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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.
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
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.
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.
It is censorship the moment they decide to what you should or shouldn't be shown. In fact, the defense you offer of this being able to be turned off means you receive censored information at all times, unless you asked to have it unfiltered. Even if you are censoring yourself it is censorship.
It sounds optional, until it isn't.
And what exactly would be wrong about this? Censoring hate speech, populist rhetoric, anti-EU propaganda and Trump supporters would only be of benefit to society. People need to be told what to think.
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.
Whenever I come across something unpleasant in the world I also seem to find the name Murdoch involved in some way.
Nowadays it's hard to determine whether this is sarcasm or not.
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