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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

You know what would make a lot of sense? Install these filters on every new device sold in the UK. Make them configurable, and even uninstallable, but defaulting to "blocked". That way if and when people choose to unblock something, it's a private matter between them and their device.

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.

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I am surprised that they haven't tried this as it would be much more affective. Network level filtering always fails because it can't see encrypted packets. To prevent circumvention you need something running on the machine, at which point you may as well just run the filter on the machine. The government could have promoted officially recommended browser plugins. If parents don't know how to protect their children why not help them?

Network level filtering always fails because it can't see encrypted packets.

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.

You need root access on the machine to add an SSL cert, meaning that the network level filter fails without maintaining control of the users machine. At that point you may as well do filtering at the client level. I think we can all agree that breaking SSL is bad.

Why would installing them on only new devices make a lot of sense? It doesn't achieve the stated goal of "protecting the children" if they are using any one of the millions of devices currently in use.

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...

I'm extremely against censorship, however I can see the benefit of having a default filter that can be turned off in private. Conservatively safe defaults are never a bad idea.

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