11 ms·

UK porn filter blocks League of Legends update

191 points by JacksonGariety 13y ago

csmithuk 13y ago
This seems like bollocks because I'm on one of the "big four" ISPs and I can quite happily request anything I like other than a few sites listed here: http://help.sky.com/security/privacy/our-approach-to-protecting-copyright http://help.sky.com/security/privacy/our-approach-to-protect... All of these can be trivially accessed by proxy sites.
- feelstupid 13y ago
  Are you a new customer? The filter is on by default for new customers only at the moment. It'll be rolling out to existing clients later on (few months) where you decide to opt in or opt out (however they plan on asking).
  - csmithuk 13y ago
    Yes last week.
- doctorfoo 13y ago
  You don't have the porn filter enabled. This guy does.
- barrkel 13y ago
  Your filter is not enabled. The sites listed in the URL you mention are blocked by CleanFeed, the censorship mechanism developed to block child porn and repurposed by the courts for commercial protection. CleanFeed can't be disabled with a phone call to your ISP.
  - csmithuk 13y ago
    Well I haven't disabled any filters, haven't been asked about filters and I'm a new customer as of last week.
doctorfoo 13y ago
I love incompetent filtering like this, it irritates those who might not otherwise care. It would be nice to see it commonplace and socially acceptable to disable the filters purely because of how rubbish they are.
- rhizome 13y ago
  On the flipside, overfiltering that begets controversy like this tells the PTB what people care about. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, so sayeth the sociopath, and hey, any information on undesirables is gravy.
hahainternet 13y ago
There's no "UK Porn Filter". Please stop believing this.
- dijit 13y ago
  last line of the article "Only new customers affected" so, at the moment there is no filter for old customers, but that will change.
  - jamescun 13y ago
    All the ISPs say only new customers are affected. I have had Virgin for over 6 months now and it suddenly enabled itself. Same goes for my parents who have been with Sky for a number of years now and their filter enabled itself and my mother couldn't even load her work email.
- wernercd 13y ago
  Slight wave of hand There is no porn Filter. These aren't the droids you're looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.
- JacksonGariety 13y ago
  Elaborate, maybe?
  - citricsquid 13y ago
    The government "asked" (read: pressured) some of the biggest ISPs to provide parental filtering controls to all customers, set at a broadband account level. For new customers these filters are enabled by default, but any customer can turn them off through their broadband account control panel (see here: http://i.imgur.com/dWxORfJ.png http://i.imgur.com/dWxORfJ.png). There are quite a few smaller ISPs who have refused to implement these filters. There is no filtering at a country level and anyone can opt out with one click. The difference between now and 1 year ago is that instead of being opt-in the parental filters ISPs provide are now opt-out (for new customers).
pasbesoin 13y ago
I assume all things Essex are likewise unreachable. (The implication of my comment being that the filtering mechanism is not limited to being that dumb; the stupidity in the particular (as opposed to the general) may be laid at the feet of incompetent management. In the general, the incompetence -- and maliciousness -- has already been rightly laid at the feet of governent as well as its subornation to vested and entrenched private interests.)
mcphilip 13y ago
This reminds me of the early days of parental web control products like Net Nanny. I remember being frustrated that www.titanicmovie.com was blocked and asking my brother why. And then I learned what tits referred to :)
- degenerate 13y ago
  And then Kate Winslet showed you a pair!
  - jafaku 13y ago
    Relevant username.
- catshirt 13y ago
  when i was 13ish we had AOL and Homestead was blocked by the parental controls. i installed a keylogger to steal my dad's password and when he went to work i would sneak onto his account so i could make websites using Homestead.
- robgough 13y ago
  I'm actually from Scunthorpe. Being quite young and innocent, we never actually knew the particular offensive word contained within until we had to work out why the school computers were changing our town name to SXXXXhorpe.
bguthrie 13y ago
Obligatory link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem "The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails, forum posts or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives, causing innocent phrases to be blocked."
- mikeash 13y ago
  And you can obtain hours of hilarity by putting "buttbuttination" and similar terms into your preferred search engine.
  - anon4 13y ago
    I really like "clbuttic". Not least because it's actually self-descriptive, "clbuttic" is a clbuttic profanity filter mistake.
    - vacri 13y ago
      My favourite was 'consbreastutional'. It even sounds like a formal thing.
- Livven 13y ago
  Even Google has this problem with some common words. If you type "Nudel", which is German for noodle, into the Google search box, you won't get auto-complete entries presumably because it contains the word "nude". This happens even on the German Google version (?hl=de). Interestingly, it seems that Bing does a better job of separating "Nudel" and "nude" as it does offer appropriate auto-complete entries. I'm not sure how widespread this problem is and how Google and Bing compare on other search terms, though, since I only randomly stumbled upon this issue while searching for recipes.
  - _glass 13y ago
    Strange, did they fix it in 12h? For me "Nudel" autocompletes.
fuhrer1996 13y ago
PCPro and Wired suggest otherwise. [0] http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/386665/league-of-legends-game-update-not-blocked-by-isp-filters http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/386665/league-of-legend... [1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/21/league-of-legends-porn-filter-block http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/21/league-of-leg...
