recent decision by MNHQ

[NetworkGuy]

Please, MNHQ, do have a read of this thread and consult your Tech people so they can give you the answers as to whether your support for this campaign and the Minister's plans are worth going on with.

I would hope you not only reverse your position but assuming you get sufficient technical reasoning in 'Plain English', that you go public and explain how unworkable the proposal is likely to be. I feel sure journalists at Computer Weekly and Computing will be able to provide confirmation that filtering is a hiding to nothing and can be very costly because of the millions of GB of data flowing through the bigger ISP networks.

For anyone baffled, and wondering if I'm a nut case, this concerns a proposal to get ISPs to "filter out" all porn, unless a customer "opts in". For numerous technical reasons the idea is never likely to achieve filtering without blocking access to legitimate sites or not blocking access to better than say 95% reliable, thus making it a costly exercise in futility, while parental vigilance and filtering software at the home would still be essential for peace of mind.

(Incidentally the wording of the campaign page implies the parents need to ask, at the same time as someone wanting not to have censored content needs to ask - it is one or other, but not both that would need to contact ISP. )

[Eleison]

I am too technically ignorant to assess the issues that are discussed here. I support the objectives behind the policy MNHQ is endorsing, but I don't know whether or not it is a good policy technically.

I do really strongly wish that there was some means for MNHQ to distinguish in the public mind between what it supports, as the owner/management of a talkboard, and what the talkboard supports. Failure to make that distinction amounts to lying.

[plupervert]

Excellent point, Eleison.

[NetworkGuy]

Eleison - what I found curious but interesting was the wording in part of the campaign page mumsnet.com/campaigns/porn-default-filter

"Parental controls just aren't working ? it's time to try another approach. We're delighted that Ed Vaizey agrees - and now we'd like him to increase the pressure on the industry to act."

The curious part to me is that this boils down to parental action (or lack of it) and cannot simply be made a burden for the ISPs.

It's like saying that Royal Mail has a duty to protect us against anything illegal being put in the post - how would they do it? - by opening every item and putting knives, porn, drugs in the bin.

The ISPs and the phone lines / mobile networks are merely a method of getting data to you, from the internet. If anyone has heard of 'distributed processing' (eg for analysis of medical data, or trying to detect new stars and black holes, etc) by sharing our the work across thousands and millions of home PCs for them to 'number crunch' whenever they show a screen saved during coffee breaks etc.

It is be obvious that the (censorship) load is small when processed on a home PC but massive when processed centrally (at the ISP).


BadgersPaws and others put some excellent technical arguments together as to why getting the ISPs to filter would be a costly exercise and still leave sufficient holes that parental monitoring / PC software would still be needed anyway

Some parents would be lulled into thinking nothing could get through and drop their guard!

As is clear, the ISPs won't pay for this (I think it was dittany who suggested they'd absorb the cost) but simply pass it on to us customers.

[NetworkGuy]

plupervert - "For example, I examine the search results of Google and don't click on what I'm not sure of. Norton Antivirus also lets me know which sites are freighted with computer threats. If there is a grey Norton Antivirus symbol opposite a site I think I do need information from, I use Google's "cache" of the page, so don't ever hit the unknown server."

I too use the cached copy of some pages, primarily to check content without being likely to leave a footprint (one of my internet connections has a fixed IP, so my monitoring of competitor web sites would easily be spotted) but I have grown to not trust the warnings from some of these security services.

It only needs a few false positives to make them report a security issue (a few weeks ago there was a situation >LINK< where lots of threads were being classed as 'infected' because of some advert appearing on those MN pages).

Sites like StopMalware.org have good intent but when they go wrong the results make people lose confidence. Blocking Wikipedia for one photo is overkill and the IWF had to back down and their over-reaction made them even more of a laughing stock.

[ChickensHaveNoEyebrows]

Watching this with interest. Have to admit to being a bit techy-thick, and generally thought the opt in idea was a good one. I'd not considered all of the very good points raised about categorising etc.

[NetworkGuy]

It doesn't seem to be a very well-thought-through solution so should we really be backing it at all?

THANKS maryz - it is precisely what more technical people than me (in IT 30 years but still learning new things each day) have said on that first thread I linked to. This so-called solution of getting the ISPs to attempt to filter stuff is prone to failure, an administrative nightmare, and unlikely to be a cheap one, yet not for the first time a government minister has suggested there be ISP-based monitoring/censorship.

