I don't think there's a full-fledged conspiracy at play - it's more like a progressive process of disneyfication of the internet: apps and not websites (easier to control and monetize), progressively more bland content, soon preferential allocation of the band for the majors, and so on. This is what happens when a resource becomes economically appetising: the stakeholders try to enlarge the user base as much as possible by means that include the sanitisation of the image of the media (cinema too, for example, was considered dangerous when it was young).
Soon enough they will be able to sell 'the internet' to people like my mother ('omg, you work "on the internet"? but there are pedophiles "on the internet!"' 'Mum, am thirty' [sic])
We knew the internet while it was the Far West. It was (allegedly) dangerous to some extent, it was fun, and very much free. I hope it will stay such (well, it still isn't that much anymore, but still) to the maximum possible extent but I don't feel very optimistic, bar for some marginalised areas like IRC.
Can't stand Disney tbh. Also, sanitisation is always accompanied by a drop in quality.
I am rather flabbergasted by the suggestion of an LGBT filter, but then again, the whole of the available categories is a religious fundamentalist's wet dream, and not a representation of the mainstream. I wonder why this clumsy heavy-handedness...
>>Of course it’s impossible to see what’s been blocked other than through tedious trial and error. One website owner (@pseudomonas) asked BT on Twitter for information about whether their site was blocked, and their experience was something like talking to a brick wall who only speaks French.
Oooohhhh, don't you worry about that. The folks over at dslreports.com, who revealed the comcast torrent tampering[1], and HN and slashdot and neogaf.com and even Reddit will be sure to keep an eye on any sites access mismatches. In today's world where we can spin up a linux cloud server in almost every first-world country for less than the cost of a family dinner at a nice restaurant, it'll be noticed. I think even Google made a tool to test your internet-connection for tampering. There will be a site where you can put in a URL and see what it shows from all kinds of ISPs around the world. And proxies sites like http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/. Then they'll have to ban those too, and then other blogs will also start posting info about what's blocked by who... then those sites will be blocked... and eventually... the internet will look something like this: http://feross.org/images/tiered-internet-service-fail.png ...with an addition for adult-content that cause 2x your regular bill.
(HINT: Focus on checking any sites that wouldn't align with conservative values & beliefs. Those will be blocked first, as proven in this article)
And now the discussion shifts from WHY there should ever be a filter to a never ending discussion of WHO is behind it, WHAT the filter should and shouldn't block and HOW. Minds distracted, efforts diffused, mission accomplished.
Answering who is behind it can help answering the why.
It doesn't matter what you ask anyway, once something like this is in place it takes a lot of bureaucracy to get rid of it.
You are right, knowing who was behind its creation is very helpful. Focus will swiftly turn to who currently controls it and then the tracks can be lost though.
The daily mail was the main media organisation putting pressure on the government about it. It's completely inline with the values of their print production.
This is the same premise we've seen already in Finland.
First, you introduce some level of mandatory filtering for ISP's in the name of protecting the children. (The fact that shoving one's head in the sand does nothing to protect the children is never acknowledged.) Check.
Then you offload the collection and maintenance of the list to an unaccountable third party, who is not bound by law on what they can introduce on the list. Furthermore, you make sure that the police are not only understaffed to deal with any fallout - they are actively avoiding any and all responsibility. After all, the list is provided by an outside party. There is no judicial overview, no audit trail and absolutely no way to tell who was responsible to introducing erroneous or just opinionated domains on the list. Items are added to the list far more aggressively than they are removed from it. Check.
As a logical next step, you start to build up propaganda to the tune of "inclusion on the filter list implies criminal and/or abusive activities." Ending up on the list or any reason is stigmatizing, regardless of the reason or validity. Check.
After that it's trivial to start snuffing out content you don't like. Just add the domains that deal with inconvenient subjects and if there is too big a backlash for any single item, backpedal on that particular domain with a lame apology, while at the same time emphasizing that such errors are unavoidable but will be eventually corrected - as the very case itself is shown to prove. Note the disregard for the previous point, where ending up on the list is bad enough for any entity not big enough to get non-negligible public support. Check.
Once you have the filtering in place and opposition firmly silenced and/or marginalised, you start adding entirely new categories which are legal but just otherwise inconvenient for any reason. Check.
All of this has already happened in Finland. The one thing the advocates of the filtering system did not anticipate was that the filter system would become so universally loathed that it was the operators who started to push back against maintaining it. Nowadays the list is not really maintained any longer, but it is still in place, and as one can imagine, used to silence at least one source of criticism.
