Porn filters to be on by default for UK ISPs by 2014

[Steve]

It's basically the same bollocks as before.

 

Awareness campaign = Good (and where it should stop IMO)

Censorship by default = Terrible idea

 

When you let the government decide what people should and shouldn't see, this kind of thing happens: -

 

Among its more than 1,000 entries were URLs for child porn, rape and bestiality sites as well as online gambling (some forms of which are illegal in Australia) and gay and straight pornography. But many sites appeared to have been blacklisted almost at random. A dentist from Queensland, whose website had once been hacked into by a Russian purveyor of pornography, was on the list. So was pet care facility MaroochyBoardingKennels.com.au and canteens.com.au, a site belonging to a school cafeterias consultant. "The only thing I can think of [that got me on the list] is that I have e-mailed schools telling them about my book and CD resource How to Have a Healthy and Profitable Theme Day," owner Jocelyn Ashcroft told the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

And while the list in many cases appeared arbitrary at best, some selections appeared politically motivated at worst. Sites advocating legal euthanasia, Satanism and even Christianity were blacklisted.

http://wikileaks.info/wiki/A_Blacklist_for_Websites_Backfires_in_Australia/

[Steve]

This is going to be announced by Cameron today, along with further measures. Porn that has fake rape scenes in it will become illegal and possessing it will carry an up to 3 year jail sentence. ISPs are going to have to block certain search terms.

What's funny about this is that the government did a study on this late last year, the results of which are here: -

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/c/20130122%20gov%20response%20to%20parental%20internet%20controls.pdf

Some key points from the findings: -

A large majority of respondents, including parents, said that they did not like any of the three options for parental controls the consultation invited responses on.

Only 14% supported blocking at the network level.

Respondents very clearly said that children’s online safety is the responsibility of parents or a shared responsibility between parents and businesses. A majority of parents think that it is their responsibility solely, and parents are more likely than other groups (with the exception of VCS organisations) to think it is a shared responsibility with business.

It is also clear that in accepting that responsibility, parents want to be in control, and that it would be easier for them to use the online safety tools available to them if they could learn more about those tools. They also want information about internet safety risks and what to do about them. There was no great appetite among parents for the introduction of default filtering of the internet by their ISP.

And the best bit: -

To date, the Government’s approach has been based on expert advice that default filtering can create a false sense of security since:

It does not filter all potentially harmful content: given the vast amount of material on the internet, it would not be possible to identify all the possible content to be filtered, and very large numbers of websites are created each day.

There is also a risk from “over-blocking” – preventing access to websites which provide helpful information on sexual health or sexual identity, issues which young people may want information on but find difficult to talk to their parents about.

It does not deal with harms such as bullying, personal abuse, grooming or sexual exploitation which arise from the behaviour of other internet users.

It does not encourage parents to engage with the issues and learn about keeping their children safe online. There is a risk that parents might rely on default filtering to protect their children from all potential online harms and not think about how their children might want to use the internet, the kind of content that is appropriate for each child according to their own circumstances, and the risks and harms their children might face.

But hey, ignore the expert advice, what parents and other people in the country actually want, and the results of your own studies and go ahead with this shit anyway, right?

[djdiggla]

Good idea. You just unblock it if you want access. I don't think it's incompetent parenting but rather the obvious and understandable fact that most parents don't have the first clue what's on the net or how to censor it so its age appropriate. The parent could always severely limit net use but I think that's worse than filtering porn. Of course there is always gonna be kids able to circumvent the filters and frankly good for them but this will hopefully limit unintentional exposure to porn (pop-ups and what not). I do of course see Steve's slippery slope concern but you usually don't subscribe to that argument anyways so dont see why it would apply here... and it fits with the UK's stricter net/speech laws. Would be strange to see in the states (at least any time soon).

[Steve]

http://i.imgur.com/qmeBsia.jpg

 

[d00ban]

Take it you're referring to the other articles on the right?

