Cameron is at it again.....

[Gatt]

except in my case little johnny is only 6 years old and does not know what a vpn is what an ISP is.

 

Any child adept at using Google will quickly learn what a VPN / ISP is.

 

My son for example is 6 - and very inquisitive - for that reason he is already restricted when he goes online.

But given how widespread advertising is for ISPs (Billboards, Magazines, Radio, TV, etc, etc) my son knows a lot about ISPs (even if he doesn't know the term itself)

 

He doesn't yet know about a VPN but he knows about the internet and wireless and windows, etc purely by being around us and through his own initiative he has learnt about stuff we haven't told him - We've found him on sites like Argos and Smyths and with toys added to the shopping basket!

 

Children soak in information like a sponge - hell he can find his way round Windows 8 better than I can!

The Little Johnny scenario is not that far from the truth..

 

it comes back to Education - the more we educate our children about the dangers the more they will be aware of them.

 

Children choke on food - we don't ban them - we educate the child on how to eat it safely

Children get knocked down - we don't ban cars or buses - we educate them on how to cross safely at crossings.

Children can drown in a paddling pool - do we ban them? no we don't - again we EDUCATE the child and we supervise the child whilst they are playing.

Children can get kidnapped - bugger all we can do about banning other people - we EDUCATE them on not talking to strangers, on what do do/say if someone tries to take them (We say to scream very loudly, make a lot of noise and if possible find a policeman)

 

Ergo, we should be doing the same with Pr0n - we should be deciding whether to have a filter on or not, we should be educating our children on the dangers of what they see online, on how to be safe - we should be watching what they are up to..

 

Complacency is a very dangerous thing...

[X-13]

except in my case little johnny is only 6 years old and does not know what a vpn is what an ISP is.

 

And my case, "little Johnny" is 24. [it's also not my name on the internet bills, so I can't just turn it off.]

 

Forcing filtering "to protect children" in a household WITH NO CHILDREN is ridiculous.

[flyinghaggis]

Yes but if the magazine shop came to your sons bedroom would you not want the xxx mags removed from the pile before your son gets to view them. And do not say the parent should be the one to remove the xxx mags as 99% of parents have no idea how to stop internet porn being viewed by kids.

 

For the record I'd have no issue with this policy if it wasn't for the the default on / opt-out nature of it. Is it really so hard for parents to phone up their broadband provider and say "I'd like you to turn on website filtering for my connection to prevent my child accessing innapropriate content" ?

 

Is there anywhere else in Europe that has a similar policy because most of the countries I know of who pro-actively censor the internet aren't places I'd like to live!

Edited July 23, 2013 by flyinghaggis

[CAM]

And my case, "little Johnny" is 24. [it's also not my name on the internet bills, so I can't just turn it off.]

 

Forcing filtering "to protect children" in a household WITH NO CHILDREN is ridiculous.

 

This. I am single and provide a broadband connection to a family of 5 adults, why should I pay for a filtering system so some lazy parent down the road who can't be bothered to activate parental filtering by clicking a Yes button gets nannied by the state? I have a choice; I leave the filtering on and force it on everyone else or I remove the filtering to stop false positives and end up on "the list." Either way my broadband cost goes up because now everyone is using the filtering system when they don't need to.

[MikeGilbert]

To quote a US High Court judge - "I know [hardcore pornography] when I see it". And that's the problem with all these sweeping censorship rules.

 

To quote chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC from the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960: "is this the kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to read?"

Edited July 23, 2013 by MikeGilbert
Correcting a guessed quote.

[psydii]

Kids today are no less smart than we were. VPN tor shell etc are point and click these days. Some of the stuff they do to bypass our filters is jaw dropping (pdfs calling embedded dlls that contain wrapped tor entry points and a portable browser launched using the 'bypass applocker' switch - for example.) This stuff comes from the darker side of the internet, the places that most kids don't go at the moment. It would be extraordinarily naive of ministers, civil servants and ISPs to believe that a prohibition will do anything other than increase the number of people learning how to break it.

 

 

 

There is sufficient nasty/objectionable stuff out there not covered by porn filters that even if they get this idea through, the internet will still not be a safe place to leave a child unsupervised.

 

They must launch a public information campaign on sky virgin and the beeb about the risks (after the watershed and aimed at the parents) coupled with a 'be nice, be tolerant, and don't take any pleasure in watching people be nasty to each other' message aimed at the kids. In this context the 'porn' filter could be *part* of the solution.

 

The solution isn't hard. It needs to be holistic.

Edited July 23, 2013 by psydii

[DrCheese]

Yes but if the magazine shop came to your sons bedroom would you not want the xxx mags removed from the pile before your son gets to view them. And do not say the parent should be the one to remove the xxx mags as 99% of parents have no idea how to stop internet porn being viewed by kids.

 

And that's *still* not my problem. If a parent can't be bothered to do the research then it's STILL not the states problem to sort.

