Censorship - porn on the net

i like this post from here. Copypasting everything here in the hope of penning more thought later. very surprising to note that Britain actually 'ban' porno sites [whatever that means]. What interest me the most is the 'tips' on how to access sites despite censorship by government ie Facebook in China.


No ‘opt-in’ system in S’pore for online porn: MDA
By Xavier Lur – December 25th, 2010

The Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) does not intend to follow the British government in its plans to blocking pornographic websites and allow consumers to “opt in” to receive explicit material.

However, this does not imply that the Singapore government is not taking a serious stance on the matter.

According to The Straits Times, the MDA instead plans to better educate the public, especially school children and teen. This is believed to be more effective in the long run as compared to the mandatory ban.

“Education (particularly of children and youth) is a more effective long-term solution than the mandatory provisions of filters,” said the National Internet Advisory Committee (NIAC), whose members include academics, senior government officials and industry executives.

Maris Stella High School, which embraces a high level of technology into its educational system, places the safe use of the Internet as one of its top priorities.

“It’s not about those fanciful gadgets. Our goal is to create a rich ICT-orientated culture that inculcates a sense of responsibility regarding the use of technology in students. This is what education is all about,” Principal Joseph Lim tells Yahoo! in an interview two weeks ago.

MDA has banned over 100 “mass impact objectionable” pornographic websites so far, according to a 2008 report by Reuters.

Why the government chose not to block all pornographic websites

It is just not feasible. The sheer volume of pornographic material online made the job impossible.

According to the “The Stats On Internet Pornography” infographic by OnlineMBA, 12 per cent or 24.6 million websites on the Internet are pornographic.

And the number is growing significantly everyday, thus requiring a huge effort and manpower to block them. As such, MDA thinks that is not a wise solution to combat pornography.

There are numerous ways to bypass the ban and access to undesirable sites — via file-sharing networks, proxies and Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

How VPNs work is that users are given a foreign IP address, which connects them to servers based in foreign countries such as the United States or France, therefore allowing them to access blocked websites. This is how many Chinese Internet users manage to access Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in their country even though these websites are blocked in China.

Moreover, there are several legal issues regarding consumer rights laws that need to be reviewed before any blocking policy is implemented as it will include websites that sell premium pornographic materials.

Will educating the public be a better solution?

It will be a more effective measure, but only to a certain extent.

A mandatory ban sends a signal of what is acceptable and what is not in society while education tells a person the right and wrong doings, but it does not ensure that he or she will abide by it.