cynicalbastard

The IWF and BT release figures demonstrating that the number of access attempts to banned child porn sites has increased, and this is therefore a major concern. Everyone repeats the story. Because no one can question the child porn epidemic, uhhr, no one looks twice at the figures.

The story suggests that because attempts to access the banned sites (on the IWF list) have risen from 10,000 eighteen months ago to 35,000 per month now, it shows a worrying increase in the number of evil kiddy-fiddlers on the net. Extrapolation from the BT figures (across 1/3 of the UK net) to the whole of the UK business suggests a shocking 100,000 attempts made every day to access child porn sites. Well, uhhr, no. Shock horror.

As the IWF themselves point out, they’ve increased the number of banned sites from 3,500 to 6,000 in the last year, thus quickly accounting for a doubling in the number of visits (I know, dodgy statistics too, but we’ll keep it rough). But, wait a minute, these sites are banned. So people trying to access them will probably make multiple attempts before realising that 404 is REALLY there. Thus accounting for more failures.

At heart though is some major disingenousness. If the sites are banned, how do people find out about them? You can’t just put ‘pictures of nekkid little girlies’ into google and come up with a list of child porn sites (I’ve just tried ‘little girls cunts’ and got, yes, lots of images and sites around quite mature ladies, not an under-18 in sight). Child porn sites are hard to find. So how are these supposed attempters attempting? Could it be spam? Yup, that’s what’s most likely. Clicks on spam e-mail of the ’see teen girls’ type. They aren’t deliberately trying to access this material at all.

The extrapolation is even more nonsense. If only BT are actually banning these sites, we have to assume that some of the attempts through other ISPs are successful, which would suggest a lower number of attempts, and a lower overall figure. And likely a lot of people visiting sites where they’re rather disappointed by what they find…

So what’s it about? Well, it’s funny that this major social story is accompanied by BT and children’s representatives calling for everyone to adopt the BT Cleanfeed system (a system which can be reverse-engineered to provide the banned list). That’s a commercial system. So, congrats to the BT commercial PR team for getting their product enthusiastically endorsed by every major news organization under the sun. But still we’re no further forward in understanding paedophilia.