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UK ISP Adult Filters Block Sex Education Websites Allows Access To Porn
toshikodo writes "The BBC is reporting that Internet content filters being rolled out by major ISPs in the UK are failing to allow access to acceptable content, such as sex education and sexual abuse advise sites, while also still allowing access to porn. According to the article, 'TalkTalk's filter is endorsed by Mr Cameron but it failed to block 7% of the 68 pornographic websites tested by Newsnight.' The ISPs claim that it is impossible for their filters to be 100% accurate, and that they are working with their users to improve quality. I wonder how long it will be before one of these filters blocks access to the Conservative Party's website, and what will Cameron do then?"
Probably not care, since the conservative base is a bunch of luddites anyway.
Also first.
... we all know that the filtering is done, how to put it, to solve an interest conflict.
And people should work, not amuse themselfes in pubs, at home or anywhere else.
Maybe the prices for tabaco and alc. are a little bit more adjustable too!
Can't say I'm surprised by this.
failing to allow access to ...sex education and sexual abuse... while also still allowing access to porn.
Confused - I thought you said the sexually educational materials were blocked? Then you say they are allowed.
P.S. plenty of abuse to be found in porn too if you try the right keywords.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The ISPs claim that it is impossible for their filters to be 100% accurate
Nobody's asking for it to be 100% accurate, but there's a huge difference between 100% and just 93% accurate.
Considering this is automated restriction of speech, you'd better make damn sure you're atleast in the 99.99% range of accuracy.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It could go down either for porn or "hate speech", which Cameron is wasting no time adding to the filters. The lulz will be heavy then.
no, actually I don't. In fact I love it. I told you so, I told you so, I told you so ...
-- Make America hate again!
ISPs claim that [...] they are working with their users to improve quality.
One question: how can the users know about a blocked sexual education site in order to request unblocking it?
Disappear? Nah, I know that's just wishful thinking.
So I'm on BT, and like most people I've replaced the terrible "home hub" with a simple 4 router solution, 5G backbone to distribute wired around the house, single 2.4G AP for non-wired devices, OSPF to manage it all.
It's connected upstream to the VDSL via a pppoe (username bthomehub@btbroadband.com, no password), and the central DNS proxy uses either 4.2.2.2 or 8.8.8.8 upstream.
I've spent the morning scientifically browsing lots of porn sites, and haven't found a single one blocked. A google search for "porn" reveals the following sites on the first attempt, all work just fine.
http://www.pornhub.com/
http://www.youporn.com/
http://www.redtube.com/
http://www.porn.com/
http://www.xnxx.com/
http://www.perfectgirls.net/
The search also brings up the following site
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Which is blocked as being morally unwelcome in my house.
What am I doing wrong?
...that there's a country even more batshit crazy than us here in the USA!
"but it failed to block 7% of the 68 pornographic websites tested" that's 4.76 websites it failed to block (?)
The first world is overpopulated, so instead of being educated about sex, kids are encouraged to watch porn and wank themselves to death. This is all part of the plan to punish white people for keeping the brown people down. Soon the guilty white folk will be extinct and brown will inherit the earth.
I was staying at a resort in Utah a couple months back and they had a filter on the internet connection. My favorite web comic was considered profane. Another one had one panel blocked because it had "gay" in the image file name. (They were introducing a new, gay character.) Foobies was obviously blocked. But I could GIS page after page of triple X action. Of course, the filter blocked all kinds of non-pornographic material. Got around it by using a VPN to a system that didn't filter my requests.
You Brits are not free.
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I'm not surprised they can't get filters right, they can't get anything right. I joined TalkTalk in December last year as the price is attractive. They are the worst ISP I have ever had the misfortune to sign up with. Go-Live dates that came and went, with no connection. Engineer visits. Incorrect billing. Horrible network congestion rendering internet use nigh on impossible during peak times. The list is endless with my woes. My 12 month contract is up in a few days and I will never re-sign with this company.
There is a reason this company has been listed as the worst ISP in the UK as defined by complaints to Ofcom (UK ombudsman) http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/09/27/latest-telecoms-and-pay-tv-complaints-figures-3/
As we are getting more like Iran & China in our internet censorship more and more we will turn to VPN, and the harder and harder it will take the likes of GCHQ to read our internet words.
This is, supposedly, what this is all about. So why not ban the ones that really cause damage: violent sites (people shooting people, stories about murder), religious sites (think of the guilt complex that many catholics have, islamic fundamentalist sites, ...), facebook (nuff said), ... ?
We will never agree on what causes damage, the current list has more to do with the daily mail tory electorate than any rational sense.
"I wonder how long it will be before one of these filters blocks access to the Conservative Party's website, and what will Cameron do then?"
Duh. The long term goal is to white list the ruler's web site and black list everything else. Read up on the principles of newspeak.
Let them wank off until they elect their health and reproductive capacity enough ..
Someone should sneak a clause banning sex outright into one of these stupid laws.
When a kid can access porn but not say the site of a breast cancer charity that's a problem, yes. But if you work on that angle you're critisicing how internet filtering is implemented when the true problem is the fact THAT it is done at all.
I suppose Essex and Wessex are equally blocked...
There are more C**nts on show on the Conservative website than any other porn site. How is this not blocked?
That is the most horrifying thing I've heard anybody say on this subject.
Nobody's free.
Has everyone forgot the last time these retards were in power? Like 50% of them died of auto erotic asphyxiation dressed in French lingerie, It was almost weekly that another torry would off himself to extreme masturbation. So perhaps a lack of porn in the uk (for retards who can't work interwebs) might have a silver lining?