Stop expecting other people to raise your kids. Take the computer *out* of their bedrooms if your worried.

[localzuk]

let the 1% who have passed their flying lessons fly, and for the other 99% they can be looked after and flown around the world by someone that does know how to fly

 

Ah, but that analogy would mean "allow the 1% who want the filtering enable it, but leave the 99% alone"...

 

How does hitting a no button intrude on your liberties?

 

The ISP will then have a log of who you are and that you want access to porn (well, that's how the government will look at it). The government may not do anything with that data right now, but in the future? Government has form for doing stuff like that.

 

and for those poor children who have parents that do not give a sh*t they will be expossed to images that might send them on a path that is rather dark and twisted.

 

Sorry, but we can't negatively damage the rights of society because some people are crap parents. If there are crap parents, they need to be helped instead. If you have crap drivers, you don't ban every driver from the road - you target the bad ones.

 

I am trained in IT and will be choosing to disable the filtering and use my own filtering but my sister who is not trained in IT will be very grateful to have some filtering for her children even if it is only partial, as partial is much better than nothing.

 

Why not educate your sister to do things herself? She has a responsibility to do so, rather than expecting the government to do it for her.

[psydii]

I actually know a High Court Judge. He did not know Hardcore Pornography when he saw it. He had to take expert advice (from his grown up children)...

 

They were pretty liberal (and this was over 10 years ago, they'd not grown up with the internet and were only just getting broadband).

[psydii]

I am a parent.

 

If they passed a law that said: "all parents must ensure they have considered internet filtering from their ISP" and that all ISPs were required to ship routers that did transparent filtering as an option, I would not object, in fact I would be for this; for a start, it would save me time rolling my own!

 

But control needs to be with the parent, and so does the decision, and the record of that decision. The state has no right to know, because once they know and have control of a national level filtering service, we are not a free people.

Edited July 23, 2013 by psydii

[maark]

an interesting article in favour on the register PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister makes some good points.

[localzuk]

an interesting article in favour on the register PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister makes some good points.

 

Doesn't make any good points to me - it just brushes over all the criticism by referencing the flawed filtering on the mobile networks, ignores the categorisation argument, laughs at the concept that the government would use opt out information for whatever reason, and generally just repeats the flawed arguments of Cameron.

 

It doesn't even mention the false sense of security or educating parents aspect of it all.

[Gatt]

I thought the filters for mobile networks was aimed more at trying to stop people running up huge bills, rather than keep naughty content at bay?

[localzuk]

I thought the filters for mobile networks was aimed more at trying to stop people running up huge bills, rather than keep naughty content at bay?

 

Nah, they have always been marketed as adult filters as far as I can tell. They have also always been massively flawed. My old Orange contract constantly blocked websites, until I had it taken off. Not to mention many porn related things getting through (usually porn ads on forum sites and the like)...

[Sdrawkcab]

Do we know what form the blocking system is going to take anyway? The current DNS blocking they're doing (i'd assume with Cleanfeed but I don't know) relies on you using DNS servers provided by your ISP. If you set your PCs DNS to Google DNS (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) you can get around it that way and still get access to blocked sites like The Pirate Bay and KAT with no problems. If this is how they're planning on blocking porn too, I can't see it being very long before kids start figuring things like this out.

 

This needs to be made opt-in, otherwise non-techy parents will just get complacent about things like this. To those of you saying they won't opt-in, surely they have had to fill out a form or talk to someone to sign up for their broadband service in the first place? Why can't that person say "Do you want a porn filter?"

 

MUCH more focus needs to be placed on education as a means of prevention rather than looking for technological solutions. The problem is, that would mean openly discussing pornography with people. Most people don't really want to talk about that sort of thing, especially not with their children, and would rather just pretend it doesn't exist. Also discussing porn like this means accepting the damage it's done, which is something people will also find hard to deal with as they have probably enjoyed porn themselves in the past. It's much easier to pretend that the government has it all covered and not think about it. Self deception is something that we as a species are extremely good at.

[Sdrawkcab]

Also I would like to ask: If we are putting this ban in place, are we going to make tabloids like The Sun top-shelf publications too? Page 3 is arguably more accessible than most internet pornography, since any kid can easily access the papers outside a newsagents and most adults probably wouldn't stop them or refuse sale. If you think that Page 3 isn't harmful, remember that during the olympics last year the biggest photo of a woman in the paper was of a topless woman. What kind of message do you think that sends to young people?

 

The answer, for the record, is No. David Cameron is a giant hypocrit.

Edited July 23, 2013 by Sdrawkcab

[Geoff]

Do we know what form the blocking system is going to take anyway? The current DNS blocking they're doing (i'd assume with Cleanfeed but I don't know) relies on you using DNS servers provided by your ISP. If you set your PCs DNS to Google DNS (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) you can get around it that way and still get access to blocked sites like The Pirate Bay and KAT with no problems. If this is how they're planning on blocking porn too, I can't see it being very long before kids start figuring things like this out.

