Slashdot Mirror
UK ISP Asks Religious Groups To Set Parental Controls
Barence writes "A British ISP is inviting religious groups to help set parental controls for its customers. Claranet says it is recruiting volunteer 'Guardians' from a number of different organizations — including religious organizations, schools and child safety experts. A press spokesman for the ISP said that an 'Islamic advisor' was among the first batch of Guardians, but refused to identify them. The Claranet Guardians will be asked to choose whether they think 140 different categories of internet content are appropriate. Within those categories, the Guardians can choose to add or remove individual websites from the blacklists, which are created by a third-party company that Claranet also refused to name."
Remember that these parental filters are voluntary. Much worse filtering - one that western people are creating themselves - is called Google Filter Bubble.
What is Google filter bubble
I'm glad you asked. It's a filter you're creating to yourself without thinking. It's a bubble you're creating around yourself, letting only your opinions and knowledge ever reach you. Everything else is censored.
Religious groups can go and fuck themselves, I've had enough of superstitious groups trying to change the world to their liking, really it's too much. if some idiot needs to censor what he sees, install dans guardian or similar. geeze, leave the net alone
http://chimpbox.us
We need controls to prevent kids from overdosing on religion. There's a maximum safe dose of religion, maybe around an hour a day. Kids who substantially exceed that dose may turn into cult members, Jesus freaks, non-working yeshiva students, or Islamic militants. It's not the brand of religion that matters as much as the dosage.
It's not just religious groups, it's several different organization types. Singling out religious groups in the title is merely inflammatory and designed to ignite a flamewar. While I think what this ISP is doing is wrong, I also feel it wrong for Slashdot to engage in the same zealous behavior against a certain group.
Call ISP:
(20 minutes on hold)
Them: "Hello, how may I help you today?"
Me: "Please opt-in me on any blacklists started, managed, or endorsed by any religious individual or organization. Thank you."
Them: "...okay?"
-SaNo
"You can only go to the CoS sites, the rest of the sites don't exist and if they did they are evil and corrupting."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We can envisage a situation where people would only block known malware sites... and they can allow everything else.
That appears to be not the desired situation. They're marketing it at parents, but taking a bet each way.
When I scanned the summary I thought it meant that an ISP was implementing parental controls to shield minors from dangerous religious sites. That seems like a far more worthwhile endeavor....
Reposting, but similarly short-sighted even if it's voluntary on the part of the parents at the customer-end of the service.
So now we can have a filtered ISP for the weirdy religious types, and they can stick to that and leave the other ISPs alone for normal people.
It also means that detecting people who spend a worrying amount of time looking at the wikipedia pages for explosives, ebay auctions for chemical equipment and downloading illegal copies of the talmud can be spotted and chucked into Broadmoor before they hurt someone.
The paedos could be looking forward to catching a break for once.
I don't understand why the gov't, isp, etc. want to be in the business of parenting.
.. that may get more intrusive over time. Something beginning 'W' perhaps. Ah yes, a wedge indeed.
You just can't "un know" and "un see" things.
As so many times in the past (seriously- back to like 200 A.D.), those censors and monitors will be corrupted. Some will be found to have large collections of porn- some of it illegal, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They tried with an atheist but she left the blacklist empty.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
A private company offers an opt in filtering service, and they hire religious people to help them set up that service. Okay, sounds like something I absolutely do not want. But who am I to tell other people they can't have it. It's not bothering me any.
Which is fine if they limit themselves to themselves. I'd hate to have my whole neighborhood burned to the ground, the women raped the men decapitated the children enslaved all in the name of religious tolerance because some nutjobs happened to see some porn or worse, something Jewish.
Allahu Porqchop!
Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Here, as long as tax dollars are not used to support the ISP and if it is not a government sanctioned utility, I don't see anything wrong in a private company doing it with their own money and capital. You don't like it, use a different ISP.
Further recognize it is UK, it is not a secular nation but a Christian/Protestant nation and their laws will differ from ours, I mean the USA's. We did not like their laws and so we said adios way back in 1770s.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The difference between censorship committees and regular people is that the censorship committees want to watch and read their smut in a group setting rather than at home alone. It's rather kinky when you think about it that way.
I am officially gone from
I'd want the option to filter content based on my own beliefs and opinions by NOT GOING to the sites that I find objectionable.
What method of "NOT GOING" did you have in mind? If you mean just not keying in the URLs of objectionable sites, what should you do if someone cites a document in support of his argument, but when you click the link to view the document, it ends up being a shock site?
When our household got cable for the first time, it was great.
The first thing we did was put the parental lock on the God Channel.
Here's a good idea that will be only implemented after thoughtful, contemplative consideration of all its implications and effects are throughly explored with invitations to discussions for all affected parties extended I'm sure.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Well if it is like my experience it will help produce more atheists. When I was young so many things I enjoy were declared satanic by the church. For example I used my own money I earned from mowing lawns, and shoveling snow to buy dungeons and dragons books. I had all of them. I also would play D&D with a few friends of mine. I was a early teen and still hadn't discovered women yet. I appreciated the thought aspect of the game in thinking about your decision and the mathematical aspect as well. I also appreciated a lot of the original artwork contained in the books. Which if you seen the original AD&D books then you know what I mean. Even Deities and Demigods had some of the real mythology behind the characters contained. I mean seriously I look at it as an adult and an inspirational way to get a kid to use his brain and read and calculate all the math, is that such a bad thing?