The saddest thing about these filtering systems is that they really do absolutely nothing to aid the victims of the genuinely repulsive and dangerous trades. (Such as trafficking, child prostitution, etc.)
Don't get me wrong. Child pornography is despicable. It is repulsive. And it is most certainly criminal. The recordings of the acts are themselves 100% evidence of a children getting abused in the most horrific way one can imagine. Blocking a site that deals with such filth may help the individual doing the blocking in the short term, but that's it. If they don't report the incidence to international police forces and assist in tracking down the actual dealers, they are in my eyes guilty of criminal negligence of astronomical proportions. By blocking the content but not doing anything else, they are actively helping the perpetrators to continue their abuse and allow them to find more victims.
Exactly the same thing is happening in Russia. They started with "child porn" and "suicide propaganda", then added anime, politics and copyright enforcement.
Unfortunately, as a UK voter, there's no way to do anything about this. The position of every party at the next election will be the current position plus more control in one form or another.
I think we're living through a massive societal change, as big as the end of feudalism or the invention of the printing press. The internet is the first mass peer to peer communication system, and it works like the Christmas Truce in World War 1:
Ultimately, when people can talk unmediated by elites, they begin to want similar rights (eg Arab Spring), to share ideas about oppression (eg Womens' Movements), to share information (eg piracy, wikileaks), and trade (eg Amazon). They essentially stop seeing borders as being important. This is revolutionary, and it's not surprising that the establishment is resisting it. The whole theory of nation-states is based around the primacy of local laws being the only way the people in a country can live. No country is going to want people doing an end run around that. Rules about pornography and the control of public morality are just one form of this.
It's essentially the Shirky Principle: institutions will seek to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
I wonder what the big picture is here, who is really behind it.
There has to have been some company lobbying their asses off, a company either already in this business or a company expanding.
I've been thinking about this as well. A lot of people seem to think that the plan is to, at first, block porn under the guise of protecting the children and then move on to full blown censorship.
If that is true, then who are the people that came up with this plan? Has there been a company that has been lobbying just to sell more equipment? Are people in the government realizing that free flow of information makes their jobs harder? Or do they want to trick people into believing that they care about the children?
What's really frustrating is that, while people report on things like this, you never really seem to understand what the main driving force is behind decisions like these.
The same political party that legislated Section 28 in the 80s is the same political party pushing the filters today.
It's simply about suppressing information about ideas and lifestyles the Conservatives and Daily Mail readers do not approve of. It really is that simple.
When I was in Ireland last year, many torrent sites were blocked at the ISP level (with big scary "you are doing something illegal" pages in their place). I found it kinda amazing they were so blatant in their censorship. (Only some ISPs did it though. I got around the cable Internet censorship by tethering to my 4G iPhone on an EE SIM.)
I'm in Northern Ireland (so different ISP's to the Republic - not sure which you're referring to) and the reason torrent sites are blocked here is due to a high profile court case in which ISP's were legally required to block specific sites. AFAIK they actually fought against it. When you visit the sites you get a message from your ISP explaining that it's blocked because they "received an order from the Courts requiring us to prevent access to this site in order to help protect against copyright infringement".
I wasn't aware of that, good to know. The blocks are useless and easy to bypass with a proxy. I've noticed recently though they've started to block some of the proxies specifically setup to help people flout the blocks.
In RoI, the only torrent site that was blocked by all ISPs was The Pirate Bay. Eircom rolled over for the media industry, but the other ISPs fought and lost a court case over TPB.
There may be another case about KAT soon from what I've heard. Eircom has presumably blocked more sites.
Isn't there a large body of existing knowledge on how to help the average Chines person get through the Great Firewall of China? Considering how relatively easy it is to get onto The Pirate Bay and other sites one way or another, despite the present ban... Like all Tory policies, dead in the water, totally a waste of effort and money, and thoroughly without integrity, to boot.
I'd recommend Tor, but the Tor Browser Bundle does not work -at all- out of the box like I'd assume it would (on OS X). I spent over an hour fiddling with it trying to get it to work (10.8) and it would always die on starting up.
This is only good in the long run because it is further proof of how out of control the UK government is, and is bound to keep waking up the apathetic.
the Chinese firewall is easy to get around, it's just there to make it inconvenient enough so most don't bother. I use vpn when I'm in China and offer to set it up for my relatives, but the response has been "it's too complicated". Most people don't want to learn the tools just to access youtube/google, especially when there are Chinese equivalents that cater specifically to a Chinese audience.
