7 ms·

ISPs to include porn filters as standard in UK by 2014

44 points by chinmoy 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
venomsnake 13y ago
On a unrelated news we observe massive increase in computer literacy among UK male teens and the VPN traffic in and out of UK increased hundredfold.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  This. Except I somehow doubt it should only apply to males.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Absolutely anecdotal evidence but I have noticed that men prefer generally their porn visual while the women in written form. There is reason why the slashfic writers and consumers are mostly female.
    - itsybitsycoder 13y ago
      Aren't yaoi artists and consumers mostly female, too?
      - deathhand 13y ago
        I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is more population exposure(and thus consumption) of novels such as 50 shades vs any yaoi. Why is there more exposure? Because it is delivered what women want(thrilling erotica)Is it just because Yaoi hasn't broken out into mainstream? Perhaps, but there are always erotic novels featuring a handsome men at the checkout counter.
        itsybitsycoder 13y ago
        Venomsnake mentioned slash specifically -- yaoi is much more mainstream than slash, especially in Asia. If you want to talk about more mainstream material, particularly what appears at the checkout counter, one confounding factor is that written material in general is less restricted and stigmatized than visual material. There is no ESRB or movie ratings board for books, and parents who would never allow their children to watch an extremely violent movie or a porno will let them read absolutely anything at all. So written pornography can be put out at the checkout counter in a way that visual pornography can't. Women who want visual porn get it online or on late-night TV.
- reinhardt 13y ago
  Next step: outlaw VPNs (only half-joking)
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    You can't. You just transfer a blob of random radio noise data to a server in Canada. I have always thought that every encryption system must have constant transmission up/downstream rates no matter if you are sending or receiving any data. You connect and begin sending 1Mbit every second. And it will just filter the nonsense packets for when you send receive real data.
    - tlrobinson 13y ago
      They can certainly try to outlaw it. In the US you can be jailed for contempt of court until you're able to decrypt a "blob of random radio noise data": http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969 http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      It doesn't have to be a perfect technical solution. They can outlaw VPNs - they just make it a law. Enforcement will be selective, although I guess for some well-known handshakes they could perform blocking. If they detect something like what you described, they can flag your account, ask for justification, use as "evidence", etc.
dreen 13y ago
Is this on the router level or ISP level? The article doesn't say.
- foxhill 13y ago
  can't link you to something direct, but everything i've read about it leads me to believe it's ISP level. i'm not sure how effective this will be..
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/06/big_4_isps_will_all_embrace_network_level_filtering_to_protect_children/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/06/big_4_isps_will_all_... ISP level
KaiserPro 13y ago
This should article should be taken with a piece of salt. Firstly this was a debate outside of Parliament. Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own. Also I don't think this was in the queen's speech. There isn't even a draft bill yet. Also depending on the press, this could be silently dropped. The only people that really want this are the daily mail, and the rabbid anti porn lobby.
- VLM 13y ago
  "Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own." I quote the fifth line of the article: "As ISPs are voluntarily rolling out filtering technology, it will require no new legislation or regulations." I'm curious how this works politically in the UK. My limited understanding of the issue is pr0n censoring is a purely protestant religion hot button mostly in the US, and the relationship between church and state in the UK is the opposite from the US, where we pretend they're separate and pretend not to let our clerics rule us, however with a nod and wink that our neocon party is pretty much the political wing of our evang church and they're pretty activist, in the UK they've got a state religion where the clerics directly rule them, but they take a much more hands off approach than the USA such that they meet the criteria for figurehead-hood. Or is their particular brand of church/state merger more like liberation theology which would be a bit more leftie explaining why .uk has a civilized healthcare system but the .us does not. All of this speculation could of course be wrong, which is why I ask any .uk folks (or people that understand .uk folks) how this all works politically in the .uk. For example is pr0n opposition a primarily evangelical religious issue like in the states, or how much teeth do your clerics have over your .gov, or is this manufactured news to get on TV as a stunt, or manufactured news to get the neocons in .us excited as the local population yawns/laughs... It sounds from the "no new legislation" line much like if the FCC declared a ruling in the USA, no legislation required or permitted, but that doesn't mean its not going to be vigorously enforced.
  - testbro 13y ago
    To address your first point: the way the state religion works is a few bishops have seats in the House of Lords. That means they have the power to kick back legislation, but nothing else. That doesn't exclude the influence the Church of England can exercise indirectly through lobbying/high profile members issuing statements of course. The advisor's statement is correct: this filtering does not depend on legislature. The proposal was to compel ISPs to filter porn by default. If all the ISPs sign up there's no need to create laws to force it. I don't get the impression that this legislation is religiously motivated beyond the puritanical underpinnings of the British public; it's based on "think of the children" rhetoric alone.
rotnewson 13y ago
