No sex please, we're British.
PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'
Britain's four biggest telcos are under pressure from the Prime Minister to describe their forthcoming network-level internet filters as "default on" by 22 July, The Register understands. A well-placed industry source told us today that Tory leader David Cameron will make an announcement about the web content controls next …
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:51 GMT Dazed and Confused
Re: No sex please, we're British.
blocking lega> sites that contain porn, violence and other material that parents might deem to be inappropriate for their kids.
Err no, not actually, they have no interest in filtering out what "Parents feel is inappropriate for their kids"
What they are only interested in is censoring what they feel is appropriate for my kids.
Their views and mine are frequently not the same.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:54 GMT MrXavia
Re: No sex please, we're British.
Exactly!
What I find inappropriate is not what others would, and what others find inappropriate I find acceptable...
But I am in favour of filters on the router, but NOT at ISP level,
unless the adults in the house can control which computer can do what, then there is no control..
Anyway, by the time my kids are interested in sex, I expect them to be able to bypass any filter I put in place...
But if you trust your kids, and teach them right from wrong, unfettered internet access is no more risk than letting them go to town with friends or to the local library (if they still exist)
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 08:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Usually I'm suspicious of almost all government control. But, horror of horrors, I can actually see this working. Just as crime is related to opportunity, so, ahem, children viewing porn is related to opportunity. The reality is *there will be fewer children seeing at porn* and that's going to be a good thing.
I have to be honest and relate a story here about my own child. When she was about eight years old loads of kids had come round with their parents for a house party. All the kids went upstairs and, as kids left to their own devices are prone to do, they were starting to get overexcited. We could hear them all evening. But then at about 8pm, after a flurry if giggling and conspiratorial voices, suddenly there was complete silence. "What's going on?" I thought, "this is unnatural." I sneaked upstairs and found them all sitting around the computer. They (I won't name names) had been using the web browser and typed www.wee.com and www.poo.com into the browser. Innocence shattered (not sure what's at those addresses now, don't want to know).
A couple of points here. First my daughter had my partners password. I was always quite careful to ensure different accounts were used, but my partner saw that as me just being anal. Second she had her own account on her own laptop that was pretty much unlimited anyway. I had found the site blocking software at the time to be a pain in the arse, so switched it off and relied on having a good talk with her about the Internet and the fact that generally she was and remains a sensible girl. But if I'm honest, I wonder if that was good enough, and wonder if I could be arsed enough and if my "can't be arsed-ness" was post justified a bit too much by arguments and concerns over freedom from censorship etc. because the reality is, now my daughter is grown up (yes she's well edjusted etc) I do think it would have been better if the bad stuff was less available for her and all her friends, especially between the crucial ages 8 to 14 (well i know because i had logging switched on at the router), but who knows what she saw, at friends houses.
Clearly this was not going to be enough to prevent all encounters. I'm sure these new measures won't prevent all encounters anyway, but they surely will reduce how much children see. I'm suspicious of most things state controlled, but a can't say I can bring myself to get in a lather about this being the thin end of the wedge, re censorship either. Porn is a pretty distinct category, and there is always the option for the the in-charge member of the household to disable it. This is a storm in a tea-cup. Indeed the biggest problem I see is that the person who likes to think (he) is in charge, may not be. So those who will feel this measure strongest, will be the men who's wives says "this is a good ideas isn't it dear, let's leave the filter on."
"Absolutely" comes the reply from the man shaking his head.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 15:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
> So those who will feel this measure strongest, will be the men who's wives says "this is a good ideas isn't it dear, let's leave the filter on."
or the women who don't want to own up to their husband that they sometimes surf porn while he's out during the day. Remember the days when corner shops used to do video rentals. Amazing how many videos from the plain cardboard box behind the counter used to be rented after dropping the kids at school and be returned just before pick up time.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:23 GMT John Smith 19
Cameron's looking pretty stupid on this one. But he wants all Britains to feel like this->
The question is who are you trying to protect?
In a free society of adults it should be opt in not opt out.
I'll remain a great deal more concerned about what nosy b**tard is looking at my metadata than if someone is looking at pron on my line.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:32 GMT Piro
Re: Cameron's looking pretty stupid on this one. But he wants all Britains to feel like this->
I completely agree.