You could not be more wrong. Technological "solutions" can only punt the issue down the road a few months or years, after which your "solution" will also be outlawed, and never mind the collateral damage.
The problem lies in folk lacking understanding and being scared. That's what needs fixing.
Your problem, on the other hand, is perhaps in lacking understanding and being scared of politics... unfortunately politics is all-pervasive. You cannot make that fact go away by burying your head in the sand and trying to work around the roadblocks that it throws up. While you're busy trying to avoid politics, those who are playing the game are winning.
Just remember that every time you are tempted to put your head back in the sand - while you are trying hard to pretend politics doesn't exist, the fundamentalists, spooks, industrialists, bankers etc. are playing hard & to win at all costs. The easiest targets for them are the ones who don't push back because they aren't playing. Which means you.
All these filters by ISPs are optional.
Is it that hard to say "hell no" when they ask you "do you want us to block stuff?"
The amount of misinformation spread about this mythical "UK porn filter" is astounding, but I guess unsurprising as it fits completely into the orwellian surveillance state conspiracy theory agenda.
Cameron is pandering to worried parents who believe the internet is a bad place, and little Johnny must be protected by a filter. The government believe it will mean they'll win the next election. It's just politics.
It's nothing whatsoever about censorship. Anyone can opt out of the filters, and anyone can get past the filters with a couple of clicks.
edit: anyone downvoting actually live in the UK? Any of you actually have any hard facts? Or are you just regurgitating the crap you read on the internet.
The fact that we are even discussing this as option should be alarming. This is how to erode personal privacy.
You dont just put up cameras on every street corner pointing at citizens. You attach them to traffic signals. You tell them CCDs have become cheaper than other sensors. You tell them you will never actually even record the images- it'll just be processed by a computer to control the lights. Then later you tell them- we have these cameras here, we might as well stop red light runners. Oops the court wants to see the images we'll just turn on the record feature. You know what would be great? Face recognition and software that tracks an individual as they move through the city.
Putting infrastructure in place for "opt-out" filters will lead to mandatory filtering of esoteric materials such as asking the question- why is this country so wealthy yet cannot afford to give their children quality university education the way neighboring nations can?
Living in the UK does not make you an expert. You should ask someone who lives in China. Specifically, find a college aged kid and ask them what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
>You should ask someone who lives in China. Specifically, find a college aged kid and ask them what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Do they really not know or are they just saying what the gov wants to hear to avoid difficulties? As much as this filter is a bad idea, because it should be opt-in, it is quite beyond the pale to say it will lead to a way to prevent questioning of education funding.
I was under the impression that these policies are opt-out, rather than opt-in, so many are on by default. Since default settings are pretty much never changed (organ donation rates are the canonical example here), that's potentially an issue.
Second, and this is important, the filters aren't controlled at the level of an individual user, but at the level of a subscriber. So as the article says, an abusive partner/parent can prevent their spouse or children from accessing resources that could help them - that's why there is outrage about blocking Childline - a site where you can report child abuse.
Combine on-by-default with "blocking resources for abused minors," and you have what people are complaining about, here.
Child line is not blocked in the default o2 filter. Its blocked in the opt-in filter, as is most of the net (it's a whitelist). This is clear if you use the o2 URL checker yourself.
While not agreeing with the filters, it seems that there's a large and vocal contingent who are being hysterical and getting the facts wrong. They are not helping.
Some people will be embarrassed to make that phone call. Some people won't be able to do it because they don't have a credit card (if they're on PAYG, for example) and will have to go into a store, which is inconvenient, time consuming, and potentially embarrassing. For others, in the case of a wireline internet connection, the account might not be in their name and they will be unable to do it. I've had situations where the internet connection wasn't under my name but my housemate's name, and, of course, I couldn't have just called up or clicky clickied and disabled the censorship. I'm not someone that embarrasses easily but there are those that might not want to have that conversation with their housemate. What if those housemates decided that they didn't want porn going over the household's internet connection, or were too embarrassed themselves?
The next few generations are going to grow up with the idea that nanny filters and censorship is fine, or that porn is something shameful that you have to ask permission from a CSR to see. Then there's the sophisticated central apparatus in place for the government to trivially block any sites that they deem unsuitable, content they might deem exempt from their opt-out procedures.
Just because O2 and other UK mobile operators have been censoring for a while doesn't make it okay. Now you're arguing that censorship-by-default is fine because it's been going on in some capacity for a while already! See how this works?
