Jolly rogered

I note with dismay that the recent High Court ruling to force some ISPs to ban access to The Pirate Bay has been hijacked by lobbyists who are confused about what the interweb does. A classic example was heard on Radio 4's Today on Tuesday, which devoted eight minutes to John Humphrys inexpertly tying himself into a mesh of …

[Bob Vistakin]

If MP's had it all their way regarding censorship...

...we'd still be paying for their duck houses, moats and pr0n whilst listening to them telling us how hard they're making our taxes work for us.

That's the deal with censorship. You have to trust totally the ones doing the censoring to do the right thing. So, can anyone think of anything MP's collectively did in the last few years to affect the publics trust in them? Hint - read the first sentence again.

[LarsG]

CAN THEY CENSOR PARTY POLITICAL STUFF

which is all lies, misrepresention and manipulation of the truth.

I would sign up for that.

[Ian 62]

I wrote to my MP.. Got a reply too..

I didnt baffle him with science, and the why it wont work, and the how to get around any blocks... Because thats not going to win us any arguments. We'll get 'oh you're just not trying!' thrown back in our faces. 'We can put Men on the Moon, you must be able to deal with this!'.

So.. I took a differnt tack, one you've hinted at in this article.

I said, "why should I have to put my name on a list to access legal adult content? And when my name is on that list, and an annoymous hacker gang releases that list to the internet... People like teachers, nurses, politicians will be called PERVS!! Someone think of the children!!"

Scare them with their own game! Thats my thought.... Many of them think it'll be fine to add their name to the lists, because really its 'just harmless adult pron'... but when they're the one on the front page of the Daily Fail, they'll soon realise it was a bad idea.

[Ru]

Re: "We can put Men on the Moon, you must be able to deal with this!"

Can we? Bit more of the past tense there, chief.

Besides, it is a perfectly cromulent answer. I believe it is entirely possible that investing a couple of hundred billion pounds into a censorship infrastructure might yield something that worked okay.

[Oninoshiko]

Re: "We can put Men on the Moon, you must be able to deal with this!"

Not even past tense. I dont think the british have ever put someone on the moon, or are you planning on outsourcing this software to the americans (who will inturn outsource it to the indians)?

[NightFox]

Re: I wrote to my MP.. Got a reply too..

It's a good point you make about the dangers of being on an "opt-in" list, as obviously anyone who does opt in will be a sexual deviant and a menace to society. Especially when some do-gooder publishes a leaked list online with an address lookup, as they did with the leaked BNP(?) list a couple of years back. I can see my kids wondering why none of their friends are allowed to come round to play any more.

And no doubt when I ring my ISP with an Alan Partridge-esque "Can you unblock the porn on my interwebs please" request they'll quite happily do so for an admin fee and a monthly £5 "Supersurfer Premium" charge.

[Anonymous Coward]

dick?!

did I just see a word "DICK" in that text? This should be banned outright and you should be re-educated.

oh, what would my children do, if they saw that word, OMG?!

not, let me ask them....

[Steve Renouf]

Re: dick?!

And whatever you do, don't mention Dickie Davies...

[Graham Marsden]

Re: dick?!

I once posted on a forum about the Sci-Fi author Philip K Dick.

His name was (I kid you not) rendered by the forum software as "Philip K masculine area"!!!

[Ru]

Re: dick?!

Ahh, the clbuttic mistake of simple text substitution. But no-one ever learns; it is still out there and in common use.

[Blofeld's Cat]

Bleaugh...

Sir,

Having subscribed to this august journal for many a moon, I feel once again compelled to bring you to task on your coverage of a subject dear to my heart.

A shoe needs to be decently marinaded (preferably in French brandy) before being cooked. Butter should only ever be used when lard is unavailable.

I notice that your correspondent has also introduced other, completely unrelated, matters into this article.

Please ensure this sloppy journalism is not repeated.

I remain sir,

Colonel Buckfast-Guzzler (retired)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bleaugh...

