Re: UK: Government Sets Target Date for Blocking Child Porn

["Jerry Hill" <malaclypse2 () gmail com>]

On 5/18/06, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu <Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu> wrote:
> And the next paragraph...
>
> > Obviously, neither of those is foolproof,
>
> Which is exactly *why* it's impossible.  Also, you have the "collateral
> damage" problem - if you have  2,593 different domains all vhosted on the
> same Apache server, it gets *really* difficult to block by IP address and
> not cause an issue.

Sure, I'll happily acknowledge that it wouldn't block every child porn
site. I never said that it would. I would hope that the MPs in the UK
know that too.  Presumably, that's the reason the proposal is worded
in the way it is.  They seem to feel that blocking some percentage of
people from visiting known purveyors of child pornography is
worthwhile.

As to the "collateral damage" problem, I think that's a feature, not a
bug.  If you're being vhosted on a server that also hosts child
pornography, maybe it's time to look into another hosting provider.
Sure, there are implementation problems -- how does a host get added
to the list?  What steps can be taken to get off the list? What's done
with the ISP logs of people who attempt to visit blocked sites?

All that being said, I'm not sure the proposal made by Mr. Coaker is a
good idea.  The implementation is difficult, and there would certainly
be problems with false positives, false negatives, and circumvention.
In the longer term, I'd also be worried about what the government
might do once they have started a content-based filtering program, and
how they might exand it in the future.

All in all, the proposal certainly doesn't block all child porn from
all the computers in the UK, but I think it would have some impact.
It would add aditional costs (in time, money and/or technical
expertise) to a behavior that the government disapproves of.  That's
usually the point of laws.

--
Jerry

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