Slashdot Mirror
UK Govt's Censorware Blocks Tech, Civil Liberties Websites
A few days ago, we mentioned that the UK's ISP-level censorware software not only does a poor job of its stated job (blocking porn), but blocks at least some sex education sites, too; now, reader badger.foo writes to say that's not all: "It fell to the UK Tories to actually implement the Nanny State. Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites such as slashdot.org, or civil liberties ones such as the EFF or Amnesty International. Read on for a small sample of what the filter blocks, from a blocked-by-default tech writer."
I mean, where will the people in the UK get their week old news from!
I kid but in all seriousness this is exactly why the filters should be done by the individual, We dont need the government telling us what is best for us, especially when the filters cant seem to tell the difference between "porn" and slashdot. I guess we can all blame AC for posting goatse every day
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
now pick up that can.
Our hobby site got blocked by Googe/SafeBrowsing twice this months. No, we weren't hacked. No, we weren't hosting malware. We just happened to use the same advertising broker, that was fooled into showing malware ads earlier.
If one wanted to make a good case, they could point out, how you can disappear from the Internet for mere association with someone else — and how suspicious it is, that that "something else" just happens to be a direct (if small-scale) competitor to Google...
No, I don't like governmental censorware — as Heinlein put it in several of his books, the real danger comes not from content, but from the government's attempt to tell their citizens, that they can not be trusted to view it. That UK is doing just that is an outrage. But the fact, that the automated censor happens to be mis-categorize some content has nothing to do with it — the censorship is scandalously wrong whether or not it functions as designed.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...blocks "sex education" web sites...
Yeah, that's how I feel about xHamster, too.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
beta.slashdot ending up on beta.slashdot at random.
make up your mind please.
Feeling sheepish?
They blocked the BNP website. (I don't agree with the BNP or anything those racist thugs stand for, but I don't condone political censorship.)
Also the PPUK website.
He states, based on a single "URL checker" from O2, that every website he tried to check including slashdot, other tech news/resources sites and his own blog are "blocked by a parental controls regime - according to the URL checker".
But a little testing would have shown him that disney.com is blocked on this. As is www.gov.uk - the UK governments own official site. The parental controls he's ranting about are bunkum. He should have researched his subject, and posted from an informed viewpoint, instead this article is a waste of time.
http://genki-genki.com/
Because I'm trying to figure out if that's even porn or not.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Its fucking ridiculous. State-controlled internet filtering is unacceptable in *any* case. Given how we more-or-less live our lives on/via the internet now, I'm shocked that more people aren't vocally objecting to this.
This.
Every single site I tried was either not listed or "blocked by the parental control regime".
I don't agree with filters, but this particular one (the parental control) is an opt-in filter which just seems to block everything by default.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
So, what he's saying is that the blocklist labelled "Parental Control (opt in u12 service)" - i.e. Opt In Under 12 year old - blocks a lot of stuff. Pretty much everything, in fact.
That would be scary, except that it isn't the default opt-out list, and it is apparently intended as a whitelist of known ok sites. Any whitelist based system will block most stuff, because that's kind of the point.
I liked this guys post called Content filtering is stupid, but you are stupider.
To quote: "However, and unfortunately, most of the last couple of days’ Twitter chat about content filtering has involved gibbering idiots who know fuck all about fuck all talking embarrassing nonsense.". I think that sums the OP nicely.
It also blocks the Tory's (also known as Conservatives) own web site: http://www.conservatives.com/Splash.aspx under Parental Control. The irony is delicious!
I just woke up from a comma and I heard that they cut off Angelina Jolie's tater tots? Is this true? Because if it is I don't see the point in living anymore.
Too bad Nanny Tory does not want kinds to read up on tech web sites
Kinds of what?
Information which helps circumvent filters has to be blocked by the filters, for the filters to work. So yeah, thats why lots of other stuff has to be taken out and its why the filters won't work.
Also there's the other thing about webmail. In my experience a lot of casual porn gets delivered by yahoo mail, etc. So are we going to block webmail now?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I just checked to see if the filter would block children from accessing the website of the UK's most important helpline for children, childline [www.childline.org.uk]. Guess what? It does - you really really really couldn't make this shit up. Lets hope the little darlings aren't feeling suicidal as a result, because it also blocks their access to the Samaritans [www.samaritans.org]. Speechless!
No volcanos here
Feeling sheepish?