"Butter should only ever be used when lard is unavailable."

Tell that to Marlon Brando.

Paris, because, well you know ...

[squilookle]

"Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

If that's going to knock all the politicians off the internet too, go for it.

[Circadian]

Re: "Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

That's not sufficient - will also have to filter for twats

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

The new motto for 21st century Britain.

"Ban Onanism - save Thatcherism!"

remember kids, every time you masturbate God kills a Tory.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: "Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

Really? That's my weekend sorted then. Just off to the chemists for some hand cream.

[Andus McCoatover]

Re: "Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

Won't work, from what I *ahem* hear, most dicks are practically invisible during the 'act'.

I guess that's why one euphemism is "hiding the salami" (Now-you-see-it-now-you-don't. Repeat, oh, maybe 10 times?)

Of course, if the numpty programmers just looked for "a blueish 'helmet' ", we'd never get to see The Bill on YouTube ever again.

[xperroni]

Walled garden anyone?

The only way I can see censorship controls of this kind working is by the use of a whitelist – in other words, everything is pr0n until proved otherwise.

It wouldn't be too hard for the ISP's to compile a list of the 1,000 or so top-access sites, decide which ones are "safe", and block access to anything not in this list unless requested otherwise by customers.

The long tail could be covered by an online form for people to suggest additions to that list; this could grow into a service where, if you wanted your site to "whitelisted", you'd pay your ISP for continued certification of its contents' safety.

What about Facebook, blogs and the like, you ask? Why, the ISP's could just spin their own versions of those services, all continually reviewed for guaranteed family-values-compliance.

And there you go, your sanitized Internet in a nice and tight package. It's not unimaginable that the ISP's could spin it as a "service" – I can already hear the ads about "a leaner, cleaner, better Internet", safe for work & play, and free of any harmful images or contradictory truths...

[Andus McCoatover]

Re: Walled garden anyone?

No 'Walled garden' for me, thanks. One reason I'll not buy an Apple product, unless they dismantle it.

One advantage of it, we could put all the politicians who want this to be passed into the walled garden. In it, build them a nice rest-home for the bewildered.

I pay enough to my ISP to want to NOT pay them more to 'release' e.g., Theregister.com, justlinux.com, etc. from their choice of 1,000 - out of millions.

Sorry, Internet is about 'free speech'.

"What about Facebook, blogs and the like, you ask?". Yep, with you on that. Shareholders of those companies would really welcome that...

Come to think of it...your second part of that phrase makes sense! "Why, the ISP's could just spin their own versions of those services, all continually reviewed for guaranteed family-values-compliance."

Let the owners of Google, Facebook et. al. buy the ISP's!

[xperroni]

Re: Walled garden anyone?

The "walled garden" scenario I came up with was just a thought experiment on how Internet censorship / "parental control" could ever be made to work, and what the consequences might be; I don't in any way promote or support it. I thought the "Big Brother" icon would be enough indication of this – perhaps I should have gone with "Joke Alert" or "Black Helicopters"?

Bur anyway, since you've mentioned the likes of Google and Facebook: ISP's would just love to sideline them, what with the ISP's paying for the data pipes and ad-brokers raking in all the money. In fact mobile carriers have been trying to do that for a while, only their approach is technological. So far it hasn't worked – but perhaps if the heavy arm of law gave it a little push...?

[benjymous]

Probably also an apocryphal tale, but I'm sure I remember reading about a porn blocking scheme that tried to block images based on the amount of skin tone it found in images.

All this meant was you couldn't view photos of pigs, but the porn went through fine as long as their skin colour wasn't "pink"

Aha, here it is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8094026.stm

[Jad]

Or the time that Bill Clinton and his missus images were blocked on the White House page because it had the caption "The Happy Couple" ... :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst tending to agree with the article it did fall into the same trap as it was mentioned others fell into. This was supposed to be an article on Pirate Bay wasn't it ? It seemed to get stuck on arguing, all that's labelled "porn" isn't bad.

