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UK ISP Sky Is About To Start Censoring the Web For All of Its Customers (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson, writing for BetaNews: The UK government is on a mission to protect the young of the country from the dark recesses of the web. And by the darker recesses, what is really meant is porn. The main ISPs have long been required to block access to known piracy sites, but porn is also a concern -- for politicians, at least. As part of its bid to sanitize and censor the web, Sky -- from the Murdoch stables -- is, as of today, enabling adult content filtering by default for all new customers: Sky Broadband Shield. The company wants to "help families protect their children from inappropriate content", and in a previous experiment discovered -- unsurprisingly -- that content filtering was used by more people if it was automatically enabled.
And we criticise China?
UK is one of the WORST violators of human rights laws in Europe. Once they leave Europe, it will get WORSE. They already want to get rid of the Human Rights acts.
These are PARENTING issues, not GOVERNMENT censorship issues.
The control belongs with the parent, not the government.
No wonder post world war parents are bad. They expect government to do their parenting for them, in schools, the police etc.
The reason they are putting it on by default is that only 5-10% of their audience was requesting things be blocked.
Instead of admitting that their customers DID NOT WANT THIS CRAP, they decided to expand it by making it default
News flash, when only 5-10% of your target audience wants something, that means you should discontinue it, not force everyone else to use it - and worse, create a 'pervert' list of people that refused to accept your censorship.
So now they are pissing off over 80% of their customers because
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
... is on that list because the UK said, "Fuck you!"
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Christians, people who just want The Facebook, etc probably wouldn't mind a decent filtered version of the Internet. Remember Compuserve?
It is not and should never be the place of Government to enforce subjective morality.
I give it 2 days before every Dad in the UK is begging their kid to hack it to "Off" 'cos the broadband is in their wifes name, and the account PIN is the date of their anniversary.
The appity-app-app schtick was amusing at first, but lately the execution has been severely lacking.
Step up your game.
Make a T-shirt that says "I disable porn filters and I'm not ashamed of it." There may be a need for a flag too, and a yearly pride parade, if this keeps up.
Perhaps they want to drive traffic to their payed media sites, instead?
"help families protect their children from inappropriate content"
I also want protection for my children. I want them protected from a far bigger threat, however: that of inappropriate authoritarian politicians.
http://www.vice.com/video/asse...
Sorry. It just felt like a perfect response.
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Billies or nannies?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The scummy feeling is the best part of it though.
I watch porn, I have no kids and I don't give half a shit about your opinion about me.
Anything else?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I live in the USA, and I wish my ISP offered this for myself, even if I had to call to opt in.
I would use it even if I didn't have three kids, which I do. Also, I would use this to supplement, not replace, good parenting.
content filtering was used by more people if it was automatically enabled
Uh, duh. Getting mild electrical shocks is used by more people if automatically enabled. Hell, getting kicked in the knackers would be used by more people - at least for a certain period of time - if you're doing it by f***ing default.
The dead ones after they have been sacrificed to Satan. Also bearded ones!!!
Oh good, the Social Justice Warriors are here.
Nope. That is ALL. Thanks for playing.
Perhaps the filtering will enable those ultra-conservative parts of the people to engage in the society through internet. Their minds and values really need that protection in order avoid crumbling all over the place. Some of those crumbs surely end up in the couches of ISIS recruiters.
Yeah, okay, slippery slope. But is it really censorship if it's optional? You can either turn it off or switch suppliers.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
On one hand, it's silly to project morality on any public audience. This doesn't directly have anything to do with the UK government (summary is misleading), as this appears to be a unilateral decision made by Sky. On the other hand, IF one assumes that porn sites are more likely to carry malware than others, I can see the utility for blocking these by default. In the case they're blocked, I assume the landing page will easily provide access to an authenticated page that will allow a user to change their preferences.
This isn't much different to my thinking from Google Images turning "safe search" on by default. In the context of security issues, it's similar also to blocking SPAM or viruses coming in from email by default; a provider should allow this content to traverse if desired, but by default, shouldn't. The obvious difference outside of security concerns is that porn is content that a customer may very well want to receive.
Potential for abuse on the blacklist is going to be high. If I want to learn about vaginas, should that information be blocked?
I'm willing to bet a simple web proxy will get round the filter. Bet it'll take a determined horny teenager a good 17 extra seconds to get to the porn now.
Unfortunately this is simply a 'somebody think of the children!' approach by the government to try and prove they are actually effective rather than being the bumbling, no-nothing, never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives, etonian toffs they truly are.
Still, by researching and working out how to get round the block it might just inspire a few more kids to get into IT/programming/networking/etc so perhaps it isn't all bad.
Preferably one operated by a company in the free world (no, not the US). Eastern Bloc countries shield you from western oligarchs, but expose you to organized crime. Probably best to get one from a country like Switzerland, or from Hong Kong. Some of the Nordics can be an option. The Netherlands are quite central and are known for their liberal rules, but have been taking a big step to the right lately.
