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UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

• frobozz 13y ago
  Pope is Catholic, Vatican reveals.
• EGreg 13y ago
  First they criticize the Great Firewall of China. Then they start building it themselves. And who better than a Chinese network operator to do it? After all: "The Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry is an agreement between the Chinese internet industry regulator and companies that operate sites in China. In signing the agreement, web companies are pledging to identify and prevent the transmission of information that Chinese authorities deem objectionable, including information that “breaks laws or spreads superstition or obscenity”, or that “may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability”." -From Wikipedia
• rqfowler 13y ago
  ImageVision.com
• pasbesoin 13y ago
  As I've been saying for years, the Great Firewall of China is -- or was -- the prototype. Look at its early history: Built with "Western" technology and consulting. Did you think all these firms were creating a one-off? And, the following observation is perhaps stretching the interpretation a bit (or not), but I find it somewhat ironic that, after all this, it is a Chinese company that is pushing this implementation forward. Use domestic market access to acquire the knowledge (sometimes, by hook or by crook), and then use your control of your own labor market to undersell the competition.
  • adrow 13y ago
    So you could call this one the China Firewall of Great Britain.
    • samstave 13y ago
      B.ritish O.nline L.imiting L.ude O.bjectionable C.ontent S.ystem: B.O.L.L.O.C.S
      • mortenjorck 13y ago
        That's... actually pretty good.
      • cjrp 13y ago
        [...] [O]bjectionable [C]ontent for [K]ids [S]ystem ?
        • samstave 13y ago
          heh... Yeah - I couldn't think of a [K] ;)
      • lazugod 13y ago
        lewd
    • TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Or Hadrian's Firewall, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6107385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6107385.
• nodata 13y ago
  It turns out that the slope was very slippery indeed.
  • TranceMan 13y ago
    It's worse than that - a 'slippery slope' seems to imply [to me] that you can go back up the slope. What we are seeing now is a thin end of a very big wedge which once in place will be much harder to reverse. With this and the recent disclosure regarding fibre tapping, take a moment to remember these words from John Gilmore [1] >How many of you have broken no laws this month? >If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody. >When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot. But we have hope: >The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Sadly quote 4 may lead to quote 3. 1. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore
• cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  If the block itself is only a technical measure, it only boosts alternative access methods. But if they make it illegal to do things like watch port or download torrents without government permission, like they do now with the requirement to hand over private encryption keys to the officials require them, then GB will become worse than China in the freedom of information flow aspect.
  • pyrocat 13y ago
    Baby steps.
• worksaf 13y ago
  So basically its a business deal between Huawei and the UK and they're using the angle of "Think of the children" to sell the idea.
• fastball 13y ago
  So what are the speculations on circumvention? Would an unblocked proxy suffice, or do we think UK internet users would need to purchase a VPN? Also, is the idea to block porn sites, or any site that contains pornographic content, like NSFW subreddits?
  • DanBC 13y ago
    1) Open web control panel 2) Click checkbox by "Filters on [ ]" so that the box is unchecked.
• dcc1 13y ago
  Us hackers need to make a new "web" a web where censorship is not possible and everything is encrypted, a "web" with no single points of failure, a "web" where domains cant snatched or censored, a "web" like the web used to be :(
  • stevenleeg 13y ago
    I think cjdns[1] is a step in this direction. You should check it out if you're interested in an encrypted and truly distributed web. [1] http://cjdns.info/ http://cjdns.info/
  • rorrr2 13y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)
    • cmpctyd 13y ago
      I'll throw in another anonymity network (I2P). Its design is similar to Tor, created in 2003 and is mostly interesting due to some of its properties (tunnel based/garlic routing, everybody-is-a-router, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P
  • mixmax 13y ago
    It's already there, developed by the US military no less. It's called Tor. If the installing and usability was improved it might catch on for normal people concerned about their privacy.
    • jaredmcateer 13y ago
      Installing Tor on Windows is a breeze, it even comes with a modified Firefox browser that enables your tor session when you open it.