[mark 63]

Ignorance

I dont think its so much "cant be arsed" parents as much as Ignorance - parents who just havent put 2 and 2 together and realised that

-their kids might not stick to the cbeebies site

-their kids could type "porn" into the seasrch engine as easilt as they do

a lot of em probly dont realise that their kid's phones and pads can go on the net even though they use their own phone to do just that.

[mrmond]

Master Dick ?

If we get software to recognise Dick, will it recognize Bruce Wayne as well ?

[Tankboy]

Please!

Think of the children! I thought the US was bad about being a so-called "Nanny State"... Sounds like you folks in the UK have your mothers looking over your shoulder while you surf the internet. Let me know how that works out for you.

[mattharesign]

i invoke the power of....

brass eye. had to be done./

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NesjvRihbEg

[mattharesign]

Re: i invoke the power of....

i'll take your monkey dust and add an it crowd, which is probably the most apt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUcHpyOOmo4

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Re: i invoke the power of....

"I am the Peado-Finder General and I declare that as judged by demented readers of News International publications, I deem you to be a PEAD-O-PHILE! Bring the faggots! ( Just my little joke! ). Ha ha!"

Great little skit, can't remember the radio programme now, Mum is on a march with a mob to attack the local old gent who everyone suspects is a peadophile, her kids are along on the march and shouting and moaning about it. Mum starts shouting, "Yeah we don't want them sort in our area, we wants justice and to make sure all our little kiddies are safe from 'arm and not one ain't gonna 'urt none of '!em! Oi, Chantel! Stop yer bleeding crying and bleedin' moaning or I'll wallop yer good and proper, shut it! Yeah kill the peado what 'urts the kiddies!!!"

[Scott Earle]

Urban legend?

You mean this one? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/901723.stm

I think that was "something that happened". Slightly different thing. It's like an urban legend, only is based on fact.

[Alistair Dabbs]

Re: Urban legend?

I'm aware of this story but all I found were lots of websites quoting each other, BBC included. For all I know, the original story was an April Fool. Does anyone here have any real info on this?

[Marty]

I am just sick of the godsquad and the rest of the do-good'ers thinking they know whats best for me....

yes, there is porn on the interwebbynet, but in the last 10 years I have not accidentally found myself on a porn site. do I want to opt in to get whatever content the government, godsquad and other do-good'ers, so I can be profiled by MI5 or whoever? Hell no...

If there was a government backed program to educate parents on how to monitor their own kids on the interwebs then I am all for it...

there is now way we should allow the government or their puppets to control what we can or cant see. where will it end? With the blocking of political parties websites because the government doesn't agree with the content or with newspapers publishing expenses of mp's

[Tankboy]

"If there was a government backed program to educate parents on how to monitor their own kids on the interwebs then I am all for it..."

Sadly, that won't happen. Too many mouth-breathers.

[Velv]

Opt In Schemes

Given the wide availability of porn offline (with porn being a very loose definition), are the authorities going to demand everyone who wants to buy a magazine needs to register?

And are we just talking about those who want to buy Bombay Badonkadonk's, or Playboy, or FHM, or The Sun?

Surely the playingfield must be level for all media services - Please enter your PIN now to watch tonight's Strictly Come Dancing as tonight's show may contain what some consider to be provocative dancing

[Anonymous Coward]

Also

Also while writing to your MP, about them being on the Perv list, do mention to all your friends that being on the 'Clean Feed' will be slower, it must be as they will be checking all the places you want to visit and then allowing and disallowing them.

Of course it may be that if you opt to be on the '"Not a Perv Clean Feed list' when you accidentally find that something your interested in is on the Perv list, you will be flagged up and noted as a Perv.

Just think about it, not only will you get a slower internet, you may be flagged up as a trouble making pervert, just for going to the Amnesty internaional website, or even the Sun's website.

Don't think the banned perv list will be available to check or won't contain other non perv websites.

