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." -----