And how long it will be before such machinery is
mandatory for all ISPs.
The excuse that there is no technical solution is gone - it was a lie
all along the way, and most techies knew.
Hmm it's not a lightly engineered solution. it was not an obvious one.
One thing to consider is that there are people out there who are ISP's just for a bunch of people or for people outside Switzerland.
So I'm not too sure what the solution costs but I'm sure its not available for free. I assume its around 10k at least.
Today this solution is easily "affordable" for the big guys but still expensive for the smaller ones (but I assume not out of reach as it was assumed).
Tomorrow they want to filter google for the search keyword "child porn" etc. Now go figure how many requests then will go through the box...!
The day after, the government thinks its smart and we should go one step further and start filtering videostreams by using a box which looks at the content. Then such a solution will start to cost 100'000's of francs (at least once its invented). And down goes the deadly spiral. Someone pays the bill. Always.
If we give in to such matters, it means we will be asked more and more because everyone thinks its so easy to do technically. But that's not the point.
Blocking the sites won't bring the effect compared to the cost to the economy. Think of this: we sure have more than 40 ISP's in Switzerland. Assuming the box costs 10'000 CHF (and thats a pure guess), the cost to the swiss economy is 400'000 CHF (someone pays for it and I believe its going to be the end user at the end). Not even including the cost of maintaining it. For that amount you can send out quite a few policemen to take down child porn sites at the other end of the world which would be way more effective.
The law doesn't allow us to wiretap and intercept. So lets not start burning our fingers with something which does exactly that . The human rights of free speech should be hold high even in the fact that "someone" might stumble on.
One thing which would be interesting to hear is how many requests do such site actively block today? How many people have been prevented from seeing nasty content? What has this saved Switzerland that those people did not see the content? Is this bigger than the cost?
Frankly, since the 15 years I'm using the internet, there has not been a single time where I stumbled on to child porn, and if I would, it would take me 0.5 seconds to realize and go away. This was probably because I was not actively looking for it. So for me (taking the hat of a a normal typical user now), such a solution would bring zero value. The value might more be negative because there's the danger that something might get blocked by mistake.
The key question is who do you want to protect and from what?
The child porn lover wont be "protected". You might make him more angry maybe, but it wont change his intention. He might even go and rape real children instead because he can't do it in virtuality. Everybody else with a normal moral sense who would see such content would either close the window immediately and/or call the police to take down the publisher.
Closing your eyes in front of a problem wont solve the problem.
Its like selling sunglasses to protect your skin at the beach.
Andreas Fink
Fink Consulting GmbH
Global Networks Schweiz AG
BebbiCell AG
IceCell ehf
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