The Great Big Porn Block is coming

http://www.sheeldz.co.uk/2013/12/blocked.html

by coldwired • 13 years ago

66 97 13 years ago

ColinWright• 13 years ago

More interestingly, O2 has not blocked access to its own site. That would be silly. It has, however, blocked access to http://www.giffgaff.co.uk, one of its competitors.

I've seen it claimed that it's blocked access to the Conservative Party's web site. Based on all this, that's a block I'd like to see remain in place.

drcongo• 13 years ago

O2 own giffgaff, so not exactly a competitor. Which makes it all the more of a facepalm.

finnw• 13 years ago

Please don't joke about censoring political parties' websites. That is one of the biggest dangers of systems like this after all.

pja• 13 years ago

That will almost certainly be O2's whitelist opt-in blocklist option, which only allows access to sites that have been explicitly flagged as safe. This is not the blocklist that you'd be signed up to as the default option.

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

Porn is not the problem — you are[0].

[0] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201305/p...

forktheif• 13 years ago

Nothing in that article is a reason why they are introducing the porn filters in the UK

thenerdfiles3• 13 years ago

"What is Porn Anyway?" is a philosophical question. So you're actually misfiring in your claim of irrelevancy.

OP opened a can of worms. Seriously. (No, really: seriously.)

Arguing that it's art? That it is in itself valuable to culture as "low art" is? This isn't a question restricted to the UK, and it's one we need to get philosophically astute about pretty fast. So, again: Porn is not the problem — you are.

Whatever it is, analogies to automobile accidents and art, in any sense, is a stretch beyond palatability, and makes this entire discussion look entirely intellectually one-sided. I think such talk is a disservice to the discussion, and maybe porn should be blocked on those grounds alone, for I am quite sure OP's aesthetics are common.

gmuslera• 13 years ago

There may be a point on optionally blocking pure, meant to be porn, sites. But when you block wikipedia, youtube, art galleries, xkcd, social sites and so on because it could show somewhere some skin or talk about life as it is, you are forcing people to skip your filters in the best case, and get disconnected to good part of the digital world in the worst with all that could come after that.

rwmj• 13 years ago

Opt out, or better still, vote with your pounds and use one of the many ISPs that aren't blocking sites.

dspillett2• 13 years ago

One of the reasons I use AAISP: they provide a nice clean connection with no mucking about.

That and a bunch of other technical reasons too: proper dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 across the board (they've provided IPv6 for a decade while many UK ISPs don't even have solid plans to support it soon), fully delegated rDNS for the addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6) I am assigned and so forth.

Also excellent support when something goes wrong as I experienced when BT's vDSL box died. Unlike some ISPs I could mention, after making sure I'd done all the relevant tests so knew what the problem was rather than guessing they both handled nagging BT for me and kept me well informed (all comms were visible from my login on their control panel) of that process. When a friend had similar trouble (there was a spate of those units overheating, to the point where BT eventually started proactively swapping out those installed between certain dates) it took much longer to get resolved as he was passed from pillar to post.

Caveat for balance: there are other ISPs that people describe in similarly positive terms for much the same reasons, of course. Unfortunately, like with AAISP, you do pay a bit extra for the better service.

w_t_payne4• 13 years ago

Why block porn? The cynical answer is this: Government is about power, and power is about sex.

Boiled down to it's raw animal fundamentals, having power is about being able to maximise your reproductive chances and suppress the reproductive chances of lesser males.

As a result, the powerful will always impose a (hypocritical) morality on the weak. Even if it just provides a symbolic victory over their libido, it plays an age-old role in cementing the pecking-order of society.

gadders• 13 years ago

Boiled down to it's raw animal fundamentals, having power is about being able to maximise your reproductive chances and suppress the reproductive chances of lesser males.

So blocking porn minismises the reproductive chances of lesser males? So you feel that watching porn would enhance their reproductive success?

lhnz2• 13 years ago

I don't think he's saying that.

