David Cameron's Internet porn filter is the start of censorship creep
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (1)As a UK citizen, I've been very disappointed by this debacle. I suspect that Cameron's heart was actually in the right place (protecting the children, etc) but he does not understand the significant number of unintended consequences that we are likely to see (and are already seeing).I would suggest doing the following to make this workable long term:- Centralise the list of sites categorised as obscene/pornographic/etc (why should it be different for different ISPs?)- Make the list of these sites publicly accessible and searchable- Ensure the list is maintained by a non-political and balanced panel (is this possible?)- Implement a process for removal requests where a site is mis-classified and ensure that this appeal process is separate from the initial panel- Implement KPIs on the effectiveness of the filter that take into account false positives + false negatives- Remove any automatic categorisation based on keywords, this is too crude- Make publicly accessible the guidelines for classificationUnfortunately, I don't expect the above to actually happen :(1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor