Slashdot Mirror
British 'Porn Filter' Blocks Access To Chaos Computer Club
An anonymous reader tips news that the Chaos Computer Club's website was inaccessible for many internet users in the UK after being blocked by the filter set up to block porn sites. Additionally, Vodafone users are unable to access the ticket site to this year's Chaos Commuication Conference. In a post on its website, the CCC said, "Internet filters simply do not work, but leaving technical limitation aside, the CCC's example shows that unsolicited overblocking, meaning wrongly classified websites, is a common phenomenon in large censorship infrastructures. However, it may very well be that the CCC is considered 'extremist' judged by British standards of freedom of speech." CCC spokesperson Dirk Engling added, "We see this as proof that censorship infrastructure – no matter for which reasons it was set up, and no matter which country you are in – will always be abused for political reasons."
Porn filters... Really? Well, what do you expect from a country that has CCTV on every corner in every town, and an internal security apparatus that shames the NSA? We're not talking about Russia here...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Tweak the filter. Problem solved.
Will somebody please think of the children !!!
someone get windows update block and then the filters will come down so fast your head will spin
CCC, XXX, what's the difference? The two keys are close to each other. Easy to confuse. Wait until WWW is added to the list.
Its like someone doesn't learn lessons, not just from history, but from the present
When do we start adding UK to the list of unfree states.
Or if the filters block google or facebook; watch how quickly those filters will be OFF by default.
What was that quote again? Never attribute to politics that which is adequately explained by stupid perl scripts?
Which side won the Cold War again? Oh yeah, "Ignorance is Strength". That side.
Why is Snark Required?
Just had the lamp-posts replaced around here- and there's a camera atop each (most people don't realise, because they think such a cameras sees 'around' the lamp-post itself , but each camera is designed to 'see' beneath a further lamp-post two posts down). People are informed, when they ask, that the visible camera mount is a 'radio aerial').
Lamp-post cameras in the UK were first introduced during the last IRA scare many years back- I remember seeing the contract of an Asian supplier that had provided millions of camera units to the British government in the 1990s- they were boasting about the order for commercial reasons online. More recently, Britain experienced political scandal when big city police forces were discovered placing such camera systems in Muslim areas. Now the camera lamp-posts are rolled out everywhere, using the excuse of a move to LED lighting systems. Camera lamp-posts have even been installed on semi-private access roads, where no lamp post had ever been installed before, flooding the front of people's homes with light at night, and positioning the camera where it can see right into many people's bedroom windows.
Brits have a daily clue as to the extent of GCHQ TOTAL SURVEILLANCE when their daily 'crime reports' show footage of crimes captured by these lap-post cameras, no matter where the crime occurs in the UK.
Years before it was even a thing, Britain installed comprehensive facial recognition systems at all main public transport hubs, to begin monitoring the movement of all individuals by train or by coach. Plate and driver recognition cameras are placed frequently on all roads and junctions (and few are designated 'speed' cameras), and under-surface RFID readers do an even more comprehensive job of tracking road traffic by the RFID 'fingerprint' of the tags present in every recent tire.
GCHQ dwarfs the NSA in domestic and international TOTAL SURVEILLANCE spying, although GCHQ depends just as much as NSA on the Google designed database systems that store and process the massive amount of data gathered. In reality, Google is the R+D division of the NSA. Google's voice recognition and machine translation algorithms are designed primarily to allow the NSA/GCHQ to better index and search the data it collects.
Today, of course, Google frontlines research into AUTONOMOUS KILLING MACHINES for use by the US Army in its future invasions (with Iran being of special interest to Google's controllers). Google's main owners see their research as directly comparable to that by those weapon experts that gave Hitler the ability to BLITZKRIEG his way to military success. Google want the USA to have a parallel ability, so it will no longer hesitate to 'take out' targets like Iran.
The TOTAL SURVEILLANCE society of Britain followed Blair's rise to power. Every single aspect of present day Britain is under the direct control of Blair loyalists.
Blair's interest in TOTAL SURVEILLANCE is the same as any dictator in the past
-to 'survey' the mindset of the 'chattering classes' so they can be better manipulated by government propaganda.
-to gather potential blackmail information on every person, so later every person in a position of power or influence can be easily coerced
-to identify emerging grass-roots leaders or movements, so they can be co-opted or exterminated before they reach the level of greater public awareness.
