Slashdot Mirror
UK ISP Filter Will Censor More Than Porn
The UK's on-by-default censorship, as you might expect, presses with a heavy thumb: coolnumbr12 writes "The Open Rights Group spoke with several ISPs and found that in addition to pornography, users will also be required to opt in for any content tagged as violent material, extremist and terrorist related content, anorexia and eating disorder websites, suicide related websites, alcohol, smoking, web forums, esoteric material and web blocking circumvention tools. These will all be filtered by default, and the majority of users never change default settings with online services."
So will it also block cult sects like scientology and other major religions like cristianity? How about homeopathy?
Though most people are still too busy cooing over the royal baby to notice...
I don't know how you do it, but I "opt in" by sending a page request in the form of a URL.
...seriously?
On the other hand, more stuff they block, more users will opt out. I guess it can easily become a "traditional first thing you do with Internet", like removing IE and installing fox/chrome is now.
And in the future years it will also include sites critical of the government, large corporations, etc.
The ministry of truth will define what is allowable content and which is not. This using the Royal baby as a distraction to implement totalitarian control of the Internet. Just waint until they start blocking all "unwanted" content.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
I just opted in cuz I wanted to read some forums, Mom!
How long until the filter includes "fringe political content"? Reply with your guess.
Are people so bored, and mentally so obese from their consumption patterns, that they actually take this crap without protesting ? If this happened in the country I live in, I would be nagging MPs, protesting loudly and write mag / newspaper articles. How can Brits just take this silently ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The USA doesn't have universal health care. What you have at the moment is a system where everyone (almost) will have some level of health insurance coverage - but they still have to get their healthcare paid for by companies that continue to profit by doing everything they can to avoid paying for it.
I'm a school governor here in the UK. We will not be in a position to 'Opt Out' of this blocking for our School'. I expect it to be the same for universities. I would also image that Corporate Governance would find it very difficult to opt out too. So just forget the internet at all those places.
Not letting poor people die of preventable illnesses vs. censorship?
Point one, America is no where near getting the health care options that the UK has. A good free system as well as excellent private options. Or to simplify that, the US does not have any health care options that are not available in the UK but the UK does have health care options that are not available in the US.
Second point, the UK is going to filter it, bad, the US spies on its people and will arrest you for accessing it, worse.
Point two has a lot of scope for discussion but do not start propaganda from Fox News.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Will they continue to call these connections "Internet" connections? At what point does it really become an "Intranet"?
And it's a non sequitur.
So France has its gendarmerie, and the United States has the Coast Guard. Although a military organisation, the Coast Guard has scope to enforce Federal laws against civilians. How long before the DHS sends military police out in to the streets to enforce littering statutes, sorta?
Thinking back, this analogy will hopefully not be prescient.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
UK's citizen becoming experts on web technology, encryption and obfuscation in 3... 2... 1... I mean, take a man's porn away and he'll build a rocket to Mars to get it.
The ISPs don't want to implement this as it will cost them money to run so what they are doing is stymieing it by putting everything that could possibley be non-child friendly on the filtered list. Thus making the net largly usless to the majority of adults, thus getting everyone to opt out and then they can say to the gov, "look we implemented it, infact we went beyond what you asked". As almost everyone opted out they can put most of the kit they had tied up running this to more profitable use.
About 2004: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2004/291004toystore.htm
The DHS enforces patent and trademark law. The official justification is that patents are vital to US economic prosperity, prosperity is part of national security, therefore patent infringement is a threat to national security.
I'm already teaching several friends how to use it. Got a little network set up now. There is porn.
Well, not photographic porn. We're just not into that. It's all explicit artwork and comics.
Between this and the NSA/GCHQ/everyone-else revelations, I'm expecting Retroshare and similar things to grow in popularity a great deal. It's like WASTE, but less buggy.
Opting out of filtering isn't easy,
I use 3 mobile and after several years of unfiltered content began hitting the blocks fairly regularly and not because of porn.
With the rather extended winter in Ireland the traditional start of spring and the gardening calender is 17th of March but this year the cold miserable weather continued through to May. One area I looked into was grow lights and thats where I started to run into blocks, as the greatest source of information on grow lights are cannabis growers. The filter provider, who ever that is, obviously thinks its impossible for an adult to want to investigate grow lights for anything else.
In my youth i might have been interested but as an older adult with little interest in fecking up my life any further not really. I just wanted to have a nice garden.
