Telegraph.co.uk - Government Postpones age check for Porn websites
Made me lol
Our Government is so embarrassingly incompetent - When it comes to the internet, they're oblivious.
Cretins, total utter time wasters all of them, I wonder how much cash they've thrown at "consultants" and other useless people, to come to the conclusion that this is probably not going to be an effective policy...
They've been trying to get rid of the Pirate Bay for years now but there are loads of proxy links people use to access it. I imagine the same thing will happen to banned access to certain porn sites, people will just proxy their around to them.
There was one point about 3-4 years ago, where most of the ISPs were working hell for leather to enforce the automatic blocking of torrent sites which had received court judgements, I actually helped design one of the blocking systems for a big ISP, trouble was at the time we all knew people would just proxy around them - but we were just doing the bare minimum to satisfy the government legislation (we'd be fined if we didn't because we were one of the 4 biggest ISPs), we didn't really feel the need to be thrashing money into a bigger system to restrict the service our customers were paying for anyway, (we didn't really care that much)
We had 1Tbps+ inbound most days to around 6 million subscribers, and the vast majority of that traffic was google (youtube) and facebook, a tiny tiny proportion of it was torrenting, torrenting really didn't bother us, constantly having enough peering capacity to handle stuff like Youtube was 10x worse to deal with.
In the last few years, a number of different torrent sites have appeared and focus has shifted away a little, as a result - I can now get directly to the pirate bay without having to proxy, (it used to be blocked) along with a number of other sites, I rarely even use proxies now, whereas a few years ago I had to.