According to the the BBC website, the government has unveiled plans to stop sex offenders and paedophiles from accessing websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Their genius idea is to collect the email addresses from the sex offenders and tell the websites to block them.
Sex offenders’ e-mail addresses are to be passed to social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo to prevent them contacting children.
Under government proposals, offenders who do not give police their address – or give a false one – would face up to five years in jail.
This is a marvellous plan with one possible drawback. It’s bollocks. Have the government not heard of Hotmail? Do they not realise that anyone can get a free email address from tens of thousands of different websites in seconds?
Are they all morons?
Well yes they are, in fact that they went on to say:
However, BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said ministers admitted that details of the system were still to be worked out, including how it would work with websites based abroad over which the UK has no jurisdiction.
Both Facebook and MySpace are based in California.
Fuck me. Details are still to be worked out? What utter wankshaft came up with this ill conceived idea? They’re going to waste our money gathering email addresses of a reported 30,000 sex offenders, who could get a new email address in seconds, and then ask websites to waste their time blocking the email addresses? But they can’t ask websites that are based outside the UK, which of course almost all social networking sites are.
Please, for the love of all that’s alcoholic, don’t announce dumb fuck ideas like this without first asking someone who knows even the first fucking thing about the Internet.
Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.
