Do you want porn with that sir?

So kind of as predicted earlier on this blog there's a growing head of steam around this "Opt in for porn" thing with your ISP. The Daily Fail has got its panties in a bunch and started a campaign and Labour, always quick to spot a rolling bandwagon particularly when it comes to nanny stateism, have jumped on board

"Block online porn!" screams the banner, which without a trace of irony is placed right next to a photo link about someone called Kim Kardashian "Vehemently denying nude photos whilst stepping out in very tight trousers" because that right, isn't porn yeah and doesn't objectify women, right?

You would have a better chance of blocking the tide coming in Canute style. The majority of internet innovations were driven by or became mainstream because of porn. Grumble, I read somewhere, accounts for the majority of the web's traffic. Hell back in the day the video recorder war was won by the technologically inferior VHS system mainly because all the "adult titles" were released on that format.

And you are up against one of the most powerful forces in the universe, the raging hormones of a 14 year old boy. It cannot be bargained with, it cannot be reasoned with and it absolutely will not stop until it's found a way into wobblybigjugs.com and had one off the wrist. I know, I was one once; of course back then it was the magazines passed furtively around your mates and on one memorable occasion we managed to hire Ai No Korida from the video shop and it wasn't out of any desire to explore and critique Japanese cinema I can tell you. And have you met kids lately? They grew up with computers and probably have forgotten more about configuring anonymous proxies than I've ever known and will probably end up helping their dad's bypass the filters.

Its all utterly pointless gesture politics of the "something must be done" type as per usual. It's surely up to parents to bring their kids up, police their internet use and yes, accept that their teenage sons and daughters are a seething cauldron of hormones and talk to them about it, explain what porn is and about the difference between what's depicted in  porn and what real relationships are about.

What's that Mr Government? Ordinary people taking responsibility for their lives and children? That'll never do will it, after all, we're not qualified.

Shush, don't tell the government

For various reasons I found myself in the market for a 3G broadband dongle last week to replace the ancient Vodafone PCMCIA card version I have been using for years* and a look at the coverage maps showed my best bet was Three and a pay as you go would work out fine instead of a contract.

So off I flapped down to the Three shop and just out of curiosity I wondered if in out surveillance society you could still buy communications equipment anonymously. And it turns out that, yes, you can. Picked up a dongle pre-loaded with a 1Gb allowance for 20 or so quid cash, no names, no registration, nothing. You can buy top-up allowances at a tenner a time again for cash in plenty of places so I have an anonymous internet connection, and it's pretty fast too.

This got me thinking what would you have to do to be virtually undetectable using this, and its not that hard. There are location services, you might have seen these advertised as "find where your kids are" services that use data from mobile phone masts and triangulation to identify the location of a mobile device and the networks will of course give this information to the police but a bit of research indicates that they are not that accurate. Plod would have you believe that they could go "Yep, Dragon's on his 3G searching for ocelot porn again, he's at his house behind the water pipes, in the back bedroom" but they can't. Even in a city with a dense collection of masts it's only accurate to 100 meters at best, in rural areas that drops to kilometers.

Traffic analysis would be a way to work out its you of course. If anyone really was interested in finding me they would be able to work out the dongle gets used most mornings on a particular train into London just by watching what masts it connects to so you would probably need to use it in one space or adapt a usage pattern that makes no sense and can't be attributed to you.  Dumping the dongle every 3 or 4 months as well and getting a new one, ideally on a different network, would probably be prudent as well.

Combine this with strong encryption and the use of proxies like TOR and darknets and you're as undetectable as an undetectable thing.

I'm amazed we can still get away with this, really amazed. I would have thought that our lords and masters would have pointed at those modern horsemen of the apocalypse, Terrorist and Peedofils, and gone "waaaah! all communication equipment must be registered for your own protection citizens".

Of course all the information presented above is just a thought experiment, if you choose to act on any of this I take no responsibility. But here's a link so you can find your nearest Three store...



* "Tiamat" - my lovely old T60 is laid up awaiting repairs and the Compaq 6720 (named Voliatus as it's not the smartest lappy in the world) I've borrowed doesn't like the old card it seems.

Thinking of the chiiiildren, again.

Ah yes, the Tories. Just like Labour always ready with their ban-hammer when it comes to the thought that someone out there is having a good time. Following on from a report from that bastion of all things blue rinse and prudery the Mother's Union (whose leader appears to be a bloke called "Reg" for some unfathomable reason) your lovely nanny state will insist that the main broadband providers will offer a block on "adult content" to all subscribers.

Of course there's no detail on this but I would imagine it'll be some sort of BT Cleanfeed and so easily subvertable by any moderately tech savvy twelve year old (and they all are) who can configure a proxy.  In  other words this is a fig leaf, a sop to those members of the party faithful bluenoses who wander around with a disapproving expression and looking for all the world like someone has just rammed a pine cone up their arse.

And how is this going to work in terms of opt in or opt out? The Daily Fail is saying "opt in" whereas everyone else reporting the story is non-commital on that point.  Mind you opt in is going to make for some amusing conversations in PC World.

"Do you want porn with your new Dell laptop?"
"Er, yes please."
(Turns on tannoy) "Mr Verity to the checkout please. Can you bring a porn opt-in form. Gentleman wants internet filth on his PC. Now sir, what sort of porn do you want? Straight, gay, midgets, horses, horses with midgets..."

