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Friday 18 June 2004

BT carves the thin end of the wedge (child porn) [brit]

Child porn, bad.
Now that I've got the obvious out of the way, lets have a quick look at what BT are doing with other providers planning on similar programmes.
BT, wearing their Hat of Morals, are implementing a programme whereby their customers connected via their dialup and broadband services will be denied access to sites which contain child porn. The user will receive a 'server unavailable' message, and that'll be their 'net journey ended.
The idea was pushed for by a vocal kid's charity, and on the face of it this is a great idea - banning kiddy porn at the ISP level can only be a good thing right?
Wrong.
This is very much, in my view, the thin end of the wedge. It's ISP level censorship of the internet on par with Red China and that sucks big time; and I absolutely guarantee it won't end with the child porn issue.
It *will* end with the ISPs censoring sites which are deemend inappropriate full stop. Sites which contain information say, from Islamic Fundamentalists, or sites which show you how to make a bomb out of garden or which are just plain against whatever the government of the day feels we should read, will be blocked.
Of course, you'd have thought that such an invasion of our rights to view whatever we like would be the subject of some well thought out and openly debated bill in the House of Commons.
Not so. BT are apparantly engaging in this 'initiative' themselves... a little digging shows that they're doing it in partnership with The Home Office. What's this I hear you cry? a government led reduction in our rights to view what we choose and nary a cough in the home of our own democracy?
But of course. Welcome to the Orwellian Reality, 21st century styley.

5 comments:

  1. I think it's a bit of a non issue really. If you're a paedo, you move ISP. If BT starts censoring more, then other ISPs advertise the fact that they don't censor their feeds. So really none of this bothers me as a heavy handed hint of future Internet regulation and censorship.
    It just strikes me as being stupidly naive. If they know the address of a bloody paedo site then it should be forwarded to the authorities running in that country and if they wont do anything, the countries should be blocked to start encouraging governments to get up off their arse.
    You see the same thing with China. Less and less people are accepting any form of email from China whatsoever because they're a rampant source of spam and don't seem to want to do anything about it. They'd far rather shut down Net cafes frequented by students, lest they get any dangerous subversive ideas.

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  2. Well thats the point, this isn't a BT only initiative; it's something all ISPs are talking about doing.
    The idea that it's there to prevent child porn is of course laudible; but I suspect child porn is simply being used as a high profile excuse to implement something that folk in Whitehall must be chomping at the bit over; control over the information available to the public via the net.

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  3. I see what you're saying. I read all the lefty stuff on slashdot too... The thing is, I'm not worried about it - I'll wait until there's legislation because that's what it will take. Then I'll fight it, just like I fought all the other cack-handed Net regulation rubbish the government forced through.
    Helps when your local MP has an office a few doors up mind...

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  4. Is child porn really as prevalent as the screaming headlines suggest? Are children stumbling on this material via Google day in day out? No, of course not, like all web pr0n, kids have to learn the harsh economic reality of webland... you gotta pay to view it.
    I remember the good old days when all this porn was free... no wonder usenet is still popular with da kidz :)
    So, anyone ever stumbled on child pr0n? I'm genuinely interested. I've been looking at smut since the good old days of the interweb and haven't seen any, thankfully, not even a sniff.
    Sigh, the good old days of interweb pr0n sniffing... we had to telnet to the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina as a guest user, then run their tin newsreader which accessed a unfiltered newsfeed... and get ready for this, copy and paste page after page of uuencoded ascii into Notepad and then run uudecode.exe, a tool which was sent by email from the Imperial College Sunsite archive. LOL.. All for a 256 colour gif of somebodies arm up their new best friends vag!
    The youth of today have it on a plate.

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  5. Hows this different from the isp's blocking certain ports, which most of them have been doing for years? Or using transparent proxies, or traffic shaping/prioritisatoin? You think you've had a free and unbuggered connection to the interwebnet all these years? You're wrong.Well Brit?

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