• glesica 13y ago
  Which is, of course, an excellent reason such projects should never be tolerated in the first place. Government-mandated filters simply should not exist. Full stop. It's an easy question: Does the law in question require that access to publicly-available information be blocked in any way? If yes, then it is a bad law.
• majke 13y ago
  I tried to look it up, but UK's law is still a mystery for me. Can someone help: what is a definition of ISP in the UK? Especially: is a VPN provider an ISP? Additionally, what definition of ISP is used in Mr Cameron's proposal?
  • ElliotH 13y ago
    The reason you're struggling is there has been no bill published yet. I'm fairly sure this is mostly political bluster, it'll be hard to know exactly what is required until they actually publish something real.
• reidrac 13y ago
  I don't know how things are going to change but I ordered Talk Talk a couple of days ago and they only ask you if you want content filter and antivirus filter on; whatever you choose they say you can customise it later in your control panel. So far I like what I have seen. I just don't want any filter, thanks, and I did't have to say why (ie. porn or anything else).
• mcintyre1994 13y ago
  Absolutely no way they'll ship with social networking blocked by default, it'll be dead on arrival. Every household will want social networking, and will enable that if they just skip through and realise they can't get to Facebook. Once they do that the whole systems pointless unless people actually see some benefit.
• triangle 13y ago
  If you live in the UK, please consider signing the petition to stop the filters: https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746 https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746. At the moment, it's sadly languishing at a mere 21,000 signatures. If it reaches 100,000 then that should trigger a parliamentary debate. I'm also going to send an email to my local MP. Does anyone have any other ideas for fighting this censorship?
  • stusmith1977 13y ago
    The press could mention it, that would be a start. BBC news for instance barely mentioned the proposed blocking. The only stories to hit the front page (and then, right at the bottom in the Tech section) were the links to Huawei and the spat between the minister and the reporter. The actual proposed block has barely been mentioned. Apparently a baby being born warrants continuous headline coverage; loss of civil liberties gets a footnote.
    • ElliotH 13y ago
      Was a cleverly chosen publication day to be honest. I wouldn't be surprised if there's other bad news that we haven't even heard about that was completely blanked off the news by baby discussion.
• Fuxy 13y ago
  There's no feasible way of blocking circumvention tools without causing massive collateral damage. If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely. I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that. At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(
  • straight_talk_2 13y ago
    You're kidding yourself. It's fully possibly to establish complete control over the Internet. If these power hungry sociopaths have it their way, there will soon be no free network to run a VPS on.
  • sneak 13y ago
    If you restrict unfiltered access to the web to only those who know how to ssh, your hopes for a free society are doomed.
    • tomjen3 13y ago
      If the ability to use ssh stands between horny teenage boys and lots of pictures of naked ladies, the boys will be profficient in ssh in no time.
  • vidarh 13y ago
    I don't think they care about it enough to want to go even that far, unless VPNs become totally mainstream. But you can tunnel encrypted data over anything that can carry a signal, and stuff IP datagrams inside it. This will only stop people that are "casually" looking for stuff and don't really care. Latency might suck. But if the filters become a problem, you'll start seeing VPN applications with "UK filter modes" that use whatever the current simplest circumvention method is. Heck, I'm in the UK and I'd go into business selling VPN solutions like that myself if the filters get obnoxious enough for that (through suitable shell companies somewhere more favourable). The trouble with a business like that, of course, is that the market will be limited as long as the filters are not mandatory. But just as an illustration of how ludicrously infeasible turning this into full censorship is: If they allow HTTP through at all, you could easily create a VPN were the packets are exchanged by ensuring every Xth character is lowercase for 0 and uppercase for 1, and serialise your packets by downloading / uploading hacker news comments to the VPN server, with the case changed. Or you could use a thesaurus on both ends, with an algorithm for assigning 0/1 to words, and rewrite the text by looking up the next word and deciding whether (and if so what) to rewrite it to. Of course that'd also be ludicrously slow and waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but it's an example on the far extreme end. More likely if they ever try to make this mandatory and actively filter, it'd likely start out with just be a matter of changing port numbers. The next step up in escalation would likely be wrapping the data in something that looks like you're talking to a DNS or mail server or similarly slightly massaging the data. It'd only be somewhat tricky if they get to the point of trying deep packet inspection and validating that the contents matches expectations from the protocol and doesn't look "too random" for every protocol people might use. (As a last resort we'll just have to implement IP over Avian carriers: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 )
• Shish2k 13y ago
  A possible silver lining - if you're against the filters that currently exist (blocking child porn), someone might infer you're a paedophile, which would be bad for you. If you opt out of porn filters, you'll go down on a list of people who want porn. If you opt out of everything-filters, the only thing that can really be implied is that you want access to something, which is somewhat less easy to blackmail with.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • fauigerzigerk 13y ago
    Exactly. If I disable all all those filters, I can credibly argue that I'm against filtering on principle, not necessarily because I want to view any of those things. I just wonder how long until they start using this infrastructure to compute a profile that determins things like your social security contributions or security clearance. They could also threaten to take the children away from people who disable the filters or force them into some kind of "re-education" program.
