If you're stupid, you will try to censor the Internet.
China tried...and failed. Lots of people tried. Lots of countries attempted shit. They all failed.
You can do it to some degree. For example, with a few lines of coding, you can turn all 'fucks' into 'ducks' or 'F**ks'.
However, so far there has never been any software that could determine whether a picture contains child pronography or a child's birthday party.
How do you teach a computer to identify, at billions of instances accurately, that this group of pixels is a dick, owned by someone below 18? There are many dicks out there, on the Internet, and no two dicks are the same.
Achieving that would be to solve the Holy Grail of AI. There would be sentient, thinking machines that also has its own moral judgment. It's not impossible, but I believe that at its soonest, that kind of technology is 5,000 years away.
And there has always been ways around it. GutterUncensored is blocked? Go to a website that fetches the contents of a blocked site and view it from there. That's how I read Rocky's Bru when NSTP servers blocked the URL.
I wanted to get my own site blocked by Nasty Pee servers, but they didn't do that to me. Even writing about some ballet dancer called Kalimuliyana didn't do it. In a desperate attempt to get ISA-ed, I even wrote about Pak Lah tossing KJ's salad. Goddamn it, man. I could have been famous-er. And richer.
At its base level, porn can creep in through file transfer things. FTPs, IRC, p2p. And how would you recognise and distinguish porn, when the file has a .txt extension? As is done way back in the 90s, when Geocities banned images with .JPG, .GIF extensions. We just renamed the files as .TXT. It loaded correctly enough.
Currently, the safest way to distribute porn is via IRC channels. You can leech everything there. From pictures to software.
My skills and knowledge in porn, are around 13 years old. Which means I am obsolete. I know PHP, ASP coding, with basics in all manner of programming languages.
Today's kids are way ahead of me. Hard coding, which I sometimes fall back to, are extinct. I see some of the websites these kids do, and it's dynamic all the way. And that's at a basic level.
Today's kids hack into games and change whatever they want. They create mods and change the content of everything. There has never been a game that I couldn't hack into, and I'm a novice compared to today's 12-year-olds.
Censoring the Internet will only result in something akin to the Prohibition Era in the States. We might see our own 14-year-old Al Capones.
What you resist, persists. Everything you suppress, just pops up somewhere else. Maybe somewhere you least want it to. Ever wonder what would happen if Uncle Najib's 1malaysia website gets a splash page with multiple images of Goatse?
Sure, you can imprison a few. ISA a couple of hundred. But you can't catch them all.
If there is anything Malaysians - or humans, for that matter - can agree on, it would be porn. Porn is the lifeblood of the Internet. It is the driving force behind almost all innovations we see today.
Porn paved the way for videotapes. Porn pushed for the popularity of the Internet. Without porn, we would be nothing. Porn is a cornerstone of civilisation.
To combat child pornography, what you need to do is to get people who live on the Net to participate in its eradication. You don't curtail their freedom. You assist them. Have a reward system in place. Arrest as many child pornographers as you can.
Porn doesn't kill people. Listening to idiotic suggestions does.
And one last thing. Censor the Internet, and I'll fucking kill you. CAPTAIN PLANET!
