Let's blame Google and ISPs for others' crimes

daveyj792

peter_the_piper wrote: »

Getting Google/Isp is surely the easiest way of reducing the number of visits to these sites. You won't stop the inveterate pae***ile as they know the sites anyway but could stop random browsers.

Google already removes such websites from its search index when it encounters them. I should imagine the people accessing these sites do not do so through Google and this move will in effect achieve nothing. Google is not the internet, as many politicians seem to think.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

It's an unenforcible knee-jerk political stunt to keep Daily Mail reading voters who dont' think too deeply happy. It has the added bonus that anyone who disagrees can be accused of wanting child !!!!!! to be freely available. I bet Tory advisers knocked off early and went to the pub after thinking up this one.

fluffnutter

Ban the ridiculous anachronism that is page 3 and keep your silly kneejerk paws away from the interweb, that's my advice.

robatwork

I am trying to see how your paws can kneejerk....nope all I see is a slightly camp bear.

But I get your point!

pmduk

Cameron makes an announcement, ISPs must block !!!!!!, he doesn't know how to do to it, the ISPs have no clear idea how to do it, but Cameron has already identified the culprits if it doesn't work: the ISPs. Not to mention distracting everyone's attention from more pressing, and embarrassing to him problems. eg kowtowing to paymasters in the tobacco industry

Ronaldo_Mconaldo

pmduk wrote: »

Cameron makes an announcement, ISPs must block !!!!!!, he doesn't know how to do to it, the ISPs have no clear idea how to do it, but Cameron has already identified the culprits if it doesn't work: the ISPs. Not to mention distracting everyone's attention from more pressing, and embarrassing to him problems. eg kowtowing to paymasters in the tobacco industry

Are you the head of Google? Do you own an ISP? If not then what's the problem? "Boo hoo, i know better than everyone, look out world, I'll show you all...by hammering away on my keyboard to any forum that will listen".

Seriously, what difference does it make to you?

antrobus

pmduk wrote: »

Cameron makes an announcement, ISPs must block !!!!!!, he doesn't know how to do to it, the ISPs have no clear idea how to do it, ....

That's not strictly true. The ISPs know perfectly well how to 'block !!!!!!'; they provide their customers with a web filter. The Cameron initiative is all about insisting that all ISPs provide a web filter, and that people have to opt out of having one.

Not that any of this will necessarily work, mind you. I've always understood that it's a fairly trivial exercise to bypass a web filter. Something to do with converting the IP address into hexadecimals. That, or simply finding a proxy.

j0nathon2

Search Google for "free proxy" and the first if not all of the results will aid you very easily in bypassing a filter. An intent teenager who can't find that probably wouldn't be able to find !!!!!! either.

And you do realise we're all going to be the ones who pay for the ISP's filtering implementations, even though we don't want or need it.

If parents want to stop their children looking at !!!!!!, and can't be bothered to actually parent and/or supervise them, and they take comfort in filters, they should pay for them.

Are you the head of Google? Do you own an ISP? If not then what's the problem? "Boo hoo, i know better than everyone, look out world, I'll show you all...by hammering away on my keyboard to any forum that will listen".

Seriously, what difference does it make to you?

I tend not to resort to insulting individuals, but you're a bit of a fool aren't you. Isn't David Cameron doing just that, yet blabbering to news channels instead of hammer on keyboards to forums?

Nilrem

sweetstudent wrote: »

Surely there must be some software that can detect this material and record an IP address without a human on the other end who has to view this material in order to put these perverts away?

It's quite simple for software to check an image against a known catalogue (the police, google, tineye, and the likes of the image catalogue/licensing companies have been using it for years).

It's extremely hard to get software to tell if an image if "ok" or not without a catalogue check (which itself takes time), as you need the software to be able to:
Identify an image as being of humans - harder than you'd think (some filter programmes famously blocked images of pigs, whilst letting through pornographic images of people who were not Caucasian).
Work out if the image is of say children.
Then work out the context.

The first part is reasonably hard.

The second part is pretty hard (to very hard - is that a young looking woman, a midget, or a child) - You just have to look at the issues with alcohol and tobacco licensing to know it can be very hard to tell someone who might be 14 from someone who is 18...

The third part is almost impossible for a computer.

For example a child in his/her undies could be an image from the M&S website for child's underwear, or it could be something dodgy.

Equally an image of a child fully clothed could also be very dodgy depending on what the child is doing, or what is being done to a child.

For the computer to do it would require it to be able to make value judgements based on loads of variables and being able to actually work out what the person in the image is doing/what is in the background etc (IIRC current filtering software is well known for both blocking huge swathes of innocent stuff either by mistake or because the owners of the software don't like it, whilst at the same time being very ineffective at actually stopping access to adult content).

And the software would need to be doing this for every one of the (many) millions of images uploaded to the internet every single day.

This of course presumes that the images of child abuse are actually set out in a way that google and the like can easily find them - they're not likely to be, given that the people doing this aren't necessarily stupid (the stupid ones probably get caught fairly easily), and will know ways to stop the images being easily found (the most basic step is the robots.txt file that tells search engines you don't want your site indexed, or not to index parts of it*, a step any book on web design will tell you about).

The idea is pretty much a PR exercise by politicians who don't have a clue about what they're asking (ever wonder why so many government IT projects are miserable, expensive failures? ), and realise it's easier (and cheaper) to make out that it's the responsibility of the companies to deal with child !!!!!!, or bringing up the children, than it is to actually increase the resources of the police units who are tasked with dealing with it, let alone the suggestion that parents might want to keep an eye on what their kids are doing and if need be take action to filter at the local level (which tends to be far more effective at stopping adult content you don't want your kids seeing, than a one size fits all option that might stop sites that are legitimate and useful for schoo).


*Something that is handy if you don't want to have your bandwidth wasted by search engines, or want a basic way to make your site a little harder for people to look around (IE if you want to keep it so it's mainly your friends accessing it, without the bother of passwording it), or to stop the CPU load that a search engine can impose on something like a forum.

pmduk

Ronaldo_Mconaldo wrote: »

Are you the head of Google? Do you own an ISP? If not then what's the problem? "Boo hoo, i know better than everyone, look out world, I'll show you all...by hammering away on my keyboard to any forum that will listen".

Seriously, what difference does it make to you?

Yet another fool who believes that as someone disagrees with him the other party must work for the company concerned. There;s a long history, worldwide of politicians and the media creating a huge moral panic over folk devils. Sometimes it's to hide their own problems.

It's like the Sun, screaming about sex offenders opposite a page 3 topless pic.