And who, exactly, is going to administer this list of what is "adult material"? Sure so it's a fair bet that a website with a name like "HotSexyDragonsDoingItWithAnythingThatMoves.com" will end up on the list¹ but how about some gay advocacy sites that offer advice to to teenagers struggling with their sexuality? What about stuff that's not actually sexual or illegal in any way but maybe you really would not want your kids looking at such as these "pro anorexia" sites?  What about "dangerous" political sites that you find distasteful such as those from extreme right and left wing parties or Muslim extremists?

See where as it's nice an easy to block something obvious that we can pretty much all agree on a definition of such as child porn² it starts to end up like a quagmire of The Dead Marshes proportions as soon as you try to categorise what's "adult" and what isn't.

And as ever, with politicians in charge, they are bound to monumentally fuck this up.

¹ memo to self: register that domain name ASAP.
² and even there, if the spam I get in my mailbox inviting me to come to sites with names like "hot-teens.grubbysmut.org" is to be believed, where I am sure the models are of legal age but are pretending not to be so, where do we stand with the ban-hammer on this one?

Claudia Hat 'nen Video Spiele

17 years after its release Germany has "unbanned" the famous first person shooter game "Doom". The funniest thing reading about this was becoming re-acquainted with the German government ministry that originally did the banning, the fabulously named Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien literally "Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons"

Germany actually has this organisation that goes beyond rating media like games and films but can actually completely ban an item from sale or distribution if it is deemed "Harmful to Minors" which they define as:

Objects are considered harmful or dangerous to minors if they tend to endanger their process of developing a socially responsible and self-reliant personality.

What actually happened in practice was that items on the "index" were only available through certain outlets like sex shops.

I first came upon this "Won't somebody think of the chiiiiildren!" nightmare organisation some years ago through a German punk outfit "Die Ärtze" (The Doctors) who had one of their songs banned by the blue noses at the BPjM; it was a lovely little ditty about a girl called Claudia and her German Shepherd dog, went something like this...

Claudia hat nen Schäferhund
und den hat sie nicht ohne Grund,
Abends springt er in ihr Bett
und dann geht es rund!

Yes, it's rather rude but it really does beggar belief that some serious, educated people sat around in a room and went "Yes this song will encourage our young women to experiment with bestiality, better ban it."

So as a result of the ban Die Ärtze were forbidden to sing this song at their concerts. 

But as technically only the lyrics were banned what they used to do was play the song as an instrumental.  The audience used to sing it.

I can just imagine some Mary Whitehouse type watching thousands of teenagers singing..

Claudia mag keine Jungs
Und sie ist auch nicht lesbisch,
am allerliebsten mag sie es,
mit ihrem Hundchen untern Esstisch!

... at the tops of their voices as she slowly turned purple with impotent rage.

Doing your thinking for you

So I haven't written much recently. So what, neither has Shakespeare.

Well I've been thinking about getting back into blogging recently (and was kind of goaded into it by my fellow blogger Steve over at Natural Yoghurt). Mainly I took some time out as, well, I used to just grump about the government and general fuckwittery of my fellow inhabitants of planet Earth and a change of government last year kind of felt like a breath of fresh air. Well that air is getting rather stale and this week it took on a decided whiff of "hang on, doesn't this smell like the same bullshit we had before".

First up we have the latest "oh no, evil peeeedofils! Little kiddywinks are dressing up in "suggestive" clothing and being sexualised" - whatever the feck sexualised means. Of course the answer here is not to look at why there is a demand for a padded bikini top for an eight year old - because all the shops are doing is responding to that demand from their customers - but of course reach for the ban hammer, the first, last and only weapon of the lazy, mob-ruled politician.

Maybe if we took a good luck at what our culture has become, little more than panem et circenses which teaches us all you need to be a success is to kick a pig's bladder around or perform some "raunchy" dance routine and win a talent contest (that's rigged anyway, see here) we might see why kids want to look "cool" and "sexy" because that's all that seems to count. Education, manners, learning to be a decent and engaged citizen? Nah, I'm gonna win celebrity come X factor's got talent and get rich and shit, innit.

And fresh from pandering to this along comes the British Board of Film Classification, a bunch of middle class cunt-trumpets who apparently have this amazing insight into the processes in my brain and have determined that if I watch a certain film by the name of "Human Centipede II" I will be so mentally damaged that I'll start going around and stitching human beings together with Mrs Dracunculus' Toshiba sewing machine ¹. OK now having glanced at the plot of this film which seems to involve masturbating with sandpaper, coprophilia and rape with fencing materials I can tell you here and now that I won't be "damaged" at all by this piece of crap because I will under no circumstances be watching it as I would like to retain the contents of my stomach but surely that, as an adult, is my decision and not that of some faceless committee meeting in a room in London somewhere. I've no problem with them placing "ratings" on films, saying "This film contains explicit scenes of X, Y, Z and Justin Beiber and is therefore only suitable for adults and throwing in the bin" so parents can make an informed decision on what their kids see but a flat out "you can't see this, we think it will warp your tiny little minds you ordinary people" is as offensive as the movie they just banned.

Meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss.



¹ Which as I have utterly failed to figure out how it works on no less than three occasions would mean some very lumpy and misshapen aberrations walking around Norfolk - not that anyone would notice.

In case you thought a Tory government would be better

No they won't...
"Lad mags" encourage irresponsible behaviour among young men and promote a negative image of women, a leading Conservative has said.

Yep, nothing to do with irresponsible behaviour having no consequences, it's all down to some tits and bums in "Zoo". Fuckwit.

And speaking of zoos I guess this means that a new tory government won't be re-legalising my horse porn collection any time soon.