[Steve]

 

 

I do of course see Steve's slippery slope concern but you usually don't subscribe to that argument anyways so dont see why it would apply here...

 

It depends what the slippery slope argument is. A lot of them tend to come from conspiracy theorist types who say "If we don't stop this, in 5 years we'll be rounded up and put in forced labour camps and blah blah" - tin foil hat bollocks.

 

I can't see why anyone who looks at the facts would support this: -

 

1. The majority of people in this country do not want it. This comes from the government's own research, which they have ignored.

 

2. The government's own study shows that is is extremely problematic, but this is being ignored.

 

3. It has failed to work effectively any time it's been tried before.

 

4. It covers what some government agency decides is "porn" and nothing else - it'll do nothing to stop kids viewing violent content, being bullied online etc. etc.

 

As for the slippery slope argument, sure, I believe that 1 of 2 things will happen: -

 

1. This will fail miserably and the government will do yet another u-turn. They've done a couple of dozen of them on big issues like scrapping GCSEs, minimum pricing for alcohol, plain packaging for cigs etc. so if this is scrapped in a few months' time I will not be surprised at all. In Australia, they spent 4-5 years trying to get a system like this to work before scrapping it and instead using Interpol's list of child porn/abuse websites and just blocking those.

 

2. This will be implemented and over time, more things will be added to the filter. I wouldn't be surprised if it was made harder to turn off, or if they went back to their original plan of having the filter automatically turn on every X number of months, so you have to keep phoning up to get it turned off again. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a database kept of all the people that turn it off and that they are looking upon with more suspicion than people who leave it on. For instance, if the police suspect a man of committing a certain crime, they might look at the database to see if he's turned the filter off. After all, this is being done in part because the UK government believe that if you look at certain types of porn, you are more likely to commit certain types of horrendous crimes.

[djdiggla]

It defo is problematic... It's a hard issue to approach and I'm sure that it's really only being done as political pandering to some base.

[Vekked]

I don't think it's incompetent parenting but rather the obvious and understandable fact that most parents don't have the first clue what's on the net or how to censor it so its age appropriate.

Come on man. Sure plenty of OUR parents don't know how to use/censor the internet, but this law is affecting parents with young kids presently and going forward. The % of these parents that can't already turn on internet filters themselves is probably super tiny and only going to get smaller.

 

Couple this with the fact that a bunch of people will get it unrestricted and then have to set filters manually, and some percent will get it unrestricted and just not have filters with kids using the internet, how many more kids will this actually help?

 

Even further, there's already a few generations of kids who grew up with completely uncensored internet, including myself. I still didn't find porn online until like 3 years after I'd already seen plenty on cable TV. Sure now there's porntubes and stuff that are easier to find, but also easier to block, and we had sketchy ass shit like Kazaa where you'd search for pictures of super saiyans and get pictures of girls pissing on each other sooo.

 

These wrinkly ball politician mother fuckers should probably just poll the few 100,000 kids in university right now who have had internet access since they were 5 and ask how much they got fucked up by it and if they would have had a better childhood if it was censored. Pretty sure the answer is no.

[djdiggla]

I don't know how to. But my kids are not going to be allowed to use the net so it's whatever.

[Vekked]

not sure if serious about either statement

[Steve]

David Cameron said in an interview today that what's blocked would "evolve over time". Now he's saying that the initial block will "include pornography and possibly self-harm sites".

 

He was also asked how it would work and whether it would block written pornography and stuff that could be considered soft-porn, such as topless women appearing on The Sun's website, but he said no to that.

 

He comes across like Ali G when he was on Dragons' Den with the deck of a skateboard which he said was a hoverboard and when he was asked by the dragons how it worked, he said "I dunno, that's your job as you is the geniuses innit?".

[Steve]

David Cameron praised TalkTalk's censorship model earlier this week. That's run by a Chinese company called Hauwei, who have been in the news over the past year for stuff like this: -

 

 

 

Huawei and ZTE are two giant Chinese tech companies frequently targeted by accusations of industrial espionage, intellectual property theft, and even providing backdoors for network attacks to the Chinese military. Now, the two are the focus of a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report issued today. The report finds that the two companies "cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems."

