The four ISPs that have agreed to block explicit web contents – read porn at the time of writing – are Sky, British Telecom, Talk Talk and Virgin according to The Guardian newspaper. Subscribers to those ISPs need to opt-in to be able to view explicit contents on the Internet.

It is expected that the prime minister David Cameron will announce further moves like restricting “aggressive advertising campaigns and certain types of images on billboards”. Those obviously will come without opt-in options.

The government furthermore plans to unleash a website called Parentport to the public which citizens can use to “complain about television programmes, advertisements, products or services which they believe are inappropriate for children”.

It is interesting to note that the government believes that they can filter out all explicit contents on the Internet this way. Web filters, even on the ISP level, have weaknesses. This includes not only that they will never have a 100% detection rate, but also that the likelihood of false positives is high.

It is also not clear at the time of writing if individual web pages will get blocked or the entire domain.

That’s beneficial for the Orwellian phantasies of the British government in two ways. They first have established censorship on the ISP level, supported by parts of the population. The term explicit contents, adult contents or even porn is vague at best which leaves lots of room for interpretations. Will this only include images and videos or other forms like texts as well.

Vagueness actually is a common denominator in public state-driven censorship. From a concerned citizen perspective it all boils down to the question of power. Who has the power to decide what to censor and what not to, and what quality objective guidelines are available to base that decision on?

Others might say that violence, drugs, computer games, weapons, Tom and Jerry, The Simpsons or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet should also fall under that censorship.

It is also interesting to note that part of the users who would opt-in won’t because of fear of landing on “the country’s perverts list”.

It is not clear yet how users can opt-in. Do they have to phone their ISP asking for permission to watch porn on the Internet? The opt-in cannot be anonymous, and it would not make sense to display options to opt-in right on the blocked web page.

Update: BBC now contradicts earlier reports stating that parents can opt-in to filter specific types of websites during sign-up (presumably like Open DNS offers packages to block certain types of sites).

The code has beens spread by worms and thousands of people around the world have been caught out.  The self-replicating worm exploited a cross scripting (XSS) vulnerability and used just a small amount of Javascript to automatically direct Twitter website users to another website.

The vulnerability appeared to users as a coloured block that users only had to mouse-over to activate.

It only affected people directly using the website Twitter.com and not other third-party software such as TweetDeck or applications on smartphones.

The worm was initially created by Magnus Holm who “”simply wanted to exploit the hole without doing any ‘real’ harm” according to BBC News.  “It started off as ‘ha, no way this is going to work’.”  The flaw was later identified by others however after he used it and was then used for more unwanted purposes.

Mr Holm said he’d seen the worm passed around in at least 200,000 tweets.

In April 2009 Twitter suffered another attack that spread links to a rival website.  Twitter security chief Bob Lord said today This issue is now resolved. We apologise to those who may have encountered it.”

Over the past year several web 2.0 porn sites, lets call them social porn sites – emerged and became incredibly successful over a short period of time. Even censorship like the removal of the successful site Youporn from Google’s index could not stop the rise of a site that is currently placed 85th in Alexas ranking. Remember, a site with no help from Google makes it under the top 100 sites worldwide sitting there in front of Apple Inc. for instance which got a rank of 90.

Megarotic, another of those sites is just one place behind currently placed 86th in Alexa.

Youporn (Alexa:85, Pagerank 4)

Megarotic (Alexa: 86, Pagerank 5)

Pornotube (Alexa:198, Pagerank 5)

Xtube (Alexa: 326, Pagerank 4)

Redtube (Alexa: 528, Pagerank 0)

Yuvutu (Alexa:583, Pagerank 3)

Fantasti.cc (Alexa: 31722, Pagerank 2)

Nipplebyte (Alexa 117385, Pagerank 4)

Only X-Rated (Alexa: 118291, Pagerank 0)

X-Digg (Alexa: 422190, Pagerank 0)

Emergency Porn (Alexa: 559306, Pagerank 3)

Sin 2.0 (Alexa: 1279022, Pagerank 0)

The article from tinynibbles.com tries to explain many of the bad things that can happen while surfing the internet. (not only while looking at sex sites, other sites use many of those methods as well).

For instance, they compiled a list of bookmarklets that you simply drag to your bookmarks toolbar. Among the list bookmarklets that let you zoom images, navigate in TGP Galleries (no it does not mean Terrorist Group Profiles, it means Thumbnail Gallery Post) and let you search Google for similar sites.

That’s not all, the guys over at Pornzilla also compiled a list of the most useful Firefox extensions for porn surfing. (make sure your version is supported). Those extensions help you again to navigate through porn sites, view all images on a page, save all images and the well known panic button if your boss / wife / husband / enter a person you fear bursts into the room with the PC.

They also recommend to change some Firefox settings which stops some of the nasty porn sites habit like resizing windows and disabling context menus.

Check their site out: Pornzilla

Update: Pornzilla is still available on the Interne.t. The site has not been updated for a while though, which means that some of the suggested tools and services are no longer available or functional.

The majority of bookmarklets and at least some of the services are still working, making the site still a viable resource collection.

And while it is called Pornzilla, the majority of tools can be used for regular Internet activities as well. Bookmarklets for instance include options to search Google, zoom in or out of images, or removing redirects on sites.

Some of the suggested Firefox add-ons can be used for generic purposes as well.