Illiterates on the radio

I am listening to the politics programme on Radio4 with two - or is it three - women MPs. They are, unsurprisingly, against child porn and think that Something Must Be Done.

Specifically, they want Google and ISPs to block it all, and the argument is that because Google agreed at one point to block dissident websites that China didn't like, it must be able to do this too.

The level of ignorance is staggering. As has recently been shown via a leak from someone else, China gives people a list of words and phrases it doesn't like (some very strange ones to Western eyes included). Talk about them and your site will be blocked. These idiots want an infallible picture recognition system that can determine whether or not an image is child porn.

One is trivial (and leads to the Zircon / Zipper effect, so almost worse than doing nothing). The other is, to put it mildly, a more difficult problem.

But they both involve blocking stuff, so of course they are the same....