British Telecom Blocks Access to Child Porn Sites

An anonymous reader writes "British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online. The decision by Britain's largest high-speed internet provider will lead to the first mass censorship of the web attempted in a Western democracy."

Comments

Re:Foot in the door

[jc42]

Well, there have been repeated stories of medical sites blocked as porn. One of the more common is breast-cancer support group sites, which a lot of ISPs have blocked. AOL was reported to have done this with their own mailing lists and chat groups three times last year. When the cancer patients complained, AOL apologized, restored the lists, and then a few months later blocked them again. Anyone talking about breasts must be involved in porn, right?

One problem is that blocking a single site by hand is easy, but to get effective blocking, few organizations can afford the thousands of employees that it would take to examine every site on the Web. So software is used, and that software usually does some sort of pattern matching. It can be tricky to write patterns that match only porn, but not valid medical information about assorted body parts.

If history is any guide, we can expect that the BT blocking will hit quite a number of paediatric sites along with the porn sites.