Fine, I'll start my own DNS provider. With BlackJack! And Hookers! In fact, forget the DNS provider and the BlackJack!
Aah, screw the whole thing.
*Wanders away dejectedly*
UK.gov admits porn age checks could harm small ISPs and encourage risky online behaviour
Enforcing age verification checks for online porn sites could be detrimental to smaller ISPs and significantly increase online fraud, the government has admitted. The measures, which are due to come into force in May, will require UK residents to prove they are 18 or over in order to get access to porn sites. The plans have …
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Friday 5th January 2018 09:13 GMT Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?
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Friday 5th January 2018 10:02 GMT Dan 55
Unless the law is horribly prescriptive and specifies that the ISP must use a transparent proxy for DNS so there's no getting out of it unless you use a VPN, a small ISP could provide a DNS server which blocks the government-designated naughty websites, everyone could set their own DNS server anyway, and life would go on.
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Sunday 7th January 2018 00:58 GMT Paul Hovnanian
Re: DNS over TLS
"ISP who hijacks the DNS port wholesale"
You run a local DNS daemon on your own system and direct clients to use it (resolve.conf set to localhost). The local daemon forwards DNS requests out through a secure connection to an external service that uses something other than the standard port.
Anyway, that's the basic theory. I'd have to get my kid's help to actually set it up.
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Friday 5th January 2018 19:11 GMT JimboSmith
I demonstrated to a friend who was convinced that technology would protect her children from porn that she was wrong. I showed her what happened if you visited a pr0n site on my phone it came up with the mobile network adult block. I then showed her a website showing pr0n on my phone and said it doesn't seem to work on everything does it?
To say she was shocked is an understatement.
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Friday 5th January 2018 09:35 GMT Halfmad
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
Looking at the action the government is taking I feel like I can say with some certainty that they haven't got a bloody clue what they are doing and this is entirely to grab headlines and allow them to say at their party conference that they are "thinking of the children"
Sadly that last line is probably a little too close to the bone for many of the older party members..
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Friday 5th January 2018 09:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
"Sadly that last line is probably a little too close to the bone for many of the older party members."
It has long seemed apparent that those who vociferously campaign against "pr0n" are those whose minds see sex in everything. St Jerome et al have a lot to answer for in conditioning people's thinking even in these supposedly enlightened times.
David Frost once did a satirical sketch where he interviewed a supposed Mary Whitehouse type campaigner. The man said he could identify "filthy" TV programmes just from their titles. He declared the "filthiest" programme to be - "Blue Peter"***.
***a wholesome children's programme famous for making things like Christmas decorations out of wire coat hangers and plastic bottles. A "Blue Peter" is the signal flag a ship hoists when it is about to set sail. "Peter" is an old euphemism for a penis.
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Friday 5th January 2018 11:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
"It has long seemed apparent that those who vociferously campaign against "pr0n" are those whose minds see sex in everything."
Reminds me of the classic 'Not the Nine O'clock News' sketch where Rowan Atkinson describes London's skyline in similar terms:
- It is not Nelson's column, it is Nelson's Willy thrusting into the sky!
- It is not St. Paul's dome, it is an enormous titty!
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Friday 5th January 2018 17:49 GMT JimboSmith
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
Looking at the action the government is taking I feel like I can say with some certainty that they haven't got a bloody clue what they are doing and this is entirely to grab headlines and allow them to say at their party conference that they are "thinking of the children"
Dailly Mail politics take a subject that the DM have got their readers in a froth about. Introduce a law where you ban or encourage or restrict whatever the DM don't like/like. Get more votes as a result. Doesn't matter if the whole thing is dumb and unworkable.
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Saturday 6th January 2018 11:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
Daily Mail politics take a subject that the DM have got their readers in a froth about. Introduce a law where you ban or encourage or restrict whatever the DM don't like/like. Get more votes as a result. Doesn't matter if the whole thing is dumb and unworkable.
That's how "The Will Of The People" works, isn't it?
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Monday 8th January 2018 05:59 GMT P. Lee
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
>Doesn't matter if the whole thing is dumb and unworkable.
Sadly I think the scheme is workable. As in, the plan is to turn the internet into a government-managed network.
It isn't hard to filter out all the video and audio providers and isp dns servers and then dpi remaining Udp for dns. I suspect those 30gbit nics with fpga's would be useful. You can do the dpi offline and once you've found the service, add in a redirect in an upstream isp network. Or don't do a redirect, just tag the source IP for "special attention."
Until we start building wholesale encrypted networks and/or manage to demand the removal of such features, the government control creep will continue.
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Friday 5th January 2018 22:24 GMT Mark 85
Re: "blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
"blocking ... between 1 and 50 sites a year"
Erm, did someone miss the word "million" out of that? Or have the government not been looking very hard for porn sites?