I think he's making an abstract argument about the symbolism of blocking access to sexuality.

w_t_payne4• 13 years ago

I didn't say it was anything more than a symbolic act, or perhaps an unconscious throwback to a primitive sociological drive. I seriously doubt that those who crusade for a restrictive moral code have the self-awareness to recognise their motivation for what it is.

vixen99• 13 years ago

Lesser males having their reproductive chances lessened? In the UK no substantive government moves have yet been made (open to correction) against those usually unemployed feckless not over-bright males who casually father many children by a number of different women.

w_t_payne4• 13 years ago

Stop for a second and re-read what you just wrote. Think about the feelings and motivation that led to you writing what you did. Put practicality to one side too; Try not to get distracted by the myriad justifications and nuances of the debate itself, and think about why you hold these beliefs. Does it stem from somewhere cold and rational? Or does it feel "right" on some biological level? Why do you feel the way that you do? Is it too early for me to point to your writing and say "QED"? What do you think?

VLM9• 13 years ago

you're supposed to be spending your time meditating on the false dichotomy of divide and conqueror, daydreaming about "if only the other political side ...". Or viewing the output of one of the few remaining media international megacorps who have purchased the .gov. Daydreaming about the women on /r/gonewild is not effective indoctrination and is not profitable for those who own "our" culture.

mikegioia• 13 years ago

This whole thing feels like a way to embarrass people into accepting a filter on pornography, while including non-porn content in the filter at a later date.

Once any type of filtering is set up it opens the floodgates for what content can or will be filtered. Imagine how easy it would be to filter out anti-government content when the response is merely "oops, must be a bug with the filter".

How can you even be sure that the opting out will still truly allow you access to the full, unfiltered internet?

DanBC7• 13 years ago

How can you even be sure that the opting out will still truly allow you access to the full, unfiltered internet?

We already know that opting out of this filter does nothing about other filtered content - stuff the IWF has filtered will be hard to find; stuff that courts have ordered ISPs to filter (at the request of the companies asking for the court order) will be harder to find.

spiritplumber• 13 years ago

Dear UK government: You are putting your technological expertise against a horde bored, horny 14 year old kids. Your abject failure will amuse the world.

lhnz2• 13 years ago

You miss the point. They don't care about a 10% of elite children which will find ways around it, they want to censor and restrict the majority.

Also, quite importantly it's about delegitimising and criminalising whatever future content that might make them uncomfortable. It ensures that if you do get around the filter you are de facto purposefully breaking the rules (and can be judged as the miscreant you reveal yourself to be.)

ihsw2• 13 years ago

The target was never bored, horny 14 year old kids -- it was the likes of WikiLeaks/Snowden sympathizers.

Currently, military personnel and other public servants are barred from viewing any and all 'classified' content (WikiLeaks/Snowden material). This restriction will now be applied on a national level resulting in a variety of news websites being rendered inaccessible.

It's not if but when the censorship will be applied across the world. It's coming to nations whom are regarded as shining beacons of democracy (especially all of whom are in the sphere of US influence), and such censorship policies will be as untouchable as our ever-growing war budgets.

No politician wants to be the one responsible for tragedies resulting from rolling back censorship in the same manner no-one wants fingers pointed at them for reducing the defence budget.

hahainternet11• 13 years ago

The target was never bored, horny 14 year old kids -- it was the likes of WikiLeaks/Snowden sympathizers.

This is stupid to such a level you should delete your account immediately. How exactly could optional ISP filters possibly ever target people who know about computers to any reasonable degree.

It won't be applied nationally, and you're busy predicting the future when you don't even understand the present.

VLM9• 13 years ago

Pretty close to a perfectly correct comment, but in the last line you misspelled "after" as "resulting from".

smtddr2• 13 years ago

Oh yes, it starts as ThinkOfTheChildren... but then it's an opt-out process. They know people will feel kinda embarrassed to call their ISP and say "I want porn". And of course, this filter will eventually expand to cover more than that. And now, you have those in power censoring the internet in a China-like fashion, but the masses assume it's just porn. Maybe at first they'll put up an error message from the ISP that "This site is blocked by porn filter" but that would make some people curious and ask questions. So eventually, it'll just 404.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/12/20/bt-gives-parents-tool-t...

http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2013/07/uk-internet-filter-wil...

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20130107/1119...

>This very broad, default censorship is disturbing for at least two reasons. First, because many people will be unaware that this kind of "mature content" censorship is taking place at all, and therefore won't ask for it to be stopped. And secondly, even if they are aware, the fact that asking for the filter to be lifted could be seen as tantamount to wanting to access porn -- something that many will understandably be reluctant to have noted down on their Internet access record -- means that they will simply put up with a limited feed

drdaeman• 13 years ago

If this goes live, at least, maybe, there still will be a bit of good side to that - admitting the fact one's watching porn won't be considered too embarrassing. :)

(Not that I say censorship is good by any means.)

