According to a new paper from Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski, internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn. Basically, the filters are expensive and they don’t work. “Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations — filtering can lead to ‘overblocking’, where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information.” TechCrunch reports: The researchers “found that Internet filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases [and] were an insignificant factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content.” The study’s most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households “would need to use Internet filtering tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content” and even then a filter “showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects.” The study looked at 9,352 male and 9,357 female subjects from the EU and the UK and found that almost 50 percent of the subjects had some sort of Internet filter at home. Regardless of the filters installed, subjects still saw approximately the same amount of porn.

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Source: Slashdot – Researchers Find That Filters Don’t Prevent Porn

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Chinese authorities have arrested six suspects behind a World Cup gambling ring that was hosting more than 10 billion yuan — or $1.5 billion USD — worth of cryptocurrency bets, according to a statement released yesterday by the police department in Guangdong province. The gambling syndicate ran on the dark web, accepting bets in the form of bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin for an eight-month stretch before being apprehended. It attracted more than 300,000 players from different countries, and 8,000 “agents” who earned commissions for recruiting new members through a pyramid scheme-like system, according to the South China Morning Post. The bust that took down the dark web syndicate was a part of China’s larger plans to stem the criminal activity — though this was the first to involve cryptocurrency, according to Guangdong law enforcement. Thus far, they’ve arrested 540 suspects and frozen more than 260 million yuan as a part of their efforts.

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Source: Slashdot – Chinese Police Bust World Cup Gambling Ring With More Than Billion In Cryptocurrency

According to Anchorage Daily News, the two remaining Blockbuster stores in Alaska are set to close, leaving just one location left in the United States. The last one standing in the U.S. is in Bend, Oregon. From the report: The stores, one on DeBarr Road in Anchorage and the other in Fairbanks, will close Monday for rental business, a post on the Facebook page for Blockbuster in Alaska said Thursday afternoon. They will reopen at noon Tuesday for an inventory sales that will run through July and August. Thursday’s news follows a smattering of other recent Blockbuster closures across the state, which had 13 Blockbusters in 2013 and was down to nine stores by 2016. As Blockbuster stores disappeared from most of the Lower 48 in recent years, the brand long managed to persist in Alaska. Some have said expensive internet here is one reason why. The stores have also been a destination for some who visit just for the nostalgia.

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Source: Slashdot – Alaska’s Last Two Blockbusters Are Closing, Leaving Just One In the US