Slashdot Mirror
UK ISPs To Begin Censorship of Porn Websites
An anonymous reader writes "In a plan sponsored by the UK government, four major UK ISP's, Virgin, BT, TalkTalk and Sky, are set to implement blocking of porn websites, requiring subscribers to 'opt-in' if they want to visit blocked websites (or to put it another way, 'opt-out' of internet censorship)."
Good luck with that.
The Bible, Qur'an and Torah are full of sex, weapons and violence. I hope the new net filters will remove all trace of them off the net.
Actually this is misreported. Most the ISP's are making it opt-in. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/oct/11/internet-pornography
BT is providing filtering software as part of their install package. Mcafee no less. Botnet admins are probably rubbing their hands with glee.
Internet without porn.. INTERNET without porn... INTERNET WITHOUT PORN!??!!??!?
No they are not... Catch up will you?
Wrong wrong wrong. You have to OPT IN to the filter.
For the legions of probably around 14-to-[something] year olds that live at home leeching "free" internet from their parent's wallets.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15252128
The BCC imply this is opt in for censorship "They said they would talk to parents about how to *activate* and administer parental controls. The tools to limit what children can see and do online are already available but, before now, have not been offered to customers as they sign up"
Vodaphone already have this on their 3g sticks. Had to opt-in for porn to be able to surf Norways biggest newspaper (and also the recent winner of the best ipad newspaper app.)
This is blinging
Probably some fruity/corrupt member of parliment.
This story is completely inaccurate. Consumers don't have to opt-in to receive adult content: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/370450/confusion-reigns-as-government-announces-porn-ban
I usually hate the idea of censorship, and arguably still do... but if this is designed to be an easy (or at least easier) tool for parents to use, then yes I think it's a good thing.
Once the rugrats are of age and on their own, then they can choose their own connection's ability.
--- no sig to see here... move along.
All bow to our Puritan overlords! And my captcha was "unclean" haha.
LOL, and after few years some Anonymous will get their (opt-outers) database from ISP resources and everybody will know that every Tom, Dick and Harry watches porn. On the other hand, everybody is watching porn so it won't be that bad like hacking PSN this year, right? :)
Opt-In to visit websites which don't agree with the government?
Rather than dealing with the problem of social attitudes towards sexuality, drive it underground. Clever.
So sane, healthy adults will have to identify themselves to their ISPs (and potentially other billpayers) if they want to access legal content. How about getting these lazy parents to actually discuss the content with their kids rather than turning it into forbidden fruit? That or use local technologies rather than national sledgehammers.
... that's it for 4chan in UK, then?,
Stupid mothers, watch your own god damn children, stop forcing your laziness on us!
I'm seriously getting sick of lazy parents blaming others for their childrens corruption.
You, as a parent, are responsible for educating them about these things so that it isn't some sort of taboo!
Taboos are points of interest for the curious! Children by design are curious, it is how the learn!
You are the kind of people who bring up 40 year old virgins.
He is giving even more reason for laziness in Britain! After all the reform of the benefits system, this is completely hypocritical.
Worse, spearheaded by a religious charity group at that!
Next we will have sex-before-marriage banned!
Fuck that. Yes, fuck that. Fuck you David Cameron, fuck you. We got rid of this shit in the past for a reason.
Stop allowing religious nutjobs the ability to push their nonsense upon a country of multiple faiths. Especially if it is laziness!
...how is that "censorship"?
Misusing words eventually makes them meaningless.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
But if they block "porn websites" that only leaves Slashdot on the interwebs.
So in other words, the ISP's are giving parents the easiest form of parental control they can muster, and any censorship they wish to impose using this system on their children is on their hands?
That wouldn't bother me so much, but children and teenagers are going to discover web proxies and evade blocks, and a block on websites containing adult material will expand to blocking methods for circumventing blocks on adult material, and so on. I just hope this doesn't lead to a blocking of services used for more formidable purposes (SOCKS proxies and the like) just to block porn.
Let me guess, they are going to block it the same way pirate sites get blocked? Good luck with that.
This is likely just going to be a false sense of security.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Oh my! How they've turned full circle. Appropriate name, mind you.
"everybody will know that every Tom, Dick and Harry watches porn."
