UK Adult Filter

[CAM]

I haven't put this on the news yet as I am struggling to find any sources for it. Only an Australian site (oh the irony!) reporting on something from the Sunday Times which is behind a paywall.

 

All internet porn will be blocked to protect children, under UK government plan | News.com.au

 

Does anyone have any other sources for this? Put simply, it's a national web filter that blocks porn unless you explicitly say to the ISP that you want to access it. Real solution or just censorship riding on the back of safeguarding?

 

And yes, this does affect residential connections.

[featured_spectre]

so they plan to block 1/5th of the internet? lmao

[EduTech]

It does appear that most of the links on the search engines or link back to that AU Web site.. Hmm...

[srochford]

It's on the front page of today's Sunday Times and I think the Aus article you link to is probably the same story (both Murdoch publications and the last line of the story says "The ISPA did not return calls to London's Sunday Times."

 

Not sure how you do this in such a big scale. Smoothwall type approaches are fine for the relatively small organisations like schools but I'm not sure if you can scale them. Blocking by DNS is possible but then takes out huge chunks of the web "by accident" because there happens to porn on the same host as loads of other stuff.

 

There's also the problem of whether it will do what's intended. "She quoted the example of two underage brothers sentenced to at least five years' detention this year for a sadistic sex attack on two other boys in South Yorkshire. The brothers were said to have had a "toxic" home life where they were exposed to pornography." - in this case, I'd guess the parents would have opted in to having porn available so the children still wouldn't have been protected.

[joe90bass]

Damn, may as well cancel my Broadband subscription now then

[pete]

BBC covered it a while ago: BBC News - MP calls for pornography 'opt-in' to protect children

 

It's a sneaky attempt at forcing self-censorship on people, pushed forward by yet another MP who wants to be seen to be "doing something" regardless of how utterly retarded that something is.

 

And so no doubt Ed Vaizey will go charging off in Internet white knight mode. Hey Ed, if you hate the job you could just resign rather than messing things up until it gets taken away from you.

 

*damn kids, get off my Internet*

Edited December 20, 2010 by pete

[nile_c]

This was raised in adjournment debate by Claire Perry MP a couple of weeks ago. As far as I can tell nothing much has come of it.

 

The whole debate is actually on YouTube however, I'll warn you, I've watched it and it bored me to tears.

[AyatollahPies]

I agree with pete. How long until they start blocking access to sites like wikileaks, using the excuse that they harbour dangerous content?

 

Make the most of the internet folks. I doubt it will be anything like we know it, in 10 years time.

[localzuk]

Another ridiculous scheme which won't work and open a giant can of worms:

 

1. Who gets the blame when something slips past and parents get upset?

2. Who gets the bill when a company gets misclassified as a pornographic provider ends up blocked, loses income and decides to sue?

3. Who gets to decide what is certified and how?

4. Is this the start of what people talked of when the whole clean feed system was introduced? ie. start with the illegal stuff, then move onto pornography, and then onto stuff the government doesn't like? Will sites like Wikileaks end up on such systems?

5. Is it also the beginning of marginalising consumers of porn? ie. they request access to adult material, therefore must be deviants and perverts?

 

My preferred outcome of this - get parents to actually parent their children. They find something online? They should've been taught from the beginning to tell their parents, and as such the parents can explain and deal with it, rather than hiding behind technology.

[gshaw]

Agree with AyatollahPies, it's the start of trying to censor the free web... can't let it happen as it'll start with this and before you know it you've got a walled garden of "Government approved" content and big business closing out the market (kinda fits in with the whole two tier Internet argument also going on at the moment as well)

 

However some hope is still there, if groups like Anonymous can take down corporates like Visa then imagine what they could do with an entire population's worth of machines if the Government tried to put censorship on

[pete]

However some hope is still there, if groups like Anonymous can take down corporates like Visa then imagine what they could do with an entire population's worth of machines if the Government tried to put censorship on

 

Much as it would amuse me to see a certain ring-wearing bowel-stretching man appear as the wallpaper on every government desktop, they'd use it as an excuse to say "see we're right! and slip yet more stupid over-reacting laws through parliament on a tidal wave of Daily Mail readers getting upset.