The difference is that Tony Blair operates in the Computer Age- where total surveillance can be literally perfected. Worse, the mass murdering monster Blair knows that Britain sets a perfectly evil example for every barbaric authority across the planet to copy. When Middle East depravities, like America's favourite partner Saudi Arabia, crack down on movements for democracy and freedom, these depravities QUOTE the actions of the UK government, and say TRUTHFULLY they are only doing the same sort of thing.
By indulging in VERY selective policing, the Orwellian nightmare implemented by Tony Blair seeming impacts on very few Brits- allo
...land of freedom.
Many good Americans died protecting the U.K. from the Nazis, and now the U.K.
is doing its best to emulate many of the most unsavory behaviors of the Nazis.
Of course it's not much of a "united kingdom" any more - and those who run
the show over there are too myopic to understand why.
Unsolicited my eye.
I remember a time, before _everyone_ had a mobile phone and there were still phone booths with phones in them.
And every phone booth in London was plastered with ads for "escort" services. I could be wrong, but my impression at the time was these were really just thinly veiled ads for prostitutes.
I haven't really paid attention the last few years, I don't know where they're plastering the ads these days.
But yeah, filter the porn out.
Porn filters... Really? Well, what do you expect from a country that has CCTV on every corner in every town, and an internal security apparatus that shames the NSA? We're not talking about Russia here...
What I expect is that the CCC block actually exists on my very popular (over 4 million users) UK ISP - which it does not. In fact I've not seen any UK poster confirm this, just rebut it. But don't let me stop you now you are on a roll ... what's that, CCTV on every corner in every town you say? Do you actually realise that the vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are operated privately and are indoors - not state controlled? A Cheshire survey in 2011 found a total of 12,333 cameras in the county of which 504 where operated by public authorities(and it's extremely unlikely those 504 work in concert).
Your comment is the kind of ignorant shit I expect to find on reddit.
Time to take your meds ...
Nah not really. Under 10% of internet subscribers have chosen to not opt out. Most people would never know if the filters went to crap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
VPN
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
In related news, access to pr0n continues unimpeded.
Have gnu, will travel.
The filters have usually been super-secret because letting the public know what was being censored would let "the children" get around them, and would promote the worst kinds of pornography by telling perverts where it was. But English libel law is surprisingly broad, from the perspective of those of us in other countries, and allows people not from England to sue other people not from England if there's some English hook in the publication somewhere, so maybe the CCC can demonstrate that they've been censored and argue that it's libel that's causing them actual damage (after all, the fact that they were censored by the pr0n filter says they were pornographers or Even Worse.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm wondering how Scunthorpe Council is getting on. Did they get blocked, again?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I'd really expect technical sites like Slashdot, and CCC to actually have a clue about these filters. Instead users have latched on to a bandwagon.
Except ccc.de isn't actually blocked. I'm visiting a friend in the UK right now and have no problem reaching ccc.de through PlusNet nor do I have any trouble reaching it through an EE mobile internet connection.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Given the demand, there'll always be supply, one way or another.
And I hope it will not take the form of rape and harassment.
I'm fairly sure that Windows updates, Facebook, Youtube and everything else that "the general public" would notice if it was blocked is whitelisted. As long as only a small group of people is pestered, they don't matter.
You can only outlaw and censor something before the general population got used to it. Sadly I can't find the study for it anymore, but the general idea is that you cannot censor or ban something that everyone likes AND is not afraid to say so. So if you want something to be safe from censorship or ban, give the general population a piece of it and make it legal to use.
There is no chance in hell a western government could simply shut down Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. No matter how much it pisses them off. These are things the general population, not just a few geeks who care about their freedom, use.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The purpose of this censorship technology is, and has always been, to give government the means to control information in order to deceive the public.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I clicked on a link someone had posted on Twitter that was to my own research (statistics research) on ScienceDirect. My British ISP (EE) blocked it on grounds that it is "adult content". Whatever content filter they are using is dangerously bad.
What? Someone already posted an I told you so comment? Well.... We all told you so.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
At least things aren't as bad as when the "Scunthorpe Problem" was rife! Those are days I'm glad to have behind me.
Running a school network and suddenly finding that you are unable to email colleagues or browse websites with Essex, Sussex, Wessex or Scunthorpe in their addresses was annoying... but having to explain this to the ISP who implemented the block was a challenge. Techs there just didn't seem to be able to get their heads around the concept of a SUB-string being a problem (they thought their filter was only parsing whole addresses for comparison against the "think of the children" list.
That being said... Chrome's spell-check remains convinced that Scunthorpe isn't a word!
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)