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  This deserves a lot more of a response but for now I'll just leave this: Liberty is about the ability of the individual to do things that others disapprove of. You don't need liberty if everyone else approves of your actions. As a corollary, the exercise of liberty does not require a justification, because it's a liberty, practicality or "usefulness" or what-have-you play no part in it. It's onerous to require someone to justify their right to look at porn. It's even more onerous to ask people to put their name on a list as someone who desires the ability to look at porn. And indeed this is how freedoms are eroded. Because once you put things on a different footing and you require people to justify their freedoms then it becomes ever more difficult to justify anything. Can you justify eating a cheap, greasy cheeseburger? Can you justify watching "Jersey Shore"? Are you willing to? These are precisely the same sorts of tactics that have been used since the dawn of time for busybodies to rein in individual freedoms of others, and thereby to obtain greater authority over others. People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once (if) we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    > People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once, if, we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so. Jesus fucking christ you people should go look at what happens in real dictatorships sometime. A voluntary filter is not tyranny and it's fucking disgusting to compare optional filtering of semi-random webcontent with governments who murder and torture their citizens.
    • dasil003 13y ago
      Exactly, nothing like that could ever happen here.
• Nursie 13y ago
  Well DUH! Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics - 1. The filter is full of holes 2. What's blocked is pretty arbitrary For instance, I was at a music festival last year (Beautiful Days), and access to the online site map and festival schedule was blocked as 'adult' content. The festival itself was full of kids and teenagers (brought along by their parents) for whom the info would have been useful. To get around it, I installed Orbot (Tor for android), because they only care about censoring the web.
  • keithpeter 13y ago
    Yup its the randomness that is the issue. Health education type material for teenagers springs to mind. I have seen issues in the past with 'walled garden' type software in schools/colleges blocking content of that nature unless specifically unblocked. Suspect there will be backlash, then weakening of system to the point of uselessness once it gets going. Usual expensive UK government IT mess.
    • DanBC 13y ago
      The Government is hopeless at buying IT, and there are many many expensive hopeless government IT projects. This project is hopeless, and it's going to be reasonably expensive for someone, but as understand it the government isn't paying for the filters. Thus, it's not going to cost the government anything.
  • daxelrod 13y ago
    Wait, is there already a government-imposed web filter on mobile phones in the UK? And you can't opt out? When did this happen? What were the justifications given when it was put into place? Does it also apply to GSM tablets and devices tethered to your mobile?
    • JackWebbHeller 13y ago
      I'm not sure if it affects all carriers or not. But you can opt-out, you just have to go through an age-verification process - usually providing a credit card number to confirm you are over 18.
• nutmeg 13y ago
  If the concern is actually about enabling people to restrict what their children see, why not create and distribute a free, open-source software package that citizens can run on their own? Obviously the question is rhetorical, but I'd like to see someone ask it.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    They have asked it. the politicians said that people are stupid and don't want to learn how to use complicated software, they just wanted to be protected. ISPs said they offer opt-in filters (and opt-out on mobile products) that people could use. politicians now say those filters must all be opt-out.
