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Financial Times, Sept 13, 1995.


Scientist urges action on Internet pornography

By Clive Cookson


Pornography accounts for about half of non-academic use of the
Internet, the global computer network, the British Association
science conference heard yesterday.

Prof Harold Thimbleby, professor of computing research at
Middlesex University, said most parents, politicians and
educators had no idea how easy it was to find graphic
descriptions of horrific perversions, through any personal
computer linked to the net.

"If you want to know about any perversion, you can find full
details," Prof Thimbleby said, "and they are described in
deceitful and evil ways."

He was particularly upset by Internet porn sites that
masquerade as victim support groups, such as those for child
abuse that tell paedophiles how to entrap children. "I have
found text, film and sound material that I find extremely
disturbing, for example instructions for killing minors for
sexual gratification."

Prof Thimbleby has been researching the pattern of traffic on
the Internet since the beginning of the year.

It is impossible to monitor how more than a tiny fraction of
the estimated 30m to 40m users utilise the net. But Prof
Thimbleby analysed a representative sample of "bulletin
boards" and of searches made via so-called "web crawlers"
which act like telephone directories for the World Wide Web,
the fastest growing part of the Internet.

He said his conclusion - that pornography accounted for about
50 per cent of the searches - tallied with recent US findings
about the dominance of porn on the net.

"There is no reliable way, technical or otherwise, to detect
or intercept pornography," Prof Thimbleby said.

Censorship of the Internet was impossible, because
pornographers could easily disguise their material. And
censoring programs such as SurfWatch and Internet Filter could
not cope with all the fast-changing pornographic material.

Because censorship was technically and politically
impractical, Prof Thimbleby suggested that a better response
was to dilute the pornography with other material.
"The Internet has very little interesting material for the
non-specialist user. It needs more," he said. "When it has
more, it is just possible that pornography will slip into its
statistically appropriate place, one aspect of humanity but
not the most prominent on the Internet."

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