This is something of a major problem to solve with one of two major outcomes that aren't mutually exclusive: 1. The blocking comes up with many false positives blocking many things that shouldn't be blocked (the John Graham-Cumming issue) 2. They don't catch everything, which is very likely, and the work required to get around blocking by teenagers is minimal.
- VLM 13y ago
  3. Log everything. 4. Immense blackmail potential (see #3 above).
  - qu4z-2 13y ago
    Sorry, I thought we were talking about problems...
JamesMcMinn 13y ago
I'd be willing to bet money that any porn filter will simply be a DNS-level filter, for which the solution will be to use another DNS server.
- michaelt 13y ago
  The existing filtering reported to apply to 95% of British households [1] is reportedly implemented as IP-level routing of traffic through a transparent proxy. This is how they were able to censor only specific images on Wikipedia without blocking Wikipedia entirely. A VPN would be a superior way of bypassing the filter - assuming teenagers too young to have a credit card can figure out how to pay for a VPN. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    > A VPN would be a superior way of bypassing the filter - assuming teenagers too young to have a credit card can figure out how to pay for a VPN. This comment makes me very sad. It was a huge upgrade to my quality of life when I got a debit card and was able to buy things over the internet. We almost went to a system of paying cash for prepaid credit cards, but somehow prepaid cards are generally not usable over the internet, which is a damn shame for children who have nothing but cash. I don't think the ability to attribute purchases is worth the (yes, minor in the grand scheme of things) immiseration of everyone too young to have a bank account.
  - alex_doom 13y ago
    I'm not sure if it's available in the UK, but here in the US you can buy pre-paid credit cards.
gesman 13y ago
Yay... time to invest in VPN businesses. Thanks for the tip!
casca 13y ago
This is a good thing. Filtering of porn, malware and other undesirable content _if that's what the person paying the bill wants_ is a good thing. Asking people to install protection on every device in the home is unrealistic so having the ISP providing an on-network solution is excellent. Of course, this is only true if the service is available on many networks and opt-in. Otherwise it becomes censorship by stealth which is hopefully not where this is going.
- dillona 13y ago
  I think it depends on your goals. I want my ISP to be as close to a dumb pipe as possible.
- thenomad 13y ago
  Currently, I believe it's being pitched as opt-out.
kunai 13y ago
While I have no interest in pornography, this is one step closer to fascism. I worry what will happen next. Journalism filters? Blog filters? International video filters? And if this is the case, then what is the result for neighboring countries? Will they decide to be as totalitarian as well? I know this is mainly the ISPs' decision, but I can't help but feel that government influence is a large factor in the filters.
- ankitml 13y ago
  the great wall of united kingdom
  - motters 13y ago
    Hadrian's firewall
- im3w1l 13y ago
  It will certainly be easier to set up other kinds of content filters once the infrastructure is already there. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/australia-internet-block http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/australia-int...
  - coob 13y ago
    The infrastructure is already there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...
- GeneralMayhem 13y ago
  A bigger problem is the "he's a terrorist" issue - if there are not severe and well-defined repercussions for using a filter with false positives, and an active watchdog enforcing them, what's to stop, for example, anonnews from suddenly finding itself declared as pornography? Once one thing is censored, you may as well consider everything else already censored as well not just as a slippery slope but as a fact, because anything else they want censored will just mysteriously get pushed into the same pile.
jrabone 13y ago
If the filtering applied by mobile phone operators is anything to go by, this will be completely obtrusive. For example, Reddit appears to be filtered by default by Vodafone. Soon it'll be time to vote with your feet, or setup that VPN virtual host.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  >Reddit appears to be filtered by default by Vodafone // Do you think that's wrong? Reddit hosts and links pornography and probably a heap of other standard filter stuff, nazism, explosive making and such. You can just ask for the filter to be dropped presumably. (Or like you said, vote with your feet).
  - jrabone 13y ago
    Yes, I do think it's wrong. I disagree with filtering in the first place, but also I'm on a contract which if I were a child I couldn't have legally signed. It's certainly possible to opt out but only by providing ANOTHER set of personal information (a credit card number) which there's no good reason for them to have. More tracking possibilities, more data...
cupcake-unicorn 13y ago
Off topic, but I just want to say that I love HN - anywhere else, and you'd be getting a bunch of crude comments about this. Glad that we're sticking to the technological and censorship aspects :)
wisty 13y ago
They tried this in Australia, some time ago. The PM told the minister to do it. The minister (who's reasonably tech savvy) told the department. The department told him it was a joke - it wouldn't work, and the government would get blamed every time a legitimate site was blocked, or a kid got caught bypassing it. It's political suicide. They will be blamed every time a teenage boy figures out how to bypass the filter (hint - they all will). They will be blamed every time they block a non-porn site. Tech sites will publish "10 ways to bypass the government's joke of a filter" articles. Current affairs programs will have concerned parents shocked that their unsupervised 14yo boy filled their computer with smut (probably passed around on a USB). The next time an MP or celebrity gets arrested for really shady stuff, they'll say the filter failed. They will look like idiots, and waste millions doing it.
alex_doom 13y ago
"peddling [pornography] to kids" He tries to make it sound like there some creepy dude in a trench coat going, hey kids wanna see some porn? What are they going to do, block imgur.com?

