All major UK ISPs prepping network-level porn 'n' violence filters TalkTalk - it would seem - has blazed an unlikely trail for Britain's big name ISPs by being the first telco to switch on network level filtering of web content. Now, after many months resisting the urge to apply such controls to their services, the other major providers - BSkyB, Virgin Media and BT - have all decided to follow …
"That would be for a court to decide. They're the only people empowered to make decisions on what is or isn't legal."
They would do the ASBO trick. The material on the list wouldn't have to be proved illegal - circumventing the list to access these sites would itself be illegal, even if the site was on the list by accident
Yep, next thing fine-art photo websites with male and female nudes, that includes the Royal Photographic Society showcase pages, DeviantArt, 1x.com, all perfectly valid photography art sites but some prude with the blocking app on their PC at UK Gov HQ will no doubt deem the merest hint of a naked body to be porn and that's that!
Going to be just like the US, your kids can see all the beatings and shootings ( no blood of course! ) they like on pre-9pm TV but one flash of an inner-thigh or a nipple at any time, anywhere and all hell breaks lose!
Just like China, North Korea and other dictatorships around the world our dictatorship has managed to introduce censorship. Right now it is banning porn and violence because the stupid majority will buy that this is 'good for them'. Next it will be anything the government doesn't want you to see... that will be anything that disagrees with its view.
The problem with 'democracy' is that it is run by the privileged few and supported by the uneducated unwashed stupid idiots and those in the middle who can think but are powerless just get shafted with the bill.
This will be a great way for businesses to block each others web stores. Send a report to an ISP about some dodgy stuff on a rival site. Get a hacker to "upload" adult to a rival website (no need to link anything to the JPG). Send URL to JPG to ISP, wait for the block.
Dictatorship?!? Don't be ridiculous, that's one person! What we have is a bunch of unelected civil servants in lifetime jobs that make all the decisions and then persuade our elected leaders that it was really their idea all along. They're always very clever though; they make sure to push different ideas through different politicians, so that a right-wing idea is given to a right-wing politician and vice versa.
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a) The parents now feel safe in the knowledge that their kids can't see porn and so allow them unfettered access to the internet, where they can chat & webcam with kiddy fiddlers to their hearts content. But it's ok, they are safe. They can't look at porn.
b) The kids just change the DNS & carry on as normal.
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Shared servers. Lots-and-lots of sites on one IP - very common practice in budget webhosting. If you go by IP it becomes very easy to accidentally block a few hundred sites that happened to share the same host as one porn site.
IPv6 will fix this. If it ever gets adopted fully. Some time between the rise of the ape civilisation and the death of the Sun.
Hard to say, but OpenDNS works for me and they offer *you* the choice of categories if you want to block stuff home-wide.
Having said that, their system is stupid in needing a client on your home machine so it knows your IP address to match any preferences to, without that it cant be controlled. Should be a router setting like dynamic DNS support.
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Hard to say, but OpenDNS works for me and they offer *you* the choice of categories if you want to block stuff home-wide.
Having said that, their system is stupid in needing a client on your home machine so it knows your IP address to match any preferences to, without that it cant be controlled. Should be a router setting like dynamic DNS support.
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There are some routers/firewalls that have an OpenDNS updater built in like those for DynamicDNS hostnames, IPCop which I use for example. IIUI it is a similar system used for the clients for both types of service updater clients, so shouldn't be a diificult job to build it in, it just needs the router manufacturers' support, of course whether they would be willing or not to do this is the big question. There does seem to be a bit of discussion on the OpenDNS fora about this, and ways around it though.
I think its a good thing really in this day an age. But I will still continue to use OpenDNS at home and in the SMB's I support to compliment any ISP filtering.
My son mentioned to me last week, that kids in his IT class were creating VPN connections to some free provider in the US. Then they were browsing what ever they liked, bypassing the schools internet filtering.
