UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Liberty is about the ability of the individual to do things that others disapprove of. You don't need liberty if everyone else approves of your actions. As a corollary, the exercise of liberty does not require a justification, because it's a liberty, practicality or "usefulness" or what-have-you play no part in it. It's onerous to require someone to justify their right to look at porn. It's even more onerous to ask people to put their name on a list as someone who desires the ability to look at porn. And indeed this is how freedoms are eroded. Because once you put things on a different footing and you require people to justify their freedoms then it becomes ever more difficult to justify anything. Can you justify eating a cheap, greasy cheeseburger? Can you justify watching "Jersey Shore"? Are you willing to?
These are precisely the same sorts of tactics that have been used since the dawn of time for busybodies to rein in individual freedoms of others, and thereby to obtain greater authority over others.
People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once (if) we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so.
Jesus fucking christ you people should go look at what happens in real dictatorships sometime.
A voluntary filter is not tyranny and it's fucking disgusting to compare optional filtering of semi-random webcontent with governments who murder and torture their citizens.
P.S. At what level of infringement of individual liberty between "just a little" and "full on raging tyranny" is it acceptable to take notice and be seriously pissed off?
You should just shut your mouth until yours is as bad as theirs.
This is basicly what you are saying.
And no surprise, I disagree with you!
Oh and by the way, you are familiar with the fact that the American government has murdered its own citizens, and that a hundred of them have been detained (and I suppose it's safe to assume, tortured) in Guantanamo? Yes, I know they are most likely not random innocent people.
You are the one that made the equivalence, not the person to which you replied. Nice straw man.
This UK porn filter is a step on a path. Yes, that current position is not tyranny, but it's a step on the path to it. Frogs can't be dropped into boiling water, but you can turn up the heat a little bit at a time until they boil. That's what's happening in the US and UK right now. The end result will be tyranny, and it will end with murder and torture of citizens.
Btw, in the US, we've already started murdering our citizens[1].
1. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/obama-assassin...
EDIT: remove "Boiled" before frogs to clarify my intent. Thanks coldcode.
The truth is that the myth is true. However they have already censored all of the boiling frog videos from the internets.
This has been called "kettling" in police jargon regarding crowd-control. For an older example, look to Roman general Fabius Maximus (from which the Fabian Society took its name) who used a new tactic [1], consisting of attrition, to defeat his enemies. Also, might as well mention that Sung Tzu (correct me if I'm wrong) said the weakest and dumbest way to enact political change is via military action, preferring subversion instead.
What about governments that murder and torture citizens of other countries? The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed by the US is pretty high - this fact alone is enough to make the US one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.
The idea is to transcend, not regress…
But I guess since it was tacked on in the end in the name of a compromise all is forgiven, as people can tell from the current state of affairs today.
I'm not condoning the actions of our nation states (Britain in this case), but as we have seen people and companies are standing in opposition with the issues at hand, and if people continue to do so to a point where it is agreed upon by more members of the community, then it will become the law of the land. Even the ideals brought forth in the constitution we're hardly original to it and we're fought for with the blood of about 1% of the population in the colony at the time [0]. But by no means does that some how make them more moral then the people who came before and those afterwards.
The founders were hashing out how each state would be represented by Congress. They decided each state would have representation proportional to its population. The problem: some states had tons of slaves. Slaves weren't allowed to vote--that was never in question--but slave states still wanted them to be included in the population count to get more representation.
Giving slave-owners more votes by counting their slaves fully would have been much worse, not better, for the slaves.
(An irrelevant tangent, I know, but this historical event is always mentioned in the wrong context and I think the truth is more interesting.)
People can learn many lessons from an event in history.
I think that the two most famous tyrannies, the Nazis and the USSR, have given us a very narrow impression of how tyranny can take hold. We think, as long as there isn't a charismatic Hitler/Lenin figure agitating for revolution and preaching a radical ideology, that we're safe.
We should be concerned the about the general erosion of the republican immune system - 1. Judiciary: Laws weakening judges in favor of prosecutors, vast unfilled judge vacancies, the FISA court. 2. The Legislature: The utter contempt shown for the people's branch by the military/executive, the troubling trend of the public echoing this. 3. Worshiping the guys with rows of medals and funny hats, giving them massive political power (Keith Alexander).