- andybak 13y ago
  Sigh. I had to read half the page before I saw this. Can we get this to the top?
wnevets 13y ago
just one more reason to play DoTA 2 instead
vfclists 13y ago
Computer game playing is inherently pornographic!! Haven't folks cottoned on to the relationship between the term 'joystick' and the location of the male sex organ, as well as the attendant and persistently vigorous manipulations of said levers? Both the PC industries, ie the Political Correctness and Personal Computer industries need to come up with a less offensive term, before the whole terminology degenerates into farce.
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  I've been playing DOOM for nearly eighteen years, which falls in the SnM category. While Konami's International Track and Field is more like solo masturbation (even in multiplayer). BTW I now remember that my record for the 100m sprint was 7.12 seconds.
deletes 13y ago
From the perspective of the filter is it working like intended. The word sex is in there, if any character can be used as a whitespace. They limit the such characters, but then you would use dirty words with underscores or punctuators, which would get through. Therefore such filter for words in useless and impossible to make accurate enough.
rhubarbcustard 13y ago
I totally get all the snarky comments and dislike for the porn filter but as a father of a 11-year-old girl who surfs the web I am 100% behind the idea of regulating material that is not suitable for kids. The current filter may or may not work but the idea is sound and I'd like to think that the politicians who are putting the filter into place are doing so for the right reasons, i.e. to protect innocent eyes.
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  > I totally get all the snarky comments and dislike for the porn filter but as a father of a 11-year-old girl who surfs the web I am 100% behind the idea of regulating material that is not suitable for kids. Does the filter protect children from "cyberbullying"?
  - Adirael 13y ago
    It protects them from learning about sex. That will work wonders for teen pregnancy rates.
    - NAFV_P 13y ago
      Back in my day the best place to learn about sex was the school canteen.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  Okay, so install a filter yourself. Alternatively, opt IN to a filter. Why impose your choice as the default on an entire nation?
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  She's probably not as innocent as you'd like to believe, and she's probably tougher than you give her credit for. She also has a basic human right to access information. Please try to see that restricting information when someone is young deforms their worldview for the rest of their life. We as parents hope that the deformation is a positive one, but this isn't necessarily so. We're biased into thinking we've made positive choices for our children regardless of any evidence to the contrary. The bias is hardwired, and unless we take conscious steps to evaluate whether our behavior makes sense then it's easy to get swept up in a "think of the children" argument.
imdsm 13y ago
Well, now we do have a problem.
greglindahl 13y ago
Yeah, not so smart. A quick look at blekko's crawl data says that about 1/2 of the urls matching /sex/i are not objectionable, assuming you don't mind your kids seeing something labeled 'sexy'. A pretty crappy filter. Here are 10 random urls that have /sex/i in them: 2 overblocks, 1 news article about sex offenders, 4 urls that mention "sexy", and 3 sex sites. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/news/3322/essex-history-revealed-through-photographs http://trace.tv/en/urban/video/1345_top_sexy_boys_rihanna_s_special http://nutrius.tumblr.com/post/33689144704/sextafoil http://www.tribunetimes.com/article/20121016/NEWS/310160041/Treatment-being-sought-juvenile-sex-offenders http://sexypornocams.com/ http://macys.tumblr.com/post/34356483165/spotted-and-sexy-a-leopard-eye-makes-for-the http://www.platinumsexpass.com/ http://520sex.530video.info/ http://bocadelrio.olx.com.mx/sexo-masculino-limpieza-para-restaurante-en-veracruz-iid-373475442 http://www.waycoolgadgets.com/sexy-tron-costume/
Houshalter 13y ago
This is complete incompetence. I am opposed to filtering at all, but if they are going to do it there are much more effective ways to do it that aren't very complicated, and if they don't want to do it themselves there are companies that do this. Spam filtering has been extremely successful with just taking keywords that are commonly found or not found in spam and updating the probability that it is or is not spam. A single word isn't enough to indicate that something is porn, especially a common one like "sex", especially if it was found in a string of characters rather than an individual word.
Groxx 13y ago
Well, that's one way to encourage people to turn off an idiotic filter. Hopefully more game updates / media will add random "expertsexchange"-like URLs.
driverdan 13y ago
I like this. Companies should use filenames containing banned words in protest.
belorn 13y ago
This is not the first time ISP deep package inspection cause trouble for League of Legends. A Swedish ISP identified league of legends game traffic as bittorrent and created an unplayable state for about 3 months. Of course, world of warcraft has had no such issues. There are too many users and too much money, and so bugs get fixed on Saturday night if needed. Others have to just hope the bug gets fixed before the company losses too much money and too many customers. I would like to see net neutrality laws could impose some liability for ISP who interfere with their customers traffic. It would self correct much of today problems, while still not outlaw filters, DPI and QoS as a technical solution.
- f00_ 13y ago
  I didn't hear about the Swedish ISP news, but League of Legends actually does have a bit torrent client installed with it (Pando Media Booster), and I believe League of Legends has much larger user base and similar if not larger profits than WoW. I think that problem had more to do with Riot being based in North America.

