They're blocking us anyway - we might as well publish a gratuitous boob shot

As the awful moralisers disguised as regulators ATVOD prepare to hammer the final nail into the British porn industry with its onerous rules about what can and cannot be done on the internet drafted into UK law, they've now turned their eyes outwards, looking to force their rules onto international websites by ensuring that credit card payments to sites deemed 'illegal' – i.e. those that don't follow a series of rules (ID checks, no free hardcore imagery, no debit card payments) that are specifically designed to put customers off. Several UK sites, featuring entirely legal content, have already been forced off line or overseas by these rules from a legislator that doesn't even have legal status, and who have chosen to interpret a European Directive to legislate 'television-like' services in an entirely different way than any other European country. In fact, they run it as both a moral campaign to kill the sex industry and a protection racket, extorting licence fees from any site hosting video content. The only industry people who seem to be in favour of the news rules are Television X, who of course can vet their customers through TV subscriptions and who are probably not too upset about the demise of rival websites – the British porn industry has always been dominated by self-servers who are too busy trying to take down rivals to join forces and fight for their rights.

It's all in the name of protecting children, of course. Yet wasn't David Cameron's block-headed filtering system supposed to be doing that?

Well, yes it was. But as we've reported before, it was never really about porn, and news of 'overblocking' (which seems to have been as much intentional as accidental) seems to have convinced the public that they might not need an internet service that treats them as children. This summer, Cameron was embarrassed when Ofcom reported that just 4 per cent of new Virgin Media customers, 5 per cent of BT and 8 per cent of Sky customers had switched the block on (annoyingly for Cameron, most ISPs still presented blocking as a choice, rather than forcing customers to specifically opt out – yet they all present filtering as the default, so people clearly have rejected it). A sensible politician might at this stage admit that he'd misread public opinion. Cameron is no sensible politician though – he's a power-fixated Tory, seen as a wet liberal by many of his own supporters, and he will always leap at a chance to prove his moral fibre to the Daily Mail.

But the depressing tales of ever more stringent rules to stop us watching porn (and, of course, all the other stuff) reminded me of the porn filters, which have been in place for some time now. And so I thought I'd use the very handy Open Rights Group website blocked.org.uk to see what the current situation regarding Strange Things Are Happening is.

You can see the full results here: https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://www.strangethingsarehappening.com - and they are fascinating. Looking at this one site alone shows how inconsistent the whole thing is.

Neither of the two BT setting blocks us, and neither do Three, Virgin Media or Plusnet (or A&A, but they don't use filters at all). According to their standards, we are not a threat to british morality or likely to distress the kiddywinks. But EE, O2, Sky and Vodafone presumably see this site as being along the same lines of Xhamster and GGG.

Oddest of all are TalkTalk. We're not bocked by TalkTalk Kidsafe, which you might expect to be the strictest of everything if the name means anything – but TalkTalk Strict (a great name for a BDSM variant, perhaps) does block us. So if this setting blocks even more than the kid friendly version, you have to wonder what parts of the internet it does let through...

All this shows the ludicrous nature of internet filtering, a ham-fisted censorship regime that has all the reliability of sticking a fishing net in a pond and dragging it along. Not that politicians care, of course – as with their other laws (and let's not pretend this is a voluntary system adopted by ISPs), the remit is deliberately vague to ensure that as many people are caught up in it as possible – anyone challenging the status quo can now be blocked in the powers that be decide to. As it is, almost 50% of UK ISPs now block this site to customers by default, meaning we get fewer hits, make less money from advertising (and Strange Things doesn't even cover the running costs as it is), and and probably get to review a smaller variety of things as a result. As there is nothing on this site that an sane person could call pornographic – and as I somehow doubt that kids looking for naked lady fixes will be heading this way anyway - I find it all rather outrageous, though I fear there is nothing much I can do about it, short of entirely emasculating the site.

You'l be relieved to know that those wholesome family-friendly sites The Daily Mail and The Sun are now blocked by anyone though, so your kids are okay to check out the latest page 3 girl, shamed celeb or thirteen year old looking "all grown up". Just as Cameron approves, no doubt.