EDIT: I found two relevant James Madison quotes:
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations"
"The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. "
i think this is exactly the delusion most suffer from, because there are many people consolidating power instead of just one the concept of tyranny seems farfetched and alien. there isn't a clear target beyond "the government" that is the source of the power creep and so people struggle to fight against it, much like a lion trying to catch a zebra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra#Stripes)
It's not the risk of Voldemort taking over, it's the risk of Dolores Umbridge doing so.
It's a good thing the US doesn't have a widely-beloved charismatic leader sending us running down the slippery slope, then.
Oh, wait.
Anytime one makes a differentiation between two things, beauty and ugliness, skill and stupidity, light and dark, one is making a value judgement. The act of segregation, in and of itself, implies evaluation, weighing and judgement.
I believe that prejudgement (or prejudice) is antithetical to democracy. The idea that looking at porn should require justification is so wrong-headed I don't even know where to begin.
Sometimes I feel like in the 21st century, our industry (tech) is focused on making dreams come true, whereas our body politic is only interested in rehashing the same problems we've dealt with since the dawn of time. Why the hell are we even discussing a pornography filter when there are so many real, gigantic problems out there.
Maddening.
a continuation of the quoted part above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYhmATD8hLk
One of my favorite quotes:
> when you don't create things, you become defined by your
> tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow &
> exclude people. so create.
>
> - _why the lucky stiff"Whether Huawei is linked to the government or not (they insist not), it’s hardly encouraging to discover that even when TalkTalk subscribers turn filtering completely off, their traffic is still routed through Huawei’s system."
Who needs PRISM when ISPs will just proxy all our network traffic through the Great Firewall!
"Next in importance to personal freedom is immunity from suspicions, and jealous observation. Men may be without restraints upon their liberty: they may pass to and fro at pleasure: but if their steps are tracked by spies and informers, their words noted down for crimination, their associates watched as conspirators, who shall say that they are free? Nothing is more revolting to Englishmen than the espionage which forms part of the administrative system of continental despotisms. It haunts men like an evil genius, chills their gaiety, restrains their wit, casts a shadow over their friendships, and blights their domestic hearth.
The freedom of a country may be measured by its immunity from this baleful agency. Rulers who distrust their own people, must govern in a spirit of absolutism; and suspected subjects will be ever sensible of their bondage."
The Constitutional History Of England Vol II (1863), pg. 288
by T. E. May
http://archive.org/stream/constitutionalhi029622mbp#page/n31...
In a despotism these roles are reversed, in government, secrecy is assumed. For the people, there is no privacy. Government is not longer the servant but the master.
"The Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry is an agreement between the Chinese internet industry regulator and companies that operate sites in China. In signing the agreement, web companies are pledging to identify and prevent the transmission of information that Chinese authorities deem objectionable, including information that “breaks laws or spreads superstition or obscenity”, or that “may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability”."
-From Wikipedia
Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics -
1. The filter is full of holes
2. What's blocked is pretty arbitrary
Health education type material for teenagers springs to mind. I have seen issues in the past with 'walled garden' type software in schools/colleges blocking content of that nature unless specifically unblocked.
Suspect there will be backlash, then weakening of system to the point of uselessness once it gets going. Usual expensive UK government IT mess.
This project is hopeless, and it's going to be reasonably expensive for someone, but as understand it the government isn't paying for the filters.
Thus, it's not going to cost the government anything.
Opting out usually requires you to call the operator, though sometimes you can do it through their web portal if you have a credit card (they'll charge and then refund it). I assume it blocks stuff through tethered devices too. Dunno really.
Justifications? Most likely "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!".
On which subject - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTeENEQkBKE
YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO.
Justifications: "Children have too easy access to very hard core porn. Provide filtering, or we'll regulate you".
..Thereby putting your name on a list of people who like to look at $blocked_thing. Why this is problematic is left as an exercise for the reader.
Any such filtering should be OPT IN by default. Not the other way around.
Further, what data children have the ability to access is the concern of their parents, not the government.
# obviously not real sql
select * from citizens where (citizen.id not in opt_in_list)
(defaultsetting_users) > (nondefaultsetting_users)
This, for instance, is why Windows Update got a lot more forceful in its later incarnations. People will not update, even when it's good for them, unless you make it hard to not update.
How many people still think IE == internet...