191 points by JacksonGariety 13y ago

This seems like bollocks because I'm on one of the "big four" ISPs and I can quite happily request anything I like other than a few sites listed here: http://help.sky.com/security/privacy/our-approach-to-protecting-copyright http://help.sky.com/security/privacy/our-approach-to-protect... All of these can be trivially accessed by proxy sites.

feelstupid 13y ago
Are you a new customer? The filter is on by default for new customers only at the moment. It'll be rolling out to existing clients later on (few months) where you decide to opt in or opt out (however they plan on asking).
- csmithuk 13y ago
  Yes last week.
doctorfoo 13y ago
You don't have the porn filter enabled. This guy does.
barrkel 13y ago
Your filter is not enabled. The sites listed in the URL you mention are blocked by CleanFeed, the censorship mechanism developed to block child porn and repurposed by the courts for commercial protection. CleanFeed can't be disabled with a phone call to your ISP.
- csmithuk 13y ago
  Well I haven't disabled any filters, haven't been asked about filters and I'm a new customer as of last week.

doctorfoo 13y ago

I love incompetent filtering like this, it irritates those who might not otherwise care. It would be nice to see it commonplace and socially acceptable to disable the filters purely because of how rubbish they are.

rhizome 13y ago
On the flipside, overfiltering that begets controversy like this tells the PTB what people care about. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, so sayeth the sociopath, and hey, any information on undesirables is gravy.

hahainternet 13y ago

There's no "UK Porn Filter". Please stop believing this.