We're a nation of adults who can opt in to things if we want. Freedom should be the default.
Freedom is no longer the default, and that is not just a slippery slope, it's a lube-greased flume.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:20 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: Cameron's looking pretty stupid on this one. But he wants all Britains to feel like this->
And then no doubt next it will be blocking anything that could be branded as "terrorism" or supporting suchlike, with the usual nebulous and flexible definition of exactly what and who the govt of the time doesn't like (or is told not to like) that should be included.
It's almost a shame we don't have something more up to date than the Magna Carta as a parallel to the American Declaration of Indepdendence to use as a cornerstone and rallying point towards freedoms of speech and the like.
Having said that if it's done by screwing around with DNS, presumably underground (or not so underground, or possibly just overseas) alternate DNS servers may spring up offering a work-around for those who may want it, for legitimate reasons or otherwise.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 16:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Doesn't seem to be helping....
"It's almost a shame we don't have something more up to date than the Magna Carta as a parallel to the American Declaration of Indepdendence to use as a cornerstone and rallying point towards freedoms of speech and the like."
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be helping US much....
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:07 GMT Tom 38
Re: Cameron's looking pretty stupid on this one. But he wants all Britains to feel like this->
a lube-greased flume
Exactly the stuff that I'm going to need to register for now.
Except that I'm not going to. Fuck them. I'm sticking all my internet traffic through a fat pipe to a dodgy ISP in Amsterdam.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:49 GMT Vladimir Plouzhnikov
Re: Cameron's looking pretty stupid on this one. But he wants all Britains to feel like this->
"The question is who are you trying to protect?"
Obviously, they are trying to protect themselves. Once filtering becomes ubiquitous it will make it much easier to control "leaks", whistleblowers and just journalists with pictures of politicians in compromising positions, or so they think, anyway...
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:10 GMT Real Ale is Best
Lawsuits
I think this will be opening the ISPs to a large number of lawsuits:
"Argh! My kiddies have seen porn on your filtered Internet! Your advert said it would be on by default!!"
"But we only wrote that because the government told us to, and we told them it wouldn't work anyway..."
"I don't care! You said it would be safe, and it isn't!!!"
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 14:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Anti-nanny?
>If there's such a market for a "clean" ISP, logic would dictate that the market would have created one by now
There is .... but very few UK domestic users are likely to pay the premium for the (human) work involved in maintaining and managing whitelists.
The government should centralise filtering, blame and effort for child protection - it's already paying out millions in tax payer cash each year for exactly this kind of service from the educational ISPs.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:32 GMT mark l 2
If the filtering is based in DNS lookups how will it work if you just change your DNS server to use alternatively DNS such as Google DNS server or open DNS, what about existing customers are they suddenly going to all get filtered by default or is for new customers only?
I worked out in schools for a few years and the kids know about using proxys to access facebook etc when its blocked on the schools internet so you constantly playing wack a mole to block the proxy sites as soon as they are found. so if it easy to get around with just changing the DNS or using proxys then thats something that kids will easily work out how to do and once one kid does it it will soon get spread around all the other kids in no time. Then the parents will be blaming the ISPs that the kids can get around the filtering rather than learning to actually supervise their kids.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:23 GMT wowfood
Bah, but I don't want to have to watch my porn through a proxy. Half of the proxies are either stupidly slow, or they charge extra to stream video.
Any other easy way to get past the idiocy once implemented?
And I agree with the masses on this, every other service is opt in, legally you have to opt in to getting spam, you have to opt in to giving away your organs. So why do you have to opt out of filtering?
And lets face it, it's targetting the masses, when it's only aimed at a certain market. "Stop your children seeing smut" 23.6 million households in the uk. And only 12 million families with or without children (taken from 2011) so they're blocking content for the majority when it's targetting the minority.
If anyone finds a "Don't autoban our porn" petition let me know about it.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 21:13 GMT Annihilator
"Any other easy way to get past the idiocy once implemented?"
Yes, you phone your ISP and say loudly and proudly "I'm a grown-up - switch my Internet back on to include porn and kindly eff off out of my browsing habits"
Or switch to a provider that just won't implement it. AAISP springs to mind.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 15:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
@mark I 2 : they intercept and proxy responses. I've been seeing some examples of this on Sky recently, none of which persist more than a couple of days (Sky testing?) but I know for sure on one domain Sky were proxying a response which said the zone did not exist. It did & does, had nothing to do with IWF or any court order as BT Broadband worked fine.
tl;dr its not rocket science....