As a former subscriber to Sky I had to check the date because they implemented the Sky Broadband Shield as default in 2013. I remember upgrading to Fibre, getting my new router and upon first logging onto it being taken to the Sky Broadband Shield page at Sky with the default option being set to enable and me having to disable it.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
What did that add to this conversation?
Years ago I got to work with some machines running cyber sitter.
It was great at blocking things you needed to look at updates software or maybe the news?
BBS flamewar? Blocked!
The trick was it was a url and text based filter so you had to use websites that weren't in its database. And didn't have any ad's on the page that would trigger the filter.
http://www.spectacle.org/alert...
I do not believe that you can have a web filter that is both effective and not a PITA for normal daily use of things that really are no relation to what's intended to be blocked.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
And we criticise China?
The big difference is that in the UK, you can turn off the porn filter at home. In China, you don't have a choice in disabling the Great Firewall.
I can almost guarantee you that their priority will not be pornography, but centers of politically incorrect speech on the Internet. That is by far the biggest trend in censorship right now.
Whenever I come across something unpleasant in the world I also seem to find the name Murdoch involved in some way.
We'll tell you what's "okay" to see and what isn't. It's for your own good, Citizen, so shut up and thank us for telling you what to think.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"The UK government is on a mission to protect the young of the country from the dark recesses of the web."
No, they're not.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
What is it with you muslims and goat-fucking?
You disable it at the router's MAC level, if it's anything like Virgin's. You got to a site, register the MAC...and you're done. I don't want filtering so turned it off - and we're done. No fuss, no bother. Virgin were very upfront about it, and provide an easy opt-out.
I personally would prefer opt-in but it was extremely clear and easy to turn off, so I'm simply not very exercised by this.
I should add that in the UK, the IWFs Great Firewall Of Britain cannot be turned off.
I'm glad we're getting out of the EU and will have the freedom to decide how badly we oppress and restrict our citizens.
Those darn unelected EU officials and their "human rights" this and their "stop censoring your internet" that - it's disgusting! This is a far better way of going about things.
If you watch porn, you are scum. Accept it. I hope you get to watch your own children fuck goats on the big screen.
That's my fetish!
is that no filter is perfect. There will be both false positives and false negatives. If I was certain that their filter was only going to block porn, I'd be okay with it being on. But I'm quite certain that their filter will block things other than porn, possibly things of interest to me (I recall reports that previous filters blocked websites devoted to breast cancer, for example). So, were I a Sky subscriber, I'd be disabling the filter.
linquendum tondere
How long before all material that MPAA and RIAA Robotic web-crawlers say is copyrighted, gets placed on the ban list to you know "protect" people from breaking the law
Maybe he was looking for the vintage shock absorbers I just got for my old car...
"Delco Pleasurizers"
My car now has 4 Pleasurizers installed for your comfort ;)
Finally a use for safe search !
that censored slashdot. You had to go to the librarian to grant special permission to read it.
Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Can we please, PLEASE cut the submarine cables that connect the UK to the rest of the world's Internet?
It's obviously too good for the likes of them.
Silly me! I always figured that the internet was meant to connect computers not disconnect them.
OK. I will play your silly games. What did it add?
relatives?
Through my porn-watching habits I'm helping several girls pay for their university degrees.
The adverts (and their web site) for Sky Fibre Broadband claim that it is "Totally Unlimited". If they limit access to porn then they will have to remove the claim to be totally unlimited.
Whether to view adult content or not is a matter for the household.
This is not a matter for power hungry policitians who want to control every fucking aspect of your life.
I watch porn, I have no kids, and I don't want anyone who I let use my internet connection to be able to find out about the porn. Many people are very sternly disapproving.
It has been relatively interesting to observe the development of internet censorship in Failland and the rest of EU. Here it all started with legislation that was supposed to censor child pornography. It was immediately abused and quite soon systematically used to censor unlawfully known "pirate sites" such as torrent trackers (such as certain famous bay from friendly neighbor). Combined together with legislation allowing ISPs to spy legally on all traffic by their clients and several years to develop spying infrastructure ISPs and certain copyright holders have managed to deploy efficient enough spying on customers to detect for example torrent tracker traffic to harass the connection holder (by for example dropping connections). In the case there was unencrypted traffic (such as torrent tracker traffic), they have been known to pass the information to IPR trolls that used it to harass individual consumers with gross overestimated damage compensations along with lawsuit threat. It shouldn't be a surprise that all damages are overestimated and aren't based on any real facts or numbers. The damage compensations mandated by court decisions have have mostly been based on actual damages and has been estimated based on facts. This broke the rule of sensemaking damage compensations. And I find it sad.
What this atmosphere created was business opportunities for VPN providers. They compete directly with content providers as "unrestricted internet access providers" that allows access to common file sharing methods that compete with content "industry". For consumer this is good but what comes to typical IPR legislation in EU, consumer is pretty much pissed on.
