Wipe the porn off the internet then give us free downloaded to software to clean our pcs

[carolinech]

There's occasional talk about legislation to clean the internet of adult material. I think that's rathera good idea. But also if that's to be done, perhaps everybody could be given free downloadable software to wipe their computers. Particularly useful if yo ever want to sell a computer again or pass it on to relative. It's difficult to know what family members have looked at, even unintentionally or what's got in the history via downloads.

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

There us!

I'm pretty sure you can just do it from within windows too...

Does fdisk still work?

[AuntieStella]

The talk of legislation goes quiet as soon as the talkers have it pointed out to them in words of one syllable that it won't work.

If you want a good (free) filter for home use, try K9.

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/wipe-hard-drive.htm

There you go , unlike removing porn from the internet this is both possible and easy...

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/wipe-hard-drive.htm

[Snorbs]

I don't want the Internet cleaned of all adult material because I'd miss sites like mumsnet.

[WMittens]

It would be useful if they agreed that it all had to go on .xxx domains, then it could easily be avoided and blocked. But noooo, the Christian fundamentalist Americans think that would be promoting porn, not controlling it.

[AuntieStella]

Who is the "they" that could enact something that would be successfully implemented globally? And who is going to define, globally, what "it" is?

And would that really stop agile, amateur producers?

[AMumInScotland]

How would anyone "clean" the internet? It is not all in one place where you can just control it.

I think the focus ought to be on making sure that people have an option of not seeing it, with filtering that actually works, but it can be difficult not to also remove access to perfectly innocent sites.

I was reading a forum entry where various words were being censored - words like "explicit" for instance. But since it was a coding forum and they were talking about the need to explicitly declare a variable, it became a bit meaningless with all the *s all through the article...

Likewise a website I worked on had to change its background image (a salmon) because it contained too much "flesh colour" and was a victim of overenthusiastic filters.

[PlentyOfPubeGardens]

Yes, just wipe it all off. Easy peasy

[WMittens]

Who is the "they" that could enact something...

ICANN, probably.

[AuntieStella]

ICANN could provide the domain names. They're not exactly set up to investigate the content of millions of sites to ensure compliance. And who would compel anyone to disclose? Or set the definitions?

[WMittens]

They let other people provide domain names; one of their functions is administering TLDs.

Some sort of crawler could probably scan and flag sites (given what Google can do in terms of crawling, indexing and archiving sites, it could probably be subcontracted easily) - site gets investigated and any porn site not on a .xxx gets their DNS entry pulled (also administered overall by ICANN).

[AuntieStella]

Goggle brigade things together that they think would be nice/useful together.

They don't even begin to pretend they have got "all" of something.

And with no standard (and international) definition of what would be classified as porn for this specific purpose, let alone the technology to get a machine to understand the difference between breasts bared for porn and breasts bared for a breast feeding information site, this isn't fit for purpose.

The "porn be gone" button remains distant, but users can get good levels of protection by using filters.

[WMittens]

What Google do with their archives is immaterial, my point is about what is possible. Content filtering tech has been around for 20 years or so - it's nothing new.

I only mentioned Google as an example of use a web crawler and associated ranking algorithm; writing a bespoke crawler would be a trivial exercise.

The software doesn't need to 'look' at a picture (although software to do this has been commercially available for SMEs for over 10 years, although they do throw up a lot of false positives); all it needs to do is analyse the page content and context and give it a rank by checking text, URLs and e.g. image filenames. Certains combinations would flag as suspect, others would be 'safe'; "naked" or "nude" might only be flagged as risky if occurring with certain other words. So breasts bared for porn might have an image name including the word "tits", on a domain of "hotgirlgirlaction", and other words on the page such as "fucking", "sucking", "pussy" etc. etc. - high percentage chance of porn; alternatively, a picture of breasts on a breastfeeding site would be more likely to include the word "breasts", on a domain called "newmothers", "babycentre" or "mumsnet" and will feature other words such as "lactating" "advice" or "FAQs". In any case, it's only a flag and rank for further investigation. Image analysis could be included to assist the ranking although IMO it's not very reliable.

I never said there should be a "porn be gone" button, I don't think it will ever happen, partly because of the commercial aspect. All I said was stick it all on a .xxx TLD.

[Snorbs]

A .xxx TLD won't work. Eg: some porn sites start moving to .xxx. Others lag behind. As it would be very easy to block the entire .xxx domain the ones who have moved see their traffic levels start to drop dramatically whereas the ones who haven't have their visitor numbers go through the roof. At that point, the entire porn industry abandons .xxx - if necessary by setting up their own root servers - and the whole thing instantly becomes pointless.

And that's leaving aside the issues over ICANN specifically and deliberately not having the power to police this kind of thing and the fundamentally intractable issues over getting (eg) the USA, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Japan to all agree what constitutes "porn" and how to categorise it.

[MurderOfGoths]

"Some sort of crawler could probably scan and flag sites (given what Google can do in terms of crawling, indexing and archiving sites, it could probably be subcontracted easily)"

How do you think they'd be able to tell which sites had porn on them exactly? Bearing in mind Google uses only what the sites (or sites linking to them) provide in the first place. All a porn site would have to do is change the information google get, or block google from indexing it at all. Easily done.

Apart from that, would you be blocking only dedicated porn sites? Or community led sites which people put porn on to? If the latter would you block the whole site or just the individual files? And how?