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:32 GMT David Hicks
"nobbles DNS lookups"
So... is it actually going to detect these and discard them, or is it just going to return NXDOMAIN when someone looks up something naughty on the BSkyB DNS server?
Because that latter is circumvented with a quick change of DNS setting to 8.8.8.8.
I also forsee a lot of teenagers getting this "tor" business figured out pretty quickly.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:24 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: "nobbles DNS lookups" - correction
You have to remember that this is stuff drawn up by politicians for application to adults. Hence whilst it may bamboozle Joe and Jane Public, their kids will of course just side-step it as kids always do in new and imaginative ways.
It sounds more like the internet equivalent of child-proof medicine bottle lids. You know, the ones that only kids are dexterous enough to open...
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 13:25 GMT Blacklight
Re: "nobbles DNS lookups" - correction
Not quite. All the ISP has to do is intercept and re-route all port 53 traffic, then regardless of which DNS IP you *think* you're talking to, you're not.
I do this at home, to ensure anything on my LAN *cannot* bypass my OpenDNS settings.
If you want to get around it, go investigate "DNSCrypt", as that encrypts your DNS and allows you to point to an upstream server which isn't on port 53.....
(and moving on beyond DNS resolution, any IP which is blacklisted will still be blacklisted, so regardless of how you lookup/get the IP resolved, a filtered site is still a filtered site. Unless you start using a VPN...)
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:01 GMT David Hicks
Re: "nobbles DNS lookups" - correction
>> All the ISP has to do is intercept and re-route all port 53 traffic, then regardless of which DNS IP you *think* you're talking to, you're not.
Well, DNSSec works around this, and is already usable with Google's public DNS, so you should be able to tell if you're getting doctored results.
>> I do this at home, to ensure anything on my LAN *cannot* bypass my OpenDNS settings.
Unless they have a tor client, which to be fair is something that mimics VPN, and gets around any/all IP blacklists etc. I only really mentioned DNS in particular because if that's all that Sky are messing with then that's pretty damn easy to work around.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 17:29 GMT Dr Dan Holdsworth
MI5 howls of outrage
At this point, I can almost hear the howls of outrage from MI5. Effectively, what the Government are doing is teaching the entire intelligent population of the country how to communicate with the outside world in ways which are impossible to sniff. Doing this throws a gigantic spanner in the works for tricks like metadata sniffing, especially if someone with serious marketing power starts up a combined VPN and email service based in Switzerland.
At that point the spooks might as well give up and go take up chicken farming, since very little metadata are going to be leaked from such a set-up; this also does a neat end-run around any local filtering system. Block it, and big business will scream blue murder. Leave it, and politicians look like complete numpties (not for the first time, either).
Cameron's best option right now is to try to force some sort of ISP-subsidised router-level filtering and leave it at that, retreating gracefully whilst trumpeting loudly about having solved the problem without treading on precious civil liberties. It ain't a perfect solution, indeed doing so is pretty much admitting defeat, but it works better than any other course of action.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 00:38 GMT Steven Roper
@Dr Dan Holdsworth
"Block it, and big business will scream blue murder."
For now. As more and more people start using VPNs to hide their copyright-infringing and porn-surfing activities, they will come under greater scrutiny. We've already seen the start of this with Visa and Mastercard refusing to process payments to some VPN providers.
Ultimately what I can see ending up happening is that you'll eventually need some kind of "business licence" to use a VPN, and if you're detected using one without a licence (e.g. by sniffing your traffic and finding it encrypted to a specific domain all the time) you'll cop a hefty fine.
Of course, getting a VPN licence will cost a small fortune and you'll have to "reasonably prove that you require the use of a VPN in the normal course of business" or some legalese wank like that. This way, "big business" can still make use of VPNs as they need but the proles will be locked out of them and left exposed for Big Brother to spy on.
I predict the Western Nanny States (USA / UK / Aus / NZ / Canada) will introduce something like this within the next 5 years, as a greater proportion of the public cotton on to VPNs. And the endless march of the erosion of human liberties will continue...
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:55 GMT Steven Raith
Re: "nobbles DNS lookups"
This.
