

New broadband users shun UK porn filters, Ofcom finds - tomtoise
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28440067

======
rkachowski
I love how they repeatedly frame the internet censorship as "porn filter".

Even in the face of (their statistics)6 out of 7 people opting out, it's still
desperately trying to be presented as the feature that will save you from the
bad parts of the internet. The implication being that the majority of people
(everyone who has opted out) are morally corrupt, bad people with no interest
in "child safety" or "family friendly" features.

I imagine Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It screaming down to the BBC
offices and making sure they use the official party line regarding "porn
filter" vs "Great Firewall of Cameron".

~~~
7952
Personally this is just reassurance that Brits are sensible people. That most
understand filtering to be annoying and shamelessly opt out.

And I find it hard to ciriticise parents that leave the filtering active. It
is perfectly reasonable to try and shelter a child from porn. This tech may
not do that particularly well but that is a different issue.

~~~
Fuxy
Is it necessary to shelter children from porn? As a child of the internet in a
time when porn filters didn't even exist and most of the sites on the internet
were mainly porn sites I find that argument without legs.

Don't get me wrong you're well withing your right as a parent to postpone the
issue as long as you like but is it really as necessary as most people tend to
think?

~~~
trose
I think it would be more reasonable to monitor your child's search history and
talk to them about pornography than to try and hide it from them and treat sex
like its dirty and gross.

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DanBC
The ISP provided optional filters all differ from each other and offer varying
levels of granularity. This article does a poor job of explaining exactly what
people are opting out of - are they opting put of all filtering? Or is thos
article only talkin about porn filters?

And just for clarity: the UK has three sets of filtering. There's the default-
on but optional filters offered by ISPs (and similar has been offered by
mobile providers for years); there's the IWF system which is specifically
images of child sexual abuse and criminally obscene content. As far as I can
tell only one ISP doesn't use that filter - A&A; then there are court ordered
filters used to prevent access to pirate bay and KAT. Personally, I feel this
is sub-optimal. The government said that users were clamoring for filtering to
be provided by ISPs. I guess this shows that most of them were not.

~~~
AlyssaRowan
Indeed the filters are very unpopular and the uptake figures haven't
significantly changed from July, as far as I know?

Claire Perry MP was campaigning for porn censorship by default. She's only got
that from Sky now, a huge reversal from what they said before, and when you
see that not even 10% of their customers who were asked wanted it, it's clear
their brand manager's made a huge mistake making it opt-out.

I thought then, and think now, that the TalkTalk bias is due to the
demographics of the users of that ISP. Everyone with the technical skill to
visit SamKnows or ThinkBroadband knows TalkTalk are poorly-rated and thus
tends to avoid choosing them, I'd venture.

As said before, censorship infrastructure itself presents a very real
vulnerability, although this doesn't seem to be fully appreciated by many of
the stakeholders.

~~~
Someone1234
Plus the filters break websites all the damn time. I cannot count the number
of times on both hands that Reddit has "disappeared" from the internet, and if
you traceroute it it disappears into an IWF box. This has been almost common
on Virgin Media.

Then there was that time that they "accidently" knocked all of Wikipedia
offline because of a single IWF-flagged album cover (and then blocked the
page, and then finally removed the block completely). It did spawn an
interesting discussion on the difference between "child porn" and "art."

~~~
AlyssaRowan
The jQuery CDN is also a semi-frequent victim of Sky's filter.

I pause here simply to note that it's quite possible to use the
infrastructure's distinctive behaviour as an oracle to scry a complete list of
all blocked sites, and to monitor that over time, given just a few volunteers
on each major ISP.

------
toyg
In other news: hot water still hot, thermometers find.

I wonder: what was (and is) the economic cost of this whole charade? How many
man-hours were spent writing memos, how many meetings were called, how many
expensive developers and sysadmins were forced to waste their time
implementing stuff that nobody wanted -- likely not even the proponents: I'd
be surprised if Cameron and his entourage were actually using these filters.

~~~
a3n
Spare no expense if it will create a wedge issue that gets people elected.

~~~
Someone1234
In the UK? I highly doubt it.

The UK has a lot of wedge issues, like austerity, capitalism Vs. socialism,
privatisation, classes, illegal wars, women's issues, train ticket cost,
anything touching the NHS or the roads...

However they are rarely what I'd call puritanical like in the US and Ireland.
I'm sure it does happen, but I cannot think of any particular moral-based
wedge issues from the last few elections.

UK politics is very pragmatic.

~~~
crdoconnor
Immigration!

Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs
or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go _up_?).

~~~
nagrom
>> "Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket
costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?)."

In charge, it would appear.

~~~
crdoconnor
Touche

------
mangecoeur
To the surprise of exactly nobody, it turns out that people don't mind being
able to access porn.

~~~
csmeu
Are you sure that its not that the first site they hit which is a false
positive causes them to opt out?

ThinkPad wiki is the one comedic false positive I get when I was testing Sky's
offering (to determine workarounds in case this shit becomes mandatory one
day).

~~~
mangecoeur
I'm sure that's what everyone will claim :P

Seriously though, a huge proportion of people access porn even though an
equally huge proportion of people would deny it. And that's the whole point of
a private life - people should be free and comfortable to do things in private
that they might not want other people to know about. You shouldn't HAVE to
tell anyone about your online habits, it's none of their business.

It's not the Government's job to even ASK you about that sort of thing, let
alone TELL you to have these filters. It's patronizing and paternalistic and
intrusive.

Of course, it's also a thinly veiled excuse to force the installation of
traffic monitoring and filtering equipment across the whole of the UK internet
- since obviously you can't block sites without inspecting the traffic. It
certainly makes GCHQs job easier - why bother hacking servers and tapping
fibre when you've got ISPs forced to monitor every connection and paying for
it too.

------
coding4all
Censorship should always be opt-in, not opt-out.

------
koyote
This report is from July of last year.

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ee04
While I wouldn't be surprised if most people in the UK don't want the filters,
this data by itself is not really representative.

I presume most households already have Internet. New customers will to a large
degree be people that are moving out on their own, and young adults living by
themselves are less likely to want a porn filter than somebody with children.
(And people with children are less likely to have available time to rurn
things on.)

~~~
csmeu
Actually we like to switch providers a lot to snag the best deals.

------
amelius
Does this apply to men and women equally?

~~~
VLM
With numbers like four percent vs gender ratios around half, I don't think it
can be blamed on gender.

Astroturfers try to tell us that in the UK everyone in the general public
loves police surveillance, but when given a choice, it appears not to be as
loved and appreciated.

~~~
DanBC
These filters have nothing to do with police surveillance.

And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has
more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public
hating cctv.

Here is a story from _this year_ where police request men to give a DNA
sample, and 500 men voluntarily give police a DNA sample. Are all these men
"astrotrufers"?

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277)

[http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
sussex-30972723](http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723)

We have CCTV everywhere. People in the UK object when they think it's misused
- councils checking whether people are using the right bins for example - but
even then (councils checking whether people claiming to live in a school's
catchmet area actually live there) you don't have to look hard for people
defending that.

If yu want to have any hope of changing the surveillance culture you need to
accept that most people in UK just don't know much about surveillance and
wouldn't care much if they did know.

~~~
crdoconnor
>And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has
more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public
hating cctv.

It helps that CCTV is pretty fucking useless. It's hardly the same thing to
take a grainy video of you walking down the high street as it is to slurp up
every email you've ever written.