I work as an engineer in a small ISP compaly, and for some time had very closely contacted with phone support (sometimes helping them) and heard many conversations with clients.
I'd say there are quite a few people who can't distinguish between Internet, browser and VKontakte (Russian analog for Facebook). Didn't counted them or did any real statistics, though.
By making it opt-out, you will get only those that feel strongly about seeing it. By making it opt-in, and following your query, you won't be able to separate those that really want to see it, from those that really don't care.
The group that doesn't care is big enough to make a difference.
So given that they can build such a list regardless of the porn filtering settings, and given that people don't change default settings, and given that a porn filter can be somewhat effective at blocking offensive content, and given that we already agree to blocking offensive content in public space as a general behaviour, and given that a porn filter will be opt-out-able, why not make it opt-in?
Look at its early history: Built with "Western" technology and consulting.
Did you think all these firms were creating a one-off?
And, the following observation is perhaps stretching the interpretation a bit (or not), but I find it somewhat ironic that, after all this, it is a Chinese company that is pushing this implementation forward. Use domestic market access to acquire the knowledge (sometimes, by hook or by crook), and then use your control of your own labor market to undersell the competition.
B.O.L.L.O.C.S
I just wonder how long until they start using this infrastructure to compute a profile that determins things like your social security contributions or security clearance. They could also threaten to take the children away from people who disable the filters or force them into some kind of "re-education" program.
Q: "Mr Smith, isn't it true that you willingly removed a filter on you Internet connection, places there for your safety, and the safety of your children, and now your connection allows you to watch hard core porn?" A: "But... I did it because.." Q: "Yes or no, Mr. Smith? Did you ask for the filters to be removed?" A: "Yes, bu..." Q: Thank you, Mr. Smitha
"No"
If the lawyer wants to be an ass then he can enjoy some excessively pedantic replies.
"Placed there for my safety? Why would I remove a filter placed there for my safety? He must be referring to some other filter."
Three years ago, or so, I was thinking about[1] the idea that we may have been witnessing something akin to peak oil, or peak credit.
At that time I was discussing it in terms of network fragmentation and net neutrality ... but a collection of different censorship regimes around the world degrades it[2] just as well...
[1] http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2010/12/peak-internet.h... [2] "it" being the "homogenous, globally routed Internet as we have known it."
Unlike in Britain, the consumers did not have an option to opt out from the filter although it seems that majority of ISPs don't use it. Later on ISPs were forced to block piratebay.org and there have been discussions about blocking online poker sites etc, because Veikkaus enjoys monopoly in gambling and betting business in Finland.
Aha! Another great business opportunity reveals itself!
If you built a relationship with the filter provider, you could get companies to pay you to have their competitor's websites added to to the list of blocked websites!
The same filter is now used to action on high court demands to block torrent websites like The Pirate Bay.
The first part hasn't received as much attention because it's harder to write a punchy article about the malicious nature of a government-supplied permanent search filter blacklist, and it isn't as easy to attack as the blocking of legal content such as pornography but this is where the real danger lies.
Once the government add all their 'illegal search terms' to the blacklist and have the appartus for such wide-ranging censorship set up, what is to stop them from adding terms unchecked and unguided to filter any "unwanted" material from web searches? If this had existed in the US, for example, when the NSA Verizon/PRISM stories were leaked, how easy would it be for them to simply add "Edward Snowden" or "The Guardian" or "PRISM" or even "NSA" to the search term blacklist? They would easily justify it on the grounds that the material leaked was classified or damaging to national security.
At this stage a majority of people would in hindsight agree that this leak is hugely important and in the public interest, but if these terms were blocked by the government then what?
"I knew of some Chinese migrants to Australia who watched a Tiananmen 10-year anniversary documentary, and apparently tears just streamed down their faces.
They had no clue that it ever happened."
I mean just about the specific case, I know that the Tiananmen square incident is unknown to almost all Chinese.
Even those whom I suspect may be aware of it seem to confine it to a cultural blindspot approaching wilful ignorance. It is something you simply _do not talk about_ in China.
It is pretty easy to find Chinese people talking about how few people (specially younger people) know about it too:
http://www.quora.com/China/What-percentage-of-Chinese-know-a...
http://observers.france24.com/content/20080605-tiananmen-squ...