It's like putting a chocolate padlock on a two foot high fence. to stop the kids getting out of the garden.
Getting past it is such an offensively simple task that it's just not worth wasting time on - might as well just leave it open and stop inconveniencing people.
If they don't want people getting out of their garden, parents (or ISPs selling a soltution) will have to do it properly - install a five foot high fence with steel padlocks (or locked down routers, dropping any DNS requests that aren't their own, etc) for those who *want* it.
Anything else is an utter waste of time.
Steven R
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:49 GMT Don Jefe
Not About Kids
This isn't about the children, things like this never are. This is insurance for the politicians: 'See here peasants, my policies have engaged [company x] in protecting [popular thing]. [Politician x] didn't do anything. If you care about [thing] then you will recognize I am the only logical choice to lead us into the future.'
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
"The battle between the government and telcos ..."
What's really disturbing about this bollocks is the whole tone of the letter, which implies that the PM seriously believes he just has to express a wish and the ISPs will give it serious attention (to a given timescale, no less).
That means either that the PM is delusional, or the battle between government and telcos has already been lost by the telcos, and they are merely trying to save face by feebly protesting what they know they are going to roll over for at some point.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:32 GMT Colin Millar
Re: "The battle between the government and telcos ..."
Give him a break - he probably doesn't give a shit about filters and intertube crap - it just that he thought that this prime ministering gig would involve him getting his own way on something, sometime and 5 years in he's getting a bit frustrated and putting his foor down on anything that moves. Maybe George will let him pick a the next three legged dog that they are going to bet everything on.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:12 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: DNS look up @Irongut
They can knobble this as well. All they have to do is block TCP and UDP to port 53 on any systems other than their DNS servers in either the router they supply to you, or within their infrastructure.
Would be hugely unpopular with most of the readers of this site, but would make no difference to the majority of their customers.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:42 GMT Phil O'Sophical
Re: DNS look up @Irongut
> All they have to do is block TCP and UDP to port 53 o
and in no time at all a bunch of dodgy DNS servers will appear using a port other than 53, which will appear to solve the problem but in fact will direct the juicier porn site names to virus-laden scam sites.
This is just DRM all over again, it won't stop the people who know what they're doing, and will just make life unnecessarily difficult for ordinary users.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:28 GMT Tim Jenkins
Re: DNS look up
Yup - last couple of generations of BT Homehub haven't had DNS as a user-available option, even under 'Advanced' settings, for at least 2 years:
"With regard to the way we work with DNS, for security reasons the Home Hub will not allow its DNS gateway address to be changed" - BTCare Community Mod (dated June 2011)
http://community.bt.com/t5/Other-BB-Queries/Changing-default-DNS-Server/td-p/191215/page/3
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:47 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Is it a national blocklist ?
The "Internet Watch Foundation" produce the list, they are a charity so they are independant of government (snigger) but also don't have any official oversight - they ban what they want and you have no appeal.
you also have no idea who their backers are, who is funding them or what their political/economic/religious motives are - but you can't possibly have a problem with this because they are protecting the children
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 11:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Violent Sites Included
If this is blocking violent sites then I am all in favour, no more problems with facebook having beheading videos as facebook will be blocked for showing violence, and Youtube will be blocked for showing body part carnage on Russian roads..........
What do you mean it doesn't work like that, oh it's only the sites that Dave and the Daily Mail don't like, well I never.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 20:35 GMT Werner McGoole
Re: Violent Sites Included
Hmm, well the protect-the-kiddies content filter that came on my wife's phone (and was on by default) also blocked alcohol-related sites. So her first attempt when on holiday to locate a good pub for a meal was singularly unsuccessful.
Never mind, I'm sure the government don't have a thing about alcohol.
Oh, hang on...
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:11 GMT Ian 62
DO.NOT.WANT.
Dear ISP,
cc Government of the Day.
I 'the upvoter below' do not want.
If you should implement such a system I will take my business else where.
If all of you should implement such a system I will encrypt my traffic via an offshore thirdparty.
That'll screw you over either way, wont it now? Either no business, or no ability to traffic shape the protocols you dont like.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:38 GMT alain williams
Who makes the list ?
Ie what should be on it ? Will the list grow to contain things that are, by some, deemed ''bad'' ?
