8 ms·

New broadband users shun UK porn filters, Ofcom finds

87 points by tomtoise 12y ago

koyote 12y ago
This report is from July of last year.
DanBC 12y ago
The ISP provided optional filters all differ from each other and offer varying levels of granularity. This article does a poor job of explaining exactly what people are opting out of - are they opting put of all filtering? Or is thos article only talkin about porn filters? And just for clarity: the UK has three sets of filtering. There's the default-on but optional filters offered by ISPs (and similar has been offered by mobile providers for years); there's the IWF system which is specifically images of child sexual abuse and criminally obscene content. As far as I can tell only one ISP doesn't use that filter - A&A; then there are court ordered filters used to prevent access to pirate bay and KAT. Personally, I feel this is sub-optimal. The government said that users were clamoring for filtering to be provided by ISPs. I guess this shows that most of them were not.
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  Indeed the filters are very unpopular and the uptake figures haven't significantly changed from July, as far as I know? Claire Perry MP was campaigning for porn censorship by default. She's only got that from Sky now, a huge reversal from what they said before, and when you see that not even 10% of their customers who were asked wanted it, it's clear their brand manager's made a huge mistake making it opt-out. I thought then, and think now, that the TalkTalk bias is due to the demographics of the users of that ISP. Everyone with the technical skill to visit SamKnows or ThinkBroadband knows TalkTalk are poorly-rated and thus tends to avoid choosing them, I'd venture. As said before, censorship infrastructure itself presents a very real vulnerability, although this doesn't seem to be fully appreciated by many of the stakeholders.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    Plus the filters break websites all the damn time. I cannot count the number of times on both hands that Reddit has "disappeared" from the internet, and if you traceroute it it disappears into an IWF box. This has been almost common on Virgin Media. Then there was that time that they "accidently" knocked all of Wikipedia offline because of a single IWF-flagged album cover (and then blocked the page, and then finally removed the block completely). It did spawn an interesting discussion on the difference between "child porn" and "art."
    - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
      The jQuery CDN is also a semi-frequent victim of Sky's filter. I pause here simply to note that it's quite possible to use the infrastructure's distinctive behaviour as an oracle to scry a complete list of all blocked sites, and to monitor that over time, given just a few volunteers on each major ISP.
  - jarek 12y ago
    > I thought then, and think now, that the TalkTalk bias is due to the demographics of the users of that ISP. Everyone with the technical skill to visit SamKnows or ThinkBroadband knows TalkTalk are poorly-rated and thus tends to avoid choosing them, I'd venture. I'd be very interested in suggestions for broadband providers who are less bad than TalkTalk while offering £20 (incl "line rental") broadband providing, say, 80 GB monthly
    - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
      An interesting point. If you're capping the price that low including the line rental, it is going to be hard to match, yes, as TalkTalk are cheap. (They do their own LLU, but that's a positive from what I've seen.) Sky are roughly competitive on price, but the "less bad" is harder to argue there, of course! Virgin can only match you on an initial deal there, but it goes up after a few months. (uSwitch are probably a good port of call for comparisons.) Which brings up another potential point - that the bias might perhaps be indicative of those who spend less money on broadband, either because it's less important to them as a household, or they have less money. Merely speculation, however, I don't think there's the data to back that up.
- desas 12y ago
  It's not the article's fault, the ofcom report it's based on is lacking in detail, it just labels the table of results "This table shows the figures for take up of family friendly network level filtering by new customers who were offered it.".
- iDemonix 12y ago
  I work for the largest ISP in the UK Education sector and concur with your points. Also, the IWF system for us is mandatory and we purposefully have to ensure that if our systems are unable to enforce the IWF list they must stop serving requests. We are seeing a large increase in the number of users using things like VPNs or attempting to use TOR etc.
coding4all 12y ago
Censorship should always be opt-in, not opt-out.
amelius 12y ago
Does this apply to men and women equally?
- VLM 12y ago
  With numbers like four percent vs gender ratios around half, I don't think it can be blamed on gender. Astroturfers try to tell us that in the UK everyone in the general public loves police surveillance, but when given a choice, it appears not to be as loved and appreciated.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    These filters have nothing to do with police surveillance. And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public hating cctv. Here is a story from this year where police request men to give a DNA sample, and 500 men voluntarily give police a DNA sample. Are all these men "astrotrufers"? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723 We have CCTV everywhere. People in the UK object when they think it's misused - councils checking whether people are using the right bins for example - but even then (councils checking whether people claiming to live in a school's catchmet area actually live there) you don't have to look hard for people defending that. If yu want to have any hope of changing the surveillance culture you need to accept that most people in UK just don't know much about surveillance and wouldn't care much if they did know.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      >And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public hating cctv. It helps that CCTV is pretty fucking useless. It's hardly the same thing to take a grainy video of you walking down the high street as it is to slurp up every email you've ever written.
