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UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

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Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#161

Post by testbro »

varmais wrote: post #61

There was a debate in Finland when the child porn filter was introduced a few years back. One guy had a website where he kept database of sites which were blocked but did not contain any child porn. Aftermath was that the site was added to list and that raised even more questions about the whole censorship idea. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info ) Unlike in Britain, the consumers did not have an option t…

Britain already has a mostly mandatory filter designed to save it from child pornography. Cleanfeed is run by the Internet Watch Foundation who look for images of abuse and put it on the blocklist. They're responsible for blocking Wikipedia due to an album cover.

The same filter is now used to action on high court demands to block torrent websites like The Pirate Bay.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#162

Post by smsm42 »

ppog wrote: post #155
ams6110 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people in the USA who have no idea who the president is.

That's probably not down to a censorship 'lens' though. A more apt US analogy might be how many people were aware of the scale of protests against the Iraq war -- especially the vast opposition to it in Europe. My impression is that US mass media self-censored and barely reported those protests. (I may be mistaken: I don't live in the US, but that's what I've heard from people who do.) Of course it's a far cry from s…

Most of the people in the US are not very interested in what happens in Europe unless it is something extraordinary. So European protests against Iraq war may be scarcely reported by US media for the mere reason that the customers of US media don't care too much if people somewhere in Lissabon like their government or not. You don't need to censor something that nobody of your audience cares about. Protests against Iraq war in the US itself was very amply reported by the media.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#163

Post by cinquemb »

smegel wrote: post #156
cinquemb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, there are a lot of flaws within it unless some people are considered 3/5ths of persons on the basis of their skin. The idea is to transcend, not regress…

But what if you transcend into something like modern day Britain? You let people start tweaking with some aspects, others will want to "modernize" its notion of free speech. It could be such a slippery slope.

If the people allow for something to happen and do nothing, then that is what will be (until otherwise confronted). The people who inhabited the world before us were no less immune to the philosophical issues that plague us today. Slippery slopes will always present themselves before us, as it has always been in our nature to create our own problems, but it matters more what will people do when the moment arises.

I'm not condoning the actions of our nation states (Britain in this case), but as we have seen people and companies are standing in opposition with the issues at hand, and if people continue to do so to a point where it is agreed upon by more members of the community, then it will become the law of the land. Even the ideals brought forth in the constitution we're hardly original to it and we're fought for with the blood of about 1% of the population in the colony at the time [0]. But by no means does that some how make them more moral then the people who came before and those afterwards.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EiSymRrKI4

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#164

Post by cinquemb »

enoch_r wrote: post #159
cinquemb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even so, there are a lot of flaws within it unless some people are considered 3/5ths of persons on the basis of their skin. The idea is to transcend, not regress…

That isn't the lesson of the 3/5ths compromise: The founders were hashing out how each state would be represented by Congress. They decided each state would have representation proportional to its population. The problem: some states had tons of slaves. Slaves weren't allowed to vote--that was never in question--but slave states still wanted them to be included in the population count to get more representation. Givi…

Interesting indeed. But as you noted, it is irrelevant to how people have been (and continued to be by some) treated according to he "original" law of the land, which is no less the "truth".

People can learn many lessons from an event in history.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#165

Post by javajosh »

whamill wrote: post #131
javajosh wrote: post #102

You know what would make a lot of sense? Install these filters on every new device sold in the UK. Make them configurable, and even uninstallable, but defaulting to "blocked". That way if and when people choose to unblock something, it's a private matter between them and their device. This achieves both the stated goal of protecting people from malicious content, and the freedom of people to consume malicious content…

Why would installing them on only new devices make a lot of sense? It doesn't achieve the stated goal of "protecting the children" if they are using any one of the millions of devices currently in use. Moreso, why default to blocked and not unblocked, allowing people to opt-in? Ah but then we'd be back in the rational and current position of giving people the ability to install blocking software or filters if they so…

I'm extremely against censorship, however I can see the benefit of having a default filter that can be turned off in private. Conservatively safe defaults are never a bad idea.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#166

Post by marshray »

cinquemb wrote: post #124
Afforess wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That crap got tacked on at the end in the name of compromise. You should read the first drafts some time.

But it existed, and was the law of the land for some time right? But I guess since it was tacked on in the end in the name of a compromise all is forgiven, as people can tell from the current state of affairs today.

What I take away from it is that a document drafted by a bunch of slave owners has such miraculously little recognition for the practice of slavery.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#167

Post by westicle »

markbao wrote: post #144
luminiferous wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source is the reddit comment. It was a reply to an askreddit thread.

Indeed. It's anecdotal, but given the 1.3 billion people in China, I'm inclined to believe that this isn't a one-time case.

I can also confirm from personal experience that many, many educated Chinese locals are not aware of this portion of their history.

Even those whom I suspect may be aware of it seem to confine it to a cultural blindspot approaching wilful ignorance. It is something you simply _do not talk about_ in China.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#168

Post by foobarqux »

vidarh wrote: post #35
Fuxy wrote: post #19

There's no feasible way of blocking circumvention tools without causing massive collateral damage. If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely. I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that. At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(

I don't think they care about it enough to want to go even that far, unless VPNs become totally mainstream. But you can tunnel encrypted data over anything that can carry a signal, and stuff IP datagrams inside it. This will only stop people that are "casually" looking for stuff and don't really care. Latency might suck. But if the filters become a problem, you'll start seeing VPN applications with "UK filter modes"…

The Tor project is already dealing with these issues using obfsproxy in places like China where VPNs are blocked.

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#169

Post by jodrellblank »

Karunamon wrote: post #96
DanBC wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is filtering on most mobile phone data contracts in the UK. YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO. Justifications: "Children have too easy access to very hard core porn. Provide filtering, or we'll regulate you".

>YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO. ..Thereby putting your name on a list of people who like to look at $blocked_thing. Why this is problematic is left as an exercise for the reader. Any such filtering should be OPT IN by default. Not the other way around. Further, what data children have the ability to access is the concern of their parents, not the government.

But "they" can already put you on a list of people who like to look at $offensive_thing by using PRISM to notice when you look at $offensive_thing.

So given that they can build such a list regardless of the porn filtering settings, and given that people don't change default settings, and given that a porn filter can be somewhat effective at blocking offensive content, and given that we already agree to blocking offensive content in public space as a general behaviour, and given that a porn filter will be opt-out-able, why not make it opt-in?

Re: UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

#170

Post by jodrellblank »

7952 wrote: post #139
javajosh wrote: post #102

You know what would make a lot of sense? Install these filters on every new device sold in the UK. Make them configurable, and even uninstallable, but defaulting to "blocked". That way if and when people choose to unblock something, it's a private matter between them and their device. This achieves both the stated goal of protecting people from malicious content, and the freedom of people to consume malicious content…

I am surprised that they haven't tried this as it would be much more affective. Network level filtering always fails because it can't see encrypted packets. To prevent circumvention you need something running on the machine, at which point you may as well just run the filter on the machine. The government could have promoted officially recommended browser plugins. If parents don't know how to protect their children w…

Network level filtering always fails because it can't see encrypted packets.

Pfft, how far in the past are you living?

https://www.barracuda.com/products/webfilter/features

SSL Inspection - Administrators can specify domains and URL categories for which SSL-encrypted traffic will be decrypted, scanned for malware and policy and then re-encrypted to the destination when deemed safe.

All you do is put a trusted SSL certificate on your office computers, and the proxy device will reencrypt the traffic as coming from your trusted certificate, and the end user will not notice the difference unless they study the names in the certificate chain.

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