44 points by chinmoy 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

On a unrelated news we observe massive increase in computer literacy among UK male teens and the VPN traffic in and out of UK increased hundredfold.

drdaeman 13y ago
This. Except I somehow doubt it should only apply to males.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Absolutely anecdotal evidence but I have noticed that men prefer generally their porn visual while the women in written form. There is reason why the slashfic writers and consumers are mostly female.
  - itsybitsycoder 13y ago
    Aren't yaoi artists and consumers mostly female, too?
    - deathhand 13y ago
      I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is more population exposure(and thus consumption) of novels such as 50 shades vs any yaoi. Why is there more exposure? Because it is delivered what women want(thrilling erotica)Is it just because Yaoi hasn't broken out into mainstream? Perhaps, but there are always erotic novels featuring a handsome men at the checkout counter.
      - itsybitsycoder 13y ago
        Venomsnake mentioned slash specifically -- yaoi is much more mainstream than slash, especially in Asia. If you want to talk about more mainstream material, particularly what appears at the checkout counter, one confounding factor is that written material in general is less restricted and stigmatized than visual material. There is no ESRB or movie ratings board for books, and parents who would never allow their children to watch an extremely violent movie or a porno will let them read absolutely anything at all. So written pornography can be put out at the checkout counter in a way that visual pornography can't. Women who want visual porn get it online or on late-night TV.
reinhardt 13y ago
Next step: outlaw VPNs (only half-joking)
- venomsnake 13y ago
  You can't. You just transfer a blob of random radio noise data to a server in Canada. I have always thought that every encryption system must have constant transmission up/downstream rates no matter if you are sending or receiving any data. You connect and begin sending 1Mbit every second. And it will just filter the nonsense packets for when you send receive real data.
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    They can certainly try to outlaw it. In the US you can be jailed for contempt of court until you're able to decrypt a "blob of random radio noise data": http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969 http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    It doesn't have to be a perfect technical solution. They can outlaw VPNs - they just make it a law. Enforcement will be selective, although I guess for some well-known handshakes they could perform blocking. If they detect something like what you described, they can flag your account, ask for justification, use as "evidence", etc.

