So: when @EE enable Porn on your PAYG Wireless Broadband, you won't *believe* the Terms & Conditions: pic.twitter.com/mpxiiKZBL9
— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) May 16, 2014
So as an Adult it appears you are contractually obliged to be filtered if anyone under the age of 18 is going to “use” the SIM.
And yet EE still don’t tell you exactly what else it is that you’ll be blocked from seeing as their block lists aren’t public.
BuzzFeed has reported that the Government is so intent on continuing to block online material, that it is willing to block the EU Internet Neutrality laws;
We wouldn’t support anything that restricted our ability to block illegal material.
We do not support any proposals that mean we cannot enforce our laws, including blocking child abuse images.Government spokesperson
Note that is no longer just about protecting children, it’s safe to say we’ll start to see the blocking of “extreme” material soon enough…
As part of the plan to filter the Internet the big ISPs also agreed to fund an awareness campaign to educate parents (the cynical among us believe this to be a PR ploy to gloss over the surveillance impact of DPI, filtering & the expansion of CleanFeed esque silent censorship).
The InternetMatters website itself ( http://www.internetmatters.org/ ) contains a lot of actually useful advice and doesn’t resort to scare tactics for sensitive subjects like Grooming or Bullying to encourage the use of filters.
Furthermore the website even tells visitors that No Filter is 100% effective;
This leads onto a point highlighted in a recent tweet for the campaigns twitter account;
Whose responsibility is it to keep your children safe online? http://t.co/RkBOPlOK8P #internetmatters pic.twitter.com/hoWoajm6da
— Internet Matters (@IM_org) May 14, 2014
96% of parents believe it is their responsibility to keep their children safe (so not the ISPs) and no filter is ever 100% effective.
So why did David Cameron and Claire Perry insists that ISPs start filtering the Internet?
Why has TalkTalk deployed surveillance grade Deep Packet Inspection equipment on their network? Why does Sky and others interfere with in-transit packets to spoof responses to legitimate requests?
One answer is that this equipment makes it easier for the Police & GCHQ to intercept traffic. It also enables rights holders to arbitrarily choose where your packets can go by blocking ThePirateBay.org and others like it.
Two days after internet porn-blocking campaigner MP Claire Perry announced ISP filters were not overblocking content, the government has announced it is.
On top of that Ms Perry consistently berates her constituents and steadfastly sticks to the story that filters aren’t overblocking;
@weborguk do grow up. Or perhaps get on with some work like the rest of us are trying to do!
— Claire Perry (@claire4devizes) February 5, 2014
@mrowebot @graphiclunarkid afraid that's total rubbish too. Filters are current device level (or better) lifted to home network.
— Claire Perry (@claire4devizes) February 5, 2014
@graphiclunarkid This is a classic example of the total rubbish talked about giving families more help to manage internet access.
— Claire Perry (@claire4devizes) February 5, 2014
The ISPs tried pacifying opponents of UK Web Filtering by telling them they had to do it or David Cameron would legislate it anyway.
They backed down and co-operated. Only a few weeks after a Lord suggested it be mandatory an amendment has already been proposed to the Children and Families Bill;
Duty to provide an internet service that protects children
(1) Internet service providers must provide to subscribers an internet access service which excludes adult content unless all the conditions of subsection (3) have been fulfilled.
(2) Where mobile telephone operators provide a telephone service to subscribers which includes an internet access service, they must ensure this service excludes adult content unless all the conditions of subsection (3) have been fulfilled.
(3) The conditions are–
(a) the subscriber “opts-in” to subscribe to a service that includes adult content;
(b) the subscriber is aged 18 or over; and
(c) the provider of the service has an age verification policy which meets the standards set out by OFCOM in subsection (4) and which has been used to confirm that the subscriber is aged 18 or over before a user is able to access adult content.(4) It shall be the duty of OFCOM to set, and from time to time to review and revise, standards for the–
(a) filtering of adult content in line with the standards set out in section 319 of the Communications Act 2003; and
(b) age verification policies to be used under subsection (3) before a user is able to access adult content.(5) The standards set out by OFCOM under subsection (4) must be contained in one or more codes.
(6) It shall be the duty of OFCOM to establish procedures for the handling and resolution of complaints in a timely manner about the observance of standards set under subsection (4).
(7) In this section, internet service providers and mobile telephone operators shall at all times be held harmless of any claims or proceedings, whether civil or criminal, providing that at the relevant time, the internet access provider or the mobile telephone operator–
(a) was following the standards and code set out by OFCOM in subsection (4); and
(b) acting in good faith.(8) In this section–
“adult content” means material which might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of persons under the age of eighteen;
“opts-in” means a subscriber notifies the service provider of his or her consent to subscribe to a service that includes adult content.”
BARONESS HOWE OF IDLICOTE
You can read the full list of amendments here.
ThinkBroadband (amongst others) has reported that Sky has yet again overblocked a website.
