News Porn filters criticised as BT goes opt-out

Ooh, there's a dilemma for the parent. Information and porn, or no porn and no information?

Guess which way the lazy and conservatively inclined parent will vote. Censorship starts with Lady Chatterley's Lover, and ends with Dr. Suess' The Lorax.

 

I'm sure if little Johnny needs access to Wikileaks, then Johnny senior will temporarily remove the filter.

Not sure what < 10 year old would need with Wikileaks tbh.

 

QED.

And if parents can't be arsed to turn on the filter --judging by the fact that it had to be set up to be on by default-- what makes you think they'll turn it off?

 

Aaaaaaaaand?

 

Is there a reason why you won't set up your own filters? Why do you think the government and random 3rd party companies have a better idea than you on what to filter for your particular circumstances?

 

Or a much simpler solution would be to use one of the many filter circumvention add-ons like “Go Away Cameron” that not only bypass the filter but also the court ordered blocking of copyright infringement sites and possibly even cleanfeed.

Why bother waiting hours for the filter to be disabled or changes to take affect when little Johnny can bypass it, along with the court ordered blocking and cleanfeed within minuets, making the whole idea of a filter an expensive waste of time and actually exposes people to more objectionable content not less.

 

Crikey... the whole thing is a crock.

I don't want to have to turn on or off a filter so that I can visit a site and my child can't. Or so I can visit a site I don't mind my child visiting anyway.

It's just mad that people let kids have free roam on the internet. That is the end of the argument. Filtering shouldn't have even entered the equation. As Nexxo says, we don't send day care nannies in to enable drug addled individuals to look after their kids.

Steps to take as a responsible parent:

1. Use a shared space for the computer.
2. Don't let them know the password to the computer.
3. Supervise their usage. You don't even have to watch all the time. Just be around.

You know, when I was at school, in the late 90s, people brought porn in to school on VHS and in magazines. Some people had VCDs of it. Some people had all sorts of stuff on 1.44MB High Density floppy disks. So you can't exactly stop people from accessing "harmful material" by using some sort of hackneyed opt-in opt-out process cobbled on to a government censoring project.

The interesting things is, you knew it was wrong back then. I have friends that teach and they have come across porn in the classroom via google/bing, whatever, and you know what? It just means that the kids get taught about it. And teacher says "if we catch you looking at that not by mistake, you are in trouble" - ummm... how it should be you might say.

Now, because they aren't incompetent, they search for the terms they use before class and, what do you know? They've effectively taken care of the problem before it happens.

You can't protect people from themselves forever.

All throughout this people scream about methods that can circumvent any filter regardless - because now they need one for visiting a wordpress blog???? Meaning that the whole point of it is completely redundant. Everyone and their Mums will know about the Tor Browser soon and in the end, what will they do to stop this? Block a project the West uses to pretend to have a moral high ground when it comes to freedom of information?

Then someone wades in and says something like: "But only filtered options will disallow Tor."

Nice one... the Tor Browser exe is about 22mb... hardly earth shattering. I have 50 2gb usb sticks I got for free from work. Kids can probably buy USB sticks from the school stationary cupboard nowdays. Should we ban USB sticks just in case? (They do at my new job by the way... they also use a keylogger and lock down your access to... yawn)

Of course the sensible parent need not worry because they supervise their children's internet access and computer time... (now if windows just didn't allow you to install things willy nilly... hmmm)

 

Some sites blocked by O2's porn filter:

nspcc.org.uk National charity dedicated to preventing child abuse

childline.org.uk Online version of the NSPCC’s ChildLine helpline for kids in trouble, especially busy at Christmas

samaritans.org Highly regarded charity helpline is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and also sees its greatest demand at Christmas

gov.uk Portal to a huge range of government websites

parliament.uk Democracy in action (oh, the irony!)

bl.uk British Library, with details of events including latest exhibition, “Georgians Revealed”

claireperry.org.uk Devizes MP Claire Perry, campaigner for tighter controls on internet content (and again...)

 

This may have already been suggested or spoken about, but instead of blanketing everyone and saying "NO! No boobies for you.", what's wrong exactly with making it opt-in? Having people make the conscious decision to block certain sites.

M'eh, common sense.. Rare as hens teeth apparently.

Sent from my C6603 using Tapatalk

 

Does anyone think the government will do a U turn on this filter ?
Or that ISP's may be purposely messing things up so they can turn round to the government in a year and say we told you it wouldn't work.

 

That's it, finally I agree with you. I can't believe these sites are permanently blocked by these filters, with no chance of them being unblocked.

I would say the risk of being brought before a parliamentary committee and publicly ridiculed would be enough to stop any ISP CEO from thinking about ****ing it up on purpose.

 

The problem is, that it's not only "boobies filter", it also includes other content. Take BT filter for example, "obscene and tasteless" category is obscure at best (whose definition of "tasteless" it is?) and can be abused to extremes.
Lets take another category - Drugs. According to description, it includes "sites that contain information on illegal drugs". So does all anti-drugs, educational (wikipedia, etc), support sites also fall under this?
Finally, what if there are multiple children of different ages in household? To whom you set your internet filters - the youngest, the oldest, switch each time one of them wants to browse? Will you need different internet lines for each age group?

Maybe I'm over-analysing this, seeing as this is simply a dns filter and can be bypassed by anyone in minutes.

 

I'm not sure it would be the ISP that would be ridiculed so much as Cameron and the MP's that strong armed them into implementing it even after all the ISP's and everyone with even a basic understanding told them it was unworkable, would either lead to under or over blocking and be a trivial matter to bypass.

 

That's just the obvious ones --so obvious it makes you wonder how they could end up getting blocked in the first place. What about the less obvious sites --the ones that do not generate outrage in the newspapers? The ones that deal with disenfranchised issues and people that are not so mediapathic?

It doesn't work. We are having to deal with a token filtering system because parents cannot take ownership of their own parental responsibility. It is pathetic.

That has never stopped politicians ****king things up on purpose.

 

The rumours on the internet is that it's a actually a whitelist maintained by an American company so that's why basically everything UK related is blocked.

 

That's cool. So the UK government vision is to have our internet access dictated by the US and controlled by the Chinese. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Nothing. All of those sites you listed above, with particular note to the nspcc, are nothing but poison to our nation's children. Good riddance.

I can now get back to proper parenting. Like punching my children on Christmas morning. The presents they bought me were ****.

 

To right, you don't want these damn kids reporting you for leaving them in the pub or something.

Not sure about the whitelist but it seems what my self and others jumped on was in fact the highest setting for parental controls, not the default. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/willardfoxton2/100011900/calm-down-freedom-squad-camerons-porn-filter-is-hardly-blocking-anything/

P.s Happy Christmas all

 

Should be fun if some of the online versions of newspapers and magazines get blocked, especially if they have supported filters

The Mail.

Femail The Mail newspapers online female site.

Alltop You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web.

Ananova Technology Media.

Mature Times The voice of the older generation.

Private Eye No explanation needed.

The list goes on and lets not forget all the online children's magazines with names that someone thinks should be filtered, the lawsuits will be flying