I think that Harry is entitled to watch porn, after all he did fight for his country in Afghanistan. And his father is hardly likely to preach morality to him given what he got up to with Camilla...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/11/1243243/uk-isps-to-begin-censorship-of-porn-websites#
I'm wondering why they call this 'opt-in', where action needs to be taken by the user in order to lift a ban. It should actually be called 'opt-out', because every user is included in the ban by default. This is more than a philosophical issue, if we're trying to present 'opt-out' as the default violation (of privacy, freedom, etc) and overloading the other meaning, then we're missing the point.
All major mobile network operators(Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2, etc) already do that. You have to go to their shop and prove you are over 18 in order to get the ban off. They even block okcupid!!
I often wonder why do I put up with all those shit and still live here...
â5 a month on a VPN and BT don't see shit about my internet use.
I'm fairly sure there's an over-quoted soundbite from John Gilmore to be repeated here.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Mother's Union. Christian charity review. Hey, and a whole new website for parents to complain about pretty damn well everything they find objectionable. The website will have no fewer than 8 oversight committees (WTF!).
And how many of these parents are not going to 'opt-in' to being able to view a little bit of porn now and then? And teens are smarter than you think, and will figure out how to 'opt-in' anyway.
I don't get it- parents' did this porn to get a kid, but what, are they still using the stork story to tell them how they showed up?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I didn't opt in to slashdot - why are you exposing me to this filth?
Assuming we all know its opt-in by now, once you recognize that most people are technologically illiterate, it makes sense to have this option on an ISP level. A lot of parents can't manage to either a: monitor their child's online behavior or b: install their own blocking software.
Do the editors in here even check their facts before throwing a story up anymore?
C'mon, this is starting to sink to CNN's "tech" area level of terrible quality...
They took our poooorn!
If it's as effective as O2's 3G filtering, it won't be any use.
O2 block access to some really tame and completely non-adult sites unless you opt out, but conveniently forget to block google image search...
If you can't find what you need on google image search, you most likely need a therapist, not an internet filter.
It will therefore just be an inconvenience, while lulling parents in to a a false sense of security. How long before an ISP gets sued because they promised filtering and poor little Johnny could still find porn?
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
UK is suddenly flush with excess bandwidth as millions of people turn off their PCs and go back to holding up pictures of Page Three girls with one hand.
http://freenetproject.org
I realise you were joking, but funnily enough my first thought about this wasn't about yet another pseudo-censorship policy that will fail, it was that ISPs have been struggling to provide the bandwidth and they've advertised now that people actually want to use it so they can watch streamling videos a la Netflix/BBC iPlayer, video calling via Skype, etc. Getting rid of most porn downloading probably removes a convenient amount of load on those ISPs' systems and lets them provide other services to customers without having to invest a fortune in serious infrastructure. That in turn means they can try to get the government to fund or partially fund "next generation broadband" or something instead of paying for it entirely themselves, though naturally they will still take all of the profits.
Of course, this whole idea is doomed as soon as the tabloids start looking up which MPs have "porn-enabled" their Internet connections and the smear campaigns start.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They are gonna lose a lot of money.
we won't see David Cameron or Nick Cleg any more
They are a pair of tits.
Not just porn will be blocked, things like looking up al qaeda on wikipedia will be aswell, basically anything harmful for children. if you want to surf the net properly then you'll have to turn it off (even for those who don't watch porn).
So I just say, unblock my VPN access, and I get the porn with it :)
They will also block VPN's and tunnels with the porn block, so say you need VPN's for work. Unblocked, easy.
Or use www.freeopenvpn.com
Is it just me, but the continuous, crushing global regulation of the Internet both in what content is legal, what our allowed "bandwidths and data caps are", what behaviors or opinions can be freely expressed, and a constant barrage of advertisements are making it as boring as television?
I don't pay for television. I won't pay for the public Internet if this trend doesn't stop.
There's plenty of private alternatives. Grandma can enjoy her walled gardens of Facebook and have her viewing habits sold off ten times over. I'll pass.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
I want to see the list of sites that would be blocked by this program. Just to make sure they didn't block any Bonsai-tree sites by accident.
Well I guess internet usage will go down now.
Submitter, why quote something so sensational and so wrong? It's like saying Google censors websites becaue it ranks them in a way that hides far away results, and I'm opting out of censorship by clicking to the next page. The pages are there, they can be viewed. By definition, that is not censorship. Just filtering. I see no harm here.
