The UK internet "porn filters" have been found to be blocking more than just porn, including TorrentFreak & Linuxtracker. Twitter, Facebook and reddit have been blocked by some ISPs as "potentially dangerous to children ".
This data has been collected by the Open Rights Group's website that checks to see if a site is blocked on a certain network (as this information is not released from the ISPs). Ironically, this site, blocked.org.uk has itself been blocked by some ISPs.
A new tool released by the Open Rights Group today reveals that 20% of the 100,000 most-visited websites on the Internet are blocked by the parental filters of UK ISPs. With the newly-launched website, the group makes it easier to expose false positives and to show that the blocking efforts actually ban many legitimate sites, TorrentFreak included.
The results of ORG's new tool show that what started as a "porn filter" has turned into something much bigger. Under the guise of "protecting the children" tens of thousands of sites are now caught up in overbroad filters, which is a worrying development to say the least.
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Recently, UK ISPs were encouraged by the government to offer network level filters that blocked naughty content to new users signing up. It appears that people aren't as keen on these filters as the government hoped.
Only 5% of new BT customers signed up, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. TalkTalk rolled out a parental-control system two years before the government required it and has had much better take-up of its offering, with 36% of customers signing up for it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by azrael on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:50PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:02PM
Until your ISP decides that Wikipedia is potentially harmful for children, that is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:43PM
Isn't this something we've known for a long time? I know that everybody expected exactly this, but I thought we had already had reports about the Great Wall of Britain being used far outside of its stated scoped.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:00PM
It was expected. I believe the next thing on the list is political dissent, isn't it?
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:22PM
They wouldn't dare, as we all know that Cameron $#@$&*%@%&*!!$#@$*&*&*&@$@#$@#%&*&*&*@%$#%#$!*&*&@*$&*%&$#%*#&%*EOF
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @01:16PM
I hereby coin the Hadrian Wall.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:48PM
The censorship infrastructure of the Internet is being built in the name of stopping child porn, porn, copyright infringement, and other things people won't object to having censored. I've been saying for years to anyone who will listen that once you build the infrastructure to censor these things, you have the capability to censor anything and everything else. No one has listened to me yet.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:02PM
Sorry dude, you were blocked.
(Score: 2) by Silentknyght on Thursday July 03 2014, @03:49PM
From the Torrentfreak article:
So, it's really that it's just opt-out instead of opt-in, right? I don't live in the UK, though, so I can't speak as to whether or not this is accurate: As long as the presence of the filers is clearly disclosed to the consumer, and as long as the opt-out process is quick and non-punitive, there's not really all that much to say. In such a case, people have a responsibility to be informed and make decisions in their own best interest; if you leave it to someone else, then you forfeit your right to outrage when you disagree with the decision that's made. There are plenty of for-purchase web filtering packages out there that can be individualized to meet your own specific needs.
I have no filtering on my internet---and would, of course, certainly opt-out of any & all filtering---but, as most of us tech-savvy folk would agree, there are some truly god-awful places on the internet that I wish I'd never seen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:08PM
I don't know if I have filtering. But I'd happily have filtering on my house ISP line so that my kids can't get to these sites, providing I can use a VPN to bypass the filters if *I* want to.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by purple_cobra on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:02PM
There's an entire market devoted to this type of software and parents are free to buy any of that software and use it. There's also the opendns.com option. The cost for this type of filter at the ISP end will, ultimately, be borne by the customer and as I don't want it, why should I pay for it? Or, by inference, have my life affected by your decision to have kids?
But this has absolutely nothing to do with "keeping kids safe" and everything to do with control.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by emg on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:52PM
Yeah, right. Because it's not like the government will put anyone who chooses to 'opt out' of Internet censorship onto their 'Naughty List'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:06PM
This! A thousand times this!
(Score: 2) by Silentknyght on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:12PM
For serious? Your ISP can already track all the sites you visit. If the powers that be wanted a list, there's already a better source than an opt-out list. Moreover, if pornography is legal where you live, it'd be a list containing plenty of people who'd at least have plausible reason for opting out, rendering the list somewhat less valuable. Not to mention, it'd be a list of households, not necessarily individuals.
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:40PM
Opting out is an overt act in direct defiance to what they government feels is best for you. You're just signing up on a different list. In Newspeak: Opting out is Opting In!
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday July 04 2014, @07:24AM
Use a VPN service. Block GCHQ/NSA snooping too. We need VPNs to become as mainstream as possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lgsoynews on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:00PM
Filters have always been a joke, and always will be.
Even when they are not manipulated (and they always end up with a shameful scope creep), they are incredibly unreliable.
I've had many run-ins with company-wide filters. A few amusing examples: you couldn't search Google with the term "robot", or a specific Java exception (something like BadParameterException), both searches were identified as porn, and you couldn't even reach the Google result page! I'd be REALLY interested to know what is the rationale. I know about Rule 34, but then everything should be blocked, no? On the other hand, at the same place, I once looked for a walkthrough and reached a site about the Zelda games, which was not blocked despite having all the keywords in the URL and the text... And don't ask for filter modifications, even if it's blocking for your job, the people supposedly responsible for it (there was an address in the bottom of the warning page) don't understand what the web is, what java is or what a "google search" mean.
What surprises me the most is that almost everytime, I got blocked by the "porn" filter, sometimes by the "productivity" filter (whatever that means). And that's when searching for programming-related topics! Without any ambiguous keywords.
If you believe those tools, it seems that all programming is really about is porn :-)
(Score: 3, Funny) by meisterister on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:20PM
(seedy voice) Mmmmm, yeah, work that keyboard. Why don't you come over here and compile that program.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 1) by PinkyGigglebrain on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:32PM
.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 03 2014, @07:02PM
Ultimately, sex is just code injection.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:24PM
Searching for robots is the gateway to blackjack and hookers.
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:04PM
I like where you are going with this.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:09PM
Robot hookers and blackjack?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 03 2014, @06:52PM
I guess it was IllegalAccessException. [android.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @04:25AM
Seth made MULTI-MILLIONS computerizing pornography in the early days of the World Wide Web before the .com bust around 2000.
In 2001, he fled the USA for Bangkok, Thailand leaving his business affairs up in the air.
I heard he was pressured to quit or else be killed!
Read more about him at the link below if you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Warshavsky [wikipedia.org]
I couldn't find him by his name because I couldn't spell his last name well enough
for Google to recognize it but was scuccessful using his company name,
Internet Entertainment Group, to find his Wikipedia page.
(Score: 2) by AsteroidMining on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:27PM
Anyone surprised by this has really not been paying attention. I would never trust any statement by any official of the UK Government.
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Thursday July 03 2014, @08:27PM
Whom would you trust ?
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 1) by DaTrueDave on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:40PM
Morality is the job of parents and churches, not the government.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:37PM
I'd argue that not even that. Morality is an individual responsibility. After all you are the only one who has to live with yourself for the rest of your life.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday July 03 2014, @09:55PM
The only common factor between those sites is that people use them.
The problem is clearly people. Ban them.
Signed,
Judge Sidney