Slashdot Mirror
British Prime Minister Promises Default On Porn Blocking
judgecorp writes "David Cameron, the British Prime Minister has promised that the UK's ISPs will be required to provide connections with 'porn blocking' filters switched on by default.. The public promise comes despite opposition from ISPs, and the near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work. Last week also saw the leak of a letter from the Department for Education which effectively told ISPs to lie — to implement their preferred 'active choice' system, and simply call it 'default-on'."
Just wait until someone hacks the list of people with "show porn" checked and joins it to the table of politician names.
This site is sure to get blocked, there are pictures of cocks all over the place.
The crucial point is that if no porn is available, the boys will just wank off the photos of clothed models and celebrities as they did before the Internet was widely available, and it's hard to find any valid argument why wanking off the photos of clothed people is inherently better than wanking off the photos of nude ones. It certainly didn't do me any good not to have porn available when I most needed it back in the 80ies.
Still, three cheers for the first enterprising foreign VPN company to offer free VPN services (ad-supported?). I anticipate approximately every single teen male in the UK becoming aware of it within a week of its launch.
Also, the earlier Firehose articles were more complete (but that's Slashdot editors for ya): BBC News giving a good amount of political commentary, and technological implementation of the blocking by Twitter.
If you choose to have censored internet access you can't sign up and are told to choose another ISP.
I love those guys.
How about a little box that says don't read my traffic ISP / government?
AND What parents are letting their children use the internet unsupervised?
Now little Timmy won't be bothered by all those nasty websites he has no interest in.
Well, at least not until he comes across some of those sites that slip by the filters - as they inevitably do - or he learns how to turn the filter off (as children eventually will).
And it's not as if he will be missing anything important. Oh sure, filters have been shown to be over-zealous in their protection, often blocking non-porn sites as well but why would he be interested in reading Wikipedia or the National Geographic or any of these other disgusting websites anyway? Do they have any redeeming value at all? And even if they do, is it worth the risk that young Timmy might see a nipple?
Besides, sex is unnatural, and so is the human body. Nobody should see it naked. It's been that way since the beginning of time; children never witnessed nudity or sex until they were eighteen and in no way should we question this belief. Its not as if this sort of repression causes any problems. Anyway, the youth of today must be inculcated from the start with the idea that it is okay for the government to tell us what to read and what to do, for the good of the nation. A strong government should lead its people in thought and action!
I for one am glad the government of Great Britain is moving in this direction and can only hope the governments of the other nations of the world follow suit. Its just one step towards bringing our world back to a more civilized level of discourse, where things like sex, violence and alternate religions are removed from view. It's for the good of our children after all.
(By the way, just out of scientific curiousity, have instructions on how to disable this feature been issued yet? I only ask to make sure I don't accidentally turn it of, of course).
I find a lot of the debate around this very deceptive. That "near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work" means that it can't block every pornographic image out there. That's a lot like complaining that speed cameras "don't work" because people still speed on other lengths of road, or that aeroplanes "don't work" because occasionally they crash, or that firewalls "don't work" because sometimes attacks come through port 80. You'd be stupid to have a firewall installed, right? They don't work - some attacks still get through! And "effectively told ISPs to lie"? That's bullshit. You have a filter which will be turned on unless you take an action to turn it off. But by default, it will be on. Sounds like default-on to me. The ISPs want to label it some active choice plus garbage, but that's what it is. The letter suggested they call a spade a spade.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
it's adult content. not just illegal content. everytime it's mentioned it's slapped on with a sauce of filtering for illegal content, but "adult content filter" is really any porno filter.
bet you 100000 bucks that The Sun will not be blocked though!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I didn't see anyone mention "illegal content". Blocking The Sun would be a first step to a better Britain, though.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Getting hold of a firearm, even for criminals, isn't trivial. Against people who are too lazy/stupid to obey the law in any case, the law serves its purpose.
it is easier, cheaper, quicker and garners more positive publicity for the politicians involved to get the ISP to block something (anything, does not really matter what, as long as something is blocked) than it is to actually tackle the underlying problem and catch the child abusers.
However, as politicians we need censorship options to go alongside our surveillance capability... we use the surveillance ability to keep an eye on the people we are afraid of (in the UK, that apparently means the Government is afraid of about 65 million people... quite a way behind the US though, who have a list of 300 million or so people that scare the politicians). We then need the censorship mechanisms so that we can keep information about our surveillance system out of the public domain, and we then need the surveillance system again to watch the people who are trying to circumvent the censorship equipment (oh, good... we are already watching those people, because they are on our "people to be feared" list!).