[WMittens]

the ones who have moved see their traffic levels start to drop dramatically whereas the ones who haven't have their visitor numbers go through the roof.

Why? The only people who are going to block porn are people who don't want to see it (or don't want their kids to see it) - anyone wanting to see porn will not block .xxx and could access it without issue. Where's the issue?

if necessary by setting up their own root servers

Which would be just as easy to block as .xxx - you just block the entire TLD.

All a porn site would have to do is change the information google get, or block google from indexing it at all.

FFS, I only used Google as an example of the tech, not that Google would have to do it. The point was about having a bot do the initial flag, nothing more.

Apart from that, would you be blocking only dedicated porn sites? Or community led sites which people put porn on to? If the latter would you block the whole site or just the individual files? And how?

It's your computer, you can block what you want. My employer's network blocks adult sites (I've not tried accessing them, btw), most things about gambling (including National Lottery), firearms, etc. Even webmail, annoyingly.

Community sites (forums, at any rate) mostly have a very similar T&C page that you agree to by signing up saying you will not post explicit blah blah, so the members have already agreed to it. If a community is of a certain nature, it would go on .xxx.

If people link images from a .xxx site your web content software would block it anyway.

[Snorbs]

Why? The only people who are going to block porn are people who don't want to see it (or don't want their kids to see it) - anyone wanting to see porn will not block .xxx and could access it without issue. Where's the issue?

I'm not talking about individuals doing the blocking, I'm talking about entire ISPs and/or countries. To choose to block porn websites across an entire ISP, with porn sites spread out the way they are, is expensive and you're constantly playing catch-up as the new sites emerge. If you can just block DNS lookups to .xxx entirely then that's very cheap and easy to do. Which is, after all, the driving ambition behind .xxx anyway - put all the porn in one place to make it easy to identify and block.

Incidentally, how well would ".xxx for porn" work with torrents? Or binary newsgroups?

Which would be just as easy to block as .xxx - you just block the entire TLD.

Er, no. That's not how DNS works. ICANN only has control over its own root servers. If you set up your own root server and other people point their computers to it then ICANN has neither the powers nor the technology to block access to it. So ICANN's servers (or, rather, whoever they delgate .xxx to) would see bignbouncy.xxx but your own server could be making it available as completelyinnocuous.myroot or whatever.

My point is, .xxx would be very easily circumvented, be totally impracticable and - as has been seen in ICANN every single time this idea has been raised - is a political non-starter. If you want to ignore all this and still keep on believing that .xxx would solve anything then feel free. But there are a lot of people with a lot more experience and knowledge in this area than I have who have looked into this extensively and concluded it won't work.

[WMittens]

Sorry, what? Why the fuck are you talking about ISPs blocking porn? What business is it of theirs?

[MurderOfGoths]

"Sorry, what? Why the fuck are you talking about ISPs blocking porn? "

Because the OP is talking about wiping porn off the internet maybe? Which individual filters wouldn't do.

"FFS, I only used Google as an example of the tech, not that Google would have to do it. "

I know, I phrased it badly. I meant that the tech they use relies on the information the website gives to them. And if the website doesn't give them that information then they can't know it. And therefore can't know whether it's porn or not.

"It's your computer, you can block what you want."

The OP is talking about wiping porn off the net. Not individual filters.

[MurderOfGoths]

Wrt .xxx domains, if you owned a porn site what incentive is there to move over to .xxx?

• people will have paid a lot of money for domain names. For example, in 2010 can you guess how much sex.com sold for? $13million. If you paid that much for something would you just drop it?
  

• sites will have spent time and money on establishing their website. That means promoting the address, possibly printing flyers etc. That's a lot of money down the drain.
  

• there'd be the worry that if they did give up the domain name that they'd been using, that some other company would come along and take it. Stealing their customers and profiting from their work.
  

I suspect that with the .xxx domain name all that'll happen is that some porn sites will just buy up the relevant .xxx domain name and keep their previous .whatever domain names. Why wouldn't they? It increases the likely number of hits.

[MurderOfGoths]

"Community sites (forums, at any rate) mostly have a very similar T&C page that you agree to by signing up saying you will not post explicit blah blah, so the members have already agreed to it."

Forums aren't such a problem as they usually don't host material. But image or web hosting sites are another story.

Forums are slightly easier to moderate than those. Still not too easy. Just ask MNHQ, they have to rely on members reporting posts in order to review and delete them.

Same goes for hosting community sites.

Places like YouTube or Flickr have got a policy of not hosting explicit material, but it remains up on their sites until someone reports it. They can't possibly catch everything instantly. And it also relies on someone stumbling across the explicit material who doesn't want to. If the material isn't easy to stumble across and has to be deliberately looked for, then it'll remain up for longer. Possibly indefinitely.

[niceguy2]

There's occasional talk about legislation to clean the internet of adult material. I think that's rathera good idea.

It's a bloody great idea! Whilst they are at it I want them to introduce legislation to ensure no child goes hungry and outlaw wars to ensure there is world peace.

I'm surprised noone's thought of it earlier!

[MsAverage]

There's occasional talk about legislation to clean the internet of adult material. I think that's rathera good idea.

I think it is a rather bad idea. Tiny non-watching-porn minority should not impose their tastes on the huge porn-watching majority.

[djelibeybi]

techthrob.com/2009/03/02/howto-delete-files-permanently-and-securely-in-linux/

srm and sfill are all you need to clean up your computer.