Leading search engine companies Google and Microsoft have agreed measures to make it harder to find child abuse images online.

As many as 100,000 search terms will now return no results that find illegal material, and will trigger warnings that child abuse imagery is illegal.

PM David Cameron has welcomed the move but said it must be delivered or he would bring forward new legislation.

Child protection experts have warned most images are on hidden networks.

In July, Mr Cameron called on Google and Microsoft's Bing - which together account for 95% of search traffic - to do more to prevent people getting access to illegal images.

He said they needed to ensure that searches which were unambiguously aimed at finding illegal images should return no results.

On Monday, Downing Street said the government would be monitoring that internet companies acted "urgently" .

In the last couple of years the iron fist of the law has come down hard on music file sharing, live sports broadcasts and the uploading of pirate copies of films, yet only now is something being done to curb access to child porn??

That's a bit fucked up.

hugorune wrote:
Yeah. Maybe it's not in their interests. What really gets me is that web servers have to host this stuff so how does that happen?

@hugo i think your cynicism is deserved unfortunately - the things that they worked on first were those that lost business money just as those who rioted were jailed and yet not one banker has been. pharma spend more time and energy looking for baldness cures than cures for diseases. it has ever been the way which makes me sad,

i would however rather that they caught those who searched for child porn and dealt with them rather than just block access as this does nothing to address the problem of those who exploit and abuse children.

Personally, I'd rather more effort was put into stopping those that actually upload this kind of content and subject their victims to horrifying stuff in the first place.

I appreciate this is bringing attention to the issue, but imo it will not serve to stop it and may very well just drive it further underground. If anything, it's merely lip-service.

In addition, this kind of opens up the door to our government initiating other laws for 'our own good'. Ofc, with an issue as contentious as this, nobody is going to object at this point.

I could be really cynical and suggest that the lack of clamp down is because big business isn't losing any money as a result of web noncery.

GCHQ will be brought in to tackle the problem of child abuse material being shared on peer-to-peer networks, the prime minister has revealed.

Following the announcement that Google and Microsoft are to step up efforts to remove links to child abuse material from search results, Cameron has turned his attention to less conspicuous methods of sharing illicit data.

Talking to the BBC's Jeremy Vine, Cameron argued that the "dark net", a general term for areas of the internet not accessible through search engines, was policeable.

"There's been a lot in the news recently about the techniques, ability and brilliance of the people involved in the intelligence community, in GCHQ and the NSA in America. That expertise is going to be brought to bear to go after these revolting people sharing these images [of child abuse] on the dark net, and making them available more widely," the prime minster said.

"You use technology which is able to get into the dark internet, that is able to decrypt encrypted files, and that is able to find out what is going on. Like all these things if you put in the resources and the effort, if you use the best brains – the brains that are, as it were, the inheritors to the people that decrypted the Enigma code in the second world war – if you take those brains, and apply it to the problem of tackling child abuse online, you'll get results.

"I'm confident, having sat in the cabinet room, listening to the internet service providers, and having listened to the national crime agency, having talked to the team that are going to be negotiating with the Americans to work out how we best bring our joint expertise to bear on this, I'm confident that we can make some real progress."

Asked whether people would be comfortable with the invasion of privacy that would result from the move, Cameron responded that "people understand that a crime is a crime whether it's committed on the street or the internet".