Have you ever been abused? Children in abusive situations are scared; the internet provides some mild form of anonymous comfort, and is most likely where a child would report abuse. That or to their school, but often they feel that the school is "in on it" and the internet is safer because they are "an outside authority."
Source: I know a few adults who have been abused in the past. Anecdotal.
> anyone downvoting actually live in the UK? Any of
> you actually have any hard facts? Or are you just
> regurgitating the crap you read on the internet.
I haven't downvoted you, but I do live in the UK, and I am informed by at least three colleagues that their sites are now being blocked whereas they previously were not blocked. Further, they are reporting serious difficulties getting them unblocked, one spending over 40 minutes on the phone trying to get the person on the other end to understand that they are the site owner, and not simply someone wanting to get access to the site.
So yes, I can confirm that I live in the UK, and am not just "regurgitating the crap [I] read on the internet."
That screenshot says it's blocked on the opt in under12 filter, that's been running for years. It's a whitelist, those sites have probably always been blocked on it.
On my UK cellphone provider to remove the "adult content" filter I am required to provide my 44 digit passport number. Needless to say this IMHO rates as significantly more than "just a couple of clicks".
It was always about censorship and suppression of ideas. A revamped Section 28 for the digital age.
> edit: anyone downvoting actually live in the UK?
Yes.
> Any of you actually have any hard facts? Or are you just regurgitating the crap you read on the internet.
Ok, what counts has hard facts and not just "read on the internet" that you have that the rest of us don't?
> It's nothing whatsoever about censorship.
Drivel. Pure and simply wrong. This is the infrastructure of censorship. The fact that it's only going to be applied to censor "think of the children!" things may be true, but it is handing enormous power to censor whatever they chose to this government, the next government, and the governments after that. The boundaries can change. Actually that's the point of the article, did you take anything on board from that?
There are several posters elsewhere in this discussion who have witnessed it firsthand in other countries. Is that hard fact enough? it's not a forgone conclusion that the UK will slide down the same slippery slope, but that's no reason to be complacent about it. This is a nasty thing that should be resisted.
so it's ok to be able to opt in to blocking child line, stonewall and samaritans? or sites that "promote gay and lesbian lifestyles"? it's not like it's hard for abusive parents/partners to opt in.
also, the filesharing filters are very much not opt-in, and you can't disable them at all. I'm extremely worried about all these filters being rolled into that
1. When you sign up to an ISP, they explicitly ask if you want a filter.
2. Asking your ISP to stop filtering is simple, easy, and immediate.
Seriously. This is a non issue.
Several cellphones have come with filtering enabled by default for years and years. It's not a big deal, you just call them up and say "Yeah when I bought this phone, I wanted to use the internet. So disable your crappy little filter, and we'll say no more about it"
Everything I'm reading at the moment suggest that this is not the case in the UK. Apparently as of about now, ISPs are turning on filtering by default without asking, and you must explicitly contact them to get it turned off. People I know who use O2 are, without being asked or contacted, finding that sites are getting blocked.
Some ISPs are, apparently, asking for explicit confirmation with a phrase such as "So you are requesting access to sites that carry pornographical material", and if you want to access anything that the Government has decided to block, you must reply "Yes."
I have no doubt that lists of people who have opted-out will, at some point, be leaked.
When signing up for fixed line broadband with any of the biggest ISPs you have to make a choice between filtered and unfiltered. As the GP said, mobile broadband has filtering enabled by default and has done for years.
Source: Am in the UK & have opted out of filtering.
All fixed line ISPs allow toggling the filter bias their online control panel, or by clicking a button when signing up online. Mobile ISPs vary - O2 mobile require you give your card details.
The thought comes to mind: why isn't filtering an add-on that costs extra? "You want kid- and church-safe internet access? Order our CleanStream product."
Incomplete sentences confuse me. Of course "pay for opt-out" is kind of how it is now, since those who opt out will still have to subsidize the support burden of filtering.
What you have there is a list of people that want to look at adult material… Nobody should want to be on this list because it's completely open for abuse. As these filters and 'opt-out' lists become more fine-grained it becomes more of a problem…
Soon enough they will be able to sell 'the internet' to people like my mother ('omg, you work "on the internet"? but there are pedophiles "on the internet!"' 'Mum, am thirty' [sic])
We knew the internet while it was the Far West. It was (allegedly) dangerous to some extent, it was fun, and very much free. I hope it will stay such (well, it still isn't that much anymore, but still) to the maximum possible extent but I don't feel very optimistic, bar for some marginalised areas like IRC.