 

No that's not how cleanfeed works at all. The ISPs network routers maintain a list of 'bad' IP addresses. If HTTP traffic from subscribers is heading for these IPs then they get transparently proxied through the IWF servers with some basic url blacklist checking done. Otherwise the traffic is allowed to go on it's merry way. There's several fairly obvious ways around this. In order of craftyness:

 

1) Use TOR or a VPN.

2) stay away from port 80 (IRC DCC, FTP, Usenet, Bittorrent, Whatever).

3) Use SSL

4) Find a mirror/web proxy.

 

The DNS workaround you posted will not work for cleanfeed.

 

It's also worth noting that individal ISP blocks are not implemented the same way, leading to differing behaviour and levels of effectiveness. For example on Virgin, trying to access the TPB you cannot get to the TPB landing page. However you can pull up any of the other pages on the site without triggering the 'block' page. So a simple google search to find the direct link to what you want works, or 3rd party search tools that use the TPB web API still work fine.

 

Also consider this effort is only concentrating on the bigger ISP and only on connections considered to be 'consumer'. If you pay a little more a month for a business class connection off XILO or AAISP you can continue on your merry way without worry about this affecting you.

Edited July 23, 2013 by Geoff

[Roberto]

Yes but if the magazine shop came to your sons bedroom would you not want the xxx mags removed from the pile before your son gets to view them.

 

I would not let the magazine shop loose in my son's bedroom without me being there to supervise in the first place.

 

And do not say the parent should be the one to remove the xxx mags as 99% of parents have no idea how to stop internet porn being viewed by kids.

 

No, but the parents should know how to exercise parental supervision and responsibility (say by opting into this kind of blocking on an opt in basis).

 

The idea that parents don't know what they're doing isn't an argument in favour of blocking: The only people who think web content blocking is the answer are those who do not understand how it works, and in that scenario I'd suggest that a false sense of security is worse than none at all.

[X-13]

The DNS workaround you posted will not work for cleanfeed.

 

Which I'm sure nobody would have a problem with... IF IT WAS BEING USED FOR WHAT IT WAS INTENDED FOR!!! [How do I grammar?]

 

 

All this talk of false positives... and I just got hit with the block page while searching for "twiglet princess zelda" for a joke. This is going to be really annoying if it actually happens.

 

 

For example on Virgin, trying to access the TPB you cannot get to the TPB landing page. However you can pull up any of the other pages on the site without triggering the 'block' page. So a simple google search to find the direct link to what you want works, or 3rd party search tools that use the TPB web API still work fine.

 

False.

 

I have a Virgin connection and have to use a proxy. [Which I've had to change twice.]

Edited July 23, 2013 by X-13

[Geoff]

All this talk of false positives... and I just got hit with the block page while searching for "twiglet princess zelda" for a joke. This is going to be really annoying if it actually happens.

 

It will just drive people to use methods (like TOR or VPNs) to get the content that are even harder to police. Look at what's happening with online piracy for example, the drive by the music and movie industries to stamp it out is just driving the technology forward even faster.

 

I have a Virgin connection and have to use a proxy. [Which I've had to change twice.]

 

Depends on the mirror you get. Some of the IPs are blacklisted.

Edited July 23, 2013 by Geoff

[edutech4schools]

Look at what's happening with online piracy for example, the drive by the music and movie industries to stamp it out is just driving the technology forward even faster.

 

Actually we have just had the biggest drop in illegal downloads ever. Mainly due to the mass take up of streaming services.

[Geoff]

Actually we have just had the biggest drop in illegal downloads ever. Mainly due to the mass take up of streaming services.

 

Measured how? and by who? How legal are those streaming services? I have different numbers here (from OFCOM).

Edited July 23, 2013 by Geoff

[X-13]

Actually we have just had the biggest drop in illegal downloads ever. Mainly due to the mass take up of streaming services.

 

If it's easy to obtain legally, and at a reasonable price, people will pay for it.

 

Things locked behind expensive paywalls [like game of thrones, which requires you to subscribe to multiple tv channels you may not even want] or thing that are hard/impossible to get legally are pirated.

 

On the topic of piracy... why is piracy wrong while second hand sales are fine?

 

Both result in precisely [censored] all going to the creator.

 

And why is it wrong to pirate something you can't get?

[LosOjos]

Actually we have just had the biggest drop in illegal downloads ever. Mainly due to the mass take up of streaming services.

 

That's a big claim - got any facts to back it up? As @Geoff said, OFCOM appear to disagree with you

[edutech4schools]

That's a big claim - got any facts to back it up? As @Geoff said, OFCOM appear to disagree with you

 

just found this Collapse in illegal sharing and boom in streaming brings music to executives' ears | Music | The Guardian but it was a discussion on radio 4 the other day.