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. )

I?m absolutely terrified of what?s out there on the www Lenn as much as I would be sending my dd off to town on her own. I kept her with me while she young and now she?s becoming a teenager, hope to god Iv armed her with enough savi to deal with things, and places to avoid.

Earlier this thread has however demonstrated one of the more viable solutions to the problem at hand; it lies in the sharing of information on how to deal with this on a practical level at home, i.e. questions on Xbox and the like earlier on.

We have a hypothetical technical proposition from a politically motivated individual(s).Id rather get my technical information from a technical source.

Basically you could say the www escaped from a military lab, it was built to withstand attacks on its ?nodes? and buy pass blocks such as in the event of nuclear war. You ether switch it off completely, (that?s not even completely possible given the recent use of dial up modems in Egypt to get news out) or you learn to live with it on an individual level in you family home.

You block, you average 9 year old could figure out how to proxy serve with in a matter of minutes.

This is a parenting issue. We just need the information and the tools to deal with it.

even if your average 9yo hasn't heard of proxy servers, it won't take too much discussion before someone with an older sibling passes on how they avoided firewalls and blocking software.

Yes, it's true about the origins, but in truth things were far less fragile back then, IMO, because the amount of traffic was low and therefore it would have been relatively easy for the different nodes to learn a different route with minimal time and programming.

Now, with thousands of GB of traffic, there are relatively few interchange points at the ends of undersea fibres, where any significant damage could cut a country off. Even without such a disconnection, if some switching centre is misconfigured millions of users might get no data for hours before that is sorted out (and it is likely to be a human task to reconfigure, not automatic the way DARPAnet would have been).

A lot of traffic goes to the USA (as many of the servers are in warehouses over there, and a large portion of demand is within the USA). However, funding is such that other countries pay for all the connecting links with the USA so they get their traffic from outside the USA for free (if they are actually looking at websites outside the USA, of course!)

When I mentioned 'fragile' earlier, it was because there are under 10 major interconnections in the USA and a computer science lecturer or professor was warned against including some information in talks he gave because from a terrorist viewpoint the details could be used to cripple the USA economically if a few of those were knocked out of action at the same time.

As well as crippling the USA, you can perhaps imagine that other links not going to the USA would be used to provide connections, but would probably be overwhelmed.

If you try to access a server in Japan, New Zealand or Australia, odds are that the connection will go "the long way round" via USA, simply because the major traffic routes converge there.

So there is an off button, there called bolt cutters.

Iv always been intrigued by ham radios..

Iv just been told by the resident tecy that the wireless peer to peer method being developed will make the www less fragile or controllable..

Just a vision of a Dr Strangelove like scene of a fanatically moralizing politician waving a pair of bolt cutters. But then he would have trouble cutting the cable as his knees would jerking too much..

I held an Amateur Radio Licence for around 10 years but didn't bother to renew it as half of my interest was shortwave listening, and then when I moved 200 miles to a fresh job, lost touch with the people I had regular conversations with down south.

I did use RTTY and AX.25 (the Amateur Radio packet switching) in the late 80s around the time I was using PSS from BT and helped get my employer onto JANET (the Academic network) so I liaised with JANET staff in London and used their satellite link to the USA when necessary, or sent e-mail via BITNET (a network of IBM systems mostly in the USA but also across Europe and there was a UK gateway between JANET and BITNET so we could exchange e-mail (with rather long mail addresses, specifying interconnection gateways).

Although I studied radio for the Navy at college, and did Morse code to 25 wpm, I never took the Amateur Morse test at 12 wpm, as the whole method of communication was different. I was trained not to interpret the message, just to copy it down, and for sending, assume one was sending a pre-written telegram, where in Amateur use, a person thinks the message and sends it simultaneously or decodes the message and absorbs it.

The training I had rejected that interpretation method completely, because interpreting would lead to incorrectly guessing a word ending, for example. Think of the Two Ronnies and their slow chat in the pub, where several different 'next word' options would be offered for comic effect.

@MmeLindt

Ok, I do not fully understand the techy bits, and I guess that many other MNetter will not either. But as I understand this, it boils down to this:

• If my PC is locked down but my neighbour's is not, then their child can show my children porn.

• My neighbour's child can download and distribute porn on his phone.

• It does NOTHING at all to stop the production and distribution of porn, as those who want to access it will opt in.

Is this correct?

Child protection would be better served if the money was spent on searching for the bastards who make, distribute and watch child porn.

I don't believe that MN should get involved in this campaign.

No that's not quite right - the idea is that the default for all is that pornography is off - you need to actively turn it on to view it. So the likelihood is that it will be off for your neighbour's child too. The problem now is that you actively have to understand and set controls and even if you do, there is every likelihood that your neighbour will not have.

Switching the default to off is an idea that has been supported on MN boards when it's been discussed in the passed. The objections voiced here are about the feasibility/practicality of achieving the desired aim, rather than the aim itself.