 

There's an idea for a slogan - "Save the Internet, Defenestrate a Daily Mail reader"

[gshaw]

Well I'd rather that than just give in and nod and agree quietly as we get restricted to what Government and big business sees fit for us to have... but tbh it's one hell of a battle for any Government to want to take on by themselves so hopefully will come to nothing

[6Foot2]

Does anyone have any other sources for this? Put simply, it's a national web filter that blocks porn unless you explicitly say to the ISP that you want to access it.

 

Not sure if you are still looking for other sources but this was on the Guardian's website yesterday afternoon and not behind a paywall:

 

Link: Broadband firms urged to block sex websites to protect children | Society | The Guardian

 

Edit: Link 2: Porn in the United Kingdom to become opt-in

 

Link 3: Porn block on PCs | The Sun |News [i can't believe I am putting in a link to The Sun here!]

Edited December 20, 2010 by 6Foot2
Add detail to the post.

[Andrew_C]

Does it say something about me that I read the title as "UK Adult Finder" and wondered whether it was appropriate to this forum?

 

Seriously though, who voted for the Tories? I'll hold my hand up to having voted (probably for the last time) Liberal. The whole thing will be run through like Part (taking the) P of the building regs. Some dopey daughter of an MP killed herself using a dodgy drill, into a wall where a wire was quite legitimately run, and we can't do any (there are things you can still do) DIY wiring any more.

 

Was it about safety? No, all about protecting the "Legitimate" electricians and tax. Will the proposed filtering protect kids? No. In the homes where they are currently abused* they will continue to be abused. In loving homes, they will continue to be protected. This is ALL about Govt wanting more control over the population.

 

* in whatever form it takes

[penfold]

 

My preferred outcome of this - get parents to actually parent their children. They find something online? They should've been taught from the beginning to tell their parents, and as such the parents can explain and deal with it, rather than hiding behind technology.

 

Cant agree more with this, and this doesn't just apply to this story, but with numerous things. Especially in education as it is always the school/teacher/support staff/LEA.... it's never the parents fault that their child is a little brat because they dont take any responsibility.

 

As you say, this is just another tech fix to a person problem.

[srochford]

My preferred outcome of this - get parents to actually parent their children. They find something online? They should've been taught from the beginning to tell their parents, and as such the parents can explain and deal with it, rather than hiding behind technology.

 

I do agree with this and it works up to the point where children will tell their parents about things they're not sure about etc (when my friend's young daughters first started using Google they got some strange results searching for "women dressing up" which lead to "Daddy, why have these women got no clothes on" and a proper discussion). Once you get a bit older than that and you want to look at porn no amount of "tell me if you find something disturbing" is going to help.

 

As you say, however, filtering is much, much more difficult to get right and I think there's little chance of it working. The idea of a .xxx TLD has been floated again and it would be easy to only allow access to that from people who've asked for it but how do you set someone setting up their own personal web site and putting porn on there?

[eejit]

I agree with pete. How long until they start blocking access to sites like wikileaks, using the excuse that they harbour dangerous content?

 

Make the most of the internet folks. I doubt it will be anything like we know it, in 10 years time.

 

Excellent post. And from experience that is exactly what will happen. "Anti-terror" laws are rarely used for anti-terror.

[CAM]

It's interesting that they say porn is causing mental issues in kids. But the other say I watched primary school kids playing on the field from my office. One picked up a stick and started pretending it was a gun.

 

Can't blame porn for that!

[Willott]

It's once again non technical people deciding what's technically possible. The scale of a system to handle this sort of thing would be immense (not to mention the administration/cost overhead). In my opinion the better option is education of parents in 2 respects - firstly so they can educate their kids about safe use of the internet and secondly education about tools they can use to help protect their kids (K9 for example, parental controls on games devices). The other thing I'd quite like to see developed is a very cut down version of smoothwall or similar - using the content filtering components only (ie no caching, no reporting, possibly short term logging) embedded onto a wireless router type device - this would (I think) be a very quick hit with security conscious parents - those of us with the know how can create a separate box for this, but having something a non-techy could fairly easily use would be a nice addition to the current market place. Edited January 4, 2011 by Willott
typos

[gshaw]

It's once again non technical people deciding what's technically possible. The scale of a system to handle this sort of thing would be immense (not to mention the administration/cost overhead). In my opinion the better option is education of parents in 2 respects - firstly so they can educate their kids about safe use of the internet and secondly education about tools they can use to help protect their kids (K9 for example, parental controls on games devices). The other thing I'd quite like to see developed is a very cut down version of smoothwall or similar - using the content filtering components only (ie no caching, no reporting, possibly short term logging) embedded onto a wireless router type device - this would (I think) be a very quick hit with security conscious parents - those of us with the know how can create a separate box for this, but having something a non-techy could fairly easily use would be a nice addition to the current market place.