DanBC7• 13 years ago

They know people will feel kinda embarrassed to call their ISP and say "I want porn".

Some ISPs have been filtering "adult" content for some time.

Turning it off is simple - you visit a page and have a credit card checked (no charge to you); or you ask for content lock to be turned off.

The filters are so poor that most adults ask for them to be removed.

Asking for the filter is not saying "I want to see porn", it is saying "I want to visit a bunch of normal sites that you are wrongly filtering" and they know this.

smtddr2• 13 years ago

Not true. I can't find the blog, but there was a guy who had a filter like this on his mobile device that blocked alternative news sources. You could not go to a webpage, you had to call. And the person that he called repeated asked "To confirm, you want to be able to access adult content". He tried to reason with them that the news site wasn't a porn site, but still he had to say something to the effect of "Yes, I wish to access explicit content on my mobile".

I really wish I could find this blog. Been looking for it for months to be prepared to reply to a comment such as yours.

They were totally going for the squeamish factor. The only way was to call and request that you want pornography & other explicit content. Something the average person would at least hesitate to do.

VLM9• 13 years ago

"you visit a page and have a credit card checked"

This sounds like an obvious social engineering hack waiting to happen, merely register "nude-hacker-news-pics.com" and put up a page promising to merely test a credit cards number, and to be certain you're an adult, maybe your mom's maiden name and social security number and DOB and a dr license # and ...

Well, maybe you need a better domain name, but the overall hack idea is good.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

> "They know people will feel kinda embarrassed to call their ISP and say "I want porn""

I'm against these filters but that's not how it works. Filters are only added to new accounts. I've been through this with a provider who has offered the feature for a while. When I was signing up they asked something like, "Do you want our child protection/home safety filters enabled". I said no. So really it isn't embarrassing and it's easy to choose to have them not enabled. I doubt the ISP's would sink to the level of referring to them officially as 'porn filters' and requiring customers to disable 'porn filters'.

goatforce53• 13 years ago

They know people will feel kinda embarrassed to call their ISP and say "I want porn"

I called my Canadian cable company on some trivial matter. The end of the call went something like: "We've got a great deal on the kids TV channel package. Do you want to sign up?"

"I live by myself. Not interested."

"Oh, in that case, I can give you a deal on our adult channels."

Moral of the story: the call centre staff couldn't care one way or the other - they're just doing their jobs. Call 'em up and get the stupid filter removed.

gaius2• 13 years ago

Sure. But people who do care will have access to the list. And the list will be leaked.

adrianb• 13 years ago

They are charging you for the extra channels. The call center people are motivated to make you pay more.

It's a bit different with this Internet filter.

svdree• 13 years ago

From TFA: " I don't mind certain art, like films or computer games being censored"

Right. He doesn't mind censorship, he just disagrees with where the line is drawn. Which is what a lot of debate seems to boil down to these days: we don't care about anything unless it affects us personally.

And, as others have said, trying to keep teenage boys away from porn can only fail in the most spectacular way possible.

vfclists• 13 years ago

It has nothing to do with blocking porn and has more to do with creating a database of people who have no fears of making it known that they don't want filters on the Internet connection.

Of course later on they government can label them has people who are happy to view porn or visit terrorist websites. It is a way of creating a database of people who can be labelled in a negative manner in relation to some government agenda.

walshemj• 13 years ago

Or sold to the daily mail and other hypocritical smut pedlars

austerity• 13 years ago

I used to get pretty upset at these constant news reports of expanding Internet censorship. Then it occurred to me that it simply means that the reactionary forces are (finally) starting to see it as a threat. And that is a good sign.

h2s2• 13 years ago

Stop calling it a "porn filter". It's censorship of the internet.

If it was actually a "porn filter", its purpose would be to filter pornographic material. In reality, there is a list of categories to be censored, and porn is only one of them. Focusing on the words "porn filtering" was a deliberate strategic move by the government, because it makes it more difficult to oppose convincingly.

Those of us who oppose censorship are playing into their hands by referring to this issue using the favourable terms coined by the government. We should all stop referring to it as "porn filtering" and start referring to it as "internet censorship".

wtracz• 13 years ago

This has already happened.

