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The UK's Internet Porn Filter and Fighting Censorship Creep
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian takes the UK government's internet porn filter to task by pointing out how absurd the opt-out process is: 'Picture the scene. You're pottering about on the internet, perhaps idly looking up cake recipes, or videos of puppies learning to howl. Then the phone rings. It's your internet service provider. Actually, it's a nice lady in a telesales warehouse somewhere, employed on behalf of your service provider; let's call her Linda. Linda is calling because, thanks to David Cameron's "porn filter", you now have an "unavoidable choice", as one of 20 million British households with a broadband connection, over whether to opt in to view certain content. Linda wants to know – do you want to be able to see hardcore pornography? How about information on illegal drugs? Or gay sex, or abortion? Your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How about obscene and tasteless material? Would you like to see that? Speak up, Linda can't hear you.' The article also points out how the filter is being used as a tool for private industry to protect their profits. 'The category of "obscene content", for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years.'"
As a 50 year-old man nearing retirement, I can emphatically say "Hell yes!" to all of those questions.
And I'll let Linda know that I'll be wankin' it to much of that aforementioned content. While smoking weed.
I would hope Linda and others would have the fortitude to say "Yes across the board" and hang up. It's better to face the odd goatse than to have the government spoon feed you.
Trolling is a art,
"I do not wish to have the government choose for me which content is appropriate for my viewing. Unblock all of it. If I am worried about what my children will get into, I will monitor them myself or purchase configurable child blocking software. Thank you. Have a nice day."
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
No big deal, I'll just make it equally creepy for Linda
How hard is it to say, "Give me the total freedom package and piss off!"?
I guess for the ruling party, the opposition would be 'obscene'.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Internet censorship, in any way, shape, or form, is wrong, and I for one do not support it nor will I endure it, because while ostensibly it is to 'protect the children!', it is inevitably mis-used as a tool by politicians to further their own political and social agendas, and by proxy it is further mis-used by big business to increase their profits by silencing their competition. Lastly it has been proven time and time again that using blacklists to censor the internet simply does not work, and it inevitably will block perfectly 'acceptable' content while sometimes allowing 'unacceptable' content through. Therefore I do not wish to have anything to do with anything having to do with any form of censorship, please do not include me in it, and please do not bother me about this subject again."
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
is now being turned, all nice and easy, into Nanny State 2.0: a Surveillance State. Police State will be Nanny State 3.0. Rejoice, o Britons !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I suddenly felt like if I was reading a Chuck Palahniuk's book
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Sorry, but some fear-mongering delusional "independent journalism" sites are more destructive than terrorists. Sites like nsnbc for instance are a hub for anti-vaxers and chemtrail believers and don't allow comments or feedback. I'd rather be killed by a bomb than a measles outbreak or by paranoid mobs of tinfoil hats.
Linda, what are you wearing?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Given that both the US and UK governments no longer operate according to their own laws, is it really insane to posit that all those that fully opt-out will be placed on a list curated by the organs of state security? And if any of those on that list dare speak up or protest the doings of NSA / GCHQ, they will be backdoored, child pron / snuff placed on their devices and promptly arrested? "See? the system works! And the rest of you lot best reconsider opting back in or you're next."
As Goering said: "It's the same in every country."
Search engines can figure out most of this stuff anyway, right? Isn't our privacy on these issues already gone? What's the difference between UK asking you for it and Google just paying attention to your browsing history? Now a-days I'm just going to assume the NSA and my ISP (I'm in the US) can see this stuff anyway.
This is in part a rhetorical question meant to focus on the general lack of privacy these days. We shouldn't get up in arms about being asked, we should be up in arms about not having privacy in these matters be a fundamental right. (Eg a law requiring ISPs to destroy all such records after 90 days.)
would you like censored internet? yes or no!!!
Hi Linda,
What do you class as adult content? Who decides? Where would an act of fellatio fall in this criteria? Would that be blocked? What about anal sex? What about playing with a vibrator? So all adult content is blocked? What about pregnancy advice? What about information on alcohol consumption? What about contraception? What about advice on which genital piercing to get? So not all adult content, then? So which content to I know that I'm opening up or not? How can I decide? Where's the list?
Cue twenty minutes of questioning, without even bordering on my side of it being considered an obscene communication with Linda, and I could make it just as awkward for Linda, and also waste an AWFUL lot of time, and even get Linda questioning herself as to why she has to ask consenting adults about this. And come to the only logical conclusion: Turn it off, because I can't tell what you have filtered for me in any way, shape or form, so it's too inconvenient to deal with "Is it a problem with my network, or my ISP, or with their filter? (whose filter?!)". Turn it off now, let's save the hassle in the future.
But, fortunately, being a customer of a major UK ISP, I haven't yet been asked. Not even once.
I was asked something similar by a mobile phone provider recently, and about 10 years ago (when GPRS was the norm), but it wasn't in person. It was an automated "I agree" box on a website / portal page. I predict that's how 99% of ISP's that are forced to do this will do it, even if there's a phone call to remind you to do it or you have to phone support to find out that the reason you see a blocked page is because you haven't done this.
To be honest, I'm not that bothered about it. I will bypass any filter that throws up even a single false positive. Sorry, I spend my working life trying to get kids away from the unfiltered net, and there is no way that even in just ordinary usage of my Internet I won't run into this and - when I do - I will bypass it. You don't even have to assume that I would go looking for pornographic material, I guarantee you that it will get in my way at some point. As such, if anyone bothers to ask me (they won't, except in a hands-off way like the 3G operators do), they will be told to remove any and all filters.
