A tale of new censors | Hacker News Reader

A tale of new censors

blog.torproject.org

83 pointsllambda29 comments

At the beginning of January, I wrote an article about T-Mobile UK spoofing RST packets to disrupt SSL connections on mail submission and other ports, and how to bypass it:

https://grepular.com/Punching_through_The_Great_Firewall_of_...

paulgraham.com is also blocked by Vodafone's filter.

Prepaid (pay-as-you-go in UK terms) users that look over 18 can show up at a Vodafone store and remove the filter.

I did it without giving away my identity by registering online with a fake name and confirming the name at the store. Your mileage might vary.

This is standard practice for mobile networks in the UK and it should be. As the OP says, it's removable on request. You don't have to give them any details other than prove you are over 18. Turning up in the store is usually good enough.

Without this, if you are in the UK an 8 year old can quite simply just buy a pay as you go mobile phone with cash from a supermarket, top it up using cash and use it to browse porn etc.

With respect to the providers, O2's ADSL/POTS broadband offerings have no censorship in place at all.

Oh my god, an 8 year old looking at porn. Guys, I think this internet thing has gone too far...

> Without this, if you are in the UK an 8 year old can quite simply just buy a pay as you go mobile phone with cash from a supermarket, top it up using cash and use it to browse porn etc.

I don't see a problem with that.

Well you can activate your 8 year old's phone and explain that to the social worker after a few weeks...

Do you honestly believe that giving an kid unfiltered internet is likely to land you in trouble with social services? That is so far out of touch with reality...

My sister is a social worker. It does. Regularly. More than you could imagine. People don't know what acceptable sexual boundaries are when they learn about sex from porn resulting in all sorts of messed up individuals.

I find it hard to believe it is the unfiltered internet connection that gets them in trouble, rather than the particularly bad parenting that accompanied it in those particular circumstances.

An unfiltered internet connection itself is nothing for the government to be concerned about.

(You also likely have some pretty heavy selection bias tainting your perception of the prevalence of things like this.)

> find it hard to believe it is the unfiltered internet connection that gets them in trouble, rather than the particularly bad parenting that accompanied it in those particular circumstances.

How about a third possibility, that social services will screw with people's lives based on their whim.

I'm not sure the (real) problems with social services are on topic here.

Rape has existed for a lot longer than the Internet.

As a father of two small children, I'll chime in. Your concerns are bizarre.

The idea that second-graders are accessing hardcore pornography is laughable. The idea that they're buying pre-paid phones, installing TOR, and using that to access hardcore pornography is insane.

Will <18 kids look at porn at some point? Probably. Will social services get involved? Extremely unlikely.

Guiding my children is my responsibility, not T-Mobile's. While I appreciate tools to help me, I do not appreciate the idea of entering a credit card number to allow myself to visit TOR's website. That's very strange.

Without this, … and use it to browse porn etc.

So their filters are effective at blocking porn? Is the Tor project pornography now?

They are very effective. They block all proxy sites and all sources of proxy software. Tor is a source to obtain proxy software.

Wait, so we're worried about 8 year olds buying a phone, learning how to use tor on their phone, then using tor to obtain pornography?

No, I suspect whoever implemented this never actually thought to sit down and figure out exactly what their goal was. They're just firing blindly without real reason.

It's called due dilligence. All it takes is one clever individual to fill a school up with tor-users, much as Napster spread like wildfire.

Any kid smart enough to figure that out will not be stopped by censorship like that. This whole scenario is contrived and absurd.

I highly doubt they are effective at stopping teenagers/under 18s from getting access to porn. They might be effective at stopping access to www.pornotub.com, www.imagefap.com and some other sites, but that is not the same as begin effective at blocking porno. I'd like to see figures.

The only way that's possible is if you block all websites. As information hosted on a website at any time.

Not to mention 'user created content' assuming these things have a camera.

Well you can be effective without being 100%. It's pretty hard to block Al Qeadia from communicating on the internet, but the average person will not be able to communicate with them easily.

However, most porno filters can sometimes be bypassed in 5 mins.

