Ponography: Why Britain’s anti-porn mega-filter is great (no, really) - by Peter Nowak

"So British Prime Minister David Cameron is keen to ban online pornography. Please sir, can I have some more? Seriously.

Against the odds, I’m pulling for the filter to actually work. That said, I’m not optimistic about this plan – which will require Internet service providers to enact default filters – and I’m also unhappy about all the free speech the attempt will inevitably trample. But this likely failure is too bad because it’s actually the kind of jolt the world sorely needs at this specific moment in time."

Brits will still have access to this cornucopia of online porn under Cameron’s plan, but they’ll have to have an embarrassing conversation with their ISP wherein they’ll have to ask to keep it turned on. It’ll be the modern-day equivalent to furtively buying a Playboy at the corner store, with similar “I read it for the articles” justifications: “Uh, why yes, Mr. ISP, I’d like the filter turned off so I can read National Geographic’s studies on mating habits in primitive societies.”

Young people’s habits, meanwhile, won’t be fazed. As soon as the filter is cracked – the smart money has it happening within hours of activation – the instructions on how to do so will be available to anyone who can type words into Google. And then what? Will the British government ban search engines from listing that information? It may as well jump on banning instructions on how to do pretty much anything illegal. It’s the slippery slope argument that free speech advocates will have a justifiable field day with.

It’s also why Australia dumped a similar plan last year in favour of a much more limited content blacklist, as determined by Interpol. Even that filter, known as Delimiter, can be defeated by a “trivial” change to the user’s settings, Australian ISP Optus admitted back in 2011.

Read more: Why Britain’s anti-porn mega-filter is great (no, really) - The Globe and Mail

NewScientist: Porn in the USA: Conservatives and Religious are biggest consumers study says - by Ewen Callaway

For the complete report by the New Scientist click on this link

Porn in the USA: Conservatives and Religious are biggest consumers study says - by Ewen Callaway

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography. A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states. "When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country.

CBCNEWS: U.S., France move to block online child pornography

For the complete report from CBCNEWS click on this link

U.S., France move to block online child pornography

Governments and internet service providers in both the U.S. and France struck deals on Tuesday to block access to child pornography. In the United States, ISPs Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable also agreed to pay $1.1 million US to help fund efforts to remove online child pornography created and disseminated by users through their servers. The changes, which will affect U.S. customers worldwide, were announced Tuesday by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.