how does an internet "filter" stop child porn from actually happening?

we should be ashamed of internet filters and their attempts to block child pornography, but not because blocking the content is a technically stupid and infeasible idea; but because of one simple fact....

if you *know* a web address (such that you can put that IP or domain or full URL into an internet filter system) then you can make somebody or some company or even some country accountable for that web address..

if governments are serious about stopping child pornography from happening in the first place, why not stop it at the source? blocking the sites from the end user point of view is akin to sticking your head in the sand; just because somebody is blocked from downloading child porn, it doesn't stop the children from being abused.

oh and the government has a list of websites with inappropriate content? is that a wise idea? i *hope* that that list does *not* go *viral*....

but ignoring for the moment the very real possibility that this list could end up being a child porn collectors' dream and could end up triggering a world wide epidemic of kiddy porn traffic (imagine if a list of a million child porn sites was leaked? wasn't the test list leaked already?), but besides that, what are we doing blocking those web sites?

if you know the addresses, you should be going after the companies that own the IP addresses and getting them to prosecute or disclose the names of the people that are publishing the material so that they can be prosecuted!!

if the company who owns a particular IP address or domain name space won't reveal the owner of the web site when it can be clearly demonstrated that their IP addresses are hosting inappropriate content, then court orders can fix that, can they not?

if international boundaries are a problem, then involve the government of the hosting country, if said government won't co-operate or their laws don't adequately cater for prosecuting inappropriate internet content and/or exploitation of children etc, then cut diplomatic ties with that country or block every web site hosted in that country or with that company, or drop the routes completely.

what? that's too much? ahem??? I'm sorry! I thought we were fucking *serious* about stopping child pornography, or is that just a lie to put internet filters into place?

Seems to me to be absolutely fucking stupid to be blocking the web sites themselves when the authorities should be going after the people that run the web sites.

as it stands, even if proposed internet filters *did* work and it *did* block 100% of every bit of child porn on the net in some magical way, it still doesn't mean children have been made safe - those children will still be exploited, regardless of whether their is an audience or not.

international relations on this matter need to improve if it is quicker to add bad sites to a filter list than it is to get those sites shut down once and for all.

Why go to that much effort to prevent child pornography from being *seen* (when those mechanisms can be easily bypassed anyway) when those resources could go to stopping the people *creating* and hosting it in the first place?

oh, and if the people actually doing it are caught, you might actually discover the other thousands of web sites they operate or visit that you did not have on your filter, and you might find all the other mechanisms other than via the web that they used to spread their "material" .. ie. blocking individual sites is like the mythical Hydra, you cut one off head and another grows back.

oh and you might just get a list of *other* people they are sharing "material" with if you catch the perpetrators ... ??

And the bottom line is that the people making the "porn" are the people doing the abusing, they don't need to market their "material" to anybody...

so again, how does a "filter" stop child exploitation from actually happening?

it doesn't but it is a very convenient way for politicians to pretend that they have done something by stopping others from seeing it.

well done, fucktards...

mostly written, 2010-07-23 22:19, mostly ....