I assume that it will contain sex sites, but what about other things that can damage young minds, eg: violence, astrology, suicide, anorexic encouraging, religion ??
I could add: BNP, taliban & facebook since some would regard those as damaging ?
Daily Mail readers will never agree with Guardian readers, so best to leave it down to the individual household and what they see as right for their kids -- ie their prejudices.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 08:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Who makes the list ?
Screw the porn, block pop music. I have a choice over whether I watch porn or not and I'm actively aware it's pornographic. I don't want to walk down the street however and hear every radio blurting out profane rubbish about how a girl wants to be touched in her special place and used like a piece of meat.
Moreso, I actually hate (and this part isn't being sarcastic) when you walk down the street and there's a little girl like, 5-6 years old singing their favourite song about how they want to get fucked. (back to sarcasm) Before going after the stuff that can be ignored conciously we need to ban the smut on the radio.
(slightly sarcastic again) and how about banning newspapers. I'm tired of buying the daily fail or the sun and finding nipples everywhere. And these aren't even out of reach of children. I demand that all newspapers stop posting nip slips and camera clunge this instant, it's abhorent and it is warping the young children who read them (going by the quality of writing in the sun, I assume it's aimed at 10 year olds)
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 12:44 GMT Rikkeh
the Headlines/court cases of tomorrow
If it's anything like O2's current mobile network blocker, it'll restrict a lot of sites without a trace of p0rn on them as well. Even a nun (was going to say priest, but bad example) would need to ask for the block to be taken down for the full browsing experience.
Of course, once the filters are in place you'll have tabloid headlines of "TV personality/school teacher gets dirty internet [sic]", taken from the inevitable leaked lists.
Far more worryingly, there's a very good chance that prosecutors would seek to have how a defendant's internet filter is set up put entered as evidence and an even greater one that the police would see an opt-out as grounds for suspicion. "He's gets teh p0rn, he must be a bad 'un!"
And all because our politicians are too gutless to tell Joe Public and the Daily Fail that, if someone's too stupid to be able to tick a box and opt in to the blocking if they want it, then they probably can't be trusted with the magic box powered by sparks that gives them the internet in the first place.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 13:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
A lot of people (mainly Mumsnet, the Daily Mail crowd, etc.) seem to forget that their six-year-old or whatever will eventually grow up. (CHILDREN DO THAT!?)
I wonder how fucked up they'll end up being unable to look at porn when they're 16 or whatever, and how many of them will end up becoming rapists, murderers or sex offenders.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 13:16 GMT Scarborough Dave
bit pointless anyway
This would mean that say most of the results from a "big boobies" image search on Google would be filtered.
But what about Facebook and Twitter, for example would the EvilPostman (NSFW!) on twitter be filtered, or some of the Facebook groups which can also be very raw.
We are probably better teaching the kids to filter themselves and keep safe.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 13:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'd love to see the system they can implement that would survive five minutes in front of a 15 year old wanting grumble flicks or facebook or whatever it is you try and block.
Be the easiest QA/testing job in the universe.
Plonk a 15 year old male in front of it and say "bet you can't find any porn" and see how long it takes.
*five years into the project*
V124.2 - Failed (10 minutes)
Please submit V125.0 by the end of the month. Thanks.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 23:06 GMT Joel 1
Re: When I were a lad.
If your school had a proxy server when you "were a lad", then you clearly still are!
Eee, youngsters today, thinking that schools had access to t'web. I remember the joys of ascii porn being passed around on fanfold paper round back of t'bikesheds.
You were lucky! We had to get our porn on punchcards, line them up and then project light through them onto t' darkened walls of coal celler where we 'ad our lessons...
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 13:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Simplified reassurance
The only reassurance I need from Tory nanny is that they'll collectively be departing on the soon-to-be-built Golgafrincham B Ark along with the staff of the Mail, its readers and frankly a good sixty percent of the rest of the population, particularly those who think "family friendly" should be obligaTory for the happily childless too.
I had thought that the scariest bit of political debate I ever witnessed was three local councillors waiting at a childrens home one wet Sunday afternoon for a grip 'n' grin with Ronald McDonald. To fill the time, they discussed - seriously (no, really) - whether there was only one extremely busy "Ronald McDonald" constantly criss crossing the Atlantic, or a number of actors attending events while the genuine Ronald McDonald remained at HQ.