 

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/congress-accuses-chinese-tech-giants-of-un-american-activities/

 

And in the case of TalkTalk, even if you turn the filtering off completely, all of your web traffic still has to pass through Hauwei's servers - it just doesn't filter it.

 

[Steve]

After reading some more about how this would work, it seems there are only a few options: -

 

1. DNS filtering. This would be trivial to circumvent just by switching to a different DNS provider unless the government blocked you from doing this, which would be a fucking shitty thing to do.

 

2. IP blocking. This would suck balls, as if there was shared hosting, everything at that IP address would be blocked, not just the "evil porn".

 

3. Deep Packet Inspection. Another option that would fucking suck, because it's expensive to implement (and I'm sure we'd pay for it one way or another) and it slows down Internet traffic. It's also trivial to circumvent with HTTPS unless ISPs use clumsy and even yet more expensive workarounds.

 

4. Some combination of the above, which would be a total clusterfuck and would involve blocking VPN services and proxies - perfectly legal services.

 

If you're against this ill-advised shit storm waiting to happen, then sign this petition: -

 

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746

[Frost]

http://www.ultraculture.org/uk-to-censor-esoteric-websites/

 

 

The censoring of “esoteric material,” in particular, has pagan groups up in arms. (Presumably Ultraculture will be blocked from warping impressionable young British minds into lives stained with pernicious sins like thinking for themselves, questioning mainstream values and caring about the environment?)

 

*Pinches salt*

[Steve]

Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales has called David Cameron’s plan to block internet porn as “absolutely ridiculous”.

 

Speaking to Channel 4 News, Wales said Government plans to force ISPs to block new customers from accessing pornography unless they opt-in “won’t work”.

 

He added that, rather than create new rules, police should be given resources to enforce existing laws.

 

"It's an absolutely ridiculous idea. It won't work. The software you would use to implement this doesn't work,” said Wales.

 

"Additionally when we use cases of a paedophile who's been addicted to child porn videos online, you realise all that Cameron's rules would require him to do is opt in and say, 'Yes, I would like porn please'."

 

He pointed out criminals hacked into Facebook accounts and that was already illegal. "I can't think of any new laws that would actually help with that. What would help is actual enforcement,” said Wales.

 

He said Governments are spending "billions of pounds, billions of dollars, snooping on ordinary people and gathering up all of this data in an apparently fruitless search for terrorists.

 

“We should devote a significant proportion of that to dealing with the real criminal issues online - people stealing credit card numbers, hacking into websites and things like that,” said Wales.

 

The recent calls for tighter regulation around Twitter, following a number of rape and death threats to women on the social networking site, have also caught his attention.

 

Wales said it should be easier to report abuse on the microblogging site, but Twitter should not be regulated more strictly.

 

“When you think about rules about verbal threats, human society has a long history of rules and laws around this, and those rules and laws are very well thought out. They deal with complicated cases,” said Wales.

 

Twitter needed to do more in the past to give people greater control of the environment by making it easier to complain, and to have people behaving badly exposed, blocked or arrested as necessary.

 

“But it is not like we don't have a law against threatening people. We do, and people are quite rightly being called up on this," he added.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/strategy/20337/online-porn-block-plans-slammed-wikipedia-founder

[Steve]

There are a couple of complaints on Virgin Media's forum today about legitimate sites being blocked. One example is a group of science research project websites. These sites contain nothing dodgy in the slightest, for example, one asks users to help try and classify galaxies by shape.

 

It's too early to call, but I wonder if VM are testing their "great porn firewall" and these are sites that are inadvertently getting caught up in it? But either way, this is an example of why Internet censorship is total fucking bullshit. Considering the number of VM users in this country, having your site be inaccessible to all of them is extremely harmful to business.