I think sex-ed sites that involve sheep probably could be blocked - and nothing of value will be lost.
*sips coffee*
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I'm not really sure if the Tories are a good source of information on how to lead a healthy sex life. Unless of course you subscribe to the "do as I say, don't do as I do" school of thought.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Was that a joke? The UK has been doing this kind of shit and surveilling the masses on their own accord for quite some time.
I know it's easier to just always blame America than it is to look at your own country, but maybe one of these days you can consider it.
But don't worry, Slashdot still allows any poorly researched knee jerk blog post onto the front page.
Maybe all protests are censored as well.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Oh, wait, even XKCD is blocked according to http://urlchecker.o2.co.uk/. Even wikipedia is blocked.
Probably the people behind this wants that the UK population be at least as stupid as them. In the race to the bottom there is no winner.
And now I feel ill
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
The article is bunk and the language used is deceitful and apparently deliberately so.
I'm in UK and my ISP is TalkTalk, the first ISP here to introduce such a filter. It is entirely optional. The *account holder* controls it, not the government or the ISP or anyone else. I can switch it off or on at will and it takes just a minute or two to take effect. It is even customisable, for example I can allow/disallow any of the following categories:
Dating
Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco
Gambling
Pornography
Suicide and Self-Harm
Weapons and Violence
The above are default blocked *if* I enable the filter and don't deselect them. Additionally I can add:
File Sharing Sites
Games
Social Networking
Using the term "censorship" implies that something is redacted, withheld or forbidden or otherwise placed off limits in a way that is outside of the user's control. That is absolutely not the case. The account holder is fully able to switch the filter off or on as they see fit. I was informed of the availability of the filter via email from my ISP and tried it in various options in order to satisfy curiosity and then decided it can remain permanently off.
What the government has done is to require the major ISPs and telcos to implement a filtering system that allows the account holder to opt in or out and even to have fine grained control. Basically this means that adults control their accounts as they like but that children whose mobile phones and internet access is the responsibility of their parents are obliged to defer to the responsible adult.
Allowing adults full discretion is not censorship by any stretch of the imagination. Parents having some say in what their children consume is also not censorship - it is part of parenting.
Rule #1 was always that you don't troll as an AC
In Great Britain you don't need to troll as an AC, for in the British Parliament you get to see those "Lords" trolling each others to death whenever they get the chance.
United Kingdom used to snide at China for their infamous "Great Firewall of China" censorware. Now the table has turned.
At the very least, users from China can still access Slashdot, even with that "Great Firewall of China" playing at full blast.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Their is nothing scummier than the owner of a website complaining about THEIR inconvenience when someone attempts to protect users from malware put onto users machines by that site.
Here's a message for you, you CRETIN 'mi'. You, and YOU ALONE are responsible to your users for the actions of ANY affiliate you allow to operate via your website. If you make money from serving ads, you are 100% responsible for any damage caused to users by those ads. And if an ad 'broker' has engaged in sickeningly criminal activity by placing malware on a users machine at ANY time, your use of that ad broker is a direct attack against your users.
The ONLY ads you should permit are those filtered through your own servers, and limited to JPGs or similar.
I'll be blunt. I would happily see the law changed so people like you, mi, do serious jail time if you, or any agent you contract with, serves malware via your website, or actively seeks the potential to do the same. You have ZERO right to make advertising revenue at the expense of risking serious criminal damage to your users' computers.
No. What this is is a default on filter that you specifically have to opt out from in order to see such subversive content as Childline. Alternatively, it could be stated as a system where you have to specifically opt in to see the same sites as you did yesterday (like Slashdot). Now they have your name and the knowledge that you are a disgusting immoral piece of pond scum of the type the hysterical mouth foamers of the hypocritical Daily Mail would advocate stringing up if they thought they could get away with it.
This is something that has no legislative backing and no Parliamentary support. That that cunt Cameron threatened ISPs in the first place because of some shrill bitch few have even heard of makes it even worse.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
It's similar to bitching that an under-12s bookshop doesn't include books on politics and censorship.
That depends. Do elementary schools over there ban Animal Farm by George Orwell?
Even wikipedia is blocked.
Probably because it's moar liek Dickipedia with its diagrams of a man's external genitals.
Tony Blair even created an agency to train loyalists to shill for his initiatives throughout the UK- an agency called 'COMMON PURPOSE'.