The Westminster crowd are quite their equal in cluelessness, but much, much more dangerous.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 15:51 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Why is regulation a bad thing?
Because there won't be an official regulated government list created by sane (or at least accountable ) people - that would be Big Brother.
There will be an order to "use a list" but the ISPs are free to pick any "unaccountable opaque censorship restriction" list they choose.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 13:48 GMT nevstah
if its on by default..
then they are at liberty to change and update the terms of the filtering without asking, because you have already agreed to it. a bit like when your bank changes its terms and conditions
what about folks without children? surely they dont need parental controls? surely its instulting to be assumed to be a parent? what about folks who *can't* have kids?
that said, they can and will filter whatever they choose. they don't have to tell us - the reason they do, is to win political brownie points
theres a lot they don't tell us though, because its 'in the nations best interest' not to. internet censoring is no different.
you can't miss what you don't know about afterall!
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:01 GMT cotsweb
Top 4 ISPs only
A quick search tells me my ISP is only number 8 in the list.
Perhaps this will be a self-selecting measure if only those who use BT, Virgin, Sky and Talk-Talk will be affected. If you care enough about it you will change to a smaller (and almost certainly better) ISP.
The majority will be "protected" and the rest of us can carry on taking responsibilty for our own lives (and those of our children).
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:16 GMT Tom 38
Re: Top 4 ISPs only
Did you not notice BT, Virgin, Sky and Talk Talk bought all the decent ISPs already? Yeah, it's fine, I'll go with PlusNet - no, its really BT? ok, BlueYonder - oh they gone too? - BeThere - gah, fuck Sky. Ok, I've been saving this choice for real disasters - Pipex. Wait, TalkTalk did what to Pipex??
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 15:50 GMT cotsweb
Re: Top 4 ISPs only
Yes; I used to be with Nildram before they got swallowed by Pipex and then as you say...
Pipex. Wait, TalkTalk did what to Pipex??
I have been very happy with Zen for several years now and they still look strong, my main worry is that the politicians may eventually see past the top 4.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 14:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Statistics make this seem even worse!
I'm already against this. Just by gut feel and instinct I'm against this.
But I've just had a look at the statistics. The 'top 4 uk ISPs' account for something like 19mil subscribers.
The census said there were something like 22mil households.
Assuming a household has one subscriber.
Assuming 'most' households have some sort of ISP provided connection.
By brow beating just those 4 ISPs into applying the Government flavourite filter, they can block whatever content they dont like from at least 86% of the population.
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Friday 19th July 2013 21:54 GMT Tridac
Re: Jobs bonanza!
There have been open source no charge url filter lists around for firewalls like ipcop for years and being open source, don't have the dead hand of nanny state. The entries for each list are individually enabled / disabled, so you have all the fine grained choice in terms of what content comes into your home.
Some of the content on the internet has no place in any home with children, unless you are really sick. Imho, of course and your mileage may vary :-)...
Chris
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 15:13 GMT bag o' spanners
Know your target
ISPs don't have a vote(unless dodgy political contributions count), but lazy, ignorant, and gullible parents do.
Once again, gubmint airheads expect third parties to do the parents job of educating their offspring in the ways of the world, while simultaneously screwing everyone who doesn't have any progeny. Cameron being a prime example of a gormless clot who refuses to take responsibility for any of the failed policies his lobbyist cronies dream up.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 15:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Official! Cameron + fiends = Shit for Brains
I have an idea. Why don't Cameron and fiends install a shit filter in their brains/mouths*.
Maybe Nick Clegg could take his head out of Cameron's arse, smell the fresh air and at least try to debate this. But no. Never going to happen.
Autocracy... It's alive and well and living in Cameron's dreams.
*Let's not forget, our illustrious leader didn't even know the simple difference between "debt" and "deficit" (and this shower are running the country? Ouch!)
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 15:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
active-choice: Cameron out of office.
We designed a filter system for a new ISP, parents could control everything, inc who there children could contact with email/IM and in our 3D worlds. We had a whole department generating content and games and were getting ready for launch. The money men did some more market research and the day before I signed the contracts for the ADSL pipes the project was canned and everyone given P45s. There was no market for it, it's all special interest groups & politics, same now and it was then.
