New broadband users shun manditory porn filters, (UK regulator) Ofcom finds | Hacker News Reader

New broadband users shun manditory porn filters, (UK regulator) Ofcom finds

bbc.co.uk

44 pointsRobAley46 comments

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Says the BBC: "The filters block pornographic websites, as well as pages promoting self-harm or drug taking."

One of the major concerns raised about these filters at the time the government announced them was that they _also_ block sites which people go to for help.

The BBC have decided to ignore this concern (which they know about) and copy+paste the government's promotional text.

This just shows it's not about actually helping people.

I've noticed BBC tends to do that a lot - publish government's stories (mostly in the way they want them published).

Yes. BBC News nowadays is essentially Government Press Release Hour.

Probably because the Government is continually holding the threat of a licence fee review over their heads (the BBC is funded by a flat-rate tax of ~£150 per year on each UK household that owns a TV). "Nice little broadcasting corporation you got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it".

It got appreciably worse after they got in hot water and backtracked over Andrew Gilligan's patently correct claim that Tony Blair knowingly lied to get the UK into the Iraq war.

It has also got worse under the present Tory ('coalition') government, which the BBC knows would like nothing better, ideologically speaking, than to eliminate one more public service.

Probably a lot of this agenda has been internalised by BBC staff. Nobody ever got fired for broadcasting the Government line, after all.

http://www.medialens.org/ is great on this stuff.

Isn't this common everywhere? Lazy reporters turning press releases into articles with the minimum possible work. BBC may be more prone at parroting UK government press releases but this is a part of a much larger problem.

Says the BBC:

"A BBC investigation last year found that porn filters from other UK ISPs were blocking access to sex education and rape-victim support websites."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25638872

And

"Pornography filters used by major internet service providers are blocking websites offering sex education and advice on sexual health and porn addiction, the BBC has learned."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25430582

Exactly. They know this - and have reported it - but in the next article, somehow everything's fine again and what the government say is fact.

I agree that the reporting in the linked article is a bit lacking (especially if the author didn't bother reading the Beeb's own past coverage of the filter), but it's a mistake to think of the BBC as a monolithic "they." I don't think it's a malicious omission.

I think this is just lazy reporting with the guy writing this not bothering to check his facts.

This short report is factually describing the release of an OfCom study about uptake of the filter. It would be an editorial comment to speculate about the causes for why people are not taking up the filter if those conclusions are not part of the study.

Such issues might fit a different story or a broader article about the filter as a whole but I see no problem with its omission from this specific report.

Wel they DO speculate that the low uptake is due to evil installation people who are maybe going around disabling the filter for everyone... Like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dht_3NziwSw

This is because the BBC is the government and the government is BBC.

Ha ha... Thank you virgin media engineers for taking care of all the hassle a new user has to go trough when they find out their favorite midget porn website doesn't work anymore.

Hell this may even cause the cancellation of a few contracts when the user finds his websites blocked doesn't know about the filter or just clicks trough it without reading and is too embarrassed to call up the ISP and ask questions.

I think this is customer support at its best. :)

'Porn filters' while getting your attention isn't the whole story. There's a whole list there. Very few adults would tolerate this much censorship.

Categories blocked across the major ISPs include: Dating, Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco, File sharing, Gambling, Games, Pornography, Nudity, Social networking, Suicide and Self-harm, Weapons and violence, Obscenity, Criminal Skills, Hate, Media Streaming, Fashion and Beauty, Gore, Cyberbullying, Hacking and Web-blocking circumvention tools

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...

Some of those I can definitely see the justification behind them of being "evils of society", but as for Dating, Social networking, Media Streaming, and Fashion and Beauty...?

Makes me wonder what they're really trying to do.

They are offering a product to people who might want that product.

If you do want the product you might go to an ISP that offers it, and thus give them your money.

If you don't want the product, well, it's opt-in so you possibly don't know or care about it.

If you're one of the few people who are aware of over-filtering, and think that any filtering by the ISP (even if currently opt-in) is bad then you might want to spend your money with for example AAISP. Get your wallet ready.

Or maybe very many adults actually plan to watch porn, but are generally okay with censorship?