So then I went to the phone shop for 3 and asked about getting these blocks removed, having to deal with 20 something women and being the typical neck beard geek wanting the porn filter removed it was pretty obvious what they thought of me and what I wanted the filter removing for. Being the type not to give a crap what anyone thinks of me I jumped through the hoops, I had to provide Id they had to get in touch with the area managers office for his/her personal approval and it was something nobody had asked them for before apparently. Eventually the middle aged pervert got the filters lifted on his internet access.
The real problem with internet filtering is the blocking of any and all sites deemed to be unsuitable. I'm an adult I can make my own choices. Is my aged mother going to jump through hoops so she can get an unfiltered connection? I don't think so and who else who cares about their reputation will stand up to these tactics.
The wholesale blocking and censoring of objectionable material is fundamentally wrong because what is objectionable for the censors will never match up with what people being censored want and need to know. Even if 95% of what is blocked we have no interest in its the other 5% which matters.
I would be surprised to think that many people on this site wouldn't have long been aware that we are monitored and censored already, just mostly unobtrusively. It doesn't make a big difference if your not interested in becoming a terrorist or criminal.
Unfortunately the public outing of Prism seems to be not causing a retreat on the states attempt to control our access to information but instead a more overt approach. To be honest there is little we can do about it, we change our political leaders of one shade to another and you'd have to be an idiot to think that the surveillance and censorship ever recedes with a change of office.
Maybe a fringe party might change something if they ever got any power but that will never happen while the majority of people are apathetic to whats going on. Doesn't help that most fringe parties are usually complete loons over some core value which right minded people will never accept.
There is a chance that the "Porn" filters will not hold, there is a more liberal society, we don't twitch behind the net curtains like our parents generation who are long retired. May be enough people will opt out of filtering if they realise that its necessary to resist the decay of our freedoms to think and make our own informed choices. The wisdom of age, tends to be to keep your head down, work hard and don't get noticed but with popular public support from the younger generations the older generations may quietly revolt too.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
That's the real question one should be asking.
There will be plenty of people and companies who suffer by this arbitrary government-supported webjacking --- and probably some small number of companies getting a big fat check by this.
Personally; I think it's a very bad thing that the UK ISPs are even looking at traffic headers; let alone performing traffic interception and blocking of sites based on someone's opinion that the site is too violent, or offensive and such and such.
How long before sites that degrade the monarchy or the current government parties or officials, or competing candidates during the election/other politically inconvenient sites get blocked too?
.. you will end up on a watchlist. -- Now that is a guess, but I guess it's not too far out of considering recent events.
Hey! What happened?!?
I ticked the "block intolerance" checkbox, and now I can't reach the web filter configuration page any more!
Remember when government used to be the tool of the people, the will of the people, to do their bidding on a larger scale?
No. In some ways, I think society has gotten better; in other ways, I think it has gotten worse. Really, the 'good old days' where we had a government that largely listened to the people and respected people's rights largely didn't exist.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I'm with Vodaphone. I had a similar issue. There is an art site (furaffinity.net) which I use as something of a social hub for messaging, discussion, journals and so on. This site also happens to allow adult artwork, providing it is tagged - you have to have an account and tick the 'show adult content' button to see it, same policy as deviantart. It was blocked as a porn site.
So I tried to have the block removed. Simple enough: You make a payment via credit card to verify age on their website. So I did. Or tried. AFter a few attempts I concluded the site was broken, as it just gave me a useless 'payment denied' error. So I gave the a few days to fix it, tried again, no change.
I did eventually work out the problem: As they are verifying age, they need the payment to be made via *credit* card. But I don't have that - I have a *debit* card. Very close, but not quite the same thing, and debit cards are available to under-eighteens. Thus, no proof of age. I solved the problem by borrowing a credit card from someone else and using that to make the payment.
The last time I was working in the UK, I was assigned a small house as my temporary residence. Where I did not have cable TV, yet at almost any time of the day I could find a nude or semi-nude figure of either sex doing something (generally streaking). My coworkers took 4 hour "pub lunches". I spent the nights pub-crawling with them (until I started wandering into the more "dangerous" parts of town to drink and pick up women - to someone from Houston, London doesn't have a ghetto). I generally woke up mildly hungover next to a woman somewhere between 18 and 36 who may or may not have been rescued from a freak show (depending on how much I'd drank). After kicking her out with taxi fair and a half-hearted promise to call, I stumbled over to the nearby Underground station and got a breakfast and cup of tea that, between the two, clogged my arteries to the point of failure and then rocketed everything back into place.
