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!??!!??!?
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.
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
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
All bow to our Puritan overlords! And my captcha was "unclean" haha.
however (having just thought of this point once clicking "submit") it would be far easier, and less expensive to just have the parents, um... parent.
--- no sig to see here... move along.
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? :)
More importantly, how many people will they hire to "find" all of it?
Related: Can I work from the privacy of my own home?
Opt-In to visit websites which don't agree with the government?
I would buy your argument if it was opt-in. Why does it need to be opt-out?
... that's it for 4chan in UK, then?,
Replying to myself, it seems to actually be opt-in. Good thing I just answered the Slashdot reader survey with a complaint about misleading and/or outright false stories.
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.
What kind of typo brings you to a porn website?
Would you really want to? A typo is just going to lead to the kid reacting somewhere along the spectrum from "Meh" to "Dude, WTF?!", and then closing the page. Genuine curiosity seems like the last thing you'd want to place technical measures in the way of. Either way, the blocking software just creates a counter-productive air of mistrust between the parent and child.
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.
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.
What kind of typo brings you to a porn website?
whitehouse.(choose carefully here)
however (having just thought of this point once clicking "submit") it would be far easier, and less expensive to just have the parents, um... parent.
And how is preventing your children from being able to view pornographic content not parenting?
Most browsers will auto-try .com (first) if you leave off the root domain.
And yes, I am ignoring the fact that you're just trying to be a troll.
I think it's funny that you've gone off on this totally inappropriate rant instead of reading either the article or the rest of the comments which have preceded yours.
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.
we won't see David Cameron or Nick Cleg any more
They are a pair of tits.
What kind of typo brings you to a porn website?
dictoinary.com used to. I accidentally typed that at work once. Awkward!!!
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Probably then Internet Watch Foundation, a completely unaccountable non-government organisation that maintains the current child porn lists (including things like Wikipedia).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
From my own personal experience this is false. I was extremely interested in sexuality in my prepubescent adolescence. I found some dirty magazines in the woods when I was 10 or so and was thoroughly obsessed with them. I started browsing porn when I was 12, and I feel my obsession was fueled primarily by the way my parents similarly obsessed with keeping me away from it. It was a secret amazing forbidden fruit, and I was fascinated by that.
If my parents were more like the way I am now as a parent and treated sexuality as just another natural thing, I probably would have had a "normal" tepid interest as a prepubescent. The more you highlight something as special and forbidden that is also undeniably abstracted as a sign of maturity and right of passage, the more fascinated those minors will be who have any initiative and curiosity.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I managed to accidentally hit lovethecock.com instead of slashdot.org, the keys are right next to each other...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
>> Most parents can't manage to monitor their child's behavior.
FTFY.
Why not do some parenting for a change? If a kid wants to see porn — he'll find a way. Even without the darn internets. If he doesn't want to see — he won't. It's not like seeing a vagina or a penis will leave you kid paralized and drive him into a coma.
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.
Less than IT (and English, if I'm honest) literate folk I know of have attempted to find Brittany Ferries information by going to google and entering "britney" as the term. That turned up a few results which weren't at all to do with holidays to France.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Wouldn't have helped in this case since the article too talks about opt-in. Maybe all you can wish from the slashdot editors is that they read the linked articles before posting a story (which would have cleared them in this case) but there are times they have obviously not done even this.
I think mathematics.com did too, once. I'm at work so I can't test what it currently does.
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.
I'm hearing differing claims from what should be reliable sources regarding if it's opt-in or out-out. It's a bit of a mystery right now. To make things worse, people can't even agree on what those terms mean. Does a person 'opt-in' to the filter, or the porn?
Don't forget all the over-eighteens living with parents, and those people who don't want their partner finding out they sometimes want to look at porn. Much subterfuge in the future.
To truly block porn you'd need to block google images, and as these use DNS filters, that isn't going to happen soon.
Agreed. I have pretty much the same story involving finding a dirty magazine out in a playground somewhere, and pretty thoroughly going through it at the age of.. 8?
The old adage goes: if you want something done, forbid your kids from doing it.
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.
And how is preventing your children from being able to view pornographic content not parenting?
Because in this case it delegates the responsibility of what is and what is not porn to the filter providers, instead of being a conversation between parents & children.
I know, I know.. I'm old-fashioned. Now get off my lawn etc.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
I did that as well once about ten years ago, except that I believe I left off the "t" in dictionary. I worried for a couple of minutes because I thought dictionary.com had been hijacked until I looked at what I typed in.
Never again!
He who has no
however (having just thought of this point once clicking "submit") it would be far easier, and less expensive to just have the parents, um... parent.
But that would require the parents to have some element of responsibility and actually take time out from party's, getting drunk, holidays, et al. to actually take care of their crotchspawns.
No, no, much easier to have the TV do it and whinge to the government when that fails.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
And how is preventing your children from being able to view pornographic content not parenting?
Because in this case it delegates the responsibility of what is and what is not porn to the filter providers, instead of being a conversation between parents & children.
I know, I know.. I'm old-fashioned. Now get off my lawn etc.
Old-fashioned because you only do one of two sensible things and act like a choice between the two is the only viable path? I don't think so. The idea that your child is capable of making adult decisions and in fact should be exposed to adult situations at extremely young ages is very new.