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.
How can the people of the USA stand idly by while the NSA snoops through their personal files by the minute?
How can the people of the USA stand idly by while the TSA has the authority to search your car while your not there.(see Rochester NY about a month ago)
How can the people of the USA stand idly by while the Border Patrol are allowed to randomly inspect and any within 150 miles of the border at any time without a warrant?(again in NY)
All those things have been done in the USA in the last two years.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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
With conspiracy theorists you must remember that, occasionally, they are actually right.
A year ago it would have looked like paranoid rambling if someone claimed the US government was secretly tracking every phone call and email, and could intercept any communication they wanted at will without any warrant or accountability. Turned out, the conspiracy theorists were spot on. They just didn't realise the British and French governments were helping.
The idea of announcing something very unpopular on a day when an event of great media coverage is certainly established. That trick has been used many times before. I don't know if it was deliberate in this case, but it's certainly possible - there is no evidence the filter speech was scheduled more than one day in advance, and Cameron must have read the opinion polls and know his filtering is actually quite unpopular.
The idea that the filter could be subject to 'scope creep' is also quite plausible too. After all, there are many things that various parties would like to see censored, for entirely well-intentioned reasons. Once the filtering is in place, it would be quite easy to pass a new regulation requiring blocks also be applied to sites giving instruction on suicide techniques, for example. Again, it would be justified as 'protecting children.' It should also be remembered that even if the current government is to be trusted, there is no assurance it will still be in power in ten or twenty years - Hitler came to power democratically via his political skill, and it could happen again in any country, so even a well-intentioned and well-administered filter could potentially be abused for political oppression in the more distant future. Note that China, known for their extensive political filtering operations, justify their 'golden shield' by claiming its first purpose is to protect public morality against the dangerous influences of pornography.