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Chinese Firm Huawei In Control of UK Net Filters
AmiMoJo writes "The BBC reports that Huawei, one of the world's largest manufacturers of telecoms equipment, is controlling popular ISP TalkTalk's web censorship system. The system, known as Homesafe, was praised by Prime Minister David Cameron. Customers who do not want filtering still have their traffic routed through the system, but matches to Huawei's database are dismissed rather than acted upon. In other words there is no opt-out. Mr Cameron has demanded similar measures be adopted by all internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK, to 'protect our children and their innocence.'"
If anyone knows how to filter internet traffic, it's the Chinese.
Oh look, another company to whom I've entered into a commercial agreement with that now has a right to my entire browsing history and "public metadata". Super.
The legal question, is filtered internet access really internet access. There is a technical definition of the internet defining packets DNS lookup and routability. I don't think a filtered internet access fully qualifies as internet access.
This could lead to legal challenges as the service providers are not selling true internet access. They are selling something else.
So do the chinese get to filter before or after the americans intercept?
AG
I don't think what you think "internet access" is really matters.
They simply state your "access" is given as allowed by law, blah blah blah. Done.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
'protect our children and their innocence.'"
Nonsense. Children are not innocent. Children are nasty, often cruel, little monsters in need of constant correction. "Innocent", in its original ( Latin ) sense, means "not (ob)noxious". Children are anything except "not (ob)noxious".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And this is why "common carrier" status is a useful concept.
Give me the line, untampered? Then what I do on it is my responsibility.
Give me the line, supposedly filtered? Then what I do on it is your responsibility, since it's your job to save me from myself.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... as they are basically a ministry of the Chinese government.
U.S. lawmakers seek to block China Huawei, ZTE U.S. inroads
"Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, at a press conference to release the report, said companies that had used Huawei equipment had reported "numerous allegations" of unexpected behavior, including routers supposedly sending large data packs to China late at night."
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
'Yeah good morning, I'd like the porn filter on my broadband turned off, please?'
'What, are you some kind of PERVERT?'
Because nothing motivates a young boy to learn how to defeat technological filters than the promise of a nearly limitless supply of porn on the other side of those filters.
The filtering allegedly works by checking every URL that you visit for porn (I've no idea how); if porn is found, not only are you blocked from seeing the URL, but it is also added to a blacklist.
The point of the article is that this checking is being done for everyone, even if they don't want filtering. So the ISP is, in effect, compiling a list of the URLs visited by their customers who do not want to be filtered.
And that list is being compiled on hardware that is alleged to be under the control of a foreign, potentially hostile, government.
No the system is not opt-in, the filtering is opt-in, there's a difference.
The system is ALWAYS monitoring what sites you visit whether you opt-in or opt-out, it just depends on whether you want to be blocked from blacklisted sites as to whether it replaces the response to those web requests.
This means that even if I opt-out it's still monitoring every site I visit.
I can't understand why ISPs are supportive of this. Maybe they think they have to be or will face massive negative publicity from hate-mongering newspapers. Inevitably they will fail to make the filters watertight and circumvention methods will become common knowledge, resulting in bad publicity anyway. The government will threaten to crack down* on them, customers will sue for failure to babysit their children for them etc.
* unless cracking down is banned after it becomes a filter-dodging euphemism for face sitting.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
'Yeah good morning, I'd like the porn filter on my broadband turned off, please?' 'What, are you some kind of PERVERT?'
And a year or three in the future...
"May it please the court, the state would like to introduce into evidence that the suspect did, in blatant disregard of the welfare of children everywhere, demand that his Internet service provider to remove all child-abuse protection filters from his account."
You missed the point. Cameron wants all ISPs to have this filtering, and will make it mandatory if they don't. The filtering will be outsourced to the lowest bidder, which in this case was Huawei. Chances are it will always be Huawei or some other foreign company.
The operators of the filter have full access to everything every subscriber does online. Everything has to pass through their filter, even if you ask for it to be turned off. All of your traffic is routed through equipment owned and run by Huawei, a company known to have strong ties with the Chinese government. Huawei set the content of the filters too, which is of course secret. You don't think they are going to publish a list of URLs for you to scrutinize do you?
Government mandated filtering outsourced to foreign low bidder companies that have access to all your traffic even if you turn the filter off. And by the way, you can't turn the filter off completely anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Obviously the real problem is with prudes who hope that no one will ever be able to look at porn or enjoy sex again, but I do really wish more people would think of the other side and realize that stripping rights away that our children would otherwise grow into is just not worth it.