rkachowski 12y ago
I love how they repeatedly frame the internet censorship as "porn filter". Even in the face of (their statistics)6 out of 7 people opting out, it's still desperately trying to be presented as the feature that will save you from the bad parts of the internet. The implication being that the majority of people (everyone who has opted out) are morally corrupt, bad people with no interest in "child safety" or "family friendly" features. I imagine Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It screaming down to the BBC offices and making sure they use the official party line regarding "porn filter" vs "Great Firewall of Cameron".
- arethuza 12y ago
  I rather like the idea of Malcolm Tucker protecting the world from obscenities.
- 7952 12y ago
  Personally this is just reassurance that Brits are sensible people. That most understand filtering to be annoying and shamelessly opt out. And I find it hard to ciriticise parents that leave the filtering active. It is perfectly reasonable to try and shelter a child from porn. This tech may not do that particularly well but that is a different issue.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    There's Windows parental controls, OpenDNS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and programs that can do all of that. You don't have to have a government mandated filter to protect your children.
    - mod 12y ago
      Assuming they're equally effective, your solutions all sound like more work. Especially if you're talking about some combination of the above. If I actually wanted a solution, I'd probably go ahead with the government one, given your alternative.
      - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
toyg 12y ago
In other news: hot water still hot, thermometers find. I wonder: what was (and is) the economic cost of this whole charade? How many man-hours were spent writing memos, how many meetings were called, how many expensive developers and sysadmins were forced to waste their time implementing stuff that nobody wanted -- likely not even the proponents: I'd be surprised if Cameron and his entourage were actually using these filters.
- a3n 12y ago
  Spare no expense if it will create a wedge issue that gets people elected.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    In the UK? I highly doubt it. The UK has a lot of wedge issues, like austerity, capitalism Vs. socialism, privatisation, classes, illegal wars, women's issues, train ticket cost, anything touching the NHS or the roads... However they are rarely what I'd call puritanical like in the US and Ireland. I'm sure it does happen, but I cannot think of any particular moral-based wedge issues from the last few elections. UK politics is very pragmatic.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      Immigration! Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?).
      - nagrom 12y ago
        >> "Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?)." In charge, it would appear.
        crdoconnor 12y ago
        Touche
mangecoeur 12y ago
To the surprise of exactly nobody, it turns out that people don't mind being able to access porn.
- csmeu 12y ago
  Are you sure that its not that the first site they hit which is a false positive causes them to opt out? ThinkPad wiki is the one comedic false positive I get when I was testing Sky's offering (to determine workarounds in case this shit becomes mandatory one day).
  - mangecoeur 12y ago
    I'm sure that's what everyone will claim :P Seriously though, a huge proportion of people access porn even though an equally huge proportion of people would deny it. And that's the whole point of a private life - people should be free and comfortable to do things in private that they might not want other people to know about. You shouldn't HAVE to tell anyone about your online habits, it's none of their business. It's not the Government's job to even ASK you about that sort of thing, let alone TELL you to have these filters. It's patronizing and paternalistic and intrusive. Of course, it's also a thinly veiled excuse to force the installation of traffic monitoring and filtering equipment across the whole of the UK internet - since obviously you can't block sites without inspecting the traffic. It certainly makes GCHQs job easier - why bother hacking servers and tapping fibre when you've got ISPs forced to monitor every connection and paying for it too.
- DanBC 12y ago
  The filters on mobile were over-restrictive. I think I remember HN being blocked by T-Mobile's "Content Lock".
- 7952 12y ago
  And most people have accessed the internet through filters before at work/school/college and know how bad false positive can be.
- andygates 12y ago
ee04 12y ago
While I wouldn't be surprised if most people in the UK don't want the filters, this data by itself is not really representative. I presume most households already have Internet. New customers will to a large degree be people that are moving out on their own, and young adults living by themselves are less likely to want a porn filter than somebody with children. (And people with children are less likely to have available time to rurn things on.)
- csmeu 12y ago
  Actually we like to switch providers a lot to snag the best deals.