dreen 13y ago

Is this on the router level or ISP level? The article doesn't say.

foxhill 13y ago
can't link you to something direct, but everything i've read about it leads me to believe it's ISP level. i'm not sure how effective this will be..
KaiserPro 13y ago
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/06/big_4_isps_will_all_embrace_network_level_filtering_to_protect_children/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/06/big_4_isps_will_all_... ISP level

KaiserPro 13y ago

This should article should be taken with a piece of salt. Firstly this was a debate outside of Parliament. Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own. Also I don't think this was in the queen's speech. There isn't even a draft bill yet. Also depending on the press, this could be silently dropped. The only people that really want this are the daily mail, and the rabbid anti porn lobby.

VLM 13y ago
"Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own." I quote the fifth line of the article: "As ISPs are voluntarily rolling out filtering technology, it will require no new legislation or regulations." I'm curious how this works politically in the UK. My limited understanding of the issue is pr0n censoring is a purely protestant religion hot button mostly in the US, and the relationship between church and state in the UK is the opposite from the US, where we pretend they're separate and pretend not to let our clerics rule us, however with a nod and wink that our neocon party is pretty much the political wing of our evang church and they're pretty activist, in the UK they've got a state religion where the clerics directly rule them, but they take a much more hands off approach than the USA such that they meet the criteria for figurehead-hood. Or is their particular brand of church/state merger more like liberation theology which would be a bit more leftie explaining why .uk has a civilized healthcare system but the .us does not. All of this speculation could of course be wrong, which is why I ask any .uk folks (or people that understand .uk folks) how this all works politically in the .uk. For example is pr0n opposition a primarily evangelical religious issue like in the states, or how much teeth do your clerics have over your .gov, or is this manufactured news to get on TV as a stunt, or manufactured news to get the neocons in .us excited as the local population yawns/laughs... It sounds from the "no new legislation" line much like if the FCC declared a ruling in the USA, no legislation required or permitted, but that doesn't mean its not going to be vigorously enforced.
- testbro 13y ago
  To address your first point: the way the state religion works is a few bishops have seats in the House of Lords. That means they have the power to kick back legislation, but nothing else. That doesn't exclude the influence the Church of England can exercise indirectly through lobbying/high profile members issuing statements of course. The advisor's statement is correct: this filtering does not depend on legislature. The proposal was to compel ISPs to filter porn by default. If all the ISPs sign up there's no need to create laws to force it. I don't get the impression that this legislation is religiously motivated beyond the puritanical underpinnings of the British public; it's based on "think of the children" rhetoric alone.

rotnewson 13y ago

This is something of a major problem to solve with one of two major outcomes that aren't mutually exclusive: 1. The blocking comes up with many false positives blocking many things that shouldn't be blocked (the John Graham-Cumming issue) 2. They don't catch everything, which is very likely, and the work required to get around blocking by teenagers is minimal.

VLM 13y ago
3. Log everything. 4. Immense blackmail potential (see #3 above).
- qu4z-2 13y ago
  Sorry, I thought we were talking about problems...

JamesMcMinn 13y ago

I'd be willing to bet money that any porn filter will simply be a DNS-level filter, for which the solution will be to use another DNS server.

michaelt 13y ago
The existing filtering reported to apply to 95% of British households [1] is reportedly implemented as IP-level routing of traffic through a transparent proxy. This is how they were able to censor only specific images on Wikipedia without blocking Wikipedia entirely. A VPN would be a superior way of bypassing the filter - assuming teenagers too young to have a credit card can figure out how to pay for a VPN. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  > A VPN would be a superior way of bypassing the filter - assuming teenagers too young to have a credit card can figure out how to pay for a VPN. This comment makes me very sad. It was a huge upgrade to my quality of life when I got a debit card and was able to buy things over the internet. We almost went to a system of paying cash for prepaid credit cards, but somehow prepaid cards are generally not usable over the internet, which is a damn shame for children who have nothing but cash. I don't think the ability to attribute purchases is worth the (yes, minor in the grand scheme of things) immiseration of everyone too young to have a bank account.
- alex_doom 13y ago
  I'm not sure if it's available in the UK, but here in the US you can buy pre-paid credit cards.

