from Hacker News

ISPs to include porn filters as standard in UK by 2014

by chinmoy on 6/16/13, 3:02 PM with 44 comments

  • by wisty on 6/16/13, 11:30 PM

    They tried this in Australia, some time ago.

    The PM told the minister to do it. The minister (who's reasonably tech savvy) told the department. The department told him it was a joke - it wouldn't work, and the government would get blamed every time a legitimate site was blocked, or a kid got caught bypassing it.

    It's political suicide. They will be blamed every time a teenage boy figures out how to bypass the filter (hint - they all will). They will be blamed every time they block a non-porn site. Tech sites will publish "10 ways to bypass the government's joke of a filter" articles. Current affairs programs will have concerned parents shocked that their unsupervised 14yo boy filled their computer with smut (probably passed around on a USB). The next time an MP or celebrity gets arrested for really shady stuff, they'll say the filter failed. They will look like idiots, and waste millions doing it.

  • by kunai on 6/16/13, 8:07 PM

    While I have no interest in pornography, this is one step closer to fascism. I worry what will happen next. Journalism filters? Blog filters? International video filters? And if this is the case, then what is the result for neighboring countries? Will they decide to be as totalitarian as well?

    I know this is mainly the ISPs' decision, but I can't help but feel that government influence is a large factor in the filters.

  • by venomsnake on 6/16/13, 6:13 PM

    On a unrelated news we observe massive increase in computer literacy among UK male teens and the VPN traffic in and out of UK increased hundredfold.

  • by KaiserPro on 6/16/13, 6:55 PM

    This should article should be taken with a piece of salt. Firstly this was a debate outside of Parliament. Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own.

    Also I don't think this was in the queen's speech.

    There isn't even a draft bill yet. Also depending on the press, this could be silently dropped. The only people that really want this are the daily mail, and the rabbid anti porn lobby.

  • by jrabone on 6/16/13, 8:36 PM

    If the filtering applied by mobile phone operators is anything to go by, this will be completely obtrusive. For example, Reddit appears to be filtered by default by Vodafone. Soon it'll be time to vote with your feet, or setup that VPN virtual host.

  • by casca on 6/16/13, 8:05 PM

    This is a good thing. Filtering of porn, malware and other undesirable content _if that's what the person paying the bill wants_ is a good thing. Asking people to install protection on every device in the home is unrealistic so having the ISP providing an on-network solution is excellent.

    Of course, this is only true if the service is available on many networks and opt-in. Otherwise it becomes censorship by stealth which is hopefully not where this is going.

  • by rotnewson on 6/16/13, 6:58 PM

    This is something of a major problem to solve with one of two major outcomes that aren't mutually exclusive:

    1. The blocking comes up with many false positives blocking many things that shouldn't be blocked (the John Graham-Cumming issue)

    2. They don't catch everything, which is very likely, and the work required to get around blocking by teenagers is minimal.

  • by alex_doom on 6/16/13, 11:36 PM

    "peddling [pornography] to kids"

    He tries to make it sound like there some creepy dude in a trench coat going, hey kids wanna see some porn?

    What are they going to do, block imgur.com?

  • by JamesMcMinn on 6/16/13, 7:15 PM

    I'd be willing to bet money that any porn filter will simply be a DNS-level filter, for which the solution will be to use another DNS server.

  • by cupcake-unicorn on 6/16/13, 10:53 PM

    Off topic, but I just want to say that I love HN - anywhere else, and you'd be getting a bunch of crude comments about this. Glad that we're sticking to the technological and censorship aspects :)

  • by gesman on 6/16/13, 7:49 PM

    Yay... time to invest in VPN businesses. Thanks for the tip!

  • by dreen on 6/16/13, 6:22 PM

    Is this on the router level or ISP level? The article doesn't say.