87 points by tomtoise 12y ago

This report is from July of last year.

DanBC 12y ago

The ISP provided optional filters all differ from each other and offer varying levels of granularity. This article does a poor job of explaining exactly what people are opting out of - are they opting put of all filtering? Or is thos article only talkin about porn filters? And just for clarity: the UK has three sets of filtering. There's the default-on but optional filters offered by ISPs (and similar has been offered by mobile providers for years); there's the IWF system which is specifically images of child sexual abuse and criminally obscene content. As far as I can tell only one ISP doesn't use that filter - A&A; then there are court ordered filters used to prevent access to pirate bay and KAT. Personally, I feel this is sub-optimal. The government said that users were clamoring for filtering to be provided by ISPs. I guess this shows that most of them were not.

AlyssaRowan 12y ago
Indeed the filters are very unpopular and the uptake figures haven't significantly changed from July, as far as I know? Claire Perry MP was campaigning for porn censorship by default. She's only got that from Sky now, a huge reversal from what they said before, and when you see that not even 10% of their customers who were asked wanted it, it's clear their brand manager's made a huge mistake making it opt-out. I thought then, and think now, that the TalkTalk bias is due to the demographics of the users of that ISP. Everyone with the technical skill to visit SamKnows or ThinkBroadband knows TalkTalk are poorly-rated and thus tends to avoid choosing them, I'd venture. As said before, censorship infrastructure itself presents a very real vulnerability, although this doesn't seem to be fully appreciated by many of the stakeholders.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Plus the filters break websites all the damn time. I cannot count the number of times on both hands that Reddit has "disappeared" from the internet, and if you traceroute it it disappears into an IWF box. This has been almost common on Virgin Media. Then there was that time that they "accidently" knocked all of Wikipedia offline because of a single IWF-flagged album cover (and then blocked the page, and then finally removed the block completely). It did spawn an interesting discussion on the difference between "child porn" and "art."
  - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
    The jQuery CDN is also a semi-frequent victim of Sky's filter. I pause here simply to note that it's quite possible to use the infrastructure's distinctive behaviour as an oracle to scry a complete list of all blocked sites, and to monitor that over time, given just a few volunteers on each major ISP.
- jarek 12y ago
  > I thought then, and think now, that the TalkTalk bias is due to the demographics of the users of that ISP. Everyone with the technical skill to visit SamKnows or ThinkBroadband knows TalkTalk are poorly-rated and thus tends to avoid choosing them, I'd venture. I'd be very interested in suggestions for broadband providers who are less bad than TalkTalk while offering £20 (incl "line rental") broadband providing, say, 80 GB monthly
  - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
    An interesting point. If you're capping the price that low including the line rental, it is going to be hard to match, yes, as TalkTalk are cheap. (They do their own LLU, but that's a positive from what I've seen.) Sky are roughly competitive on price, but the "less bad" is harder to argue there, of course! Virgin can only match you on an initial deal there, but it goes up after a few months. (uSwitch are probably a good port of call for comparisons.) Which brings up another potential point - that the bias might perhaps be indicative of those who spend less money on broadband, either because it's less important to them as a household, or they have less money. Merely speculation, however, I don't think there's the data to back that up.
desas 12y ago
It's not the article's fault, the ofcom report it's based on is lacking in detail, it just labels the table of results "This table shows the figures for take up of family friendly network level filtering by new customers who were offered it.".
iDemonix 12y ago
I work for the largest ISP in the UK Education sector and concur with your points. Also, the IWF system for us is mandatory and we purposefully have to ensure that if our systems are unable to enforce the IWF list they must stop serving requests. We are seeing a large increase in the number of users using things like VPNs or attempting to use TOR etc.

coding4all 12y ago

Censorship should always be opt-in, not opt-out.

amelius 12y ago

Does this apply to men and women equally?

