New broadband users shun UK porn filters, Ofcom finds
bbc.co.uk
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Even in the face of (their statistics)6 out of 7 people opting out, it's still desperately trying to be presented as the feature that will save you from the bad parts of the internet. The implication being that the majority of people (everyone who has opted out) are morally corrupt, bad people with no interest in "child safety" or "family friendly" features.
I imagine Malcolm Tucker from The Thick Of It screaming down to the BBC offices and making sure they use the official party line regarding "porn filter" vs "Great Firewall of Cameron".
And I find it hard to ciriticise parents that leave the filtering active. It is perfectly reasonable to try and shelter a child from porn. This tech may not do that particularly well but that is a different issue.
If I actually wanted a solution, I'd probably go ahead with the government one, given your alternative.
But if the "opt-in" is "install and configure all this software" vs "tick this box," I'd rather tick the box.
Don't get me wrong you're well withing your right as a parent to postpone the issue as long as you like but is it really as necessary as most people tend to think?
The problem I've got with it, is I have a very difficult time believing Cameron and gang are just so disgusted with "the bad parts of the internet" (including porn) that they felt so strongly and brought down law... "to save the children!".
Coupled with his latest tirade of banning all non-backdoorable encryption so that "we can save our children faster when they're kidnapped!"... it's just not genuine.
I believe in reality it's a blanket filter which can and will be used as regular government censorship under guise of "saving the children".
Websites that "accidentally" get blocked one day when they haven't been blocked before, etc.
Arguing against it only serves to make one look bad in the public eye, "He doesn't want to protect our children", "He's OK with his children stumbling across porn while online!"
I couldn't agree more. What ever happened to just good parenting? Or put another way -- parenting responsibility.
If I did something my parents didn't want me to do, there were consequences at home. Even if it meant they changed the computer's password and/or took the keyboard to work with them.
Most workplaces aren't rife with accusations of systematic child abuse.
It's more than a little disturbing that the same can't be said of Westminster or Whitehall.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/child-abuse-i...
And just for clarity: the UK has three sets of filtering. There's the default-on but optional filters offered by ISPs (and similar has been offered by mobile providers for years); there's the IWF system which is specifically images of child sexual abuse and criminally obscene content. As far as I can tell only one ISP doesn't use that filter - A&A; then there are court ordered filters used to prevent access to pirate bay and KAT. Personally, I feel this is sub-optimal. The government said that users were clamoring for filtering to be provided by ISPs. I guess this shows that most of them were not.
Claire Perry MP was campaigning for porn censorship by default. She's only got that from Sky now, a huge reversal from what they said before, and when you see that not even 10% of their customers who were asked wanted it, it's clear their brand manager's made a huge mistake making it opt-out.
I thought then, and think now, that the TalkTalk bias is due to the demographics of the users of that ISP. Everyone with the technical skill to visit SamKnows or ThinkBroadband knows TalkTalk are poorly-rated and thus tends to avoid choosing them, I'd venture.
As said before, censorship infrastructure itself presents a very real vulnerability, although this doesn't seem to be fully appreciated by many of the stakeholders.
Then there was that time that they "accidently" knocked all of Wikipedia offline because of a single IWF-flagged album cover (and then blocked the page, and then finally removed the block completely). It did spawn an interesting discussion on the difference between "child porn" and "art."
I pause here simply to note that it's quite possible to use the infrastructure's distinctive behaviour as an oracle to scry a complete list of all blocked sites, and to monitor that over time, given just a few volunteers on each major ISP.
I'd be very interested in suggestions for broadband providers who are less bad than TalkTalk while offering £20 (incl "line rental") broadband providing, say, 80 GB monthly
Which brings up another potential point - that the bias might perhaps be indicative of those who spend less money on broadband, either because it's less important to them as a household, or they have less money. Merely speculation, however, I don't think there's the data to back that up.
Though out of curiosity - what would be considered a better provider from a technical or customer experience point of view, if a bit more expensive? When I looked briefly I got the idea that it's pretty much pick your poison between "meh" providers. We're out of Relish.net range unfortunately.
I want to know the total cost of ownership of a broadband package. This includes engineer setup fees; postal costs of equipment; line rental; time of contract. No sites provide this.
We are seeing a large increase in the number of users using things like VPNs or attempting to use TOR etc.
I wonder: what was (and is) the economic cost of this whole charade? How many man-hours were spent writing memos, how many meetings were called, how many expensive developers and sysadmins were forced to waste their time implementing stuff that nobody wanted -- likely not even the proponents: I'd be surprised if Cameron and his entourage were actually using these filters.
The UK has a lot of wedge issues, like austerity, capitalism Vs. socialism, privatisation, classes, illegal wars, women's issues, train ticket cost, anything touching the NHS or the roads...
However they are rarely what I'd call puritanical like in the US and Ireland. I'm sure it does happen, but I cannot think of any particular moral-based wedge issues from the last few elections.
UK politics is very pragmatic.
Apart from that, not too many wedge issues. Certainly not train ticket costs or anything like that (where are the people who want it to go up?).
In charge, it would appear.
ThinkPad wiki is the one comedic false positive I get when I was testing Sky's offering (to determine workarounds in case this shit becomes mandatory one day).
Seriously though, a huge proportion of people access porn even though an equally huge proportion of people would deny it. And that's the whole point of a private life - people should be free and comfortable to do things in private that they might not want other people to know about. You shouldn't HAVE to tell anyone about your online habits, it's none of their business.
It's not the Government's job to even ASK you about that sort of thing, let alone TELL you to have these filters. It's patronizing and paternalistic and intrusive.
Of course, it's also a thinly veiled excuse to force the installation of traffic monitoring and filtering equipment across the whole of the UK internet - since obviously you can't block sites without inspecting the traffic. It certainly makes GCHQs job easier - why bother hacking servers and tapping fibre when you've got ISPs forced to monitor every connection and paying for it too.
Some ISPs are now changing the filter question on signup to default to "yes". We'll see which is correct in a few months.
I presume most households already have Internet. New customers will to a large degree be people that are moving out on their own, and young adults living by themselves are less likely to want a porn filter than somebody with children. (And people with children are less likely to have available time to rurn things on.)
Astroturfers try to tell us that in the UK everyone in the general public loves police surveillance, but when given a choice, it appears not to be as loved and appreciated.
And you're wrong about how the UK public feels about surveillance. The UK has more CCTVs than most countries and we didn't get here by most of the public hating cctv.
Here is a story from this year where police request men to give a DNA sample, and 500 men voluntarily give police a DNA sample. Are all these men "astrotrufers"?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30920277
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-30972723
We have CCTV everywhere. People in the UK object when they think it's misused - councils checking whether people are using the right bins for example - but even then (councils checking whether people claiming to live in a school's catchmet area actually live there) you don't have to look hard for people defending that.
If yu want to have any hope of changing the surveillance culture you need to accept that most people in UK just don't know much about surveillance and wouldn't care much if they did know.
It helps that CCTV is pretty fucking useless. It's hardly the same thing to take a grainy video of you walking down the high street as it is to slurp up every email you've ever written.