After which I'd go into work for 10 hours. On smoke breaks, I could enjoy the nude girls from the Sun or whatever that had been pasted all over the smoking area. The only time anyone looked at me funny is if I mentioned my firearms collection back home.
How did the British go from a relatively hard-drinking, smoking, swearing, fucking, nude, fighting-in-pubs, generally relaxed culture (I actually had a cop ask me nicely to throw up in a trash can once - in the U.S. I'd have at least spent the night in jail, possibly been in a fight and gotten tasered about four to eight times [it would help if I stayed down, I suppose]) to this? It just doesn't make sense from my experience...
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
When I got 3G on my phone, I had to call them to unblock the porn filters because I wanted to read slashdot. Seriously. It is blocked as a forum and therefore "adult material". I've never downloaded porn on my phone.
Oddly though the mobile ISPs only filtered data being displayed on the phone, plugging it in and having it presented as a CDC modem device and connecting over PPP went through a different machanism and did not cause filtering. That's a curious aside.
The reason that it is a good thing that everything of interest will be blocked is that it massively removes the stigma from getting it unblocked.
While the whole thing is full of stupidity, if it's so stupid then there is less useful information to have on people if they unblock. This (or a massive U turn) is the best we can hope for.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's "slippery slope", Great Britain, not "slippery precipice". You're supposed to ease people into surrendering their rights; first you take away the pornography (for the children!), then perhaps "terrorist material" (for the nation!) and then work downwards from there. You get much less objection from the proles that way.
Well, maybe they just assume everybody is to bedazzled by the new royal infant (baby!) to notice. Or perhaps they've just given up any pretense of listening to their own citizenry. Which may not be the greatest idea if you take away their porn...
I'd rather not have to check any boxes, thank you very much.
If I were a concerned parent, I'd be okay enabling a filter. But, like its been said, a tiny minority will bother disabling the filter, making it much more easier to track you for whatever reason. What guarantee do you have that this setting will not appear, later, in your credit report? With UKUSA agreements, what guarantee do you have that the US,CAN, AUS will not ban you from entering their countries because you disabled the filter (that blocks for "porn" and also blocks for "terrorism")?
Porn is a great excuse to disable the filters if you're looking for terrorist-related stuff!
It has *nothing* to do with tracking. The ISP *already* knows which sites you visit. If they couldn't know this then you couldn't connect, could you? Doh.
How do you know what proportion of people will change the default? Are you claiming mystic powers of foresight?
Why would a credit report note that I did or did not choose to filter, for example, social networking sites or xxx video sites? Credit companies care about financial status, not whether I block access to social networking and gaming sites during homework times. Yours is such a ridiculous assertion that it is unanswerable and meaningless.
US, CAN, AUS might bar my entry because I disabled a filter and might have seen some boobies or some legal xxx or looked at some nasty stuff on youtube? Please get real.
You have resorted to arguments that are so childish and illogical that they go speeding past "reductio ad absurdum" like it isn't even a bump in the road.
Today, for the first time ever, I actually enabled the filter to see how it worked in practice, and did so using its crude "block everything from social media to self harm, drugs and xxx" settings. In use it is actually quite sophisticated and unsurprising. It blocks well known torrent indexing web sites but not trackers or torrent traffic. It allows access to sites that offer help to people who self harm but blocks access to sites where self harmers congregate and encourage each other. Similarly with drugs: I searched for "legal highs" and could read all about them but sites selling them were blocked. It allows access to The Sun "newspaper" but blocks that publication's page3.com soft porn site.
What happens when a page is blocked is that it's replaced with a notice telling you why and actually linking to the page where you can unblock it (assuming you have your ISP log-in details). It's hardly difficult. Anyone with the mental capacity to log in to a hotmail or youtube account will be fine. Clearly this will inconvenience some of the shrieking paranoiacs on slashdot but normal grown ups have nothing to worry about.
I switched the filter off again while composing this reply and within one minute I was again able to access sites that wanted to sell me drugs, xxx movies, help me harm myself and others and so on. Happiness is restored.
*I* decide if my connection is filtered, not you, not the government, nor anyone else. What the hell is wrong with that?