Similarly for those ISP's that used to block port 139 for me. I think it's a good idea to block it by default. But I didn't ask you to do that, and I'm clever enough to know what it is and what it does, and do better myself. So take it off, so that a single nmap packet going out on port 139 to my own private server elsewhere on the net (to test that I'm NOT doing anything stupid myself) doesn't trigger 30 minutes of web interception telling me that I have a) a Windows machine, b) exposed to the Internet without anything firewalling it at all, c) that must be infected and d) I must have some stupid option turned on that I don't even have available to me.
Honestly, there's just too much of a pain in the arse in even considering letting you putting it on by default. I will ring my ISP and have them remove it the second I see such a thing. The fact that I can get round it in a matter of *seconds* just with the tools and systems I already have available and already am using is neither here nor there.
And, you know what, I reckon those homes who think the same will do the same. And those homes who are already reliant / believing in the government to filter everything because they are too stupid to parent themselves - they'll leave it turned on.
If anything, the database behind this will see a correlation of IQ / parental responsibility with those who turn it OFF than those who leave it on.
I am not from the UK but I live there. I signed up to GiffGaff, only to realize that the "optional" filter could only be disabled by giving GiffGaff my UK passport information. However, not being a citizen of the UK, I obviously do not have a UK passport and therefore cannot opt out. So much for the freedom of movement for workers.
Sites which have been blocked included childline.org.uk and British Library. Obviously they correct those mistakes when they make it to the newspapers, but what about all the sites that are too small to get the media riled up? Although most of the UK media are very much FOR the filter. Maybe they hope that people will turn to the old media when the blog sites are blocked.
The UK seems to be eager to combine the bad parts of the US with the bad parts of the EU.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
This optional layer of filtering sits above the mandatory "cleanfeed" filtering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_system)
Anything judged to be illegal is already blocked.
Sorry, but why is everyone opening their posts by saying "sorry"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You clearly don't read conspiracy-theory sites. When tin foil hat wearers speak of "chemtrails" they are NOT referring to cloud-seeding, whether-manipulation, and geo-engineering. They're referring to their own delusions about poison and mind-control with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back it up. What you're talking about is a completely different thing altogether, and of course it's real.
Fuck yes i want freedom. ( and be sure to scream the obscenities )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah, WTF are you talking about? Do you even know? I am talking about the UK govt. classifying people like David Miranda and the papers like the Guardian as "terrorists" and you're talking about chemtrails. Then your buddys' are jumping in talking about chemtrails. What is this, a UK sponsored hijacking of my point?
Go fucking fuck your fucking selves. The word "terrorist" can't be used to describe "anyone who pisses us off on matters of national security or business " or it will lose all meaning and take the faith of the population in government with it.
The government has to protect it's reputation and deal with complex situations honestly if it's going to be respected.
Those parts of the security apparatus who think they can rule nations and their people by fear and intimidation instead of representing their legitimate interests are dangerous to any nation that permits them to have access to power.
I wish I had an option for cheaper internet that included a porn filter.
That *should* be the other way around. If you're making use of their filtering services, that's requiring more hardware/bandwidth/etc on their side, so you should have to pay more (a filtering tax?), whereas if you opt out, you should not have to pay for the service.
Sadly, if there was a cheaper option, I know it'd be what you said. They can even blame the cost of having to call everyone every year to confirm they want to keep the filter off as the reason those people need to pay more.
What is really being asked:
"Do you want to be able to see hardcore pornography? If you answer yes, we'll make sure your partner knows, along with any visiting family, friends or co-workers who may use your connection and have the fleeting curiosity to see if sex.com if blocked."
Whenever privacy issues are discussed, someone will quickly raise the obvious question: 'What are you hideing? The innocent have nothing to fear.' Well, here's your answer. Pornography is still legal, that doesn't mean I want everyone who shares or visits this house to know I look at it.
Hasn't gotten very far through the process yet, and is less likely to do so now it's clear that all the major ISPs are complying without a law to force them.
You're right about filters being useless. They do nothing about all the non-web sources of pornography - IM programs swapping pics with friends, p2p software, etc. And let us not forget that the prank of posting pornography of an unusual or humorous nature to unrelated forums is a long-established pasttime of internet culture. Plus all those dubious sites hosted in various legally-vacant countries that just want to lure in all the clicks they can get and don't care who sees, and are quite willing to resort to search engine manipulation and spam.
In a perfect world we'd all be able to have jobs that didn't piss you off. Sadly, we don't live in that world and there are some people who have to take the only job that's available to them, and in some cases, that jobs going to be a job that consists of annoying you. When the alternative's starvation, any job's a good one. You're an asshole because you're advocating making life even shittier for people who may have no choice in doing the job they do.
If she's calling me, I'd want to be sure she's calling from my ISP. For a question this sensitive, I'd hang up and call them back on the number published on their website / invoices.
It'd be an interesting game: Call someone up, pretend to be from their ISP, get them to tell you their private preferences, record it all (you notified them you were recording, too), blackmail.
And before those games came out, British TV was always playing wartime and post-war movies like "Battle of Britain". Those were just as violent, if not more. Wartime movies would show innocent civilians being hurt, like someone taking a cab through English countryside roads, only to be shot at by a fighter plane.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Thanks you for calling, Linda. Please sign me up for the no-filtering-whatsoever service, please. My own filters that I have setup and maintain are more accurate, more unbiased, and less aligned toward corporate group think than the crap you are trying to push on me. As for child pornography and hard core porn, I have already discussed such things with my children and prepared them for what is out there. I trust that they are mentally strong enough and intelligent enough to be able to make basic decisions about "wrong" and "right" more than some faceless and unaccountable political dweeb that I have never met.
I just can't think about this and NOT imagine Linda and Mr.Bean's discussion on this topic... :D