If this gets pushed on to people there will be a market for smaller "default off" providers, who will be, as usual, providing a better service for their clients too..
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 17:07 GMT Don Jefe
Re: As a parent
That is a real problem in all Western news media. The 'news' gets away with some pretty terrible stuff because it is 'news' (by their definition anyway) and any moves to control it is interference by the government. It is a fine line to walk for sure.
Here in the U.S. I listened to 'experts' describe, in detail, how to make a bomb out of a pressure cooker. What had once been niche knowledge was being publicly disseminated from multiple sources just so 'people could understand how dangerous common household items can be'. Over here it used to be that inherent morals and ethics prevented some things from being broadcast but that system was taken advantage of by a greedy few. The worst part is that there was almost no public outcry, they were making money and creating jobs you know.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 16:47 GMT Maty
this isn't about protecting kids
It's about getting control of the net.
Of course the current idea won't work. But now we've accepted that our web usage should be 'filtered' (read 'censored'), the govt can 'tweak' the system till it has Chinese-style control.
Legislation has been steadily working in that direction for years.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 17:27 GMT Wanda Lust
Sick, sick, sick & tired of this imbecile Cameron
Every week there's some populist, lame and inconsequential idea or policy spun out and fed to the sheeple. Everything's just a distraction from the main issue which is that these pillocks are shafting the greater proportion of the citizens they claim to govern.
This is going to be a waste of time, it's totally legit for Mr & Mrs Smith of 3 Acacia Avenue to surf on over to "www.blacksozzies.co.uk" & so they will do switching off the controls thus leaving little Jimmy & Jessica exposed! What about gambling, what about protecting the little ones from the mountain of advertising ridden kids sites, the ........
Argggh I'm just exasperated .....
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 18:09 GMT Michael Habel
How will this work? On BT & BSkyB or Virgin Media Routers ONLY?! Or must every Manufacturer now bow to this? I for One can not see how the ISP is to filter anything mildly upsetting to anyone. Without it being labeled as blatant censorship on the other side. I certainly do not see how this would work over the Web though.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 19:15 GMT Herby
Block everything?
If they want to block content that is "objectionable", then they should block ALL content. That way there can be no decision made. Then have the dialog box state:
This content is blocked, to unblock tick this box
Of course then ALL content gets passed, but ISPs can claim that the user asked for the content!
(Un)Fortunately this is the only proper blocking scheme!
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 19:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
More Choice
Why, why, why?
The internet here in the uk is already rubbished enough as every site asks you if you want a cookie with that webpage you just click on.
Remember when "Homosexual" won the Olympics....due to the software changing it from Gay?
If you have kids it should be YOU looking after them......YOU put the boundaries in place....You take steps to make sure they are not over stepped!
Same as beer.......it is there legal to all adults....it is YOU who must instil some kind of order within your family not me or big gov.
If the internet is as evil as you think......save money, play with the kids and do not pay the monthly bill for it.
Rant over :-)
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 19:37 GMT Mark 110
Calm down
I don't see the problem - they aren't saying that you can't optout.
Just got a new sim card. Parental control was on by default. I phoned them and its now off. If they remove the right to turn it off then yes I will scream but this seems a good thing to me. There is some awful nasty stuff out there and if I had kids then I would prefer they get well into their teens before they run into it.
I would filter it myself true, but not everyone is a techie.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 22:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Calm down
Coz then you go on the perv list at the ISP, which then gets stolen and given to a red top news paper, who then cherry pick enough to get "FILTHY PERV TEACHER OPTS IN FOR PORN!" "Are your children being taught by a pron watching perv? Check this list!" "Is your neighbor a potential rapist? Check this list!"
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 21:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
in x years time...
1. the filtering will have had no noticeable effect (although, as always, "involved" parties will be making claims to the contrary, based on some random figures in carefully
2. the system WILL stay "on", regardless (as the restrictions are ALWAYS one-way traffic).
3. meanwhile, a usb pen drive left on the train by a public servant / senior police officer / unknown party will be found to contain a list of of all the people, including their personal details, addresses, etc. who happen to have actively told their ISPs to turn the filter OFF. This will be front-page news. Briefly.