The Internet Watch Foundation already tell ISPs to block child pornography, and the court system can tell ISPs to block file-sharing/streaming sites.

It is a myth that the internet is uncensored in the UK at the moment.

h2s2• 13 years ago

That's correct, but we should still not allow them to misdirect our attention while they tighten the screws.

dingaling• 13 years ago

The Internet Watch Foundation can't tell anyone to do anything. It's just a private company based in Cambridge:

Company No. 03426366 Status: Active Date of Incorporation: 29/08/1997

Some organisations ( fewer than 100 ) have entered into voluntary commercial contracts with the IWF that oblige them to self-implement the list provided by the IWF.

Silhouette3• 13 years ago

Both distributing child pornography and distributing content in violation of copyright are explicitly against the law. Distributing "normal" porn is not. I think there is a qualitative difference between attempting to prevent illegal activity and attempting to prevent legal activity that some vague authority out of the public eye just doesn't like, and I'm not sure it's helpful to equate the two cases in a debate like this.

w_t_payne4• 13 years ago

You can bet that a lot of non-mainstream political thought gets blocked by the filter under the label "esoteric".

charlesdm• 13 years ago

Vodafone has had something similar for mobile for years, no? I bought a UK SIM a while back for when I'm in the UK, and discovered that they have some sort of filter enabled by default that blocks all 'adult' content.

The quality of that filter is so absurdly low, that it actually blocked a ton of irrelevant stuff (such as random PDF email attachments, word documents, a ton of FB and Twitter images, etc.). My smartphone was pretty much transformed into a brick, and became an annoyance to use. Also took them nearly 20 minutes to remove it, when I finally went to a shop to get it removed.

I hate filters, because they actually don't filter properly.

dspillett2• 13 years ago

Vodafone has had something similar for mobile for years, no?

Virgin too, I had one of their PAYG SIMs for a while and you had to opt in to have the filter turned off (which was a faf IIRC).

The content that it blocked for me was the national lottery web site (presumably gambling was one of the filtering criteria), but the holding page presented when you visited a blocked site carried adverts which amusingly enough at the time were for what was essentially sex chat lines... I've still got a screen grab of it somewhere.

return0• 13 years ago

What if people massively "opt in", thus dismantling many social taboos around the subject?

DanBC7• 13 years ago

What if the filters are so poor that many people will want to opt in even if they have no interest in online pornography?

Silhouette3• 13 years ago

I'm fairly sure that's exactly what would happen if they made this mandatory.

Obviously a lot of people do enjoy watching porn on-line, and personally I have no problem with that (with the usual caveats about consenting adults etc.). Some of those people will be shy about admitting it, but plenty won't care.

Moreover, even those who don't watch porn on-line have several good reasons to opt out: support of civil liberties, technical concerns over whether any filter will actually work properly, objections to the general "nanny state" trend and absolving parents of responsibility for properly supervising their own children, and the list goes on.

I think enforcing these kinds of measures will just make Cameron and Perry look even more out of touch than they already do.

VLM9• 13 years ago

Leak the list of course, and use it as a weapon against anyone in politics or the public eye. Much as you can fire any public schoolteacher seen consuming alcohol in any form, now any librarian or political opponent will be attacked for being "on the list". May as well wear a scarlet letter "P" on your 3-piece suit.

Of course if you'll agree to support what we define as network neutrality, perhaps your name can accidentally not be included on "the list". Or we can charge an extra fee for an unlisted account much as the phone company used to charge extra money for an unlisted account.

Even funnier it would be a shame if your political opponent were added to the list, right? I mean, obviously no one would ever execute a pretexting attack to tarnish the good name of their political opponent, or perhaps the good name of a coworker aiming for the same political appointment as yourself.

All you really need to do is see how the Germans treated the Jews in the mid 30s. I'm not trying to be inflamatory, merely factual. I specifically listed the 30s not the 40s.

hahainternet11• 13 years ago

All you really need to do is see how the Germans treated the Jews in the mid 30s. I'm not trying to be inflamatory, merely factual. I specifically listed the 30s not the 40s.