Even those who have heard about it though, many probably haven't seen the pictures to truly understand the scale of it.
A more apt US analogy might be how many people were aware of the scale of protests against the Iraq war -- especially the vast opposition to it in Europe. My impression is that US mass media self-censored and barely reported those protests. (I may be mistaken: I don't live in the US, but that's what I've heard from people who do.)
Of course it's a far cry from self-censorship by the mass media to state censorship of the Internet. But for many people it results in the same distorted view of the world.
ISPs have a stated objection to these proposals (if only because they understand what's really involved) and it feels to me a little like this could just be spin from their camp. Suggesting that this is the start of wider censorship would certainly be a way of pushing the public against it which would suit the ISPs cause.
None of which is to say that what they're saying is wrong or that it's good bad or indifferent, just that my reading of the article is that it doesn't really have much to support it's claims.
All that said we know for sure that the proposals will block things other than porn if only because it's almost impossible to accurately define porn or build a perfect filter for it based on whatever definition you have. There will be false positives and negatives both in terms of definition and implementation, meaning that stuff will absolutely be restricted which shouldn't be (and let through when it should). Good luck running an on-line site such as Ann Summers or Agent Provocateur, even when you're allowed shops in the high street.
Why won't they block games or dating sites?
That Talk-Talk product was put in place in response to earlier requests by MPs to "protect children", which is why mobile content tends to have filters now.
It seems that filter is as good a model as anything else for what the filter will be.
Obviously that's the likely implementation for the new system but it seems unlikely that they'd enable all that by default - that would absolutely open them up to claims of censorship and undermine what they actually want to do.
If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely.
I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that.
At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(
But you can tunnel encrypted data over anything that can carry a signal, and stuff IP datagrams inside it. This will only stop people that are "casually" looking for stuff and don't really care.
Latency might suck. But if the filters become a problem, you'll start seeing VPN applications with "UK filter modes" that use whatever the current simplest circumvention method is. Heck, I'm in the UK and I'd go into business selling VPN solutions like that myself if the filters get obnoxious enough for that (through suitable shell companies somewhere more favourable). The trouble with a business like that, of course, is that the market will be limited as long as the filters are not mandatory.
But just as an illustration of how ludicrously infeasible turning this into full censorship is: If they allow HTTP through at all, you could easily create a VPN were the packets are exchanged by ensuring every Xth character is lowercase for 0 and uppercase for 1, and serialise your packets by downloading / uploading hacker news comments to the VPN server, with the case changed. Or you could use a thesaurus on both ends, with an algorithm for assigning 0/1 to words, and rewrite the text by looking up the next word and deciding whether (and if so what) to rewrite it to.
Of course that'd also be ludicrously slow and waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but it's an example on the far extreme end. More likely if they ever try to make this mandatory and actively filter, it'd likely start out with just be a matter of changing port numbers. The next step up in escalation would likely be wrapping the data in something that looks like you're talking to a DNS or mail server or similarly slightly massaging the data.
It'd only be somewhat tricky if they get to the point of trying deep packet inspection and validating that the contents matches expectations from the protocol and doesn't look "too random" for every protocol people might use.
(As a last resort we'll just have to implement IP over Avian carriers: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 )
Dirty, filthy sysadmins :)
At the moment, it's sadly languishing at a mere 21,000 signatures. If it reaches 100,000 then that should trigger a parliamentary debate. I'm also going to send an email to my local MP. Does anyone have any other ideas for fighting this censorship?
YouTube, Vimeo and all other video-sharing websites Flickr, imgur and all other photo-sharing websites WordPress, Blogger and all other blogging platforms (and every blog on them) Facebook, Google+ and all other social networks BBC, CNN, NPR and almost all foreign news agencies ... And also HTTPS rarely works. They have limited the HTTPS bandwidth so much it's impossible to use Gmail without a headache, in an effort to encourage everyone to disable it, thus making it easier for surveillance.
Dear British friends, it's a slippery slope. Don't let the same thing happen to you.
[0] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
[1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en
For exit nodes, the issue of legal liability for routing other's traffic is less clear. You'd basically run the same risks as providing an open wireless network: https://openwireless.org/myths-legal
It is rare that an exit node is raided but there has been no known occurrence in which a normal relay was raided.. nor would it make any sense for there to be. Many people run non-exit relays as they are uncomfortable with the risk of exiting for the Tor network, perhaps you should be one of them.