[Jonathan 29]

black market

I have given some thought recently on what level of restrictions to apply to our Internet at home for my children. I am probably far more concerned by extreme violence than extreme porn, but you have to accept that anything I block can be gotten by other means. I suspect there will be quite a thriving black market of interesting content on usb sticks being passed around in the playground if this bill or something like it gets passed. The naughty videos I borrowed from friends at 12 were far, far more hard-core than anything I would choose to watch now and god knows what passes for extreme today. At least I can check the logs quietly if he has unrestricted access at home.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: black market

"At least I can check the logs quietly if he has unrestricted access at home."

...For the boy's sake. Yes... that's plausible... that'll do. Now leave me alone so I can... err... check these logs in peace.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd have used the joke alert icon, but...

[Pat 11]

That's Google Images blocked then

Try searching it for American, African, and Asian. Interesting differences.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That's Google Images blocked then

And the Google logo has a slight resemblance to fruit flavour polos. Clearly an attempt to entice children.

[Crisp]

"Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

Already filing the patent for it...

[Darryl]

Re: "Dick recognition software, perhaps?"

Sorry, prior art - as noted above, Google Images

Just drag a pic of Simon Cowell into the drag-n-drop feature. It recognises him immediately.

[Andrew James]

Society has a strange attitude to nudity lately I think.

As an example of this, a couple of weeks ago my wife took my 4 year old daughter out for a day with her friend from school, and that friends mother was there too.

While they were out they saw a statue of a naked man. The friend of my daughter, 4 and a half years old, pointed at its genitals and asked what that was. My daughter told her it was his "willy". The friends mother was outraged that a 4 year old girl would know this and was asking how she knew, why she knew, etc.

Obviously in their house opposite sex nudity in front of the children is not allowed, which I just find really strange. I dont wander around my house naked for the sake of it, but if my daughter is there as i come out of the shower or while I'm getting dressed, we dont make a big deal of making sure I'm covered up.

But, having said that, i wouldn't want her looking at xvideos or youporn.

[squilookle]

And, despite not being an expert in child development or having children myself, I'd put money on the fact your child will grow up to be the more well rounded and sensible person.

I remember some of my friends parents being like that from my childhood and dealing with them was far more traumatic than seeing a "willy".

Have a pint, sir, it's Friday.

[Lee Dowling]

I have to agree.

My 3-year-old daughter watched her little newborn cousin (I think, I can't be bothered to do the family-tree maths) have his nappy changed for the first time. You have never seen a child stare like that in your life, we were all in fits of laughter and she was transfixed, crouching over him "pretending" to help while actually she just wanted to see the thing she'd spotted straight away.

What would those parents have you do? Hush it up? Pretend it doesn't exist? Tell her off for being rude (she's THREE - how does she know that something she's never seen is considered "rude")? All courses of action that I guarantee you would leave her with a morbid curiosity about finding out what that thing is when Mummy/Daddy/Grandparents AREN'T around (and hence you end up with a pregnant 11-year-old or whatever).

To quote Kindergarten Cop (there's a line I never thought I'd say!): Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.

What the big deal is in that, I don't know. Get over it. Your daughter could have called it a lot worse and at least she KNEW what it was. Now imagine how your friend's daughter is going to cope when she gets to secondary school where there's talk of sex and all sorts and she gets pressured to tell her friends that she knows what it all means, or to confess that she doesn't know at all.

Nudity is on page three of several papers, and you can spot nude women as soon as you're old enough to look up in a newsagents. Sex is a natural human function that, okay, maybe you might not want to discuss in public (at least, any more than other natural functions like the operation of your stomach and bottom on food, which is what my three-year-old is obsessed with at the moment and wants to share with the world), but there's nothing scary there and they WILL teach her it in school (unless you WANT to pull her out of that class and make a laughing exception to the rest of the class). Pornography - that's something entirely different and you might well want to hide that from children but even upon discovery? It's just pictures of people who "love each other" and "are having sex", depending on your outlook and acceptable "lies to children" factor.