Wow. I have nothing to say but wow.

etanazir3• 13 years ago

I'm less in favor of network blocking and more in favor of just making porn illegal. Establish civil and criminal liability for displaying it. Seize the assets of porn producers and burn them to death in an electric chair or whatever.

michh• 13 years ago

I have one simple question: why? For the children? For the fraction of performers involved in it involuntarily? Because you simply object to it yourself and want to force your morals on others? Because you're just trolling? Oh..

etanazir3• 13 years ago

Why flush the toilet? Why not just excrete your waste into the living room.

err4nt• 13 years ago

Does your definition of 'porn' include magazines like Cosmo?

Does your definition of 'porn' include medical materials?

Does your definition of 'porn' include religious texts?

The problem with banning 'porn' is you have to ban very very specific things (like photographs of coitus, or textual descriptions of intercourse) in order to enforce it - but what you're really attempting to control or prevent is perversion or pleasure other people take in something you don't approve of.

If you even glance over a list of fetishes you'd see there's no limit to the creativity of human sexuality. Pretty soon you're going to end up banning balloons, and a whole lot of other weird things that emerge. What about things like Bubbling (https://www.google.ca/search?q=mormon+bubbling) Is that 'porn' or not?

etanazir3• 13 years ago

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it... —Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964)

qwerta2• 13 years ago

Censorship is small problem in UK.

The SS forced c-section on pregnant woman and stole her baby. She was visitor, foreign citizen who stayed in UK just for a few days...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/social-servic...

hahainternet11• 13 years ago

No they didn't. The doctors made the request which you'd know if you bothered to read more than a few lines.

iwasanewt3• 13 years ago

"Despite the woman’s mother explaining her daughter’s condition to police over the telephone from Italy, she was taken to a psychiatric hospital and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Five weeks later, her daughter was removed from her womb without her consent."

adrianlmm• 13 years ago

The truth is, that pornography today is not the same as 10 years ago, today, porn is more about humilliation of women and really low depravation, psycological studies have found the high impact this is having on young citicens, the social future of the UK is in jeopardy, and this is what they are doing save it.

oscargrouch• 13 years ago

Government controlling what people can see and know... smells like teen dictatorship

stefan_kendall• 13 years ago

Author's statement: "Censorship is bad!" Author's point 1: "Some censorship is okay! But this is more censorship than I personally agree with!"

If you hold the premise that minors must be protected against media by the government, then you can't possibly argue that this move is radical or illogical.

DanBC7• 13 years ago

Sure you can.

Most people in the UK are totally fine with some levels of censorship.

Ask them if they want a ban on people producing or distributing images of child sexual abuse and most people would say that they do want a ban.

Extend that to images of people having sex with animals and many people are happy with a ban, and some people saying that they agree it should be restricted to those over the ages of 18, and not accidentally available to anyone.

But when you ask someone in the UK if a TV show should receive a huge ($500,000) fine for an accidental < 1 second showing of a partially clothed nipple most people are going to laugh and say "no". (Unlike US FCC which imposed such a fine for Janet Jackson nipple slip. That fine was overturned 7 years later, but only because FCC had used new powers before taking action). Or if you ask whether it's okay for terrestrial broadcast TV shows to include nudity or swearing after 9pm most people are going to say it's okay. (Unlike US, where shows have to censor their language. See for example The Good Wife which parodied this situation with a street noise during a courtroom hearing. The noise was used to mask bad language.)

VLM9• 13 years ago

In the british movie adaptation of "1984" which was filmed in 1984, when he had sex with Julia, was that explicit enough to get the film blocked on the internet? Just idly curious. I haven't seen the film adaptation in probably 20 years (or more?) so I have to call out to the wider HN community.

I think the movie adaptation of 1984 would be a good idea to rally around. I say "idea" rather than "film" because I don't remember if the actual film is any good, but the idea of censoring 1984 "to save teh children" but primarily motivated to politically censor is too juicy to pass up.

NAFV_P2• 13 years ago

Of course, certain censorship is fine. I don't mind certain art, like films or computer games being censored, and think that it is key to keeping a powerful art community when protecting those from harmful images or powerful material.

The author hasn't made a distinction between restriction and censorship. Films unsuitable for children, say Sword of Vengeance have their availability to them restricted. On the other hand, I'm quite sure that the British release of Ichi the Killer has scenes edited from it, ie. it is censored.

I was wondering if this porn filter would block access to the works of the Chapman Brothers.

http://jakeanddinoschapman.com/