Seattle’s Lake City library has been fighting a particularly contentious fight lately, upholding patrons’ right to watch pornography on library computers. Well, not that specifically, but rather the right of patrons to access whatever content they like on the library’s unfiltered Internet content, LOLcats and porn alike. Naturally, there have been some complaints about the pornography, but things have been astoundingly civil so far.

There’s a new Facebook exploit out there that showed up a few days ago, but is only just now reaching critical mass. What does it do? Not much, just post gore and pornography to the infected user’s feed, causing them to unwittingly share it with all their friends, their acquaintances, a number of people they’ve probably never met, and sometimes even Grandma. The exploit has been snowballing over the past few days, affecting more and more users directly by forcing them to post the material, and even more indirectly, those who just have the pleasure of stumbling across them.

Irish airline Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is looking to make flying with his company just a little more enjoyable. To that end, he’s looking to provide a smartphone and tablet app for passengers that would grant them access to entertainment options, including some controversial additions like video games and gambling. Also porn. Did we mention the porn? He wants to charge passengers for watching pornography on his planes.

Of course, there are some major obstacles.

Four major UK Internet Service Providers are to start blocking pornography as a part of David Cameron’s attempts to crack down on pervasive and easily accessible adult content. When the plans take effect, new users of BT, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin will be presented with the option of parental controls which they will have to actively accept or decline.

Prior to all this, the UK government approached Reg Baily, chief executive of the Christian charity group the Mothers’ Union, about conducting a review concerning the “commercialisation and sexualisation of children,” along side the Department of Education. The ISP pornography blocking iniative is thought to be only one of many upcoming policies that aim to make sexualized content increasingly difficult for children to be exposed to.

The above banner is for a real site that provides just the type of service one would expect with a name like Porn Wikileaks. The adult film industry, as one can easily imagine, is pretty unhappy about it, as Porn Wikileaks maintains a database that currently lists the real names, birth dates and home addresses of more than 15,000 adult film stars. Not only is Porn Wikileaks the center of extremely murky territory simply by freely providing this information, but as Gawker reported, the way Porn Wikileaks obtained said information is even murkier, as they scraped it from a patient database belonging to an STD testing clinic in California.

Though still harmful, some of the adult film star listings only list a star’s stage name, date of birth and real name, though other star listings go much further, and include a home address, information on family members (including their employers), and even photos of said home addresses taken with Google Streetview.

Freedom of information can frequently be a genuinely good thing, but adult film stars use stage names for a reason, whether it be because they may want to hide their past once they retire from the industry, or because being in the adult film industry has the potential to generate fans that may not understand the stars are regular people who don’t exactly want to have sex with every single person in the world and said stars may not want to deal with that false sentiment every waking moment. The site is hosted in the Netherlands, so U.S. authority is limited and not much can be done about the site from this side of the world.

(via Switched)

Several British media outlets report that there’s a growing faction within the government that wants to block access to pornography across ”millions of porn sites, chat rooms and bulletin boards” online.

Citing concern for children, ministers including communications minister Ed Vaizey have been quietly approaching Internet service providers about setting up automatic blocks for porn sites such that their content is available only on an “opt-in” basis: “Now ministers want to see adult pornography controlled with similar technology, with sites blocked unless people specifically request access to them.” The pro-filter faction within the government acknowledges that parental controls for Internet content already exist, but says they are too difficult for most parents to set up.

Unsurprisingly, many people who value open Internet principles are alarmed by this proposal:

History students at Cliff High School got an eyeful when their substitute teacher unwittingly showed them a video of graphic pornography.

The graphic video, described by one student as “naked ladies doing things,” had supposedly been taped over by a History Channel program on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.  But as is apt to happen with analog technology, the beginning of the tape still contained porn.