gesman 13y ago

Yay... time to invest in VPN businesses. Thanks for the tip!

casca 13y ago

This is a good thing. Filtering of porn, malware and other undesirable content _if that's what the person paying the bill wants_ is a good thing. Asking people to install protection on every device in the home is unrealistic so having the ISP providing an on-network solution is excellent. Of course, this is only true if the service is available on many networks and opt-in. Otherwise it becomes censorship by stealth which is hopefully not where this is going.

dillona 13y ago
I think it depends on your goals. I want my ISP to be as close to a dumb pipe as possible.
thenomad 13y ago
Currently, I believe it's being pitched as opt-out.

kunai 13y ago

While I have no interest in pornography, this is one step closer to fascism. I worry what will happen next. Journalism filters? Blog filters? International video filters? And if this is the case, then what is the result for neighboring countries? Will they decide to be as totalitarian as well? I know this is mainly the ISPs' decision, but I can't help but feel that government influence is a large factor in the filters.

ankitml 13y ago
the great wall of united kingdom
- motters 13y ago
  Hadrian's firewall
im3w1l 13y ago
It will certainly be easier to set up other kinds of content filters once the infrastructure is already there. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/australia-internet-block http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/australia-int...
- coob 13y ago
  The infrastructure is already there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...
GeneralMayhem 13y ago
A bigger problem is the "he's a terrorist" issue - if there are not severe and well-defined repercussions for using a filter with false positives, and an active watchdog enforcing them, what's to stop, for example, anonnews from suddenly finding itself declared as pornography? Once one thing is censored, you may as well consider everything else already censored as well not just as a slippery slope but as a fact, because anything else they want censored will just mysteriously get pushed into the same pile.

jrabone 13y ago

If the filtering applied by mobile phone operators is anything to go by, this will be completely obtrusive. For example, Reddit appears to be filtered by default by Vodafone. Soon it'll be time to vote with your feet, or setup that VPN virtual host.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
>Reddit appears to be filtered by default by Vodafone // Do you think that's wrong? Reddit hosts and links pornography and probably a heap of other standard filter stuff, nazism, explosive making and such. You can just ask for the filter to be dropped presumably. (Or like you said, vote with your feet).
- jrabone 13y ago
  Yes, I do think it's wrong. I disagree with filtering in the first place, but also I'm on a contract which if I were a child I couldn't have legally signed. It's certainly possible to opt out but only by providing ANOTHER set of personal information (a credit card number) which there's no good reason for them to have. More tracking possibilities, more data...

cupcake-unicorn 13y ago

Off topic, but I just want to say that I love HN - anywhere else, and you'd be getting a bunch of crude comments about this. Glad that we're sticking to the technological and censorship aspects :)

wisty 13y ago

They tried this in Australia, some time ago. The PM told the minister to do it. The minister (who's reasonably tech savvy) told the department. The department told him it was a joke - it wouldn't work, and the government would get blamed every time a legitimate site was blocked, or a kid got caught bypassing it. It's political suicide. They will be blamed every time a teenage boy figures out how to bypass the filter (hint - they all will). They will be blamed every time they block a non-porn site. Tech sites will publish "10 ways to bypass the government's joke of a filter" articles. Current affairs programs will have concerned parents shocked that their unsupervised 14yo boy filled their computer with smut (probably passed around on a USB). The next time an MP or celebrity gets arrested for really shady stuff, they'll say the filter failed. They will look like idiots, and waste millions doing it.

alex_doom 13y ago

"peddling [pornography] to kids" He tries to make it sound like there some creepy dude in a trench coat going, hey kids wanna see some porn? What are they going to do, block imgur.com?