dijit 13y ago
last line of the article "Only new customers affected" so, at the moment there is no filter for old customers, but that will change.
- jamescun 13y ago
  All the ISPs say only new customers are affected. I have had Virgin for over 6 months now and it suddenly enabled itself. Same goes for my parents who have been with Sky for a number of years now and their filter enabled itself and my mother couldn't even load her work email.
wernercd 13y ago
Slight wave of hand There is no porn Filter. These aren't the droids you're looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.
JacksonGariety 13y ago
Elaborate, maybe?
- citricsquid 13y ago
  The government "asked" (read: pressured) some of the biggest ISPs to provide parental filtering controls to all customers, set at a broadband account level. For new customers these filters are enabled by default, but any customer can turn them off through their broadband account control panel (see here: http://i.imgur.com/dWxORfJ.png http://i.imgur.com/dWxORfJ.png). There are quite a few smaller ISPs who have refused to implement these filters. There is no filtering at a country level and anyone can opt out with one click. The difference between now and 1 year ago is that instead of being opt-in the parental filters ISPs provide are now opt-out (for new customers).

pasbesoin 13y ago

I assume all things Essex are likewise unreachable. (The implication of my comment being that the filtering mechanism is not limited to being that dumb; the stupidity in the particular (as opposed to the general) may be laid at the feet of incompetent management. In the general, the incompetence -- and maliciousness -- has already been rightly laid at the feet of governent as well as its subornation to vested and entrenched private interests.)

mcphilip 13y ago

This reminds me of the early days of parental web control products like Net Nanny. I remember being frustrated that www.titanicmovie.com was blocked and asking my brother why. And then I learned what tits referred to :)

degenerate 13y ago
And then Kate Winslet showed you a pair!
- jafaku 13y ago
  Relevant username.
catshirt 13y ago
when i was 13ish we had AOL and Homestead was blocked by the parental controls. i installed a keylogger to steal my dad's password and when he went to work i would sneak onto his account so i could make websites using Homestead.
robgough 13y ago
I'm actually from Scunthorpe. Being quite young and innocent, we never actually knew the particular offensive word contained within until we had to work out why the school computers were changing our town name to SXXXXhorpe.

bguthrie 13y ago

Obligatory link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem "The Scunthorpe problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails, forum posts or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives, causing innocent phrases to be blocked."

mikeash 13y ago
And you can obtain hours of hilarity by putting "buttbuttination" and similar terms into your preferred search engine.
- anon4 13y ago
  I really like "clbuttic". Not least because it's actually self-descriptive, "clbuttic" is a clbuttic profanity filter mistake.
  - vacri 13y ago
    My favourite was 'consbreastutional'. It even sounds like a formal thing.
Livven 13y ago
Even Google has this problem with some common words. If you type "Nudel", which is German for noodle, into the Google search box, you won't get auto-complete entries presumably because it contains the word "nude". This happens even on the German Google version (?hl=de). Interestingly, it seems that Bing does a better job of separating "Nudel" and "nude" as it does offer appropriate auto-complete entries. I'm not sure how widespread this problem is and how Google and Bing compare on other search terms, though, since I only randomly stumbled upon this issue while searching for recipes.
- _glass 13y ago
  Strange, did they fix it in 12h? For me "Nudel" autocompletes.

fuhrer1996 13y ago

PCPro and Wired suggest otherwise. [0] http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/386665/league-of-legends-game-update-not-blocked-by-isp-filters http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/386665/league-of-legend... [1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/21/league-of-legends-porn-filter-block http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/21/league-of-leg...

andybak 13y ago
Sigh. I had to read half the page before I saw this. Can we get this to the top?

wnevets 13y ago

just one more reason to play DoTA 2 instead

vfclists 13y ago

Computer game playing is inherently pornographic!! Haven't folks cottoned on to the relationship between the term 'joystick' and the location of the male sex organ, as well as the attendant and persistently vigorous manipulations of said levers? Both the PC industries, ie the Political Correctness and Personal Computer industries need to come up with a less offensive term, before the whole terminology degenerates into farce.

NAFV_P 13y ago
I've been playing DOOM for nearly eighteen years, which falls in the SnM category. While Konami's International Track and Field is more like solo masturbation (even in multiplayer). BTW I now remember that my record for the 100m sprint was 7.12 seconds.

deletes 13y ago

From the perspective of the filter is it working like intended. The word sex is in there, if any character can be used as a whitespace. They limit the such characters, but then you would use dirty words with underscores or punctuators, which would get through. Therefore such filter for words in useless and impossible to make accurate enough.

rhubarbcustard 13y ago

I totally get all the snarky comments and dislike for the porn filter but as a father of a 11-year-old girl who surfs the web I am 100% behind the idea of regulating material that is not suitable for kids. The current filter may or may not work but the idea is sound and I'd like to think that the politicians who are putting the filter into place are doing so for the right reasons, i.e. to protect innocent eyes.

