BBC announced that sex offenders could be banned from social network sites like facebook, which is a really good idea and positive move I reckon… but typical of anything the government seems to do, they haven’t really thought this through… they’ve decided that by getting sex offenders to declare their email address and getting social network sites to ban these emails will be sufficient security…has no one in government thought that ppl can have multiple email addresses? C’mon, considering when an individual signs up to a site, or even lands on a site, they declare their IP address, any numpty IT person can tell you that if this ban were to work it needs to work via IP blocking NOT email blocking, and even with IP blocking it won’t be 100% secure, but at least it’ll be far more secure that blocking email addresses.

Now the banning of IP might seem like I’m back tracking on my statements on the BT issue, however, there are a few differences, 1. thats to do with marketing, this is to do with national AND child security, 2. as a webmaster we can see IPs anyways, there is no way to identify an individual by IP but considering they are requiring sex offenders to declare emails, just get them to declare their IP addresses instead, and pass on the IP’s to the social networks without revealing the individuals name, the only people who would have access to both the name of the individual AND the IP would be the police, and rightly so too.