On the evening where the new Royal pain in the ass is announced to a world who apparently cares (it’s a baby boy in case your Facebook feed hadn’t already exploded with the news), it seems rather odd that today of all days, coinciding with the birth that will keep Sky News waffling about nothing for the next 60 years, that in the news, it’s been announced that from the end of the year, if you’re going to want some entertainment to enjoy yourself with that involves the use of a sock halfway through from the internet, you’re going to have to ask for it. Say what?

Dave Cameron, fresh from saying bugger it to sorting out cigarette packaging, has made it a vital mission, out of nowhere, to ensure that children (or midget drunks) will no longer be destroyed by porn on the internet and that the market for child porn would be drained from the internet. And remarkably, this is one of the worst pieces of news to hit us, but not for the reasons you may think.

You can watch some of the highlights of that speech made from the NSPCC here; http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2013/jul/22/david-cameron-online-child-abuse-video

Other parts of the move being introduced are as follows;

• New laws so videos streamed online in the UK will be subject to the same restrictions as those sold in shops
• Search engines having until October to introduce further measures to block illegal content
• Experts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre being given more powers to examine secretive file-sharing networks
• A secure database of banned child pornography images gathered by police across the country will be used to trace illegal content and the paedophiles viewing it.
• Opt-in will be required by all internet users to unblock the filters which will be placed on all connections by default by the end of the year.

Before we get deeper into the mucky matter, the idea of protecting children is an admirable one, and we should always think about what they see before they are exposed in case it has a bad impact on the little ones.

Let’s start the hard pumping and get deeper into it…..oh yes….it’s getting good now….

Trust me….no-one should block this.

The first and most important point: Isn’t child pornography already illegal and therefore already being clamped down on by raids committed by police, certainly of well known individuals, let alone other people who want to view that crap? Gary Glitter ring any bells (not in that way, pervert)? Don’t they already do things about this to catch people, or are the experts not doing a good enough job?

As for the search engines, just how often is “child sex” as Dave put it in his speech, is being entered into search engines? Surely the likes of Google would be able to know this already and would have taken some steps for this, but given that the results wouldn’t be allowed to show up any naughty in the first place and provide alternatives such as education etc, fair enough, I actually can’t see anything wrong with that. Carry on gov.

But it’s the rest of it that sent a shiver down my spine and not in a good way after watching Debbie does Doncaster.

What are the new laws to be introduced against online streaming? Does this now mean that the likes of Netflix and Lovefilm suddenly find themselves being restricted in showing films in the Gay and Lesbian Category?

Now Lucy, Mummy’s going to show you what you’re going to have to do to get a job in future….

Netflix already have a separate interface for kids where lots of other content is not shown, so the option of ensuring they don’t just see that immediately is already there, and the only way children could see anything, would be if mummy and daddy were already drunk and had fallen asleep and little Timmy wanted some private time with two ladies who bonked all day and night in Rome for some reason. (let’s be fair, who cares about the plot in those films? )

The other points of the so-called experts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre being given more powers to examine secretive file-sharing networks and a secure database of banned child pornography images gathered by police across the country….so… who is to stop anyone working in these units from just gaining access to the images that way?

Also was this what the GCHQ and NSA recording of everything we do online really for? Who the hell is going to trust any of them at this point to act responsibly? Wasn’t Terrorism the last excuse to looking at everything we do, now it’s child safety?

Also, are we actually saying that no parent can actually be arsed to search using those naughty filthy search engines, the term “Parental Control software” so the government has to do it? It took 4 seconds to find this: http://www1.k9webprotection.com/ and it’s free. Is it again a case that parents who cannot be bothered to look at what their kids are doing?

Or and while you’re at it, what about all those music videos on Freeview where ladies and gents wander about the place on boats talking about all the ladies in the house going woo and ting with their boobies bouncing around the place? It’s of a sexual nature in a lot of those videos that a lifestyle is being sold, possibly more harmful to kids than pure naughty, but because they’ve still got a inch of clothing on, it’s OK?

Drop it like it’s hard…..

From the technical point of view, here’s a workaround for all this: VPNs.

What’s going to happen to those who just create a virtual connection to another server hosted elsewhere in the world? They just walk past it without breaking a sweat. The government has tried this before with the Pirate Bay when it was more concerned with piracy than anything else at the time, and it took one day for the workarounds to be documented and online. A day. Traffic to the Pirate Bay returned to normal in a week. A week.

What is the point?

The opt-in solution that if we want to have the ability to look at the muck from RedTube, is that we have to let our ISPs know. How will that conversation work without causing embarrassment to either party?

Caller: Hello I’d like to look at some smutt please, can you unblock it?
ISP: Certainly you wee scallywag, here you are, all unblocked, off you go now, enjoy yourself.
Caller: I certainly will, I’ve already got Shelia pumped up ready for action.
ISP: What are you like, eh?

Not bloody likely.

Also it’s very likely that this opt-in will be have to be listed somewhere and if anything were to occur, that list would be the first port of call for anyone to start going through. It smells a bit too much of being put on a secondary sex offenders register without actually committing a crime.

Frankly, a lot of what has been proposed should not be allowed to pass, as it’s again more erosion into the last place the governments of the world so desperately want to control; the internet. They are still too busy playing catch up with the tax laws which Amazon and Google follow to the letter, to even fully comprehend what it is, it would mean.

And finally, as I’ve remarked on this, and have written child sex on the page, will this mean that oohsometimes.com will be blocked as well? Well granted a lot of what is on this website is filth, but still, the point remains that other sites may get caught by accident. What will the process be to be unblocked and how long would that take? Will there be any compensation for revenue lost for those sites due to the block?

It’s even more scary to have people in charge making these decisions who either do not understand what they are doing, or the more scary part is they know exactly what they are doing and are hell bent in taking further control for our own “protection”. Trust, shall we say, is in very short supply.

No, For things like this, it’s up to us and the Police in their current capacity to sort out, not the ISPs. If we have kids and don’t want them to see things, we should be the ones to ensure that happens. Apparently that’s what parents used to do. Now it will be Big Brother and it really is scary to think what is next to be taken away.