Where is the wonderful open market when it comes to this thing?
I would love for my ISP to offer virus\porn blocking services to certain members of my family.
If the ISP goes to an end user and says do you want the safe package? And they block certain sites with possible a way around it this would be acceptable.
Why does the government have to get involved if customers are clamming to block porn? Sounds more like a small group of anti-porn people who just can't stand me seeing it so they go to the government in some last effort.
the internet is for porn only, all the rest is wasted bandwidth
Daily Mail Report,.... therefore the headline has nothing to do with the substance ( Mail readers generally only react to headlines)
helo
Not the good porn sites. Not the ones with effective age verification, and good security. Not the ones careful about who they might lure in, who run open businesses, accept audits and pay taxes. No, those will all suffer heavily because they lose the lucrative 'Twenty years old and still lives with parents' demographic and the possibly even more lucrative 'Don't want my wife/girlfriend finding out I look' market.
I mean the dodgy sites. The ones that operate out of Elbonia. Here today, gone tomorrow, shifting domains to always be one step ahead of the censors. Advertising with a spam blitz and search engine manipulation to lure in as many viewers as they can, regardless of age, as quick as they can before getting blocked and moving on. All those people hideing from those they live with will still want their porn, and cut off from respectable sources they'll have no option but to move downmarket.
To truly block porn you'd need to block google images, and as these use DNS filters, that isn't going to happen soon.
The "Opt-in" and "Opt-out" once again is setup backwards!
Why is it that people should have to "Opt-in" for a standard. This is why society is so confused today. There's
no rhyme nor reason to that which corporations do things anymore; their norm is to be abnormal it seems! To
do things ass-backwards has become SOP.
People in a twist about being an opt in or opt out of porn. The bigger picture is they are censoring something, and as soon as the government sees it working on porn, they they will decide to roll it on to another "objectionable" content, and slowly chip away until they get to stop you looking at political opposition websites.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
The Guardian reports that the scheme is only applicable to *new* contracts, and is neither opt-in or opt-out: you choose the service you want when you sign up: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/11/david-cameron-porn-filter-isps
Does Tumblr count as one of those sites? I doubt the ISP's have the spine to take on a site that big.
How are they determining what to block and how to block it? Is nudity porn? Are certain types of nudity porn? In order to be considered "porn" does it have to contain sexual content? If so, what is the difference between sexual and nonsexual nudity and what exactly is "sexual content"? Do they have a list of specific websites to ban? If so, what will they do about the ones being created every day, how will they keep up? Is there currently a porn TLD in the UK that they can just block? All of the above questions apply to qualifying for such a top level domain. What exactly constitutes porn, like it or not, is largely in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are well defined characteristics to determine what is pornographic and what is not, but even those standards are largely arbitrarily decided by how someone views the material. Simple nudity can be porn if someone gets off to it. There is a whole industry devote to capturing celebrities and public figures candidly nude and whether or not the images are sexual or nonsexual in nature does not determine who will buy them and how they will be used. Censorship is hypocrisy because there is nearly nothing that is offensive or harmful to any, or everyone involved in the creation or consumption of it. Censorship of any kind, the banning or limiting of any human creation that is not generally harmful is absurd. Censorship is always harmful to everyone in all circumstances. Here is the crux of the issue for me and a good question to ask in general with any form of censorship; is this a money making scheme? Will those who opt out pay a different rate for their internet service than those who opt in? Who stands to benefit from this and why and how? Certainly not the British people.
From what I read, for at least one of the ISPs, their service requires the use of McAfee software. With that ISP
to use Linux the customer would be forced to "Opt-In" to see pornography.
Take down your curtains, replace with pornography. Remove your tablecloth. Replace with pornography. Put it in your car wondows, storefronts, whatever.
The sooner we expose everyone to it, the better. "No child left behind"; it will invalidate the use of censoring if there's nobody to shield. Everyone should realize that pornography isn't an evil thing that creates evil people.
Personally I think it's a brilliant idea.
My only regret is that I don't live in the UK so I can opt in to the filtering and then go looking for something they failed to block so I can sue them for damaging my delicate psyche by failing to block it.
People really need to give of on this idea of a G-rated Internet, not that I think that having all Internet traffic running through a governments filtering/monitoring/blocking center is actually going to end up being about filtering to make the Internet G-rated.
-- Terry