And, of course, if it's impractical, that's a very good reason for not trying to do it. The people in the know who we've spoken to - most notably the folks at Childnet and other child protection agencies who've been monitoring this and talking to the phone companies about it for some time - seem to think it is feasible. We obviously don't know (we're not experts) and obviously there's some scepticism from techy types here.

There is a meeting with the relevant government ministers - Ed Vaizey and Tim Loughton- the ISPs, the NSPCC, the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety on Monday. We're going along too. We'll get a very good sense there I think of what the ISPs think about this and whether it is or isn't feasible and we'll, of course, report back.

Thanks for all your input.

Justen, it boils down to how or who defines pornography.

And that is for now out of the range of even the most advanced computing as in certain areas, this remains subjective.

I would be very interested in the answer to one question from the meeting on Monday:

Is this proposal specifically about filtering pornography and only pornography, or is it about sites that aren't child-friendly in general?

Because if it's the former then you'll still need to run a filter on your PC to keep your kids away from sites that aren't porn but that are still completely inappropriate for children to see.

If it's the latter, then you'll likely find a lot of non-porn sites that you as an adult may want to access will be blocked. So you'll have to opt-out of the filtering and then run a filter on your PC to keep your kids safe.

Thanks Justine. You'll see from my post at 17:24 that there is a question mark hanging over the plan to block piracy promoting websites (copyright music, films). Sounds like the technical problems will be similar for porn.

Unfortunately, if they ever suggested combining such functions it would only need some future totalitarian government to force additional website entries into such a blocking system to exclude political opponents, civil rights organisations, LGBT groups, any religious groups they chose, etc....

Re problems of blocking sites, see the original news item at ThinkBroadband (concerning copyright/piracy) :-

www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/4558.html

[ PS they took on board my suggestion that long URLs like :-
www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4558-site-blocking-provisions-of-the-dea-to-be-revisited.html

could do with shortening. Hence the /i/4558.html version shown in bold.

Can your Tech friends see if there is a similar shortcut method that could be used for MN URLs please ? ]

@Motherfunster

Justen, it boils down to how or who defines pornography.

And that is for now out of the range of even the most advanced computing as in certain areas, this remains subjective.

I thought it boiled down to it being unworkable? Re. defining porn - we define all sorts of things when it comes to children - we classify dvds, we have watersheds etc etc. No one's saying ban porn - we're saying there is some porn that shouldn't be stumble-able across. Maybe the bar should be set at very hardcore porn. Quite frankly that would something. Some of the stuff that is easily accessible to young children quite by chance is horrific.

(Horrific and according to what evidence there is and most of the experts extremely damaging.)

"Is this proposal specifically about filtering pornography and only pornography, or is it about sites that aren't child-friendly in general? "

Surely that then refers back to the point that MF makes in the post above yours - how is pornopgraphy defined.

I am pleased to see the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) is not on that list of attendees. If they get involved it appears secret lists are used so who knows what they block, or why, and to whom are they accountable ? Nobody, it seems. They may be doing a public service but so are MI5, MI6, SAS, and what they do doesn't get very much public airing, either.

I suspect I am going to go down the VPN route to remote services just so any proposed blocks put in place without my consent are bypassed. $4 a month is little enough for me to not feel the effects of random organisations determining what I am or am not allowed to visit on the internet (and no, child porn is not of interest, but avoiding petty censorship is).

Maybe the bar should be set at very hardcore porn.

Justine - now you're getting to a secondary aspect - who says that what the organisations agree is the 'level' is acceptable or unacceptable to every parent.

Kaloki has suggested that parental controls be at the house end of the link and the simpler and more widely available, the better (eg open source, make whatever package run on Linux, Mac, XP, Vista, Win 7, and mobile apps for mobile phones if there is some dispute over what the networks will limit).

Make it downloadable too, since not everything has a CD/DVD drive. Distribute it at minimal cost/free (if Google can give away Chrome and Microsoft puts hundreds of MB of files into a security update then a 20 to 50 MB application is not going to hurt).

Just like anti-virus software, the porn-block software could download updated lists of hardcore porn sites but the parents could also add their own block lists.

This type of facility has been done as add-on for Firefox (to block advertising sites) so why not lists of sites blocked because they carry porn ?

ISPs would not need to invest in analysis of the traffic or web links, but could provide the software for download and the database of known-to-hold-porn websites. Parents could then add as many extras as they want, such as Facebook, etc.

Gets away from some 'body' deciding what is acceptable and what isn't. That is guaranteed to satisfy a few % of the parents, with some thinking Nuts is OK and others thinking Ann Summers is off limits.

It's a related question but it's not quite the same.