I don't expect fathers to be dangling their appendages around the houses, but for feck's sake, it's a willy. Get over it.

[LaeMing]

Little girls and willies

I had it all worked out by that age: Boys had willies and girls didn't so the doctors at the hospital could tell if a new-born was a boy or a girl - babies being born without clothes or significant hair and all.

[Uncle Slacky]

Life imitates the Simpsons?

Helen Lovejoy (re:Marge's approval of Michaelangelo's "David"): "I TOLD you she was soft on full-frontal nudity!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: benjymous

Yes, there was some software by a company in Congleton (What a place for a European HQ!) that allowed you to browse for PVC clad lovelies inflagrante dilecto as there was no skin on show - worked out and showed them the above loophole of the skin tone/ pr0n detection while on a training course, they were not happy.

[Lee Dowling]

Re: benjymous

Filtering out images by skintone is like choosing which tanks to shoot at in a battle based on the average green colour of them.

Sooner or later, the "enemy" will start painting their tanks a different colour and/or spraypainting yours, or even just knocking up cardboards cutouts for you to fire at to your heart's content.

And the poor sod who just happened to be wearing the wrong colour shirt is going to be in for an awful big compensation payout.

Until we have a filter capable of human thought (and thus able to reason not only the contents of an image by something other than skintone / edge-detection / etc., like the entire computer vision industry has been trying since the 60's, but the intention, pose, provocative nature, age, gender, obscenity etc.) it ain't gonna happen. The only thing we have that does that is humans, and even they get it wrong so often that it's laughable.

---

IT Manager in schools. At a previous school, once had to report a site to RM's Filter people because, let's just say, it was not the "traditional" retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. ("My! What a big... you have!")

[Schultz]

Nudity and our cultural frame of reference

If we talk about dick filters, we should go the extra step and ask how we can protect the cultural sensitivities of our minorities.

Some Muslims consider it offensive to look at a womens eye or hair (marry first!), so please offer the opt-in list for uncovered facials. Others consider being topless a human right, so please differentiate the filter to give an option for easy access to topless non-porn photography. Oooh, and there should be the Burka option for the ultrasensitive members of society. Or maybe they should go for the black full-spectrum filter?

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: Nudity and our cultural frame of reference

I suspect "facials" are already on the List, IYKWIM....

[Peddler]

A role for censorship in a society...

...in which stupid people live. Yes, engaging in censorship occupies their time, thus preventing the stupid people from taking up more dangerous avocations.

[Big_Ted]

An old quote.....

If they took all the porn off the internet... there would only be one website left and it would be http://www.bringbacktheporn.com

Mind you if they did take it off then more than three quaters of the trffic would disappear overnight.......

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

"I saw my first jazz-mag at school at 11, and by 12 I was regularly misusing the lingerie pages of my mum's Freemans catalogue."

I was 10 and I was so confused! The older boys were sniggering and I was left in a state of utter confusion at what was so interesting, must have taken at least another 2 years before it started making sense! As to the Freemans, my Nan used to let me have her old catalogues "For cutting out the pictures of watches and bikes I want for Xmas Nan!", yeah right!

[Anonymous Coward]

STD clinic (NHS)

... website barred by my ISP. I have never welcomed our new overlords and regularly make a fool of myself with polemic comments on their attempts to brainwashed me.

[davidbob]

It's funny that MPs want to control what kids view on the web, when 6year olds are sent home with graphic sex education booklets, with close up images of positions I wasn't even aware of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flesh filters

When I worked for the NHS it used a flesh filter, all the images would land to the sysadmin to be approved or rejected.

It was the strangest part of my role, I would spend about an hour a day going through the images and would try to guess if it was porn or medical. You may think that this would be easy, but quite often I would have to call a doctor and ask. And quite often as the emails just contained an image and no text they wouldn't know either. (some of the images where phwooer, and some were more phwooraagghhhh!

