Censoring the Web

[AdamGundry]

Those of you in the UK (particularly BT Yahoo/Internet/Openworld customers) might like to read this Guardian article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1232506,00.html). Apparently BT (who provide ADSL Internet access to a lot of the UK, including me) are planning on shortly rolling out a content filtering system so that child pornography will be blocked. The article describes it as "the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy".

So what do you think? Is this a reasonable reaction to the problem, or unreasonable censorship? Personally, I think the subject matter is abhorrent but I'm not sure this is the best response and feel it could be the start of a worrying trend, particularly since I've never seen a filtering system which avoids false positives/negatives.

Adam

[PeOfEo]

It is useless, it will not stop the spread of it. It is just going to be a pain in the butt to those who want to look at little children naked *cough* jackson *cough*. How do they plan to filter the spread of illegal porn through peer to peer networks? Also what if someone browses through a server (remote desktop or that linux thing...)? There is no way to stop browsing through a server, I go around me schools network like that with remote desktop (because I am not a telnet ace).