What we are seeing now is a thin end of a very big wedge which once in place will be much harder to reverse.
With this and the recent disclosure regarding fibre tapping, take a moment to remember these words from John Gilmore [1]
>How many of you have broken no laws this month?
>If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody.
>When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot.
But we have hope:
>The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Sadly quote 4 may lead to quote 3.
I think many people in modern society don't understand the power of data. The NSA scandal has shown how much people underestimate the power companies can have when they own everyone's data. And similarly, they underestimate the power that a government can have when it owns everyone's data.
We need to do a better job of showing the lay person how much they're underestimating the value of their data, and how much power the data aggregators have.
For instance, nationalize the internet, perhaps block services from companies from other countries or tax such services to promote indigenous companies that provide similar services. The reasoning can be why not promote local businesses and provide them incentives by taxing or levying duties on services from other countries instead of letting a company from some other country making all the profits.
edit : typo
This achieves both the stated goal of protecting people from malicious content, and the freedom of people to consume malicious content, if they want to, in private.
Moreso, why default to blocked and not unblocked, allowing people to opt-in?
Ah but then we'd be back in the rational and current position of giving people the ability to install blocking software or filters if they so desire...
Pfft, how far in the past are you living?
https://www.barracuda.com/products/webfilter/features
SSL Inspection - Administrators can specify domains and URL categories for which SSL-encrypted traffic will be decrypted, scanned for malware and policy and then re-encrypted to the destination when deemed safe.
All you do is put a trusted SSL certificate on your office computers, and the proxy device will reencrypt the traffic as coming from your trusted certificate, and the end user will not notice the difference unless they study the names in the certificate chain.
I think that I will create a business to develop technology that lets us block undesirable thoughts. We will use an EEG cap as the sensor, some machine learning to detect undesirable thoughts, then a bone-conduction speaker to play distracting and disorienting sounds whenever our detector is triggered.
Perfect.
Do you think I could get some government funding for this?
But I already hear constant radio pop-music everywhere I go without triggering anything first :(
You would have to opt-in to viewing such content as the default has you opted-out along with porn, violent material, extremist and terrorist related content.
Obviously the question is rhetorical, but I'd like to see someone ask it.
ISPs said they offer opt-in filters (and opt-out on mobile products) that people could use.
politicians now say those filters must all be opt-out.
Anyway, the idea of getting the government involved on blocking porn (or anything) is really bad. I rather live in a world where we have to teach our children to be responsable than in a world where the government decides what they can and what they cannot see.
Especially: is a VPN provider an ISP?
Additionally, what definition of ISP is used in Mr Cameron's proposal?
So far I like what I have seen. I just don't want any filter, thanks, and I did't have to say why (ie. porn or anything else).
I believe he's expressed views in favour of net neutrality and against censorship in the past. With his participation in the Olympic ceremony perhaps, if he were to get in the news, the public would pay some attention.
Say I use Google or Bing or whatever over SSL. All traffic is encrypted end-to-end. How will the ISPs know I am searching for a forbidden term? Are they going to request a CA to issue certificates for google.com to ISPs?
Would an unblocked proxy suffice, or do we think UK internet users would need to purchase a VPN?
Also, is the idea to block porn sites, or any site that contains pornographic content, like NSFW subreddits?
2) Click checkbox by "Filters on [ ]" so that the box is unchecked.
The internet as a transmission protocol is robust and redundant. And if it were used as a sort of replacement for the telephone system then that would be enough. But the architecture of the way the internet is today used in practice is far more centralized. If the web worked the way bittorrent does then perhaps your comment would be accurate, but it doesn't, so we have a "web" that is not strong due to its massive interconnectivity but rather weak because each part of it, content-wise, lives in comparative isolation and is easy to cut off (for now).
This legislation isn't about shutting down porn websites, it's about blocking their access at the ISP level. This censorship is circumventable by using a VPN or other such technology. Censorship -> damage, Internet -> routes around damage.
This has nothing to do with cutting off a website from being accessible by removing it from the Internet.
Compare that to, say, a reporter's personal blog and videos, for example. Especially if they have a family they are going to be much less able to pull the sorts of hijinx that TPB manages. When they're shut down once they will stay shut down and they will more than likely just keep their head down from then on.