Now back to UK. Single operator might have optional content filter that is enabled by default now but the fact is that there is a lot of less optional content filters such as ones for "known pirate sites". In similar manner, this has opened business opportunities for VPN providers and they do compete with content providers. But whenever something is censored, slippery slope (it's logical fallacy only when you argue against something on basis it will happen) should be considered - what will come next and what will be the improvised interpretations of what lawmakers come up with that will become common.
I wonder how much of an increase in TOR usage will result...
Porn is just the excuse, to stifle opposition. What is really being put in place here is the mechanism for censorship. Once you can censor porn, you can censor opinion. And in the UK, if you express a non-PC view you can lose your job, be "questioned" by the police - harassed, essentially - or even arrested and prosecuted and sent to prison. The police may not trouble themselves with burglary, but are red-hot on ensuring that no-one says anything on twitter that might offend the powerful.
By contrast, the political establishment has displayed no interest whatever in dealing with spam. That gives the game away: it isn't *our* interests that this move is intended to safeguard.
For customers of those ISPs which implement the IWF filter, it cannot be turned off. But not all ISPs, especially the smaller ones, implement the IWF filter.
Politics has descended into rhetoric and vote-hunting. Nobody in politics cares that much about consequences of policies compared to whether it sounds good with the voters. Porn is a stable bogeyman in religion and politics, a 'great evil that lurks in the dark shadows of the internet' which must be valiantly fought against. Like the 'negative automatic traits' of clinical psychology, these ideas prevent themselves from being challenged: the reality is ignored, rhetoric prevails, votes get won, and nothing gets fixed. The problem with underage people accessing porn is one of sexual education, or lack thereof. Humans naturally seek sexual enjoyment, if starved of this and offered only a few choice morsels, people can be motivated to work desperately. This effect (akin to the squirrel learning an assault course, as shown in a BBC program called Daylight Robbery (2, part 4/4 on youtube if you are interested)) has probably been beneficial in the past, before the rise of modern marketing. Sexual is used in much of marketing because it works. It works because often pictures of scantily clad young women on adverts are all that a young man will see in their day, and their brain will naturally reward and learn things associated with them (the primitive mate hunting instinct, a relic of our evolutionary past, would never have needed to be adapted to modern marketing).
A more sensible and pragmatic viewpoint is that humans in general have sexual desires and fantasies, often quite strong, that leaving these desires starved and frustrated has the capacity to wreak havoc in somebody's decision making. Rather, modern society need to learn to both satisfy and harness these drives, ensuring acceptable and effective outlets exist for everybody so that there is no need to seek sexual outlets elsewhere. Sexual desire, being short lived, is not a good foundation for a long-term loving relationship or a family, and thus in the modern world these things (sex and relationships) need to be less coupled than they have been in the past. Yes, sex has a major place in relationships, and ensuring drives are satisfied is a responsibility of those in that relationship, but how they are satisfied needs to be far less prescribed than it has been in the past. In addition, if there is a mismatch between desires of those in a couple, there needs to be acceptable options if one or both in a relationship are not to be frustrated (and this frustration can have serious detrimental effects psychologically, both individually and on the relationship itself, if that relationship gets perceived as an obstruction preventing relief of sexual frustrations).
Various forms of sexual entertainment need to be available, people need to understand the basic human needs better, how to use sexual entertainment sensibly, when it is a sensible option, how to avoid addiction-like behaviours, how to prevent obsessions growing to the level of being problematic, and so on. Much of this needs to be taught to children in proper sexual education (rather than the traditional religious ideas of 'tell them it's naughty and not to do it, then hope they work everything out for themselves successfully'). Conservative attitudes to sex were probably a good thing back in their day (a few centuries ago, before the rise of modern science and medicine), but these days they do more harm than good. Appealing to them is an effective means of political point scoring (which is what the 'porn filter' stuff has been about).
That said, porn filters by default is not necessarily a bad idea in itself: parents should have a degree of control with respect to what information and imagery of a sexual nature is available, but this control _must be used wisely_ in the raising of children, and that is what I doubt will be the case. Trying to keep the lid on a Pandoras box that was never closed in the first place is stupid and foolish, yet politically expedient on countries such as the UK and the US. When will we learn?
John_Chalisque
One is a Western nation and can do no wrong. The other is an Asian nation and is evil by the laws of racial superiority. Fuhrer Trump will fix this with his hair piece of white power.
"It would be a terrible shame if that new tech startup you're launching wound up on the internet Ban list? Perhaps if this empty briefcase was suddenly filled with cash, I might forget to update the ban list."
I see this as a non-starter. As a matter of principle I have and almost certainly will always opt out of any attempt to get me to agree to have my content filtered on my behalf. The arguments to the contrary would have to be extremely strong before i would decide otherwise. Whether or not it's porn simply doesn't come into the equation.
Censor's web filtering UI:
Block: <- more [ _ _ # _ _ _ _ _ # _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ] less ->
Websites: 170 million shown, 1.2 billion abbreviated, 14 billion hidden.
Secondly, they're probably hoping to boost ales of their execrable excuse for porn in "the Sun".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"