• huherto 13y ago
  At least to me, the big problem with porn is that it can rise your thresholds of excitement, make you insensitive, and you can even become an addict. But our kids will (hopefully) live in a world where porn is prevalent. We should teach them (at the appropriate age) that it is something that they can enjoy but should be careful not to abuse it. Anyway, the idea of getting the government involved on blocking porn (or anything) is really bad. I rather live in a world where we have to teach our children to be responsable than in a world where the government decides what they can and what they cannot see.
• Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  I'd like to see some direct information on what was actually said by the ISPs and where it's come from. This article is a lot of speculation based on a statement that they've said something and then an existing service offered by one ISP. Clearly they're not going to block games and dating sites which this service does so it's not clear why we should assume that it's any sort of useful template for what's proposed. ISPs have a stated objection to these proposals (if only because they understand what's really involved) and it feels to me a little like this could just be spin from their camp. Suggesting that this is the start of wider censorship would certainly be a way of pushing the public against it which would suit the ISPs cause. None of which is to say that what they're saying is wrong or that it's good bad or indifferent, just that my reading of the article is that it doesn't really have much to support it's claims. All that said we know for sure that the proposals will block things other than porn if only because it's almost impossible to accurately define porn or build a perfect filter for it based on whatever definition you have. There will be false positives and negatives both in terms of definition and implementation, meaning that stuff will absolutely be restricted which shouldn't be (and let through when it should). Good luck running an on-line site such as Ann Summers or Agent Provocateur, even when you're allowed shops in the high street.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    > Clearly they're not going to block games and dating sites which this service does so it's not clear why we should assume that it's any sort of useful template for what's proposed. Why won't they block games or dating sites? That Talk-Talk product was put in place in response to earlier requests by MPs to "protect children", which is why mobile content tends to have filters now. It seems that filter is as good a model as anything else for what the filter will be.
    • Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
      To me the Talk Talk product looks like they pulled it off the shelf - they're pretty standard categories for blocking software. Obviously that's the likely implementation for the new system but it seems unlikely that they'd enable all that by default - that would absolutely open them up to claims of censorship and undermine what they actually want to do.
• deleted 13y ago
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• w_t_payne 13y ago
  Let's see which way the wind is blowing .... hmmm... I sense an opportunity for profit! I think that I will create a business to develop technology that lets us block undesirable thoughts. We will use an EEG cap as the sensor, some machine learning to detect undesirable thoughts, then a bone-conduction speaker to play distracting and disorienting sounds whenever our detector is triggered. Perfect. Do you think I could get some government funding for this?
  • jodrellblank 13y ago
    then a bone-conduction speaker to play distracting and disorienting sounds whenever our detector is triggered. But I already hear constant radio pop-music everywhere I go without triggering anything first :(
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• xedarius 13y ago
  If you have a problem with what your children are exposed to lock them in a box, not the internet.
• spdy 13y ago
  The state nanny approach to internet censorship.
• varmais 13y ago
  There was a debate in Finland when the child porn filter was introduced a few years back. One guy had a website where he kept database of sites which were blocked but did not contain any child porn. Aftermath was that the site was added to list and that raised even more questions about the whole censorship idea. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info) Unlike in Britain, the consumers did not have an option to opt out from the filter although it seems that majority of ISPs don't use it. Later on ISPs were forced to block piratebay.org and there have been discussions about blocking online poker sites etc, because Veikkaus enjoys monopoly in gambling and betting business in Finland.
  • w_t_payne 13y ago
    \sarcasm Aha! Another great business opportunity reveals itself! If you built a relationship with the filter provider, you could get companies to pay you to have their competitor's websites added to to the list of blocked websites! \sarcasm
  • testbro 13y ago
    Britain already has a mostly mandatory filter designed to save it from child pornography. Cleanfeed is run by the Internet Watch Foundation who look for images of abuse and put it on the blocklist. They're responsible for blocking Wikipedia due to an album cover. The same filter is now used to action on high court demands to block torrent websites like The Pirate Bay.
• diminoten 13y ago
  The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. $5/month VPN subscriptions will come with routers, pre-configured.