For instance, a site like rotten.com (trust me, you don't want to go and look) has many grotesque and horrifying images on it - autopsies, accident victims etc. I wouldn't want my children going anywhere near it. It's horrible. But it's not pornography by any sane definition of the term.

So as rotten.com isn't porn, would the proposed ISP-level filtering block it or allow it? If it's blocked on the grounds that it's tasteless (and it is), what else would be similarly blocked? If it's allowed on the grounds that it's not porn, you'll still need PC-level filtering to block the crap that the ISP-level filter will be letting through.

You need humans to make judgment calls Justine and theirs a lot of www out there , the ISPs couldn't cope with provide such massive coverage.

Two quotes for you:

"Nicholas Lansman of the U.K.'s Internet Service Provider Association said that controlling access to online content "should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISP's provide, rather than being imposed top-down." He also predicted that such a ban could end up blocking access to sites like Flickr and Tumblr, which sometimes carry adult content.

"This is the wrong way to go. If the government controlled a web blacklist, you can bet that Wikileaks would be on it," said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group. "This is not about pornography, it is about generalized censorship through the back door."

I have a bit of a soft spot for MN now as I seen it a force for good .I think aligning to this could be very problematic for MN and a mistake.

Just ask at the meeting, where else in the world this has worked.You will have your answer there.

"where else in the world this has worked"

Wonderful, Motherfunster.

I think Justine went off to troll hunt, or bed, or somewhere else, anyway...

@NetworkGuy

Maybe the bar should be set at very hardcore porn.

Justine - now you're getting to a secondary aspect - who says that what the organisations agree is the 'level' is acceptable or unacceptable to every parent.

Kaloki has suggested that parental controls be at the house end of the link and the simpler and more widely available, the better (eg open source, make whatever package run on Linux, Mac, XP, Vista, Win 7, and mobile apps for mobile phones if there is some dispute over what the networks will limit).

Make it downloadable too, since not everything has a CD/DVD drive. Distribute it at minimal cost/free (if Google can give away Chrome and Microsoft puts hundreds of MB of files into a security update then a 20 to 50 MB application is not going to hurt).

Just like anti-virus software, the porn-block software could download updated lists of hardcore porn sites but the parents could also add their own block lists.

This type of facility has been done as add-on for Firefox (to block advertising sites) so why not lists of sites blocked because they carry porn ?

ISPs would not need to invest in analysis of the traffic or web links, but could provide the software for download and the database of known-to-hold-porn websites. Parents could then add as many extras as they want, such as Facebook, etc.

Gets away from some 'body' deciding what is acceptable and what isn't. That is guaranteed to satisfy a few % of the parents, with some thinking Nuts is OK and others thinking Ann Summers is off limits.

But NetworkGuy (and Motherfunster) - loads of people just won't do it - because they're technophobes, because they're lazy, because they're apathetic, because they're just too busy and they forgot (that would be me, probably). So we're back to the problem of your kid seeing it at the neighbours'... We - as a society - i.e. some recognised body or other (usually chosen by democratically elected parliament) decide things all the time about what is appropriate for kids and what isn't. I just don't get what's so different here. If there's a whiff of opportunistic censorship the net would go apeshit. (Hell we'd go apeshit ).

oh god yes Snorbs - rotten - I have stumbled across it years ago (agree if you don't know of it - don't go there - I still have some of those images imprinted on my brain years after seeing them ). I think to be perfectly honest I would be more concerned if one of my DS's stumbled across Rotten than of a naked woman with a dildo up her ass. Obviously niether is good - I wouldn't want them seeing either - but if I had to choose which to block - it would - in all honesty be Rotten.

So who's going to be the first person who finds their ISP blocking images of women breastfeeding a la Facebook, I wonder?

but the problem of seeing it at the neighbours doesn't go away - I personally don't know if either of my neighbours watches porn - but I'd hazard a pretty good guess that at least one of them does.......actually probably the teenage (adult) boys on the other side probably do too.

Unless I go around and ask all my friends parents if they

a) watch porn

b) have had to have the porn filter lifted so that they can look at another (non-porn - but adult) website

Then my children will be no safer.

I would also question how hard it would be to ask to have the porn filter lifted.

I recently (at exH's request) rang up my ISP and using his account details, and his password, stopped a planned disconnection at one address, and postponed the reconnection a the new address...... We have been separated for almost a year now........the acounnt was in his name - I just said I was "mrs his name"(legally speaking I still am) and they just asked for the main security details (which I knew anyhow) and his password)

If it to be done on the phone (having it lifted) what is to stop a determined teenager also getting it lifted?

There are loads of things my DCs could get up to at a neighbour's house if that neighbour couldn't be arsed to supervise them properly. Watching porn videos or horror films, smoking, drinking, playing with matches... The list is endless. Why go to all this effort and expense to (poorly) address just one of those issues?

A parent that can't be bothered to supervise his/her children is a social problem, not a technological one.