1. That's the schools fault for not locking down the PC's enough.
2. Kids are clever, and will always find some workaround, its up to us IT admins to outsmart the kids !.
> You guys assume that the Google Public DNS and OpenDNS services are not doing the same thing ;)
you just run your own DNS server and point back up to the root servers.
So unless they're going to transparently proxy all DNS requests then it will be easy to get around. If they transparently proxy it then only be fractionally more difficult to get around.
Its just that the kids will be much better at circumventing this than most parents. El'reg readers are typical. Stroppy teenager on the porn prowl is likely to be far more clued up than your average harassed single mum.
It would be pretty easy for the ISP to put a block on all TCP and UDP access to port 53 to nameservers other than their own. Or one stage further, only allow a whitelist of known ports out. There's lots of things they can do to make your life miserable.
My ISP says I have to use their ADSL router in their Ts&Cs. I don't, because I don't trust their customised firmware to not snoop, UPnP or backdoor my network (and I've a firewall there anyway).
Not having reasonably unfiltered access would be a real deal breaker for me.
"It would be pretty easy for the ISP to put a block on all TCP and UDP access to port 53 to nameservers other than their own. Or one stage further, only allow a whitelist of known ports out. There's lots of things they can do to make your life miserable." - That's kind of what my post hinted at. As it stands many ISPs block certain ports that you simply don't notice ... many block unencrypted SMTP connections (for security reasons), some block all SMTP connections (because they are bastards) and some ISPs place blocks on 'dangerous services', such as MSSQL default ports etc. It's not a great leap to realise that they will simply block external DNS providers if it provides an easy work around to their filtering service.
Available will shortly become enforced. Then you will have to 'prove' you are 18 to have them unblocked. Then somethings will be so bad you can't have it unblocked. Then we are exactly where everyone predicts. It is NOT good to have any censorship.
Frankly I have not found porn by accident. I have not found porn while searching for work things for example, or news, or information about places I'm visiting etc etc. If kids find porn it is because they are looking for it - largely because of something they were talking about at school. When I were a lad (someone had to go here), we didn't have the internet but we still found porn in the newsagent etc. Perhaps not quite as severe but still we found it. Most free porn is not much worse than the old newsagent stuff even if you are looking for it.
Most of the porn I got to see at school was from under the beds of friend's parents (mine were very religious, although maybe they just hid the stuff better)
Funnily enough this was usually stuff from Holland which was much more explicit than anything that was allowed in the UK even from licensed sex shops.
All long, long before the internet & mobiles.
Mines the long dirty raincoat....
The alarmist's "facts":
1. Available will shortly become enforced.
2. Then you will have to 'prove' you are 18 to have them unblocked.
3. Then somethings will be so bad you can't have it unblocked.
4. Most free porn is not much worse than the old newsagent stuff
Is it really too much to ask for a reference?
Two points.
Porn is hugely different on the Internet than in H&E, Fiesta, Club or Playboy. Legal magazines were not able to show explicit sex, and the pornography laws were so poorly defined that mainstream magazines kept well to the safer side of what was acceptable. Moving images add a lot to the impact of porn, and many of the free sites do nothing other than asking that you don't enter if you are under the legal age in your juristiction. With magazine still photos, and story pages, you had to use imagination, which was (in my day) often just guesswork for virgin teenagers. Nothing is left to the imagination on the Internet.
Secondly, it is easy to find porn, even with quite innocent words, and very easy indeed if you really do want to find it. I grant that is has become less frequent that google returns such results than it used to be, but just think how many ordinary words have alternate meanings.
There was a time when a site could 'seed' their pages with lists of completely innocent words, normally in white-on-white and in very small characters, just to try to get random hits. Many years ago, I remember my daughter searching for "medieval castles", and getting hits from some quite unplesent sites. I think that problem has largely gone away now, though.
I do not agree with restricting the Internet by default, but I can see how horrifying it can be to some people.
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