  • InclinedPlane 13y ago
    This is very, very wrongheaded. The internet as a transmission protocol is robust and redundant. And if it were used as a sort of replacement for the telephone system then that would be enough. But the architecture of the way the internet is today used in practice is far more centralized. If the web worked the way bittorrent does then perhaps your comment would be accurate, but it doesn't, so we have a "web" that is not strong due to its massive interconnectivity but rather weak because each part of it, content-wise, lives in comparative isolation and is easy to cut off (for now).
    • diminoten 13y ago
      Say that to thepiratebay. This legislation isn't about shutting down porn websites, it's about blocking their access at the ISP level. This censorship is circumventable by using a VPN or other such technology. Censorship -> damage, Internet -> routes around damage. This has nothing to do with cutting off a website from being accessible by removing it from the Internet.
      • InclinedPlane 13y ago
        That's an illustration of just how difficult it can be to try to operate a website with the governments of the G8 out to get you. It's something that requires extraordinary efforts for TPB and only works because it's a meta site, if they had to seed every tracker they index they would have died long ago. Moreover, because of the nature of their site and the demographic it's used by it's trivial for them to slap ads on the site and make a lot of money, no matter what. Compare that to, say, a reporter's personal blog and videos, for example. Especially if they have a family they are going to be much less able to pull the sorts of hijinx that TPB manages. When they're shut down once they will stay shut down and they will more than likely just keep their head down from then on.
• markbao 13y ago
  The terrifying reality of censorship, as told through the lens of that of China: "I knew of some Chinese migrants to Australia who watched a Tiananmen 10-year anniversary documentary, and apparently tears just streamed down their faces. They had no clue that it ever happened."
  • anonymous 13y ago
    Do you have any source for this? Google shows nothing and Duck Duck Go only points me to a reddit thread with that exact same comment and no source. I mean just about the specific case, I know that the Tiananmen square incident is unknown to almost all Chinese.
    • luminiferous 13y ago
      The source is the reddit comment. It was a reply to an askreddit thread.
      • markbao 13y ago
        Indeed. It's anecdotal, but given the 1.3 billion people in China, I'm inclined to believe that this isn't a one-time case.
        • westicle 13y ago
          I can also confirm from personal experience that many, many educated Chinese locals are not aware of this portion of their history. Even those whom I suspect may be aware of it seem to confine it to a cultural blindspot approaching wilful ignorance. It is something you simply _do not talk about_ in China.
  • tomhschmidt 13y ago
    Uhhh maybe they came from a Tier 3 city or something. Most Chinese I have talked to know about Tiananmen
    • 13y ago
• coldcode 13y ago
  If everything goes through a filter then anything can be tapped and recorded as well.
• deleted 13y ago
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• pavanred 13y ago
  This is probably a long shot but I was wondering if eventually this censoring functionality can be used to draw boundaries over the internet. Once you have the infrastructure in place to censor then there's very little needed to do extend the filters to censor other content. For instance, nationalize the internet, perhaps block services from companies from other countries or tax such services to promote indigenous companies that provide similar services. The reasoning can be why not promote local businesses and provide them incentives by taxing or levying duties on services from other countries instead of letting a company from some other country making all the profits. edit : typo
• ollysb 13y ago
  The whole thing comes a bit unstuck when you realise that BT has had a system in place that allows parents to protect their children for years. The new approach doesn't seem to provide any benefits but succeeds in pissing off a great number of users.
• buro9 13y ago
  HN users in the UK should note: The default blocked items includes "web forums", potentially including HN. You would have to opt-in to viewing such content as the default has you opted-out along with porn, violent material, extremist and terrorist related content.
• deleted 13y ago
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• ollysb 13y ago
  Slightly tin-foil, but any thoughts on the timing of this story? The intersection between those talking about the NSA and those that will be angered by the introduction of internet censorship is pretty perfect.
  • Tichy 13y ago
    You mean the birth of a royal baby? Is the filter even still in the news in the UK now?
• cle 13y ago
  I can only interpret this as a power grab. This is not a sensible solution, it's an opportunistic solution. I think many people in modern society don't understand the power of data. The NSA scandal has shown how much people underestimate the power companies can have when they own everyone's data. And similarly, they underestimate the power that a government can have when it owns everyone's data. We need to do a better job of showing the lay person how much they're underestimating the value of their data, and how much power the data aggregators have.