The censorship systems universally applied to mobile phone access to the Internet in the UK were designed to prepare fro similar draconian systems that would apply to ordinary ISP services.
-mobile phone censorship was specifically designed to have as wide a reach as possible, introducing default categories of restrictions that ban all but mainstream media outlets (like those controlled by the BBC and Rupert Murdoch). By definition, being on ANY banned list implies their is something fundamentally WRONG with your content. Banned lists are purposely designed to blacken the reputation of websites in the minds of ordinary people. People who choose to deactivate such filters are labelled in the UK press as 'perverts', 'terrorists', 'extremists', 'anti-social', 'trouble makers', 'mentally ill' - well you get the idea.
-despite what vile shill Julian67 states, it is incredibly DIFFICULT for the user of most mobile phone services to remove the censorship filters. ***NO*** you cannot simply go to a web-page and uncheck the filters- the excuse being that such a system would be 'insecure' and exploitable by the 'kids'. No, most phone companies require a complex series of 'in person' contacts and requests, with the filters being automatically reapplied at the drop of a hat. At every stage, mobile phone operators are trained to question WHY you would want to be such a deviant, and remove their blocks.
-mainstream media journalists in the UK are instructed to NEVER discuss the extent of UK internet censorship, and imply in every report that it somehow blocks only porn and 'illegal' stuff. The 'illegal' meme is essential, for it implies that everything blocked that is not porn is illegal in some sense, and that allowing people the ability to view such material is appalling, and must be prevented by future laws.
In 2014 the BBC, for instance, is planning multiple broadcasts on the basis "DID YOU KNOW THAT N% OF UK HOMES WITH CHILDREN UNDER 18 REFUSE TO ACTIVATE INTERNET FILTERS?". New laws are planned at the end of 2014 making it an offences under child protection principles for households with children to have unfiltered access to the Internet. At the end of 2015, it is proposed to extend this principle as an excuse to make filtering mandatory in most categories, and to make use of VPN services illegal for unlicensed entities (ie., ordinary citizens).
just wait for one the block by default systems to mess up systems in odd and unseen ways
You use words and phrases such as "pond scum", "mouth foamers", "cunt", "shrill bitch" yet you claim *others* are hysterical?
It's this kind of huge exaggeration and irrational and maniacal reaction that makes discussion futile, or at least too boring and wearisome to pursue. I assume this is intentional as it serves to obscure the facts and clears the field of rational actors leaving the discussion in the hands of people with an axe to grind.
The funny thing is that in your reply you perfectly fulfil the description of an intolerant, unreasonable reactionary who is either deluded or dishonest, all the while clearly imagining yourself to be reasonable, honest and right thinking.
"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
It is interesting the way that can play out.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Parents having some say in what their children consume is also not censorship - it is part of parenting.
Is it likewise an acceptable "part of parenting" for an abusive parent to prevent a child from accessing information about child abuse?
No. What this is is a default on filter that you specifically have to opt out from in order to see such subversive content as Childline.
No it isn't. It's opt-in parental controls for under-12s to limit access to only whitelisted sites.
By all means, get angry about opt-out filters affecting adults which achieve nothing and restrict access to political speech and information, and indeed porn. Just save your anger for cases where they really are opt-out filters which affect adults.
When you are getting angry, though, you may want to present yourself as less of a raving nutbag; otherwise you'll just do the anti-censorship side damage.
Would that by any chance be one of those straw men, a leading question, heavily loaded with bias and expectation?
It's good to see that the well worn but always emotive "think of the children!" is a straw clutched by those people of all persuasions who prefer to carefully avoid dealing with such boring and troublesome things as facts and reason.
There's many parental control packages out there, both built into Internet Security suites and stand-alone packages. There are even home-use hardware solutions. Why does the government need to mandate something the market has already taken care of?
It's a shame parents are under the belief they need to keep their kids "pure and innocent" from sex, as if it's some great evil that they grow up to enjoy. No matter how many filters you put up, it doesn't matter because there are still print magazines full of naked women. Teens masturbate, even apes and monkeys do, no matter what your deity says. Internet filtering is like circumcision in the Victorian age, a counterproductive strategy to combat what's at worst a lesser evil than the cure. After all, what's more harmful? Used tissues or the suppression of free speech?
If you do that, Wales might have to secede from the United Kingdom.
Nope it's merely a natural consequence of this "think of the children" bullshit.