On a more serious note, Claire Lilley at the NSPCC pointed out that "In every single child abuse image there is a victim, a child who has been abused". This is true, if you check the circumstances of the photograph. But I am 100% sure than a 5 minute search of Youtube would turn up a ton of clips from movies, from which you could grab stills that look like child abuse and that a third party viewer would categorize as child abuse, even though no children were abused in the production of said image.
I am all for stamping our Child Abuse, preferably in a process that involves stamping out the penis and testicles of any men involved in said abuse, but blocking sites that some unaccountable quango group deep in the bowels of the British government thinks should be blocked is not the way to go about it... unless of course, the porn blocking is simply a convenient excuse behind which the real purpose of the system is being hidden.
Damn, I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Somebody pass me my kool-aid, quick!
That's right. Gun laws in Britain make no difference whatsoever, in fact the gun murder rate there is ten times higher than in the USA.
Oh. Wait. No it's not. Actually the USA is number 11 on that list and the UK is number 60. But hey, never let facts get in the way of your preconceptions.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Yeah, the dirty strings in the hashes... I saw a A9 88 7F DF 4E 1C the other day! Dirty sods.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it. To the layperson, the idea that all these clever people can come up with a way to search the internet and classify content and even rate the quality of that content but are suddenly flummoxed by coming up with a way of reliably blocking porn that kids can find sounds more like "well, we don't want to block porn, so we'll tell you it's impossible and tell you that you don't understand the internet".
Ok, this will sound pretty cynical, but imho the current crop of politicians don't care if legislation is difficult or even impossible. And they know how difficult this task is, in fact, the more difficult, the better. All they really care about is whether a new law means that they can funnel money through parliament to one of their mates.
This sort of thing is perfect for that. A never-ending task whereby they can pay some private company run by one of their cronies an obscene amount of cash to continually search the web looking for new porn to block.
Everyone wins except the taxpayer.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it.
That there is the problem. You see, the assumption is unreasonable - you can understand why the assumption would be made, but it's still wrong non the less.
The difficulty comes with specificity, when you search for something you also get a lot of false positives. For example: You search for a pornstar and also find the facebook page of some poor schmuck with the same name. Another example would be you search for some porn term and get a wikipedia page. When searching this is not a problem, false positives have little real cost, since we just skip over them.
Now lets consider the filtering scenario. Lets say you search for Joe Bloggs' facebook page, trouble is there is also a Joe Bloggs who stars in certain adult entertainments and the system gets confused. Suddenly the facebook page of our upstanding member of society has been filtered, and worse all of his friends are now flagged as having looked for 'bad things'.
You see, the key difference between search and filtering is that of the involvement of human decision. Search uses a flawed heuristic to give us a set of things to look at first with ultimately a human deciding and making up for the flaws in the search algorithm. Filtering uses said flawed heuristic and then sticks another flawed decision boundary on top, and there is no human presence to counteract it's mistakes
Whilst I have no problem with Cameron's intention to prevent undesirable material from falling into the hands of younger users, I have major issues with the fact that he seems to be pushing ahead with this despite advice from people who actually know how the Internet works. Fundamentally, he doesn't seem to understand that the Internet is merely a network - it transfers packets of data from A to B, much the same as the postal service. It does not (and should not) care what is in those packets.
Ultimately any proposal to deploy blocking technology is doomed to fail - blocking certain DNS queries will simply lead people to use an alternative DNS server, or to share IP addresses of questionable sites. If ISPs start to filter HTTP, then people will move to a different protocol. Where does this end up? The Great Firewall of (not-so-great) Britain? Martial law? Ultimately his proposals will end in failure - the Internet community will develop new methods to access material much faster than the government can block them.
If people really understood the full implications of what is being proposed here, they wouldn't want it. Packets on a network should be afforded the same protection as mail in transit - i.e. it requires a court order to open them. This process is transparent and well-understood - it is not left to shadowy, non-elected, non-accountable organisations to decide what gets through and what is dropped. We do not need a censored Internet - it is used for so much more than browsing the web, and these other applications will suffer with this sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach taken by Cameron.
Personally, I believe the best approach to managing access to this kind of material and staying safe online is through education - something which each and every parent should discuss with their child, in the same way that they teach them to cross the road.