4. the number of RIPA requests will be dramatically higher against those individuals, who happen to have chosen to have the default OFF, than against the other, "law-abiding" citizens. And if not RIPA, then other methods will be applied to keep an eye on the pedo-terrorists. If nothing concrete, at least their details will be cross-linked to their travel details, buying habits, and other records, to produce a more in-depth psychological profile. But this won't be news, even briefly, because those RIPA requests are not subject to FOI requests, are they? Unless some junior UK government contractor, uncomfortable with the gap between "protecting the homeland" and day-to-day reality of his job, will claim political asylum in Scotland, having released those figures.
5. etc.
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Tuesday 16th July 2013 23:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's not DNS
It's either a layer 7 port mirror (more configurable) or a passive tap (less failure prone) to load balancers that deliver your connection requests to one of a number of detection systems.
They parse the URLs, do look ups in a table. If the URL is banned, the system issues a TCP reset to the target server so you never get the data returned to your browser. It can do the same to the client or send back a naughty boy warning page.
This method reduces the load on the system by many factors as you are not proxying any traffic, the request go on to the destination as normal and return valid data if you're not browsing content the Govt don't like. It also has the extra benefit that if something fails, a bit of porn gets through, but the non porn viewers still access the Internet too, so you don't get support calls about the Internet being broken.
Added value, you collect all the meta data the Govt spooks want and the spooks systems can target the actual data content of the "thousands" of terrorists and "bad people" out there flagged by the filter. Additionally, you can use another list to track visits to other URLs or parse key words like "Home made burm" and send alerts to the boys in blue, who can then come a knocking. Having this in place makes MITM stuff trivial at a later date and a tap in place permanently makes normal intercept cheaper too.
The latter is probably why the Govt are suddenly interested in this, the ISPs will be funding the general snooping of citizens allowing them to concentrate on the more intrusive stuff and state that they have stopped the generalised Govt data harvest.
Yes, I have done this myself in the past on a purely opt-in and pay for it basis. My next project is a non state SSL VPN DSL private no configuration consumer service, might be quite popular.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 07:58 GMT Frankee Llonnygog
Faith based policy
Cameron 'believes' filters will work.
Duncan-Smith 'believes' his welfare policies work.
I believe a huge Martian death ray will zap down from space and leave no trace of them save for wisps of smoke wafting up from their hand-lasted brogues.
I have no evidence for this, but I strongly believe it.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 19:27 GMT demented
Web blocking not far from the next election, co incidence or not ?
As the title says , i think such blocking by default is definitely the start of a slippery path in a downward direction for the so called Democratic society that we are alleged to live in,
Such things as web blocking are not democratic, they are a form of dictatorship ,If or one do not have any children living at home, so no need for any filtering , Another question is this who will end up paying for this unnecessary web blocking it won't be ScammerCON will it?
They have recently (government. and the likes of the BPI ect ) been colluding with VISA and Mastercard to no longer process payments for VPN services that they are told are used to violate copyright ect, so the likes of Ipredator VPN now have to use other methods , its a bit like the paypal thing, of them no longer processing payments to cyber lockers
shows how corrupt they all are
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Friday 19th July 2013 21:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
I have to disagree. Though I don't agree with censorship of any kind, I really don;'t want some of the internet rubbish available to my kids and in fact I really don't want that kind of stuff anywhere in the house. I've run h/w url filtering firewalls on the home internet feed for around 10 years, until the kids were old enough to make their own choices. Now they are, and there's no filtering at all. This is not only altruistiic either, since parents could get prosecuted because of dodgy content innocuously downloaded by their childred. It's a parents job to protect, at east until kids reach the age of reason...
Chris
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Monday 22nd July 2013 10:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Look beyond the headlines.
ISPs can only effectively do such blocking on the wire-level.
Wire-level filter = Deep Packet Inspection.
Deep Packet Inspection = Spying on your connection.
"For the kids", "for the purity of our society" slogans being thrown around are just fronts to legalise DPI. Politicians has always been crafty and child protection groups are being used.
Even tweaking DNS lookups consist of DPI. This is nothing but a repackaged Phorm.
Though I'm sure GCHQ already had DPI in place, this now means more people get access to data to see what you're looking it.
Nevermind freedom, your privacy is at risk as well to the point that it might just be possible for nosy pricks to blackmail you if you're a "respectable" gentleman on the "outside".