This latest idea was suggested in MP Claire Perry's election campaign (see BadgersPaws post 22-Dec-10 16:08:59 about the background to the 'get ISPs to block porn' idea she promoted)

Over 12 months ago a Labour minister was suggesting each web page be given a classification (like the films are) and was laughed at, mainly because of the number of web pages, but also because it only needs user contributions to change a clean page into one holding porn - just an upload of 1 'dodgy' photo would do it, so how would that be 'reviewed' and banned from under-18 viewing ?

[BaroqueAroundTheClock]

I think part of the problem is that Porn isn't just available on "Porn websites" - it's every where.

So you make all the big commerical porn sites xxx domain - but then you're still left with millions of websites that arent' "ddicated" porn sites that are still available.

Google safe search works for me in one direction (I've only eve seen one dodgy image on "moderate"). But then I've had to take the safe search totally off (not pleasant ) to find pictures which by all accounts I would deem as "moderate" or "safe".

I'm not sure if child A has managed to access pornagraphic images/material on their phone there is any way of stopping it being passed around. I'd hazard a good guess that picture messaging and bluetooth have absolutely no connection to the ISP's from where it was downloaded.

[BaroqueAroundTheClock]

ahh x posts with marzy about bluetooth ec

[NetworkGuy]

LeninGrad - yes the .xxx domains idea finally got approval last year (after 5 years of about-turns by ICANN) but still has not got the approval of all governments, and I suspect it would need legislation to force porn sites to switch from .org, .biz, .com to .xxx (and then they would complain "their" name has already been taken if there are different owners of pornovideos.com pornovideos.us pornovideos.biz - made-up-name before anyone wonders!)

[Snorbs]

The big problem with the .xxx top-level domain is that for it to be of any real use it would a) need to be taken up by the whole world, b) you'd have to persuade a significant majority of the porn-hosting sites to move to it, and c) you'd need a global consensus on what constitutes porn. It's a technically elegant idea but the politics are awful.

If only a small proportion of porn sites moved to .xxx and were then automatically blocked, they'd soon notice that their .com competitors were becoming more popular whereas their own traffic would nose-dive. So they'd then just move back to their original addresses and .xxx would be empty.

And getting a global consensus of what kind of sites should be in .xxx would be frighteningly hard. How can you get a common view of what is, and is not, porn between (say) the USA, Holland, Saudi Arabia and Japan?

[Eleison]

"should we really be backing it at all"

"We" aren't backing it. The limited company that owns the software we use to talk is backing it.

It is astonishing that MNHQ are, partly for genuinely benevolent reasons and partly to publicise/monetise their brand, routinely speaking for the talkboard. I know that the often say in interviews etc that there is never a consensus on MN. But time and again they act as spokespeople, "summing up the sense of the meeting" (that's the phrase used to describe the PM's power in Cabinet govt btw) on the basis of a reading of the site that is necessarily filtered by their PR objectives. They rarely make more than a flawed chat-based gesture at consultation. It is just staggeringly cavalier.

[Snorbs]

You're absolutely right maryz. The Internet is global and policing it to make sure that porn sites can only appear with a .xxx TLD would be effectively impossible.

[Snorbs]

Lenin, Vodafone offers opt-out content filtering for under 18s. They claim to exclude all adult sites as well as gambling sites. It's far from perfect but it's good enough for the purpose.

DS has a Vodafone mobile and he knows that if I catch him accessing dodgy stuff then Internet connectivity on his phone will be disabled entirely.

I'm less bothered by content filtering on mobiles than that on home broadband though. If my DS tries to get to a particular site on his mobile and it's erroneously blocked then, if he really wants to get to it, he'll try from home. At that point I can make sure that the site is appropriate for him (or not, as the case may be). And I can then update our home PC's filtering to include/exclude that site as appropriate. An ISP-level filter won't be able to offer that kind of flexibility.

[NetworkGuy]

Eleison - I am not sure this would be any 'good thing' for MN, siding with a disastrous and inept attempt at blocking porn.

At worst I would consider it thinking it is backing a worthwhile idea, but until someone from MNHQ comes to the thread it seems like their full views on why they believe it to be a workable solution won't be known.

I do again urge MNHQ to talk with the Tech support people and see what they come up with. I don't know exactly what they will say, but would hope they'll steer MNHQ away from supporting the Minister.

I'll be expecting red faces at MN if this goes through Parliament, gets as far as the ISPs, and then costs go up so some families are excluded from the internet, yet actual porn sites are still 'visible' for a while and (eventually) parents think it was a poor attempt, and they had to pay for the dubious privilege of an unsuccessful trial.

[KalokiMallow]

Not sure about Vodafone, but 3 had/have something similar in place, I had to opt in (similar to this plan it was treated very much as, "so you want to look at porn do you?")

Want to know what I was attempting to look at? An eating disorder support site.