General Chat

Yet another example of spoon feeding and the nanny state has been highlighted with the announcement that one of the big four internet service providers is to block all content THEY deem unsuitable for under 13s unless subscribers physically opt out.

Absolutely ridiculous!

Not only is this enforced censorship, but it is also extremely ill-considered.

Source please?? Found but can't open this
Online safety - United Kingdom Parliament - Parliament UK
www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/.../729vw.pdf
The committee is one of the departmental select committees, the powers of which are .... A legal requirement on Internet service providers to be network neutral in ...... extreme “thrills” by acting out what they have seen online: two recent cases ...... would welcome a large padlock on all content that was unsuitable to children,.

Do you remember the earlier days of the internet? Schools put in blocks for the word. Sex.....which also blocked sites which contained the words Sussex, Essex or Middlesex.

As far as I'm aware, parental controls already exist. Surely its up to the parents to use them and ensure they aren't too easy to crack?

Let's ban all internet access unless you can quote your NI number showing that you are over the age of majority ;-)

DetEcTive - I totally agree in that more than adequate controls already exist and it should be up to the user/subscriber/network administrator to utilise them as they see fit.

The comment about Sussex etc is absolutely spot on too. Even today, teachers invariably find that they can not access certain sites in a lesson environment because they are blocked for the wrong reasons.

source - http://tinyurl.com/orvjwmb

Okay, so if they can block all internet content they deem unsuitable for 13 year olds, I have a couple of questions:
How do they know who is 13 or under?
If they can be so specific, why haven't they banned /blocked paedophile sites?

I've got parental controls on my computer, which can be a pain.
Any site vaguely concerned with gambling - like buying lottery tickets online is a no-no (though I can get the results).
Also, sites to do with the intestines sometimes don't show up :-(

I am not entirely convinced that I would want intestines to show up on my monitor.

Blanket banning is strewn with flaws but setting up parental controls locally (on your own machine and/or network) should be relatively easy so that you can "unblock" specific sites if you wish.

It is also easy to create white and black lists.

As for knowing the age of a user, that's the whole point. Under the Sky system EVERYBODY would be unable to see certain sites (unless they opt out of the controls, of course).

The issue of banning or blocking paedophile sites is not quite so simple. A site would have to be recognised as falling into that category if it is to be blocked by name/URL.

There are two main ways to block content - generically or by specific address.

Having had a cystoscopy on my bladder, I was trying to show my grand daughter how beautiful a healthy bladder looks!
I managed to unlock all body diagrams, but there isn't a really good image of a healthy bladder :-(

Some do not always know what they really want until it's put in front of them.

Very true, Dermot.

It's called freedom of choice and common sense.

And how many parents have common sense nowadays??????????????

Fewer and fewer but that should not mean enforced censorship.

But enforced censorship is better for the under 13's than paedo's getting through to them and grooming them...

By the same token, would you advocate censorship of, for example, newspapers just in case a child picks one up and sees an image of a scantily clad "celeb"?

Surely it would make more sense to adopt an opt in approach rather than force every user to only be able to view content deemed by the ISP as "proper".

This is enforced censorship. Pure and simple.

If a parent allows their child to view internet content with no control then they are complicit.

Errol,

then tell me why newsagents always keep men's magazines on the very top shelf so that children cannot see them or pick them up.

Now that is censorship

No that is not censorship. There are very clear laws in place governing that.

What we have here is an ISP taking it upon itself to make the decision about what people can or cannot access unless they physically opt out. Totally different.

It is not technically feasible to censor the internet in way that Dave Cameron, mum's net and others seem to imagine. For the same reasons it is not possible to censor and monitor access to all sorts of nasties such as terrorism, extreme s-x sites, grooming and so on and so forth. The analogy with the newsagents or even the TV remote is false.

MI5 and child protection may well catch half wits in Woolwich but they won't catch anybody serious by net cafe and router controls.

In fact MI5 is at it's wits end hence the use of methods to catch all the raw data packets going in and out of the UK or en route to somewhere else and dredge through the lot, looking for meta data, needle in the haystack approach.