It's a reaction to the report that ChildLine is blocked, plus guessing at a reason why a parent would want to leave it blocked.
Skimming the comments of the article, Anonymous posted
Don't get your panties in a bunch. It would appear 'Parental control' is a whitelist. Only specific children's sites are allowed, everything else is blocked.
Here are two amazing facts:
1) A telephone can actually be used to make voice calls! The childline number is 0800 1111 and is accessible to anyone with a telephone! Doh.
") Here is an even better fact: I have enabled the "Kids Safe" family filter and checked that it is active by trying to go to a gambling site betuk.com. The filter blocks the site and informs me it has done so. Next I search for childline and follow the link to the official site http://www.childline.org.uk./ It loads as normal.
CHILDLINE IS NOT BLOCKED.
This "but what about childline, think of the children!" argument is utterly bogus and dishonest. Anyone in UK who is a customer of one of the big ISPs or telcos can enable the family filter and see for themselves.
Another thing the family filter does not block is slashdot and nor does it prevent pathetic attention seeking activists telling lies and doing their feeble minded pseudoliberal scaremongering.
Is it opt in when it is set by default by the ISP? Or do you consider it to be "implied" opt in, just like Summary Care Records and the care.data transfer, where if you don't even get informed that it happens you are deemed to have agreed to it?
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
It already is in the hands of the axe grinders. They have been far more vocal than a rant on a forum. And, yes, I am intolerant of those who arbitrarily decide what adults can see using any form of the "think of the children" bullshit *and advocate that it is applied by default*.
Porn mags are sold to children. It's illegal but still happens and is the fault of the newsagent. Should every adult who wants to buy one put their name down on a list - and thus be marked - so the innocent kiddies don't get their minds warped? When it comes to online porn it is the responsibility of the parents (i.e. a proper opt in system, which is not what O2, BT and others are implementing under an insidious and undemocratic threat of legislation).
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Censorship doesn't stop being censorship because a parent does it instead of the government. If you will argue for blocking your kids from having free access to information, then have the decency not to make excuses about it.
Blocking information, regardless of the nature of information, is censorship. Let that sink in for a while.
Disclosure I work for a ISP (Business not domestic),
I would move to Virgin media first they are going to be the last of the big 5 who add the block, but Andrews & Arnold and Claranet wont add them unless forced to by law (and even then A&A have a reputation for fighting for users rights, one of the owners troll's and sues cold callers) they are not perfect but they are the best of the bunch.
I don't work for the ones listed, I just give my opinion (and use one of the listed ISP's), but if this carrys on I can see a BIG spike in the off shore VPN market.
Britain! Let's all lobotomise the most revolutionary piece of technology ever created so that we never have to look at pictures of dicks when we aren't expecting it. God save the Queen!
Please, someone fucking invade us or something. I am embarrassed. Fuck.
These filters are for under 12s, but his point about the global filters is correct. The government is building a database of perverts. What husband or wife would date turn the filter off, if their partner might find out? How long until opting to see violent/pornographic sites is grounds for divorce?
You already get scary warnings when doing legitimate searches. I don't advise trying it but Bing warns you not to be a paedo when you search for words like"lolita", even though it is a normal girl's name, a French pop star, famous book and two noted and awarded films. You probably get a black mark against your name too, just in case you ever want to work with children or date someone who wants to do a police check on you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And they wonder why we came to America.
From Wikipedia:
The campaign for "santorum" neologism started with a contest held in May 2003 by Dan Savage, a columnist and LGBT rights activist. Savage asked his readers to create a definition for the word "santorum" in response to then-U.S. Senator Rick Santorum's views on homosexuality, and comments about same sex marriage [...] The winning entry, which defined "santorum" as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex". He created a web site, spreadingsantorum.com (and santorum.com), to promote the definition, which became a top internet search result displacing the Senator's official website on many search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing.
Let's totally do this!
I'll donate $50 towards prize money for the winner of the contest.
This should be done by a Brit. Any takers?
They screwed up there. By putting 'file sharing' on the list, they demonstrated that they have the capability to block it. Soon the BPI is going to start threatening to take legal action against ISPs if they don't make blocking of that category manditory.
Easy enough to justify: Pirates generally consider pornography just another class of media to share. They don't segregate it.
He was using them in representing the manner in which hysterical people thing. Perfectly common writing device.