[Steve]

 

 

A court-ordered block on two file-sharing sites has resulted in overblocking on Sky's network, with the ISP filtering legitimate sites by accident in its efforts to combat copyright theft.

Sky, TalkTalk, BT and Virgin were all ordered to block file-sharing sites EZTV and YIFY Torrents in July, on grounds of copyright infringement.

However, Sky's web filters were erroneously blocking any site listed in EZTV's DNS records, including legal sites, notes ISPreview.

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/383587/sky-blocks-news-site-after-dns-exploit

 

 

 

In related news we’re hearing that customers of BE Broadband (now owned by Sky) and some Virgin Media users have found that a sporadic block is SOMETIMES preventing access to 200+ websites including the Radio Times, Taylor Swift’s homepage, Northampton Town Football Club, Glasgow airport park and ride, FireEye security researchers and many more.

 

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/08/eztv-causes-blocking-shenanigans-for-uk-sky-broadband-isp-customers.html

[kut_class]

Thank fuck there's an opt in option.

[Steve]

And so it begins: -

 

Pornography filters used by major internet service providers are blocking websites offering sex education and advice on sexual health and porn addiction, the BBC has learned.

 

The four major internet companies have started to roll out so-called porn filters to their users.

 

BT launched its filter this week, Virgin has a pilot programme ahead of a full launch early in 2014, and Sky's was turned on a month ago.

 

TalkTalk's filter started in May 2011.

 

Last month, Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed "family-friendly" filters and said they were important to stop children "stumbling across hardcore legal pornography".

 

But BBC's Newsnight has discovered all the major ISPs that have launched full default filters are also failing to block hardcore porn-hosting sites.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25430582

[Ryan]

Finally I can give my cock a rest

[Steve]

A guy wrote a browser extension that is basically like Turbo Mode in Opera, so it routes your web traffic through a proxy located in another country which bypasses the porn blocks. Here's the website: -

 

http://goawaycameron.co.uk

 

But it seems that ISPs are already starting to block the above website, as O2 and T-Mobile have already blocked it, despite the extension being perfectly legal and the website offering no content that would be considered pornographic or offensive. *SIGH*

[Steve]

 

 

Every argument we have heard from politicians in favour of this internet filter has been about pornography, and its harmful effect on young people, evidence of which, despite years of public pearl-clutching, remains scant. It is curious, then, that so many categories included in BT's list of blocked content appear to be neither pornographic nor directly related to young children.

The category of "obscene content", for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years. It looks as if that debate has just been bypassed entirely, by way of scare stories about five-year-olds and fisting videos. Whatever your opinion on downloading music and cartoons for free, doing so is neither obscene nor pornographic.

Cameron's porn filter looks less like an attempt to protect kids than a convenient way to block a lot of content the British government doesn't want its citizens to see, with no public consultation whatsoever.

The worst thing about the porn filter, though, is not that it accidentally blocks a lot of useful information but that it blocks information at all. With minimal argument, a Conservative-led government has given private firms permission to decide what websites we may and may not access. This sets a precedent for state censorship on an enormous scale – all outsourced to the private sector, of course, so that the coalition does not have to hold up its hands to direct responsibility for shutting down freedom of speech.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/david-cameron-internet-porn-filter-censorship-creep

[Steve]

 

 

Sky has updated its porn filters following anger that they blocked a legitimate news website.

The filters are intended to allow parents to ensure children cannot view adult content.

But the automatic blocking of all file-sharing sites meant that news site TorrentFreak and other legitimate sites were also blocked.

Following publicity, Sky said that it had decided to tweak its filters to unblock the file-sharing news site.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25638872

 

Yeah, this was totally about porn, right guys? Right?

[Steve]

It seems the latest victim of the "porn" filters is the PC game, League of Legends. Some UK users have found that they can't properly patch the game as files are being blocked. These files have names like this: -

 

VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj
XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj

 

[djnumnuts]

Your government has inadvertently censored the Web, but it’s working on a “fix”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/your-government-has-inadvertently-censored-the-web-but-its-working-on-a-fix/#p3