[ukgnome]

It's all fun fun fun in the sun sun sun

Nudity and porn is very subjective, I would mind if 8 year old charlie viewed porn just like I would mind if he also viewed people braeking their legs in skateboard accidents!

But fast forward time and charlie is now 16 would I mind? erm no, human nature lives on (although maybe he shouldn't view the scatalogicical sites) Afterall the UK sells a newspaper that show a near naked "babe" on the 3rd page for anyone to see.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: It's all fun fun fun in the sun sun sun

And until that near naked babe is deleted from page 3, I see no need for an 'internet pr0n filter'

I wonder how many 10-12 yr olds got their first look at a naked gal from that?

[janimal]

I can think of a connection between the two cases

Because virgin media have implemented their piracy blockade using cleanfeed, hundreds of thousands of people who only wanted game of thrones have now learnt techniques to help turn them into kiddly fiddlers.

http://www.janimania.com/2012/05/04/pirate-bay-block-endangers-children/

[WonkoTheSane]

Time to put an end to these "Victorian Sensibilities"...

After all, the old battleaxe has been gone for over a century now!

[45RPM]

Dick recognition wouldn't work

If you were to use dick recognition software then the only people who'd be able to browse for porn would be people who vote Tory and readers of the Daily Express and Daily Mail. Oh, and people called Richard.

The irony, of course, is that these people not only don't view porn (or, at least, they vehemently deny viewing porn), but they only 'make love' through a carefully cut hole in a sheet. Except people called Richard of course - they're usually quite well adjusted and normal.

[Graham Marsden]

This nonsense was tried back in the 1980s...

... when it was decided that access to the 0898 "naughty phone lines" should be made opt-in rather than opt-out.

Unsurprisingly, very few people were willing to call up their phone provider and say "Please let me access the smutty message services", meaning that perfectly legal and legitimate businesses suddenly had a massive drop in their income.

Eventually, of course, this decision was reversed, but it just goes to show how stupid the "Won't Someone Think of the Children!" mentality can be.

[Colin Millar]

Humphrys

Is just amazing. He can rant better than a fanbois on steroids. His specialities are being completely ignorant of whatever he is talking about and being 100% wrong about every "fact" he presents.. We should get him to do a guest spot on an apple/MS/linux story.

John Humphrys icon cos I can see the steam coming out of his ears whenevr he speaks - and thats a good trick on the radio.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh- my company has a similar problem...

We have a similar problem in that sites that some of our employees need to access as part of their job duties are blocked because they are catagorized as 'gambling' (and legitmately so- the sites in question are slot machine manufacturers and other casinos). We use a web content filter largely as part of our security measures, but it still amuses me of how much time we've spent having to manually adjust the settings on said content filter to allow access to sites that we use for legitimate purposes.

[Anonymous Coward]

And as pointed out on the BBC website recently, Freemans' catalogue was terrible for the impossible standards of beauty it forced women to feel the need to measure up to, compared to porn where any body type goes.

[Charlie Clark]

Bring back Brian Redhead

and the time when the Today programme used to be worth listening to it because researchers had been paid to prepare topics. Now it's just sham nowtrage. Pity for John Humphrys who has elsewhere demonstrated that he is a reasonable journalist. When I am in England I find the only news programme I can bear is Channel 4 News which is now almost anachronistic in its attention to detail and attempts to let people speak.

Back to the whole kids and sexuality and I'm reminded by this misguided resurgence of Victorian mores by something J.K. Rowling said about a letter she received about one of the later Harry Potter books from an older woman concerned by the children going through puberty as they get older. The woman was quite obviously projecting a mythical "water baby" image of children who are supposed magically transform from being little darlings into responsible adults with families. Really quite sad if you think about it: Miss Havisham writ large.

It is precisely this repression of sexuality which causes confusion in children and adolescents whose bodies are being bombarded with hormones. Needless to say Ms Rowling didn't take the woman's advice and continued to make piles of money by playing, admittedly timidly, to the imaginations of her readership. Pity we never got to read the graffiti on the walls of the toilets!

