And they think this will work?

A wonderful story on several news sites highlighting how oblivious the powers that be are to technology. Apparently, paedophiles are using Bebo, Myspace, Facebook and so on as areas for “grooming” kiddies for evil sexual use. And *gasp* some of them are pretending to be ickle kiddies themselves to make themselves seem friendlier to the little tykes.

Erm. Isn’t this kind of old hat? The bit they’ve added is that convicted paedos will have their email addresses registered and passed on to all the social networking sites so they can be refused entry.

Wow, what a stunning idea. Because everyone only has a single email address and you can never get another. You know, like Social Security numbers, passport numbers, DNA and so on.

No. Wait. Sorry. I’m thinking like a government minister. In the real world, you can **** off to GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail or one of a hundred other places and get a completely new, untraceable email address.

Sky’s version of the story includes a statement from a chap at Sophos which does raise some interesting points, such as misidentification of paedos if the email addresses leak out. After all, we’re talking about trusting the government with personal data. Something that they don’t have a great track record of. Then there’s the cost in cash and man-hours (sorry… person-hours) of checking through internet logs to make sure these filthy ******* are sticking to the rules.

Simple solution. If you’re caught with child porn, you have your eyes burned out with a hot poker and your fingers amputated with a mallet. That way you can’t access the internet without third-party help and even if you could, you’d not be able to see the kiddie-porn anyway. Quicker, much more of as long-term solution and substantially cheaper for the taxpayer.