> However, most porno filters can sometimes be bypassed in 5 mins.

That's the most non-deterministic sentence ever.

bwarp, I find your stance ... distasteful. I have kids and I monitor them as appropriate. The idea that all Internet connections are now "age verified" is just getting the infrastructure in place for more serious censorship. And the idea that social workers need to deal with people like me is a pretty serious threat.

They aren't age verified any further than walking into a video shop and asking for an 18 film, or off license to buy cigarettes or alcohol in the UK requires verification. We take that for granted. It's the same thing really.

The mass censorship infrastructure is already here in the UK EVERYWHERE (Google for IWF.org.uk) yet is surprisingly not mentioned with respect to this. The censorship is independent to the mobile provider's age mandate which has nothing to do with censorship, but is more of a way of protecting mobile providers' arses from getting sued by parents (which will happen). It is not actually LAW.

Now more seriously, you bought something off the shelf. You chose to buy it. If it comes with that restriction, don't buy it. The restriction is documented on the SIM packet. I choose not to buy Apple products on that basis: because I like to replace batteries. It's simple.

You don't have a right to buy something and then complain about how it censors you. Do your research and just don't buy it. You probably don't need it anyway.

To project my comments to an idea is that "social workers need to deal with people like you" is crazy and totally incorrect. That's extremism and a blatant twisting of words.

The premise, which is proven many a time (google it - I can't be arsed to be honest), is that if you expose children to pornography too early, bad things happen. Negative personality traits develop. They don't necessarily turn into rapists as someone says, but they cause problems with other children in schools when appropriate and conventional boundaries are broken. Giving them a readily accessible channel to end up with behaviour is not a positive thing.

Now where I live, it's not uncommon to see 10 year olds riding BMX's down the road with a cigarette in one hand and a can of Strongbow in the other and beating the shit out of people to get a few quid to sustain their highs.

Is that acceptable to you?

Please get it straight:

Nothing is black and white. That applies to censorship too.

i'm a supporter of tor, but i'm not sure why they're making this out to be so alarming. t-mobile clearly presents its filtering as a family-safe content filter, and tor is software that makes it easy to bypass content filtering. this is only setup by default on pre-paid accounts because anyone can purchase a pre-paid SIM without being over 18. i would expect the same kind of filtering at a library or school, and any other internet service that one can purchase like cable or dsl service typically requires that someone over 18 be present during installation. i can just imagine the silly backlash over a parent complaining to the media because their child was able to look at porn by putting a pre-paid SIM in their android phone.

i recently purchased a pre-paid SIM from t-mobile US and was kind of surprised they didn't ask for any identification when purchasing (more so because i would have thought the government would have mandated some kind of tracking of phone numbers for going after drug dealers or something). once i logged into t-mobile's website, the form to disable this content filtering was easy to find and required giving proof of being over 18 (which they say is not stored or associated with the account after verification).

Requiring you to be over 18 to use "the real Internet" also requires you to present a government ID. Which means, effectively, anonymous or pseudonymous use of the Internet is dead. This may be a problem if you'd like to criticize your government.

Independently of whether or not you think that is a good idea in theory, it is unworkable in practice. There will always be coffee shops and open access points and neighbors to mooch off of for the kids to get ahold of porn. Your media backlash is now merely shifted from Vodaphone to the local mom & pop.

TL;DR - an Internet license is no substitute for proper parenting.

You don't have to have a "government ID" or present ID. That's a fallacy. You just have to provide reasonable evidence that you are a not a minor.

Pubic hair is usually enough.

It's a choice the providers made to protect their arses from lawsuits, not the government.

There are a lot of paranoid people here.

Edit: to explain the "pubic hair" comment is sarcasm relating to how lax the verification process is. Judging by the time of day, lots of humor-challenged Americans have woken up.

I for one regularly use my pubic hair as proof of age.

T-Mobile blocks urbandictionary.com in the UK. When you want to access that site you need to give your credit card details, but only UK-issued cards work.

http://texy.pl/2011/01/24/internetowi-psuje-cz-2-t-mobile/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com