see the enormous bowl of spaghetti that represents the internet, and I can see no way of laying it all out in a straight line without breaking a single strand, then I cannot see any group of politicians being able to devise a foolproof way of legislating for this. But I would very much ppreciate suggestions.

Thank you. You have grasped the complexity of the internet which many people who believe that 'something should be done' fail to do.

The catch all is that it has to be legal in your jurisdiction. So if Japan allows 14 year old porn models then that's fine to be viewed in Japan, but not in the UK, where a porn model has to be 18.

You will be prosecuted for that in the UK and the argument you are putting forward would be immediately dismissed. It is clear to everyone, especially here in Thailand in regards to pornography, that you will abide by the local laws or be prosecuted by the local laws.

So best to familiarise yourself with the law of the country you are viewing from, and have a look over your shoulder in case you are being tracked by your home country.

The new policy from Bing is to fire up a warning window on your screen if you search for child porn. Google's policy is to notify the authorities without warning you.

So in that same example, if the UK discovers you have been accessing child porn in Japan while in Japan, you will be prosecuted on your return.

Quite right too.

There's more to this than child porn though, there are other clear dangers to our societies from allowing unfettered use of the internet. It must be policed.

......

There's more to this than child porn though, there are other clear dangers to our societies from allowing unfettered use of the internet. It must be policed.

There are many things on the Internet that will trap people - scams about money, gambling, drugs (legal in some places, not in others), offers of goods / jobs / wives / etc., that the non-savvy may be duped by.

But something like child porn is catering to a certain market and it is the child that is the sufferer, not the person at the receiving end of the broadcast. Therefore this is an obvious priority to be dealt with.

The scams / offers that depend upon a gullible public may be limited by education of the public and a good reporting system from the receiving public to the authorities. The child porn facet cannot rely on such methods, because it is driven by the recipients - if there were no on-line paedophiles there would (probably) be no child porn. So policing this aspect presents more difficulties in policing than any other aspect of cybercrime. Especially as there seems to be a lot of P2P transfer, which does not require serch engines.

Also in the UK we have had a few recent cases of the 'grooming' of young adolescent girls for prostitution and the like. These have, in several instances, started with meetings in chat rooms. How can these be policed?

This is a very difficult set of problems to which I see no overall solution. I can suggest closing down web-sites. But as soon as two are closed five others are created. And not necessarily in the same location. An operator in Australia can create proxies in Vanuatu and Louisiana, from which he then opens web-sites registered in Costa Rica, Zimbabwe and Lithuania. And so on and so on.

So David Camoron has a glimmer of a political slogan, but no chance of achieving any substantial result, as far as I can see. But his heart's in the right place on this subject.

I found that the internet censorship in the UAE worked pretty effectively, and if I wanted to access porn, I had to rely on my VPN. Like laws on sale of alcohol to minors, or drink - driving, the aim is not to eliminate it, but to reduce what is considered a social evil. Unlike hard core pornograpy (as per the Obscene Publications Act), fraud is rampant in the real world, and I'm not sure there is much benefit in worrying about fraud on the internet - where would one stop? There are laws in place to deal with fraud; there are also laws in place to deal with the publication of obscene material, and if the internet service providers who unwittingly do so were to feel the clumsy iron fist of the law, they would find a way of not unwittingly doing so.

SC