I'm waiting for the first time it is brought up in a child custody case. "My ex disabled the child safety filters, clearly demonstrating a reckless disregard for the wellbeing of our child."
(apologies if this comes out weird, I'm struggling to understand how this fucking beta interface works and I can't figure out how to turn it off)
O2's "parental control" whitelist is designed for under-12s. The childline website has a variety of content that wouldn't be suitable for an under-12, including a rather open discussion of "sexting" and why people do it. This has nothing to do with the "on-by-default" blacklist that most people have been talking about recently.
Yes. In the appendix, no less. I was parenthetic for weeks, but then they tried me on exclamation points and I recovered. But they tell me I might relapse -- they're worried it'll be a serial comma.
Is it opt in when it is set by default by the ISP?
No. But that's not what we're talking about. Look at the results pages linked. There are results for four different access levels shown. The third on the list is "default" and is the one you're talking about. The one TFA is complaining blacklists all the sites discussed so far is the fourth on the list, and is labelled "parental control (under-12)". None of the sites mentioned in the article or in any of the parents to this post are blacklisted on the third "default" list.
I have enabled the "Kids Safe" family filter and checked that it is active by trying to go to a gambling site betuk.com. The filter blocks the site and informs me it has done so. Next I search for childline and follow the link to the official site http://www.childline.org.uk./ [childline.org.uk] It loads as normal.
CHILDLINE IS NOT BLOCKED.
Which ISP are you using? TFA is discussing a blacklist operated by O2. Are you sure this is the one you are testing against?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E5NI0vDGhM
Sure, this is easy.
I think it's ok for someone to make a filter so parent can block their own children from "free access to information".
I think it would be kind of lame for a parent to use that to block access to a wikipedia. I think it would be completely understandable for a parent to try to use that to block hardcore pornography. That is, for a parent to try to block access for their own children.
The filtering problem in that context (parent blocking access by child) is that the filters are inaccurate and ineffective, not that filters exist as such.
In fact, when my child is starting to use the Internet, I'd be quite happy if I could actually block porn, and only porn. You call it censorship? I call it parenting.
... which is the WHOLE purpose behind this...
Can't have our Jewish 'masters' being found out, can we?
Few people understand the power of that quote. Religion doesn't maintain power over society by ensuring no one sins - that's an impossible task - but by ensuring everyone agrees that religion gets to define what sin is. Hypocrisy is thus no threat to the power of religion.
Of course, we see what the modern stand-in for religion is.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Enter
http://periodensystem.com/
in
http://urlchecker.o2.co.uk/urlcheck.aspx
and see. There is even a category for this: science.
[sarcasm]I agree science is evil. But wouldn't it be more efficient to close schools or give them into the hands of creationists?
oh, wait, the governments are working on that issue. [/sarcasm]
But it is a well known fact that conservatives are LIARS.
Pardon us if we ignore you.
GP jumping to conclusions. That said, I don't care for the rib against ACs. I mean, that's kind of the point of AC.
O2 messed up by releasing this tool without explaining what it means, and also by having a whitelist blocker that's so restrictive it's entirely useless. But in some ways this whitelist is a distraction from the main issue of whether anyone should have the right to carry out this censorship, against young people who are in some cases old enough to be having sex. And who has the right to define what is porn, what is sex education, and what is "mature" content, particularly when there are grey areas that shade into political issues? There's a petition against the blocking: http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/bt-o2-talktalk-virgin-media-sky-we-urge-the-government-internet-service-providers-to-rethink-their-filtering-plans-which-are-detrimental-to-free-speech-and-child-safety?share_id=ClZgdVULyz&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition
Age Calculator online. put your birthday date and find your age in mints , sec and next birthday and many more
Age Calculator online
I'll bet that they got freebsd.org confused with freebd.org.
But wait, Hypocrisy is violating in deed your prescription for others. So saying that greed or lust are sins and then going out and robbing the offering plate and screwing one of your perisioners, don't say that men of the cloth don't do either with fair regularity, is a threat to the power of religion. It undermines religion, but it is the common type of religion that is based on moral authority, which most religion is. One of the good things about Pope Francis is that he is calling his own fellow Catholics on hypocrisy, like converting the lavish residence of one bishop into a home for the poor.
Maybe it filters it, because 'taking a slash' is sometimes used as a colloquialism for taking a pee. We don't want those kiddies in the UK to be accessing fetish sites with 'pee pee porn'.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)