 

Methinks you should get that idea registered as a patent if it's possible, could have a nice little earner there!

[PiqueABoo]

Prior art: I'm fuzzy, but it's something like 10 years since some vendors made content filtering domestic routers.

[pete]

Methinks you should get that idea registered as a patent if it's possible, could have a nice little earner there!

 

The problem is fitting that into a SBC that's both powerful enough to handle the load without slowing down browsing (filtering, random bittorrents, everything else) and cheap enough to sell them at a viable (from point of view of your average PC World shopper) price point. Your average little blue router can sort-of do it using custom firmware, but it's not pretty, fast and it's reasonably easy to make it fall over under load.

 

That's before you get into the whole "So what's stopping the kid getting the password and altering the config?" issue. 90% of non-technical people will just set and forget and it's only if young Jimmy is indiscreet enough to get caught that they'll know.

[Willott]

It seems that some people have got DD-WRT and Dansguardian running successfully... however it probably doesn't have a particularly useful interface (and the firmaware may not be as stable as firmware specifically written for the device it's used on), and the interface of Smoothwall is relatively simple to use to control blocking (though some more simplification would probably help in this application).

 

Packetprotector seems to be some way towards it but requires a USB drive (it may work without if you stop clamav, but it only runs on a limited number of routers).

 

PiquABoo - I wonder how advanced the filtering was - my guess would be URL filtering (which still appears on some domestic routers - you can block certain URLs... blocked facebook on a Friend's network when their kids should have been doing work but were facebooking...), and not dynamic content type.

 

Shame my current router isn't up to the task otherwise I'd try building packetprotector for that. If I can spare some cash to buy another router soon then I may buy one and see if I can get it working how I'd like. Even so... a joining forces of Smoothwall and one of the router manufacturers would probably provide a more stable and robust solution for mass sale!

[PiqueABoo]

I wonder how advanced the filtering was

 

Just sanity-check-googled and found a 2002 NetGear - some basic blocking stuff plus if you paid a subscription it apparently talked to some SurfControl URL categorisation service. Pretty much the same fundamental deal as K9, the Fortigate client etc.

 

Overheads of putting category checking into a domestic router are not obviously that different to the DNS service you normally get on them. Whether you'd get a categorisation service to let some vendor hook up a h/w device for free is another matter. Presumably not, otherwise this would be a common feature by now surely?

[Willott]

The problem is fitting that into a SBC that's both powerful enough to handle the load without slowing down browsing (filtering, random bittorrents, everything else) and cheap enough to sell them at a viable (from point of view of your average PC World shopper) price point. Your average little blue router can sort-of do it using custom firmware, but it's not pretty, fast and it's reasonably easy to make it fall over under load.

 

It seems that the routers are improving in their performance capabilities, with increase in RAM and CPU speeds (older routers seem to be in the 125MHz range, newer ones around 400MHz, some even @680MHz), it may be that there may be another hardware solution (a nettop possibly), the thing to remember is it would just be 5-6 people normally accessing (Dansguardian specs 300Mhz for 50 users), and cost wise, they're selling the 400MHz routers at £40... if something could be made for £100 which would provide net access and restrict access to unsavoury content (possibly with a small subscription fee for blocklist updates) then I think it would be a winner.

 

I don't have enough technical knowledge to be able to know for definite, but the idea was there for people to investigate!

 

That's before you get into the whole "So what's stopping the kid getting the password and altering the config?" issue. 90% of non-technical people will just set and forget and it's only if young Jimmy is indiscreet enough to get caught that they'll know.

 

Same argument goes for young Jimmy borrowing the booze cupboard key, taking a copy then getting drunk when mum and dad go out... the idea is not to make it automatically impossible to get on to sites, but to provide a tool to make it damn difficult. There has to be some level of person involvement, this would just provide a technical tool to help in the fight.