NAFV_P 13y ago
> I totally get all the snarky comments and dislike for the porn filter but as a father of a 11-year-old girl who surfs the web I am 100% behind the idea of regulating material that is not suitable for kids. Does the filter protect children from "cyberbullying"?
- Adirael 13y ago
  It protects them from learning about sex. That will work wonders for teen pregnancy rates.
  - NAFV_P 13y ago
    Back in my day the best place to learn about sex was the school canteen.
scott_karana 13y ago
Okay, so install a filter yourself. Alternatively, opt IN to a filter. Why impose your choice as the default on an entire nation?
sillysaurus2 13y ago
She's probably not as innocent as you'd like to believe, and she's probably tougher than you give her credit for. She also has a basic human right to access information. Please try to see that restricting information when someone is young deforms their worldview for the rest of their life. We as parents hope that the deformation is a positive one, but this isn't necessarily so. We're biased into thinking we've made positive choices for our children regardless of any evidence to the contrary. The bias is hardwired, and unless we take conscious steps to evaluate whether our behavior makes sense then it's easy to get swept up in a "think of the children" argument.

imdsm 13y ago

Well, now we do have a problem.

greglindahl 13y ago

Yeah, not so smart. A quick look at blekko's crawl data says that about 1/2 of the urls matching /sex/i are not objectionable, assuming you don't mind your kids seeing something labeled 'sexy'. A pretty crappy filter. Here are 10 random urls that have /sex/i in them: 2 overblocks, 1 news article about sex offenders, 4 urls that mention "sexy", and 3 sex sites. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/news/3322/essex-history-revealed-through-photographs http://trace.tv/en/urban/video/1345_top_sexy_boys_rihanna_s_special http://nutrius.tumblr.com/post/33689144704/sextafoil http://www.tribunetimes.com/article/20121016/NEWS/310160041/Treatment-being-sought-juvenile-sex-offenders http://sexypornocams.com/ http://macys.tumblr.com/post/34356483165/spotted-and-sexy-a-leopard-eye-makes-for-the http://www.platinumsexpass.com/ http://520sex.530video.info/ http://bocadelrio.olx.com.mx/sexo-masculino-limpieza-para-restaurante-en-veracruz-iid-373475442 http://www.waycoolgadgets.com/sexy-tron-costume/

Houshalter 13y ago

This is complete incompetence. I am opposed to filtering at all, but if they are going to do it there are much more effective ways to do it that aren't very complicated, and if they don't want to do it themselves there are companies that do this. Spam filtering has been extremely successful with just taking keywords that are commonly found or not found in spam and updating the probability that it is or is not spam. A single word isn't enough to indicate that something is porn, especially a common one like "sex", especially if it was found in a string of characters rather than an individual word.

Groxx 13y ago

Well, that's one way to encourage people to turn off an idiotic filter. Hopefully more game updates / media will add random "expertsexchange"-like URLs.

driverdan 13y ago

I like this. Companies should use filenames containing banned words in protest.

belorn 13y ago

This is not the first time ISP deep package inspection cause trouble for League of Legends. A Swedish ISP identified league of legends game traffic as bittorrent and created an unplayable state for about 3 months. Of course, world of warcraft has had no such issues. There are too many users and too much money, and so bugs get fixed on Saturday night if needed. Others have to just hope the bug gets fixed before the company losses too much money and too many customers. I would like to see net neutrality laws could impose some liability for ISP who interfere with their customers traffic. It would self correct much of today problems, while still not outlaw filters, DPI and QoS as a technical solution.

f00_ 13y ago
I didn't hear about the Swedish ISP news, but League of Legends actually does have a bit torrent client installed with it (Pando Media Booster), and I believe League of Legends has much larger user base and similar if not larger profits than WoW. I think that problem had more to do with Riot being based in North America.