This time it was code.jquery.com which a lot of other websites rely on to serve the well know Javascript frameworks core files from.
Things like this are bound to happen, were predicted to happen and will continue to happen, causing untold damage to businesses and people.
JQuery was temporary blocked this morning having been misclassified. Our review process kicked in shortly afterwards and the site was unblocked just over an hour later.Sky
A year ago today The Spectator ran an article in which Claire Perry said, in reference to online filters, that
I’m in no way the Mary Whitehouse of thisClaire Perry
Well a year later and people are not only referring to her as that but putting her in the same category as the Stasi and book burners;
@PornPanic wonder if @claire4devizes realises history will categorise her along with the like of book burners, the Stasi and Mary Whitehouse
— Megalomaniac (@dr_megalomaniac) December 19, 2013
At one point the plan was for a filter that checks the age of the child browsing, rather than her original call for all users to opt-in to accessing adult content on their computer, which a government consultation rejected. Somehow, 12 months later, we have exactly that.
Despite criticism from the ISPs, celebrity advisors and the Internet at large Claire Perry is proud that the government is pushing ahead with these plans.
Regardless of what people tweet, history will look back at sources such as the BBC and Wikipedia where her name sits side by side with the words Internet Censorship.
Claire Perry, you’ve made the world slightly worse.
LazyGamer.net has reported that patches being rolled out for League Of Legends has been blocked due to incidental filenames.
If your patcher logs show many lines like this:
RADS::Common::HTTPConnection::GetFile: File not found
And that happens with files with a name similar to this:
VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj
XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj
The cause is that your provider is blocking any URLs that contain any pornographic content. Apparently that includes cases like this. An other cause are Router protection settings, which may also block the word sex.
If you are experiencing this problem, you can try to get the whole LoL folder zipped from a friend every time you patch, or just call your ISP to lift the blockade.
Edit: This should only happen to people who switch or signup with new ISPs after a certain date (I’m assuming 1st Jan). The filter won’t be on by default to any existing customers, at least it won’t on BT, so most people will be unaffected. If the filter is on, all it takes is a call to your ISP and it’s off. (thanks to /u/mejti )
Edit2: Read this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/uk-internet-filter-block-more-than-porn_n_3670771.htmlhttp://www.reddit.com/user/LoLBoompje
What is obviously quite scary about this revelation is that it means that this might not just be a simple URL or DNS based block but could be indicative of the far more intrusive Deep Packet Inspection technology rolled out by China and TalkTalk.
It’s not a long shot to fear that games will start breaking or gamers will get accused of cheating by software such as Steams VAC if ISPs start blocking data (e.g. chat messages or server instructions) that contain naughty words.
On the same day that the BBC reports that “Children can turn off Net Filters” a LibDem Lord has asked whether the choice of filtering should be taken out of parents (read everyone’s) hands and be made compulsory
I also welcome the recognition by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport of the need for adequate filtering to protect young people from online abuse. However, as was discussed in this House only recently with the Online Safety Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, should we not be making filtering compulsory? Is it enough simply to leave it up to parents to make the choice about appropriate safety features?Lord Clement-Jones
Within weeks of the filters that everyone predicted would herald a slippery slope to mandatory filtering with ever encroaching levels of censorship going online we’ve already started to slide.
Now more than ever you need to start teaching your friends and family how to survive the Claire Perry Internet.
TechDirt have reported that EasyDNS have been victorious in their pursuit of due process when it comes to seizure of Domains by the City of London Police.
As you may be aware, the City of London Police’s new intellectual property crime unit took it upon themselves to seize domains they believed were involved in copyright infringement and some registrars co-operated without even asking for a warrant or court order.
Thankfully EasyDNS had this to say;
Who decides what is illegal? What makes somebody a criminal? Given that the subtext of the request contains a threat to refer the matter to ICANN if we don’t play along, this is a non-trivial question. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law, as opposed to “some guy on the internet” sending emails. While that’s plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn’t fly here.
We have an obligation to our customers and we are bound by our Registrar Accreditation Agreements not to make arbitrary changes to our customers settings without a valid FOA (Form of Authorization). To supersede that we need a legal basis. To get a legal basis something has to happen in court.
The request also suggests we look at the whois contact information for the domain (which looks perfectly valid) and go ahead and suspend the domain based on invalid whois data. Again, there’s a process for that, you have to go through the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint process and most of the time that doesn’t result in a takedown anyway.
What gets me about all of this is that the largest, most egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right now are our own governments, spying on their own citizens, illegally wiretapping our own private communications and nobody cares, nobody will answer for it, it’s just an out-of-scope conversation that is expected to blend into the overall background malaise of our ever increasing serfdom.
If I can’t make various governments and law enforcement agencies get warrants or court orders before they crack my private communications then I can at least require a court order before I takedown my own customer.EasyDNS
Sounds interestingly similar to Andrews & Arnold’s reasons as to why they don’t like blocks doesn’t it?