What type of logic is this?
UK ISP Adult Filters Block Sex Education Websites Allows Access To Porn
^^^ you just won "the worst title" prize of the month
It's every filter ever, all over again!
I am a traffic shaping expert for an ISP. The vendors all lie. They all claim they can classify anything with magical accuracy. In reality, they classify maybe 80-90% of traffic correctly and it's always a moving target. Anything special that needs to be classified has to be home brewed in house for the traffic shapers to classify the traffic correctly. It will never work. Maybe the UK can pass a law that all computers must be monitored by cameras, then they can 'create jobs' by paying people to watch people use the internet. The funding can come from more taxes, maybe a 1 pound per megahertz per year tax on all electronic devices, which is also never a problem because most people roll over and give away their money, since they don't need so much anyway.
Ignorance doesn't protect anyone, good knowledge does. It is a shame that people can't talk to their kids about stuff they might encounter, and instead turn to government coercion to try to keep the blinders on. This leaves the kids completely unprepared when they inevitably encounter that horrible thing they don't know anything about.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Sounds like the filter would be properly blocking obscene material in that case.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
"UK ISP Adult Filters Block Sex Education Websites Allows Access To Porn"
I think this wins the award for Most Confusing Slashdot Headline Ever. Without some sort of punctuation, it's a paradoxical statement. They're both blocking and allowing it?
The best I can parse it is as
"(UK ISP Adult Filters) Block (Sex Education Websites); [Subject Missing] Allows Access To Porn"
or
"(UK ISP Adult Filters) Block (Sex Education Websites' Access) To Porn" (dropping "Allows" entirely).
Also love how they're bitching about the filters being hard to make. "7% miss rate? Unacceptable! Make it work, programmer boy!!"
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The BBC was created to be the mainstream media mouthpiece of the British government, disseminating propaganda and social engineering messages. When Britain formalised its security agencies around the time of WW2, the BBC officially became an arm of the intelligence services (known, with basic correctness, as MI5 and MI6). All BBC foreign correspondents are required to be 'unofficial' employees of MI6. All significant BBC employees are vetted by MI5 personnel that have permanent offices in every major BBC facility.
During Tony Blair's attempt, early this year, to launch the greatest series of air attacks in Human History against Syria (with an estimated 0.5 millions Syrians murdered within the first week), Blair had the BBC run non-stop anti-Syria propaganda on every form of program produced by the BBC. Over and over, the British people were told by BBC propagandists that Syria posed a 'GREATER' threat than Nazi Germany did back in the day. However, the British people, by a large majority, consider Blair to be one of the most evil war criminals ever born, so on this rare occasion Blair's genocide was delayed a little.
Anyway, to the specifics of the article- censorship. While most comments here represent the dribble of complete morons, let me point out the REAL issue. The point of the BBC propaganda piece was to DEMAND more, and more effective censorship. The tabloid press in the UK (and that most certainly includes the BBC) operate with this crude psychological ploy. Such a ploy gets the anti-dribblers worked up and hurtling down the WRONG path (see the above comments). Meanwhile, the IMPLEMENTERS of the censorship methods get the clear message that they must do a more robust job of censoring the sheeple- develop better tools with less option to route around them.
In a years time, the filth of the BBC will run programs showing how VPN and the like can bypass Blair's Internet censorship project, and how this PROVES that VPN must NOT be an option for ordinary users. Everyone in Britain KNOWS that a VPN ban (except for licensed businesses under VERY limited circumstances) will be made law during 2015 (all British ISPs must, by law, censor all their users by the end of 2014, using conventional DNS blocking).
The 'slippery slope' in the UK is a literal vertical cliff. Every major organisation in the UK- political, religious, military, business, charity, etc- is headed by a Tony Blair loyalist (Putin DREAMS he had this level of dominance in Russia). The only problem Blair has with the BBC is that its crude, patronising methods are often self-defeating. Goebbels used to 'do his nut' in wartime Germany, at the hopelessness of their 'tame' BBC-like mainstream media services, for the same reason.
But Blair solves the problem the same way as the Nazis did, by simply imposing horrors upon the British people, and then using the BBC to tell people to 'suck it up'.
How many times is the world going to have to go through this nonsense before apparently technologically illiterate politicians get the message that filtering/censoring the Internet does not work? It's been tried time and time again and the results are the same every single time!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
... (notwithstanding the fact that most kids in the world see their first one within a few hours of being born)... ...most kids see their first one within a few minutes of being born.
Sometimes a few seconds.
Kinda makes up for all that trauma, perhaps...?
Honestly, we force our kids to live in a world of bubble wrap.
Then, when things don't work, we blame everyone else.
Your the parent, do your job.
The world wont change overnight, you need to teach your kids whats right and whats wrong.
Stop relying on tech to be the parent you cant be bothered to be.
Mission option: the vestry.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The blocking system is a menu of categories you can check or uncheck. Unless they're really stupid, the Sex Education category is there so you can block the Porn category but still leave the Sex Education option unblocked so your teenagers can find that (either because you care about their education or because you want to avoid uncomfortable conversations with your kids, take your pick :-) Even if they ARE irresponsible prudes, the Sex Education category is at least there so they can SAY they're giving you the option of leaving it on.
And yeah, there ought to be an option for blocking crazy right-wing political parties, like the Tories and Labour and on some days also the LibDems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Good luck searching for the chief executive of the Parent Zone if you are using the porn filters. The BBC article gives her name as Victoria Shotbolt.