

TalkTalk (British ISP) rolls out porn filter - hanbam
http://www.channel4.com/news/talktalk-customers-must-decide-whether-to-use-porn-filter

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casca
These is completely a political move. The history of this is that for many
years, the UK ISPs told the Government that implementing filters was too
difficult and expensive. Last year TalkTalk broke ranks and launched their
HuaweiSymantec-based filtering product for all their customers for free. Since
then, they've been very cozy with the 2 main MPs who've been pushing this,
Claire Perry and Lynne Featherstone. These MPs wanted "Active Choice" whereby
everyone should decide on sign-up whether they wanted automatic porn filters.

At some point, they decided that most people do not change often enough so
would not be forced to make this Active Choice. TalkTalk again leap to the
rescue by making all current customers do it.

So this is completely a political move to keep ahead of the other ISPs and on
the best side of the Government and media.

For those who are a little interested in how good the TalkTalk filter is -
it's terrible. They only block HTTP so bypassing is as easy as adding an "s"
into your URL bar. Also, they don't block any VPNs or other proxies.

To make it even more useless, it doesn't even block a lot of the HTTP versions
of some major porn sites. Reddit NSFW section is one example.

TL;DR: Talktalk are riding a political wave. Their product sucks.

~~~
SagelyGuru
Yes, and such moves just keep coming because all governments dearly wish to
establish firm internet censorship under their own control. (I would love to
be proven wrong on this, of course)

The discussions about 'the choice being with the user' and the effectiveness
of filtering out sex (insert anything else here that you might be led by the
media to morally abhor) are red herrings. These 'moral outrages' are not the
real targets but the means to justify putting in place mechanisms to attack
the real targets, such as the likes of the Wikileaks.

This is why their poor effectiveness does not matter and the choice is
initially suggested to belong to the user. It won't last.

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johneth
This is a dangerous precedent to set. I have a (very bad) feeling that once
TalkTalk has done this, other ISPs will start to. Soon it will become 'the
norm'. This sort of system, once in place, will end up being abused and used
for blocking other things. I know it's trivial for those who know to bypass,
but that's not the point.

It's being pushed not by ISPs, but by out-of-touch-with-technology politicians
(the absolutely useless Conservative MP Claire Perry and others), the Daily
Mail and other tabloids, and useless parents who don't want to parent and
don't understand that you can block things with software on a computer.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
It's totally backwards thinking. "We must save the children from porn and bad
things!" say the politicians and tabloid rags like the Daily Mail (while at
the same time publishing pictures of scantily clad women). "We must block it
so they cannot be accessed!"

The correct way of thinking is, "what can we do to educate parents about the
internet, and the responsible usage of it?" If their kids start downloading
porn in their teens, so be it. Kids _always_ find ways to look at that sort of
stuff when they hit puberty.

And while sensational, this sort of info (account has porn enabled) can easily
be used by the UK's dreadful tabloid press quite to your disadvantage. Like
the spy Gareth Williams, who had his S&M proclivities (discovered through
looking at the sites he visited) used to discredit him as some crazy bondage
afficionado. Imagine being accused of paedophilia and having an ISP confirm
that, yes, this guy does have porn enabled on his account.

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k-mcgrady
This a terrible move. It's been a long time coming but what surprised me
reading the article is that they are also blocking gambling and violent
images. So they've already crossed the line.

How do they determine what is a violent image? What if I'm reading a news
story that includes an image of a crime? Will the filter block me from playing
poker games with free 'pretend' chips?

The worst part is that the media is branding it as a porn filter. What if a
person wants to gamble but has no intention of using porn? They might feel
uncomfortable asking for the content filter to be turned off and as a result
end up with a restricted, censored internet service.

Edit:

Why can't ISP's/or the government partner with a software company that
provides filtering software (or develop their own), and give that out for free
to all new customers? Seems like that would completely solve the problem. It
would also enable parents to only activate the software when their children
are accessing the internet, allowing the parent full, unregulated access.

~~~
iamben
It's the start of a very slippery slope. Where is the line drawn?

The irony, of course - it's _incredibly_ easy to find porn on Twitter (and I
suspect Facebook) - but they're never going to be blocked.

Parents could, of course, put the children's computer in a communal room...

