If you want porn: Google it

pinno

This whole debate about child pornography and the moral responsibility of major search engines is a bit of an enigma.

There must be some cycling geeks out there who understand the web a bit more than I. If the administrators of all the major search engines had to comply to some international standard, would:

Child pornography be driven into the 'dark' net and become un-policeable?
Would it be faesible?

How do you solve such a global problem?

VTech

Its unfair that Google are being blamed, it stinks to me that the government are trying to add fuel to the fire about the taxes not paid by google who are in fact doing the right thing.

I like many others agree that we should pay tax, every penny we owe, but................ not a penny more, google have found a loophole that means they don't pay, whos fault is that ?

They cant control child porn just like I cant control my want for sweets

They can do more to make it harder but your average child molester doesn't use the usual methods to get his fix.

arran77

VTech wrote:

I like many others agree that we should pay tax, every penny we owe, but................ not a penny more, google have found a loophole that means they don't pay, whos fault is that ?

Agreed.

Just because they're not breaking any law doesn't make it right, it's morally wrong, if you earn your money in this country you pay the taxes that you owe, not what you can get away with paying, if we all had the means to employ high flying accountants to dodge taxes this country would be even more up shit creek than it is :roll:

I disagree though that it's unfair to blame Google, they and other search engines have a massive role to play in resolving this.

sungod

google's policy is to report any sites with child porn to the appropriate authorities, i'm sure other major search providers are the same

google alone now processes over a trillion urls, the web is far beyond human oversight

even then, creating hidden web pages, or entire hidden sites, that will never be found by google, is a trivial task, and i do mean trivial, that's even without resorting to encryption or vpns to mask content, or the use of anonymization techniques

expecting search providers to solve the problem is technically infeasible and dangerous nonsense

on the news yesterday (maybe the day before) i heard some idiot demanding that search providers verify the identity and age of users to confirm they are allowed to see pornography or other adult content

how does that help? do they think the child porn scum are going to obey the rules and announce they have 'adults only' status?

hammering on google will not stop child porn, because it can be hidden from search engines, just like your bank account details are, well most of them

but it's all a red herring, i suspect the degree of monitoring and logging that your internet activity is already subjected to would surprise and shock most of you

most governments already have the ability to track access to every known child porn site, and they keep usage information long enough to backtrack past access to sites that are discovered in future (typically at least 6 months), if you know how, you can avoid this tracking to some extent, but in doing so you simply draw attention to yourself and invite use of alternate techniques


the gutter press is exploiting a tragic event to stir things up, to sell papers and drive clicks for their online advertising, next week it'll be something else

child porn isn't a technical problem, it's a societal one, it needs fixing at source

as for sources, the daily mail is notorious for publishing pictures of young girls with sexually loaded straplines, it really makes you wonder about the editor's predelictions, this cynical sexualization of children is part of the problem, i'm sure it's not healthy for it's readers, there'll always be some who want more

VTech

Great reply. I was led to believe its around 18-24 months but regardless, we are all being tracked and watched, that's a fact. The issue is that as we are all being watched, it just needs a trigger to set a catalyst to backtrack a certain individual and find all the info they want.
It's amazing how easy it is to track what people on the net are doing, I've found posts on this very forum clearly advertising certain sites when only seconds before that same IP posted on a blog as the owner of said store.

It's also a piece of cake to track the other sites most people are viewing at the same time as being on this or any other site, I'm not sure people realise how little they are covered.

gavbarron

sungod wrote:

child porn isn't a technical problem, it's a societal one, it needs fixing at source

^ This

The are currently trying to address a symptom rather than the problem. And by 'they' I mean all authorities worldwide, not just UK Govt, this isn't a problem unique to just us

ballysmate

I don't think that it would mark me out as being unique on here for me to say that I have visited my share of porn sites on the internet. But I have NEVER EVER encountered any child porn. Perhaps I have been lucky or perhaps my tastes are so 'vanilla' that I don't get too close to the nasty stuff.
If child porn is encountered it can be reported https://www.iwf.org.uk/report for instance. But as for moral responsibility, who would, hand on heart, have no qualms about picking up the phone or clicking the mouse button to report it. Who would think it better to 'not get involved', such is the stigma and hysteria surrounding the issue. Thinking about such cases of the PAEDIATRICIAN's house in Southampton being targeted some years ago by an ignorant mob, who would blame them.
Recently at a wedding reception, a family friend's little boy needed to go to the toilet. I was asked if I would take him, but I refused and sought his parents out to help him instead. All he wanted was someone to take him in, stand outside the cubicle and then make sure he had pulled his trousers up properly. But I was mindful of how it would look to anyone not knowing the situation and to my chagrin, I let this influence my behaviour. Such is the hysteria at the moment.
As regards the OP, as stated previously, it is not the search engines responsibility it is society's. Each society around the world is different and it is up to each society to deal with it accordingly.

rhext

I don't think that this is anything to do with the internet search industry. There are legal porn sites and there are illegal porn sites. The internet search companies could, should and do restrict access to and report the illegal ones as they identify them. They don't restrict access to the legal ones.

The real debate should be about what's legal and what's not. Should legislation be put in place that further constrains what the legal sites should be allowed to show? If the contention is that legal sites contain links that lead people to illegal sites (for example) then should that content be controlled more carefully? Expecting the search engine companies to exercise some sort of grey-area moral judgement on our behalf seems to me to be a cop-out. We're basically being encouraged to say to them 'you need to make it difficult for people to access content that another group of people find morally objectionable, despite the fact that we haven't got the backbone (and/or the mandate) to actually make that content illegal'.