Well I came home one day to find all my books gone. I asked my mom where they were and she threw them all out. Why, because the church said it's satanic. I realized even at an early age the church was a nothing more than a mass of stupid people that couldn't think on their own. I went all the way up as high as I could go as a kid questioning my mom and the preacher of the church she went to if they even read any of the books. Which they all said no. Which I asked how did they know it was satanic. It was all word of mouth. People in mass just blindly following and not thinking. That's when I knew church and organized religion was a sham. Admittedly I became agnostic, later as I seen more and more of the stupid things people of all religions do. I became Atheist. We can only hope that children raised in homes that blindly just shut off access to things that kids use grow up to hate the stupidity of religion and see it for that. The world needs a lot less ignorant sheep.
On the other hand, others do have the freedom of expression to disparage the idea and the company. Again not using public funds or resources.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As long as it is always opt-in, I don't really see a big issue. TV's have parental controls that can be easily enabled/disabled by an adult with the appropriate password (how effective they are I dunno as I've not used them). If a customer wants to ring their ISP and say
I'd like the "Christian standards web filtering package", it doesn't affect me or bother me. Heck, some people would probably pay for such a "service" (which is probably what the ISP will aim for)
The issue becomes when such filters become "opt-out", and are on by default. I believe the register coined it well when they asked how many people would be willing to check off the following box on their internet-service application
[X] Yes I am a dirty pervert
Indeed, Tony Blair concealed his religious leanings quite assiduously while in office, sometimes with the intervention of his director of Communications. In the UK, someone who openly made state decisions based on religious reasoning would be ridiculed in the popular satirical comedy press, and probably regarded as being "a bit barmy" by everyone else.
don't click on a link going there (assuming the link is not masked/hidden).
That's exactly what I was referring to: links that are masked/hidden. And on a browser for a tablet, which has no gesture to show the target URL in a status bar, pretty much all links are masked/hidden.
But filters are like virus definitions.. only as good as your last update.
Microsoft at least seems to think "as good as your last update" is good enough, seeing how strongly Windows Security Center recommends installing a real-time antivirus.
If I name a porn site 'Puppiesandkittens.com' and don't use any 'bad words' in the content I'm pretty sure it will defeat the filters.
For a short time, until other subscribers to your filter click "Report this site" enough.
"including religious organizations, schools and child safety experts."
I think are smarter that you think ! There is no way those set of people are going to agree with each other!
Who better to be trusted with the well-being of children than priests.
That's not what the article says, did you read it? No?! I'm stunned!
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Methinks you're creating a strawman here. Can we argue about reality, not made up hypothetical situations?
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Nothing brainwashes a kid more than religion and has started more wars than anything else. Just ask all the religious guys what sites they do like and filter that.
Start with http://www.conservapedia.com/ and work from there on.
Is it illegal in the UK for a private company (without any government funds) to mix religion with its business? It is illegal in USA? If there is no public resources involved, there is no standing for others to sue them.
On the other hand, others do have the freedom of expression to disparage the idea and the company. Again not using public funds or resources.
If a private company provides a service that their customers can explicitly opt into which allows those customers to prevent their computer from visiting certain websites, then that is their right. It's the "explicit opt in" which is the important part; it makes whether or not the government is involved irrelevant. Nobody has the right to force anyone to go to any particular website (much to the enormous disgust of the whole marketing profession). Yes, I deplore the fact that some feel it necessary to try to shut out the world, but it is their decision. I hope that they'll try to avoid becoming over-insular, as that's always a danger with religious groupings, but I also think it's important to let them choose.
It's perhaps worth noting that the UK is far more relaxed about the whole Church/State business than the US, and that the established Church here is definitely not purely a force for conservatism (in contrast to many US churches). Mind you, the UK (like the rest of Europe) is a lot more secular than the US; there's very few ISPs who would choose to alienate the majority of their customers by imposing censorship at the behest of any religious group.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
for example, in Ireland, Catholics and Protestants really really hate each other. A lot. Or at least, the people in charge of those two groups do.
Actually, we don't (and neither do the church leaders), but don't let your misunderstanding of a complex situation get in the way of your stereotypes.
Hi everybody, My name’s Alan Tavernor and I am Sales and Marketing Manager for Claranet Soho which is the division of Claranet that has just released the Childsafe product that is being discussed. I just wanted to clarify that the product we have created is about the free choice of parents to choose what their children can access online rather than to subscribe to any particular view ourselves. It has been designed to allow parents to easily protect their children whatever their knowledge level of the internet themselves. They can do this by either allowing or banning any one of 140 categories that exist for over 6 billion webpages on the internet. The option is there for parents to either choose their own selection or to choose the recommendations that are made by something called a Claranet Guardian. Claranet Guardians could be any one of a number of different people ranging from everyday parents, to education authorities, to relevant high profile people and to religious people. It’s worth noting that the religious angle is to cover the section of people in society who are religious and would find this beneficial rather than as a blanket for all. It’s really about increasing the level of choice for parents. The Childsafe service is an option available to any of our consumer Broadband subscribers but is not mandatory and is something that a customer can select to have when signing up for a service. I hope that clarifies everything but if anyone has any questions then please feel free to email me directly to alan.tavernor@uk.clara.net. Kind Regards, Alan
Now I know the answer : dead from the neck up.
Good ; one less company to waste time considering.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"