VLM 12y ago
With numbers like four percent vs gender ratios around half, I don't think it can be blamed on gender. Astroturfers try to tell us that in the UK everyone in the general public loves police surveillance, but when given a choice, it appears not to be as loved and appreciated.
- DanBC 12y ago
  These filters have nothing to do with police surveillance. And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public hating cctv. Here is a story from this year where police request men to give a DNA sample, and 500 men voluntarily give police a DNA sample. Are all these men "astrotrufers"? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723 http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723 We have CCTV everywhere. People in the UK object when they think it's misused - councils checking whether people are using the right bins for example - but even then (councils checking whether people claiming to live in a school's catchmet area actually live there) you don't have to look hard for people defending that. If yu want to have any hope of changing the surveillance culture you need to accept that most people in UK just don't know much about surveillance and wouldn't care much if they did know.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    >And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public hating cctv. It helps that CCTV is pretty fucking useless. It's hardly the same thing to take a grainy video of you walking down the high street as it is to slurp up every email you've ever written.

rkachowski 12y ago

I love how they repeatedly frame the internet censorship as "porn filter". Even in the face of (their statistics)6 out of 7 people opting out, it's still desperately trying to be presented as the feature that will save you from the bad parts of the internet. The implication being that the majority of people (everyone who has opted out) are morally corrupt, bad people with no interest in "child safety" or "family friendly" features. I imagine Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It screaming down to the BBC offices and making sure they use the official party line regarding "porn filter" vs "Great Firewall of Cameron".

arethuza 12y ago
I rather like the idea of Malcolm Tucker protecting the world from obscenities.
7952 12y ago
Personally this is just reassurance that Brits are sensible people. That most understand filtering to be annoying and shamelessly opt out. And I find it hard to ciriticise parents that leave the filtering active. It is perfectly reasonable to try and shelter a child from porn. This tech may not do that particularly well but that is a different issue.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  There's Windows parental controls, OpenDNS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and programs that can do all of that. You don't have to have a government mandated filter to protect your children.
  - mod 12y ago
    Assuming they're equally effective, your solutions all sound like more work. Especially if you're talking about some combination of the above. If I actually wanted a solution, I'd probably go ahead with the government one, given your alternative.
    - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

toyg 12y ago

In other news: hot water still hot, thermometers find. I wonder: what was (and is) the economic cost of this whole charade? How many man-hours were spent writing memos, how many meetings were called, how many expensive developers and sysadmins were forced to waste their time implementing stuff that nobody wanted -- likely not even the proponents: I'd be surprised if Cameron and his entourage were actually using these filters.

a3n 12y ago
Spare no expense if it will create a wedge issue that gets people elected.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  In the UK? I highly doubt it. The UK has a lot of wedge issues, like austerity, capitalism Vs. socialism, privatisation, classes, illegal wars, women's issues, train ticket cost, anything touching the NHS or the roads... However they are rarely what I'd call puritanical like in the US and Ireland. I'm sure it does happen, but I cannot think of any particular moral-based wedge issues from the last few elections. UK politics is very pragmatic.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    Immigration! Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?).
    - nagrom 12y ago
      >> "Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?)." In charge, it would appear.
      - crdoconnor 12y ago
        Touche

mangecoeur 12y ago

To the surprise of exactly nobody, it turns out that people don't mind being able to access porn.

csmeu 12y ago
Are you sure that its not that the first site they hit which is a false positive causes them to opt out? ThinkPad wiki is the one comedic false positive I get when I was testing Sky's offering (to determine workarounds in case this shit becomes mandatory one day).
- mangecoeur 12y ago
  I'm sure that's what everyone will claim :P Seriously though, a huge proportion of people access porn even though an equally huge proportion of people would deny it. And that's the whole point of a private life - people should be free and comfortable to do things in private that they might not want other people to know about. You shouldn't HAVE to tell anyone about your online habits, it's none of their business. It's not the Government's job to even ASK you about that sort of thing, let alone TELL you to have these filters. It's patronizing and paternalistic and intrusive. Of course, it's also a thinly veiled excuse to force the installation of traffic monitoring and filtering equipment across the whole of the UK internet - since obviously you can't block sites without inspecting the traffic. It certainly makes GCHQs job easier - why bother hacking servers and tapping fibre when you've got ISPs forced to monitor every connection and paying for it too.
DanBC 12y ago
The filters on mobile were over-restrictive. I think I remember HN being blocked by T-Mobile's "Content Lock".
7952 12y ago
And most people have accessed the internet through filters before at work/school/college and know how bad false positive can be.
andygates 12y ago

ee04 12y ago

While I wouldn't be surprised if most people in the UK don't want the filters, this data by itself is not really representative. I presume most households already have Internet. New customers will to a large degree be people that are moving out on their own, and young adults living by themselves are less likely to want a porn filter than somebody with children. (And people with children are less likely to have available time to rurn things on.)

csmeu 12y ago
Actually we like to switch providers a lot to snag the best deals.