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Considered "18+"

daniel.haxx.se

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Re: Considered "18+"

#31

Post by joosters »

edent wrote: post #17

Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff. One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the "violations" that they picked up just weren't considered problematic for a UK / EU audience. Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocke…

Oddly enough, vodafone filtering is less restrictive in other ways. For instance, they never blocked The Pirate Bay, but I just switched ISP from vodafone and my new ISP (Sky) blocks the site via some TLS tricks. It's odd because while adult content blocks are purely a per-ISP choice (they offer it as a service/choice to customers), I had thought that TPB was blocked because of court orders. So how come one ISP blocks it, and other doesn't?

Re: Considered "18+"

#32

Post by captainbland »

I'm very much of the opinion that such filtering should be opt-in rather than opt-out. Now don't get me wrong, it should be trivial for a parent to opt in if they want to but I fundamentally don't agree that it should be the default to child-proof the internet.

Otherwise ISPs are basically collecting a list of self-identified internet deviants by whatever definition they have. I mean at least make them do a bit of work to process my DNS history to figure that out...

Not to mention the point of the article, that the filtering is often overzealous and captures the weirdest things.

Re: Considered "18+"

#33

Post by raxxorraxor »

donatj wrote: post #13

A number of my personal sites end up blocked by corporate firewalls. It’s slightly infuriating. Even my own company. I got in a literal fight with IT needing to justify the why in why I needed access to my own website. Like I can live without it, but it’s nothing but my blog where I rant about tech. The why should be why is it blocked to begin with. The default state should not be blocked .

Default approach of a firewall. When it doubt, block it. But IT has really outdone itself and grew to something that could be the largest threat to an open internet.

The same could happen to mail, where you can only use "certified provider" or you will just be filtered out. Spam and phishing are a problem, sure, but recent IT strategies are highly questionable in this regard.

Re: Considered "18+"

#34

Post by II2II »

steventhedev wrote: post #12
nimbius wrote: post #9

im always chuffed and fascinated when tech companies cloister themselves in the robes of moral arbiter. Twitter does this now, albeit it seems like a cheap excuse to pump user numbers by forcing authentication. Why 18? why not 21? or 23? What qualifies as explicitly "adult" content? violence perhaps could disqualify most military recruiting sites from my vodaphone. Alcohol? its certainly a moral vice in the UAE but i…

These content filtering schemes are usually legally mandated, and the age of 18 is set by law. More likely than not, this got caught up in a regular job that scans DNS zones for new domains to "filter". It's just a matter of time before this catches anything related to Scunthorpe[0]. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

> These content filtering schemes are usually legally mandated, and the age of 18 is set by law.

It's also worth adding that 18 is typically the age when someone is considered legally accountable for their actions as an adult. We shouldn't be surprised that this age pops up in so many laws because of that, even though it is an arbitrary line in most cases.

Re: Considered "18+"

#35

Post by [deleted] »

Terretta wrote: post #27

Can’t think what the “ha” would stand for in their analysis, but the se and xx can be indicators of adultness when you have a naive algo for dealing with bot spam domains for adult-content-as-spam: Some even started using multiple X's (i.e. XX, XXX, etc.) to give the impression that their film contained more graphic sexual content than the simple X rating. In some cases, the X ratings were applied by reviewers or fil…

[deleted]

Re: Considered "18+"

#36

Post by doublerabbit »

joosters wrote: post #31
edent wrote: post #17

Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff. One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the "violations" that they picked up just weren't considered problematic for a UK / EU audience. Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocke…

Oddly enough, vodafone filtering is less restrictive in other ways. For instance, they never blocked The Pirate Bay, but I just switched ISP from vodafone and my new ISP (Sky) blocks the site via some TLS tricks. It's odd because while adult content blocks are purely a per-ISP choice (they offer it as a service/choice to customers), I had thought that TPB was blocked because of court orders. So how come one ISP block…

If you wish to throw conspiracy in to the mix, data logging for govermentental safe-keeping. Sounded like scifi in the 00's.

Re: Considered "18+"

#37

Post by protomyth »

edent wrote: post #17

Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff. One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the "violations" that they picked up just weren't considered problematic for a UK / EU audience. Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocke…

Ultimately, the customer isn't the user. It is the network who are terrified that Johnny's parent is going to go to the papers screaming about how the evil phone company corrupted their innocent child. That's all it is there for - to protect the network.

You're not kidding. The biggest fear is a parent complaining because a library or school filter fails. People really don't give a damn what a hard problem it is nor do they care that browsers are starting to add counter measures to skip over ISP filtering. Doesn't matter if you don't have control of the laptop, you are still to blame. At this point, I wonder what the next generation of filtering software is going to do.

Re: Considered "18+"

#38

Post by xmodem »

sp332 wrote: post #6

Why would they bother doing a TLS handshake with a phony certificate?

How else could they let the end user know what's going on? Due to pinning, it's either present a phony certificate, or completely fail the connection and give the user no indicationo why.

Of course, accepting the phony certificate will immediately leak your cookies to the middlebox, along with giving it permission to read any credentials out of local storage. So as an end user you should not accept it.

Re: Considered "18+"

#39

Post by dmlorenzetti »

edent wrote: post #17

Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff. One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the "violations" that they picked up just weren't considered problematic for a UK / EU audience. Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocke…

Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocked.

I had a colleague whose surname, Sextro, was part of his email address. He occasionally had messages blocked by blanket filters like that.

Re: Considered "18+"

#40

Post by willyt »

Vodafone is a mess. I bought a 24Gb pre-paid sim which was supposed to last 2 years but they 'lost' my plan after 6months and 2Gb of data use. Spent an hour on chat with them telling me that no such plan had ever existed until I told them I had all the receipts and evidence of how much data I had used and threatened to take them to the small claims court with expenses at £60/hr for my time. They capitulated quickly after that and restored it, then 'lost' my plan again the next month.

I've had problems with billing glitches with four utility companies in the UK now and I am starting to suspect that overcharging people and hoping they don't notice is actually a common business strategy in the industry and if they get caught they blame bad IT but really their systems are configured to do this on purpose.

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