In my opinion this move is both right and wrong. It is absolutely right because it gives, AT LAST, parents and people with real troubles caused by pornography (and, yes, pornography does cause really serious problems to a LOT of people) the ability to get rid of such a troublesome content. Think of alcohol and alcoholic people, or tobacco and smokers, just to mention legal substances, at least the addicts to them have the rightful choice of NOT having access to those substances imposed in their homes. Nobody delivers alcohol or tobacco daily, 24x7, and for FREE to them. Which is not the case with pornography. On the other hand, I think the move is wrong because it imposes censorship by default (which it would be right in public places, by the way). I do really think that granting the right for everybody to really OPT OUT of pornografy, if they so desire, should be compulsory. I mean, British Government should have left the access to porn as is (although I firmly disagree) BUT forcing the companies to grant the right to opt out of it, in a swift and easy manner. Regards.
He should know.
It's just blonde, brunette, redhead...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The activity in question here is sex. Not just child abuse, rape, and other already-illegal acts. This legislation would – by default – block access to porn. All of it. Are you seriously suggesting that the solution to children accessing porn on the internet is to somehow stop all porn from being made?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is the UK we're talking about... so exactly WHAT sun do they see any way?
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Every time some government gets really stupid, they push more people into finding ways around it. IMO, it would be good to see more people using TOR - which at the moment seems to be filled with idiots, but could serve a much better purpose providing political safety.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave, saviour of the internet and all things just.
Forget that he left his own child at a pub whilst out drinking. Forget that he failed to introduce plain cigarette packets. Forget that he failed to introduce minimum alcohol pricing. Forget that he failed to fix unemployment.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave.
Forget he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. Forget heâ€(TM)s a u-turning dishonest clueless toff. Forget that the UK population did not vote him into power.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
It would be more correct to say "They would like to see content which they see as harmful and offensive". To say that they just want to "Ban harmful and offensive content" conceedes to them that this content is harmful and offiensive, as if there is some sort of universally agreed upon standard by which this can be measured and determined, when the fact is, its entirely subjective.
Are people trying to get flouride removed from water trying to get something they believe is harmful removed from water? Yes, thats true. However, it is not correct to say they are actually trying to get something harmful removed; that statement would be untrue.
The thing is, its important not to use the characterization of the point of view you are arguing against. Its like, if you are against a bill thats being called "Tax Reform" you can't argue against it and call it "Tax Reform", you are already losing the battle by implicitly ceeding a point that you don't agree with - that it's reform.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it. To the layperson, the idea that all these clever people can come up with a way to search the internet and classify content and even rate the quality of that content but are suddenly flummoxed by coming up with a way of reliably blocking porn that kids can find sounds more like "well, we don't want to block porn, so we'll tell you it's impossible and tell you that you don't understand the internet".
Fuck off moron. Install nanny ware for your kid if you're a concerned parent. You don't parent the fucking nation. Retard.
Never understand you people who think that being murdered by a gun is worse than being murdered by other means, when it is obviously superior. Now if you want to quote the real statistic instead of your perverted masochistic one, the homicide rate is indeed still higher, but a large part of that difference is due to other factors.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
UK residents can sign a petition against this for the government to dutifully ignore.
> And if you actually look at homicides, you get 3.6 versis 0.04 which is more like 90 times. And if
> you look at total, you get 10.4 versus 0.25 which is 40x.
Your right about me picking the wrong numbers, that was unintentional (whoops) I still don't find them compelling because this is again, 40x almost nothing.
However....homicide rate.... good thing to look at, you didn't, that is the gun related one...I find this more frightening and makes me glad to be here in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Actual homicide rate, regardless of guns, is 4.8 in the US, vs 1.4 in the UK, a difference of only ~2.5 times....but with a 1/40th the gun homicide rate? Fuck, I would generally rather be shot than be stabbed up or bludgeoned, or whatnot.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Sheesh... Just had to hit one of my hot buttons, didn't you?
Gun laws in Britain make no difference because you chaps are less violent than the USA PERIOD. Seriously, we still kill more of each other with non-firearms(4.8*32.3%=1.6) than you do total(1.2).
For that matter, if you go back in history, you'll find that we've actually closed much of the gap over the years since you guys effectively banned handguns. Heck, if we could end the spike in black male murder, we'd be a lot closer to you still.
I maintain that, if we really want to reduce the murder rate, we need to end the 'war on drugs', go in and provide effective education and job opportunities in the ghettos, and other systems to fight the current system of mostly-broken families in the ghettos.
I don't read AC A human right
It would prevent more harm if we banned churches instead.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.