• nly 13y ago
  Anyone know if Tim Berners-Lee has come out to say anything about this? I believe he's expressed views in favour of net neutrality and against censorship in the past. With his participation in the Olympic ceremony perhaps, if he were to get in the news, the public would pay some attention.
• grabhive 13y ago
  The rapid growth of circumvention technologies is now assured.
• x0054 13y ago
  In my previous line of work, as a criminal lawyer, this is how this would be used: Q: "Mr Smith, isn't it true that you willingly removed a filter on you Internet connection, places there for your safety, and the safety of your children, and now your connection allows you to watch hard core porn?" A: "But... I did it because.." Q: "Yes or no, Mr. Smith? Did you ask for the filters to be removed?" A: "Yes, bu..." Q: Thank you, Mr. Smitha
  • Dylan16807 13y ago
    >placed there for your safety "No" If the lawyer wants to be an ass then he can enjoy some excessively pedantic replies.
    • GhotiFish 13y ago
      not sure how that would go down. It's funny though "Placed there for my safety? Why would I remove a filter placed there for my safety? He must be referring to some other filter."
  • smsm42 13y ago
    "I am not aware of any filters that are placed there for my safety. I asked to remove the filter that was placed there to ensure I have access only to the information approved by the government".
• Sephiroth87 13y ago
  Doesn't really surprise me, since it's basically the same thing we already have on mobile connections...
• javajosh 13y ago
  You know what would make a lot of sense? Install these filters on every new device sold in the UK. Make them configurable, and even uninstallable, but defaulting to "blocked". That way if and when people choose to unblock something, it's a private matter between them and their device. This achieves both the stated goal of protecting people from malicious content, and the freedom of people to consume malicious content, if they want to, in private.
  • whamill 13y ago
    Why would installing them on only new devices make a lot of sense? It doesn't achieve the stated goal of "protecting the children" if they are using any one of the millions of devices currently in use. Moreso, why default to blocked and not unblocked, allowing people to opt-in? Ah but then we'd be back in the rational and current position of giving people the ability to install blocking software or filters if they so desire...
    • javajosh 13y ago
      I'm extremely against censorship, however I can see the benefit of having a default filter that can be turned off in private. Conservatively safe defaults are never a bad idea.
  • 7952 13y ago
    I am surprised that they haven't tried this as it would be much more affective. Network level filtering always fails because it can't see encrypted packets. To prevent circumvention you need something running on the machine, at which point you may as well just run the filter on the machine. The government could have promoted officially recommended browser plugins. If parents don't know how to protect their children why not help them?
    • jodrellblank 13y ago
      Network level filtering always fails because it can't see encrypted packets. Pfft, how far in the past are you living? https://www.barracuda.com/products/webfilter/features https://www.barracuda.com/products/webfilter/features SSL Inspection - Administrators can specify domains and URL categories for which SSL-encrypted traffic will be decrypted, scanned for malware and policy and then re-encrypted to the destination when deemed safe. All you do is put a trusted SSL certificate on your office computers, and the proxy device will reencrypt the traffic as coming from your trusted certificate, and the end user will not notice the difference unless they study the names in the certificate chain.
• dobbsbob 13y ago
  This filter is for the coming austerity cuts Cameron is about to roll out. He saw what happened in other countries and took a preemptive measure to be able to filter Twitter and other online protest organizing during times of "national security".
• ferdo 13y ago
  Sorry for the 19th century text wall, but this is so pertinent that it hurts. "Next in importance to personal freedom is immunity from suspicions, and jealous observation. Men may be without restraints upon their liberty: they may pass to and fro at pleasure: but if their steps are tracked by spies and informers, their words noted down for crimination, their associates watched as conspirators, who shall say that they are free? Nothing is more revolting to Englishmen than the espionage which forms part of the administrative system of continental despotisms. It haunts men like an evil genius, chills their gaiety, restrains their wit, casts a shadow over their friendships, and blights their domestic hearth. The freedom of a country may be measured by its immunity from this baleful agency. Rulers who distrust their own people, must govern in a spirit of absolutism; and suspected subjects will be ever sensible of their bondage." The Constitutional History Of England Vol II (1863), pg. 288 by T. E. May http://archive.org/stream/constitutionalhi029622mbp#page/n313/mode/2up http://archive.org/stream/constitutionalhi029622mbp#page/n31...