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SagelyGuru
I remember when filters first appeared and UK secondary schools were forced to
employ them. The filters work(ed) by filtering out anything on the _www_ that
contains so called _offensive_ words, such as _sex_ in particular.

Following this, the universities of Essex and Sussex suffered a mysterious but
nevertheless catastrophic drop in applications, as their websites became
invisible to secondary school applicants and nobody knew what happened.

~~~
ljlolel
[citation needed]

~~~
SagelyGuru
I don't cite anyone because I myself was doing the admissions at Essex at the
time and I saw the figures and I had put 1+1 together. However, it is
difficult to quantify how many didn't apply because of what they had not seen
and so my colleagues preferred to bury their heads in the sand about this. One
also gets the feeling that people are getting afraid to speak up against such
'morally and politically correct measures'.

More generally, it is hard to prove that/how someone didn't achieve something
important because censorship denied them the crucial information. It is a very
real negative effect nevertheless that was clearly demonstrated by the gradual
stagnation of the Soviet Block and should not need repeating. This is
_precisely_ why censorship is a lot more pernicious than most people seem to
realise.

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jiggy2011
Why does this have to be done at the ISP level, why can they not just add some
software to the free router they send out that adds this functionality?

The only way to bypass that would either be via proxy sites (which could be
blocked also) or by changing the router around (which could be done via a
voluntary MAC address lock on the modem).

I find that often porn filters cause more problems than they solve. For
example I went to do some IT support for a small company in their office, they
companied that they were having trouble accessing a whole bunch of sites that
they needed for work because they were being blocked.

In the end I just asked the office manager if he though that his staff would
be likely to sit around watching porn in the office if I turned it off. Of
course that was not a real problem that actually was likely to exist so I just
turned it off and improved their IT experience in one go.

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DanBC
This is awful, but mobile broadband have had filters on for ages. T-Mobile has
something called content lock. O2 has another adults-only lock. You have to go
into a shop with proof of age to get them turned off.

There's no granularity - it's either on or off and a bunch of stuff gets
blocked that shouldn't and a bunch of stuff gets through that (if the filters
were working) shouldn't.

I didn't try a proxy, but I guess that's a trivial way to defeat the filters.
Looks like boom time for those bittorrent vpn providers.

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ZenJosh
I was gearing up for a rant about how this hurts the open internet, but after
watching the video, it seems fairly well reasoned.

I guess it all pivots around how effective the review panel is at unblocking
access to sites that have been miscategorised and how easy it is to enable and
disable the filtering.

~~~
SagelyGuru
except you cannot unblock sites you never get to see in the first place, and
thus remain ingnorant about their very existence

~~~
ZenJosh
True, but the option to disable filtering remains with the customer, which is
pretty important. And, from what I gather from the video, unblocking is
between the content owner and TalkTalk, not the user. That said, it'd be a
good idea to build some kind of request portal for users to request a website
be unblocked too.

~~~
jlgreco
The option to _enable_ filtering should be with the customer. I can not see
any rational argument for any other system.

~~~
ZenJosh
Sorry, yes, thats what I meant. My bad!

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fpp
So censorship will finally be officially enacted in the UK.

Today it's porn or gambling - tomorrow it is the "wrong" political opinion,
the wrong colour of skin, the wrong religion or facts the government (or some
of its members) want to bury.

Looks like they soon will party like it's 1984...

~~~
DanBC
You realise it's optional, right? And that the subscriber can ask to have it
turned off?

~~~
fpp
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came>

And in the first step - a classic dilemma - how do you know what you can't see
when you are blindfolded.

Remember the police man in Denmark earlier this year that "by mistake" blocked
the half internet to his country when fiddling with such "blacklists".

Expect lots of "collateral damages" once this will have become mandatory (the
next step)

~~~
DanBC
> _And in the first step - a classic dilemma - how do you know what you can't
> see when you are blindfolded._

Because there are so many sites blocked, and it comes with a fucking huge page
saying something like "CONTENT LOCK CONTACT YOUR PROVIDER TO HAVE THIS TURNED
OFF".

> _Remember the police man in Denmark earlier this year that "by mistake"
> blocked the half internet to his country when fiddling with such
> "blacklists"._

These are voluntary optional blacklists.

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JosephRedfern
This is a bad day.