Those in charge of this will obviously leave their favorite sites alone since they will need access for "research purposes".
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Monday 8th January 2018 11:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Well well, the corruption does on and up
No this is a normal Gov tactic.
Distortion of the truth so that "The Minister(s)" makes the decision that Sir Humphrey wanted in the fist place.
Lets face it the Home Sec doesnt understand why encryption is important to computer security, in fact she thinks they are opposites, and given her wishes she would feck all and every online transaction.
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Friday 5th January 2018 11:31 GMT Nick Kew
Re: Let's continue wondering down this slippery slope
... all because Andrews&Arnold continue to opt out of the Great Firewall that once blocked wikipedia.
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Sunday 7th January 2018 11:23 GMT John Smith 19
"Another grab at control of the internet, but it has dark intentions as is usually the case "
Correct.
This is bu***r all to do with TOTC but everything to do with ciminalizing web access
More handiwork from Claire Perry I presume. A Conservative backbencher who couldn't set her browser, so wanted a law to require mandatory filtering.
And it seem she now has one. At the time she thought all those online gambling sites could be re-purposed for this task, as they'd like the revenue and they are completely trustworthy.
Beware of anyone offering "simple" solutions to very complex problems.
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Friday 5th January 2018 15:55 GMT Dazed and Confused
Re: perhaps that's what the government wants...
Well given than "the government" in the shape of the Number10gov official site and Theresa May in her own name plus of course Jeremy Corbyn and probably every one else in parliament regularly post to one of the worlds premier porn distribution sites, I'd say that the government positively support porn.
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Friday 5th January 2018 09:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Is this only going to apply to UK hosted pr0n sites or worldwide?
Define "pr0n" in that worldwide context. No doubt some MPs will be thinking along the lines of the USA school that sacked a teacher recently - for letting an 11 year olds art class see pictures of famous works of art that contained nudity.
Last year my neighbours' son's UK school set their 7 year olds a homework project to research sculpture. His parents asked for him to borrow a reference book on the history of the subject. It probably included pictures of ancient fertility figures, a "David", and various other famous sculptures.
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Friday 5th January 2018 10:20 GMT Dan 55
All government policy is driven by the imperative of avoiding bad tabloid headlines. Bad tabloid headlines mean fewer votes in those all-important marginal constituencies. Many parents are unable to search for parental control software so something must be done by the government otherwise bad headlines will appear.
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Friday 5th January 2018 11:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Is UK generally more prude than the rest of Europe, or is it just a small fraction of vocal prudes pushing this through?"
An interesting question. In the 1970s we thought England was heading towards a Danish style attitude. Then after 1979 the Mary Whitehouse brigade again started to gain control of influential channels.
Under the 1997 Labour government there was a mixed message. Equality for LGBTQI lifestyles - but at the same time Political Correctness became a way to "no platform" anyone who didn't conform to certain approved lines. It was noticeable that the younger generation seemed more enlightened about some human rights - but at the same time expressed apparently unthinking intolerance in other areas.
The current twenty-somethings seem to acknowledge gender and sexual fluidity. Ideas with which they agree with many Baby Boomer grandparents who matured in the 1970s.
My Swedish friends have long complained that the USA's vitriolic criticism of Swedish sex education etc had forced their society into a generally more repressive attitude in recent years.
The same influences have undoubtedly affected UK policies. The drafting of the Sexual Offences Act (2003) preferred to take the USA as "best practice" - and ignored the better outcomes in many of our European neighbours. Should the Tory Party succumb to a leadership coup by its more conservative elements - then we can expect the political influence of USA Christian extremists*** to increase.
***as criticised by Pope Francis recently.
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Friday 5th January 2018 10:29 GMT Neil Brown
From a legal perspective...
The requirement to have age-verification in place applies to any person who "makes pornographic material available on the internet to persons in the United Kingdom on a commercial basis other than in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18." (s14(1) DEA 2017)
It does not matter whether that person is based in the UK or elsewhere.
An ISP can be compelled by an administrative (non-judicial) blocking order to take the steps either specified in the blocking notice, or else as "appear to the provider to be appropriate", to "prevent persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access the offending material using the service it provides". (s23(1))
The legislation expressly permits overblocking: "The steps that may be specified or arrangements that may be put in place ... include steps or arrangements that will or may also have the effect of preventing persons in the United Kingdom from being able to access material other than the offending material using the service provided by the internet service provider." (s23(3))
"Pornographic material" is defined in s15. It's too long for me to paste here, but it covers quite a lot, with an emphasis on material which was "produced solely or principally for the purposes of sexual arousal". And, since different people like different things, that potentially covers quite a lot.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