  • jivatmanx 13y ago
    In free governments, the government is the servant of the people. It's activities are transparent and public by default, though the people may allow some defined areas where some secrecy is temporarily allowed. The people's liberty and privacy are assumed by default - it may be violated only by specific, well-defined legal processes. In a despotism these roles are reversed, in government, secrecy is assumed. For the people, there is no privacy. Government is not longer the servant but the master.
  • w_t_payne 13y ago
    Quite. I am very very aware of the power that the state holds over me ... and it agitates me.
• rsync 13y ago
  2010-2012 may well have been "peak internet". Three years ago, or so, I was thinking about[1] the idea that we may have been witnessing something akin to peak oil, or peak credit. At that time I was discussing it in terms of network fragmentation and net neutrality ... but a collection of different censorship regimes around the world degrades it[2] just as well... [1] http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.html http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.h... [2] "it" being the "homogenous, globally routed Internet as we have known it."
• whamill 13y ago
  There are two aspects to the current debate: - The 'child porn keyword' web search filter mandated on all UK ISPs with no opt-in or opt-out - The 'opt-out porn block' which will be applied to all internet connections, from which people can opt-out in order to receive unfiltered results. The first part hasn't received as much attention because it's harder to write a punchy article about the malicious nature of a government-supplied permanent search filter blacklist, and it isn't as easy to attack as the blocking of legal content such as pornography but this is where the real danger lies. Once the government add all their 'illegal search terms' to the blacklist and have the appartus for such wide-ranging censorship set up, what is to stop them from adding terms unchecked and unguided to filter any "unwanted" material from web searches? If this had existed in the US, for example, when the NSA Verizon/PRISM stories were leaked, how easy would it be for them to simply add "Edward Snowden" or "The Guardian" or "PRISM" or even "NSA" to the search term blacklist? They would easily justify it on the grounds that the material leaked was classified or damaging to national security. At this stage a majority of people would in hindsight agree that this leak is hugely important and in the public interest, but if these terms were blocked by the government then what?
• runarberg 13y ago
  The internet filter at the café I'm connected to at the moment (Stofan in Reykjavík, I'm sure some of you know the place) actually blocked me [following this link](http://www.siminn.is/lokad-a-sidu/ http://www.siminn.is/lokad-a-sidu/).
• cmircea 13y ago
  I don't understand one thing: how will this filter actually work? Say I use Google or Bing or whatever over SSL. All traffic is encrypted end-to-end. How will the ISPs know I am searching for a forbidden term? Are they going to request a CA to issue certificates for google.com to ISPs?
• mcantelon 13y ago
  i.e. D-notices.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• smnrchrds 13y ago
  When widespread Internet censorship started in Iran, they promised it will only be used for porn. Being a religious country, no one protested. I don't say everyone agreed, but because of all the stigma attached to porn, no one said a word or lifted an finger. What started as a porn-only filtering system expanded exponentially. Little by little, the number of unavailable websites grew. Nowadays, most of the internet is inaccessible from Iran. To name few instances: YouTube, Vimeo and all other video-sharing websites Flickr, imgur and all other photo-sharing websites WordPress, Blogger and all other blogging platforms (and every blog on them) Facebook, Google+ and all other social networks BBC, CNN, NPR and almost all foreign news agencies ... And also HTTPS rarely works. They have limited the HTTPS bandwidth so much it's impossible to use Gmail without a headache, in an effort to encourage everyone to disable it, thus making it easier for surveillance. Dear British friends, it's a slippery slope. Don't let the same thing happen to you.
• linuxhansl 13y ago
  Of course it will. Porn, terrorism, etc, etc, are always used as fronts for some other goal. History has shown that once a technology is in place it will be misused.