[JohnG]

So many problems

First of all, who decides what is pornography and therefore, which sites should be banned? The legal definition of pornography (in England and Wales) is vague and open to interpretation. After that, we can get into the whole argument as to what is art and what is pornography.

Some online porn sellers in other parts of the EU may take a dim view of having their perfectly legitimate business routinely blocked from customers in the UK and may take legal action against the UK for interference in the single market.

What the "think of the children" brigade seemed to have missed is that, despite having some of the most puritanical pornography laws in Europe, the UK consistently has the highest teenage pregnancy and abortion rates in Europe. This tells us that the draconian approach is not working at all.

Something else that the "think of the children" brigade have missed is violence. Whilst they seem desperately worried that some pubescent kids will see some nudity or some people engaged in sex, none of them seem at all worried that their kids might view videos of someone having their throat cut by some terrorists or some Chechen girl being kicked and then buried alive for alleged adultery or ...

[rbryanh]

"…Perry switched the story from copyright infringement to paedophilia. Why does this keep happening?"

Because all of Western culture along with much of the rest of the world is built on a religiously-inculcated tinderbox of sexual shame. This makes it possible to derail any debate about any subject merely by mentioning sex. It doesn't matter what's being discussed or why: use the words "sex" and "children" in the same sentence, in any context, for any reason, and the idiocracy gathers pitchforks and lights torches. I live in America, where processing images of baby's first bath can land you in court, and saying "children should be taught about sexuality" attracts tar and feathers.

Ask any sheepdog… Being able to bark a single syllable and stampede the entire flock (over a cliff, if need be) is a very handy thing. Ignorance and hysteria are far more essential to authoritarianism than shiny black boots and truncheons.

[Martin Maloney]

Politically-incorrect dictionary entry

pedophile -- a hard drive record of your daily walking outings

Sorry, Brtis -- that's the US spelling.

[Toastan Buttar]

"I hope that wasn't the sound of eyeballs getting really big"

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-01-24/

[Naughtyhorse]

Lets not forget...

John Humphries is far and away the worst journalist not employed by murdoch.

he has less than zero credibility at anything.

he approaches his job like a pre-pubescent precocious air head who thinks that merely adopting a contrary position to his subject and then hammering away at them until they recant a piece of irrelevent punctuation constitutes a 'victory'

(nuff said he thinks reporting is a competition!)

I got sick of watching this dick every sunday all through the 80's interviewing unionists from a republican point of view, immediately followed by an interview with a republican (voices changed to detract credibility) from a unionist stance.

meanwhile in the background someone who had a vague inkling of what the fuck they were on about tried to fix the situation (wip)

a pox on him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice one

Good article, but perhaps im just retarded but I did find it hard to read though!

as for censorship, in any matter, someone has to be responsible for it, there will inevitable end up being some government oversight committee, not to mention the whole thing will likely be government funded... can you see where im going with this yet?...

ok one more clue, it wouldn't be in the governments interest to censor anything that doesn't fit their image now would it? I mean, heavens forbid that on an election year some poor kid goes on a killing spree after watching a you tube video on his parents computer invoking mass public (read Daily Mail) hysteria which leads to knee jerk vote winning reactions censoring the evil youtube from poisoning our young un disciplined youth

I have a better idea of censorship or protecting our people, how about schools get given their balls back as well as parents being forced to teach their kids right from wrong, personal choice, and consequences of actions.

[Robert McGregor]

Luckily...

... once I realised Virgin had barred access to the site, I used Google to find 35 other sites offering the same information. Then I turned to my encrypted VPN to reshare said content with some lovely friends.

In addition, three of the people with whom I shared the files have gone to buy original copies of the DVDs/BluRays because they liked it so much they wanted all the extras.

So it's good to see that the sterotypes about file-sharing and the people involved being scum that infringe copyright without a care have been confirmed there.

I for one would like to see the court order that states that The Pirate Bay is actually an illegal site.