Costs no end of money ( which they are trying to fit onto the ISPs and ultimately their customers i.e. you ). There are of course methods which bypass the uk internet entirely as well but v unlikely to be teen accessible.

No doubt at some point there will be a blacklist of all the adults who have decided not to have their connection "controlled" and they will end up on assorted lists and fail this and that ...

I agree with Erroll that we are moving blindly towards some kind of dumb society ruled by opinion rather than law and logic. In the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king.

As Erroll says the best approach is for parents to keep an eye on what goes in the same as for anything else relating to their kids. If parents are too lazy or internet dumb for that in 2015 that is no reason for life to be made difficult for everybody else.

By far the easiest and simplest way to get around ISP controls is using the Onion Router aka TOR. What is known as deep packet inspection might pick up "controlled" content. There are a bunch of ways to work around the ISP router itself well known to many 14 year olds who do stuff like real time programs for hovering drones using the Raspberry B for fun... Yeah parents and prob a lot of people on these boards think a router is a sort of digital modem. It is a whole lot more. Then there are smart phones, iPads and Huddles .....

I have noticed that Brits can soon bone up on the likes of routers proxy and VPNs when it comes to accessing BBC iPlayer from, say, Spain.

The only thing that would work to a degree is to construct a UK version of the Chinese Great Fire Wall. In a supposedly democratic society that should be unthinkable.

erm call me dense, ( if you want to risk it lol) but really is it such a big deal that one has to physically 'opt out', is that really any more difficult than 'opting in'?

Yes there are parental controls, but as has been said not all parents are responsible...and even more are naive or lacking in knowledge of what an innocent google term can drag up, or even what can be found on sites that are supposed to be specifically aimed at youngsters ... I wonder if it is worth inconveniencing the many to protect the few?

It is really no good tutting in horror when we hear of yet another child being lured to abuse over the internet if we don't make some kind of effort to stop it happening online as well as off?

and the sad fact is that many of today's parents are no more than children themselves with little if any moral code

RR as I tried to point out the controls which the govt is pushing ISPs to adopt are very weak and easily circumvented perhaps not by the parents but certainly by a great many teens. They have had years of practice hacking the school systems!

Implementing any security or control system which cannot deliver its claims is a very dangerous thing.

The idea that it is better to do something rather than nothing when the nothing is worse than nothing is lazy logic and all too typical of politicians.

The internet is here it won't go away. The only way in which the dark side of it can be controlled whether child abuse or terrorism is through social means and that takes time effort and sometimes courage.

It would also help if those with some authority whether school teachers, parents, imams and mullahs, politicians and policemen took the trouble to understand what they are talking about. There is no magic bullet.

Pigs may fly.

Practically let's take Virgin as an example. TOR is a software router which can be downloaded and installed in a few minutes. It was invented by the CIA to help dissidents in places such as Iran. Using TOR ISP control can easily be bypassed.

OK, let's stop the installation of programs, no TOR. OK, our ordinary teen just runs it from a USB stick ( a favourite approach at schools and libraries). Oh dear. OK, let's block the USB ports. Wild inconvenience ...

So let's put more control in the router which has a sysadmin password ( rarely set). Virgin can now do the job for us. Well, it won't stop VPNs and TOR ( see above ) unless they are on the black list.

The cable router supplied allows no control of the DNS used. New users have to "opt out" . The router can be put into "modem mode" and another more configurable router put in its place eg Buffalo. Hey presto using, say, Google DNS the ISP controls go out of the window.

Presto back comes the latest incarnation of PirateBay and anything else - without any need to "opt out". And I am just outlining the simple legal approaches.

Don't put your trust in paper tigers.

Maggie try this with Google images :

vesica urinaria

I always thought my Latin might be useful one day.

;-)

Tried that, Rollo.
Most photographic images are of 'nasty' bladders - those with a problem.
Mine is beautiful. Pink, clear and with a cream marbelling. I was amazed :-D

Pretty peed off that I'd been taking ever increasingly strong antibiotics for a bladder/kidney problem I didn't have, though :-|
But then, that's the glory of stress. It can give you all the symptoms and pain of something you don't have :-P