TalkTalk (British ISP) rolls out porn filter

This is a dangerous precedent to set. I have a (very bad) feeling that once TalkTalk has done this, other ISPs will start to. Soon it will become 'the norm'. This sort of system, once in place, will end up being abused and used for blocking other things. I know it's trivial for those who know to bypass, but that's not the point.

It's being pushed not by ISPs, but by out-of-touch-with-technology politicians (the absolutely useless Conservative MP Claire Perry and others), the Daily Mail and other tabloids, and useless parents who don't want to parent and don't understand that you can block things with software on a computer.

I remember when filters first appeared and UK secondary schools were forced to employ them. The filters work(ed) by filtering out anything on the www that contains so called offensive words, such as sex in particular.

Following this, the universities of Essex and Sussex suffered a mysterious but nevertheless catastrophic drop in applications, as their websites became invisible to secondary school applicants and nobody knew what happened.

This a terrible move. It's been a long time coming but what surprised me reading the article is that they are also blocking gambling and violent images. So they've already crossed the line.

How do they determine what is a violent image? What if I'm reading a news story that includes an image of a crime? Will the filter block me from playing poker games with free 'pretend' chips?

The worst part is that the media is branding it as a porn filter. What if a person wants to gamble but has no intention of using porn? They might feel uncomfortable asking for the content filter to be turned off and as a result end up with a restricted, censored internet service.

Edit:

Why can't ISP's/or the government partner with a software company that provides filtering software (or develop their own), and give that out for free to all new customers? Seems like that would completely solve the problem. It would also enable parents to only activate the software when their children are accessing the internet, allowing the parent full, unregulated access.

This is awful, but mobile broadband have had filters on for ages. T-Mobile has something called content lock. O2 has another adults-only lock. You have to go into a shop with proof of age to get them turned off.

There's no granularity - it's either on or off and a bunch of stuff gets blocked that shouldn't and a bunch of stuff gets through that (if the filters were working) shouldn't.

I didn't try a proxy, but I guess that's a trivial way to defeat the filters. Looks like boom time for those bittorrent vpn providers.

It's totally backwards thinking. "We must save the children from porn and bad things!" say the politicians and tabloid rags like the Daily Mail (while at the same time publishing pictures of scantily clad women). "We must block it so they cannot be accessed!"

The correct way of thinking is, "what can we do to educate parents about the internet, and the responsible usage of it?" If their kids start downloading porn in their teens, so be it. Kids always find ways to look at that sort of stuff when they hit puberty.

And while sensational, this sort of info (account has porn enabled) can easily be used by the UK's dreadful tabloid press quite to your disadvantage. Like the spy Gareth Williams, who had his S&M proclivities (discovered through looking at the sites he visited) used to discredit him as some crazy bondage afficionado. Imagine being accused of paedophilia and having an ISP confirm that, yes, this guy does have porn enabled on his account.