Your comment is quite disingenuous. The major ISPs offer parental filters that can be used to block many different types of content, and specific websites, but they are not the default: they are opt-in. The default (opt-out) filter with BT for example is "Light"[1], which only blocks the content you'd expect to be blocked by a "family-friendly" filter. To block Media Streaming, Fashion, Sex Education and File Sharing you have to opt-in to "Strict"[2]. If someone opts out of the default ("mandatory") filter they are opting out of a porn filter, not a sex education filter.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/5IN6VGC.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/PinT3xy.png

Your comment is quite disingenuous. The major ISPs parental filters have all suffered numerous false positives and varying commitment to fixing the problems. The porn filters particularly often block access to sex education, anti-bullying, and support sites for young gay/transgender etc (also I believe some charity sites for women suffering from sexual and physical abuse at home). If someone opts out of the default filter they are ensuring that people in their household can access support they may need, not just letting porn in.

My experience was: my ISP was talktalk, under a business account run from home (SOHO?), One day, un-opted, they started censoring sites - dating sites - which would seem to be strict under the BT definition. While that might be as expected for a business it wasn't a service that was asked for.

That’s still so obstructive as to be useless for any normal adult. For example I was banned from seeing the opening times for a local brewery tour by default on my mobile connection; had to phone them up to unblock it.

If you blocked all that, what reason on earth would you have to have a connection in the first place? No Facebook, no media.

It leaves wikipedia and email I guess.

The nanny state in action. There are plenty of solutions available if you wish to block certain content. This just looks like it's doing something good.

Clearly this shows the public is widely against it, and they will promptly shut down this program?!

It doesn't show that, it shows that users who have a new broadband connection (since the end of 2013 for BT and Sky customers) have not opted-in - existing customers aren't presented with the choice.

35% of TalkTalk customers since 2011 is surprisingly high though.

Am I missing something or why couldn't users have just installed a net filter of their choice in the first place? Why did there need to be government involvement? Or is this like the opt-out vs. opt-in debate?

I was curious as to what URLs are blocked by some ISPs in the UK. Here's a (maybe NSFW) list: http://uk-blocked-sites.herokuapp.com/

Did you notice that torproject.org is blocked? As well as various torrent sites (including of course pirate bay).

Yeah, also that list is specifically excluding the "strict" filters. There's also: - defcon.org - ethicalvoiceforanimals.org.uk (don't know why) - hackthissite.org - rapidshare.com - gaylifeuk.com/helplines-a-support-groups.html

The TOR project gets blocked under "Proxy Sites" category, I imagine most VPN providers will be blocked alongside them as well.

Why is there such a difference between TalkTalk and the other ISPs?

Why is talktalk's adoption of the filter so much higher? The article mentions the fact, but doesn't dig into it at all.

I think Talktalk is one of the cheapest ISPs in the UK, their customers probably don't use the internet enough to notice.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

On by default? I know they want me to turn a filter on every time I log into the account management page, as well as some macaffe filter deely.

Do the filters really block all porn on the internet? That's quite impressive.

No, they don't. They have plenty of overblocking too.

Please see https://www.blocked.org.uk/ for details.

tor.eff.org is one of the blocked sites... This is clearly not just intended as a porn filter, gchq must have a hand in it.

What's "manditory" about the porn filter, if you can opt out of it? Not to say that the filter is a good thing, but the title of submission is an oxymoron

The nature of an "opt-out" system is mandatory.

I'm not sure what you mean here. The Great Firewall is mandatory, there is no "opt-out". The nature of an "opt-out" system is that it can be disabled.

It's mandatory for the ISPs to offer it by default.

The submission is talking about users, not ISPs, so it doesn't make sense in this context.

(Not a lawyer. Lay opinion, not legal advice.)

Not actually true. While it is the stated policy of some Government ministers and the PM, there is no primary or secondary legislation forcing ISPs to adopt filtering of any kind (even "Cleanfeed"-style blocking of sites implicated in child pornography on the IWF blocklist, or terrorism): the Government in negotiations strongly stated that if "voluntary" agreements weren't reached by the ISPs, they would make such a law, but this has not come before Parliament.

Obviously, such a proposed law would face significant legal and political challenge, were it made, as would any attempt to, via legal or regulatory hurdles, coerce an ISP into participating in this scheme. Any such challenge would have a wealth of data supporting the ineffectiveness, unaccountability, overblocking, and unwantedness of the various filters.

Existing case law regarding site blocking of sites accused of the facilitation of copyright infringement are targeted against individual ISPs which already have site blocking infrastructure in place, and explicitly does not address any coercion to fund any such censorship infrastructure, or (if it were mandatory) its legality: it was found to be orderable only on the basis that the respondent ISPs already had the means deployed and available to do it.

Clever maneuver: get the result you want, and bypass the democratic process because it's inconvenient.

Thanks for explaining this, I didn't realise this was the case.

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