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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
It is not and should never be the place of Government to enforce subjective morality.
So let them check off the box next to "Yes, protect me from The Digital Devil" when they sign up.
This is not about a filter existing. It is about that filter being turned on by default so you have to call up and answer awkward questions about why you want to look at porn if you want it turned off.
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http://www.vice.com/video/asse...
Sorry. It just felt like a perfect response.
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Billies or nannies?
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The scummy feeling is the best part of it though.
They already had opt-in filtering, they're just making it opt-out.
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.
So let them install a net nanny. Hell, as far as I care, make it free and paid for by taxes.
Now take your imaginary friend and shove him, I got porn sites to surf to!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The dead ones after they have been sacrificed to Satan. Also bearded ones!!!
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.
Note that video of gang riots, military combat, dictatorial executions, and other scenes of violence are, by their omission, presumably "appropriate content". Heaven forfend that some child should, even by accident, see an erect penis; it would scar them for life. But letting them watch police fire tear gas into crowds of rioters, or a policeman getting dragged down and beaten by rioters, or bodies lying in the street in pools of blood, is all just part of life.
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?
If they can't work out how to switch off the filter they don't deserve the porn.
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!
It's real life at least. Porn is not.
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.
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...
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.
Unfortunately you can't do that as an Anonymous Coward, you have to get registered on the Possibly Sexual Deviants list to get outside the filter.
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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
There's been rumblings in Parliament for years about porn filtering. They gave the "option" for the big ISPs to "voluntarily" implement one with the threat of mandating one by legislation if they didn't. So, yeah, it is the Government, but the ISPs will get the complaints.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
OK. I will play your silly games. What did it add?
relatives?
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.
There are privacy implications. What happens when you have the snooping parents, potential partner or puritanical co-worker visiting your house? If you let them on to wi-fi then it's a matter of seconds to type in "e621.net" and find out if you are a dirty perv who asked their ISP for pornography.
It could even be cited as a factor in divorce proceedings.
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.
Well, in the case of divorce proceedings, the correct counter is, "I do not trust the ISP to filter porn and only porn, so I would rather use the filter in my brain."
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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.
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
"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."
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"