ISP to block porn

[AliX]

Interesting thread.

I cant help wondering though, if they went ahead with blocking porn sites in this country, who would be the winners and losers?

The personal freedom of individual consenting adults will be severely restricted, but there would be a knock on effect if the viewing of porn was cut to this extent. The build-up of frustration in individuals would probably lead to a rise in crime and inappropriate comments on social networking sites.
Porn content producers based in UK (of which there are many) would be greatly affected. Many are small businesses - they don't have the ability or funds to fight their corner, or develop the technology to get around it. Some are fabulous at producing niche market content which is the most in-offensive stuff I have ever viewed - they would be gone in an instant, as their content is already too tame for US based sites (yet BBFC still insist the content cannot be sold in this country).
Surely the Treasury would feel the pinch if the porn industry was restricted in this country - the amount of money moving around the system as a result of this industry is astronomical. Credit Card providers - they will see a vast drop in business (despite the fact that they all say they don't support purchases made on pornography, how else do any of us pay for our downloads, dvds, memberships, etc?)

And what about allied industries? If They manage to ban online porn because of its (apparently) negative effect on our population, how can They continue to justify the open display of condoms (condoms are available in any public toilet nowadays, both girls and boys), sexy lingerie, or sex toys (available in High Street shops).

To summarise, I think the losers would be individuals, consenting adults, marriages, UK businesses, the Treasury....oh, and so the Government could be included in this list

The winners? Can't think of any.

[penfold007]

Originally Posted by MrInBetween

For many years, another blacklist they've drawn up has been used to block access in the UK to certain sites by all but the smallest ISPs. Were you consulted on that one?

"Cleanfeed".

It works as a proxy at ISP level and intercepts all requests to sites which have an image / images which are on their list, then if the request is not for the suspect image they pass the request on to the site, if it is then they block the request. The idea was originally touted as being to prevent people accidentally downloading an illegal image.

It has problems. The most notable is that since all requests from the user to the site hosting the banned image get routed through the cleanfeed proxy, everyone using an ISP that implements cleanfeed that accesses any page on that site appears to have the same IP address (the address of the cleanfeed proxy). Some sites take a dim view of people hiding their IP address. When the cleanfeed list included a picture of a Scorpions album cover hosted on wikipedia, it meant almost all UK users accessing wikipedia appeared to be coming from the same IP address and they all lost the ability to edit articles, due to the shared address. The fact that you could buy the album in this country with the "offending" image" is apparently irrelevant. (it also goes to show just how badly worded the legislation is regarding images of under 18s, but that's a separate argument)

The contents of the block list are, as you say, set by non-statutory, unaccountable body.

The system is also now being used to block torrent index sites, which is something it was never intended for and was never designed with the capacity to handle.



The good news is that it is not compulsory, some ISPs take a principled stand against being censors and will not implement it. The ISP that I use now asks on its signup page if you want your internet connection filtered. If you tick the "yes" box they tell you to find a different ISP and discontinue the order process.

[sto]

I once was on a work trip to Switzerland. The hotel had free Wifi, but all porno sites were blocked.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by sto

I once was on a work trip to Switzerland. The hotel had free Wifi, but all porno sites were blocked.

That's a Lazarus move on a thread last seen eight years ago!

Hotel wifi . . . is a security nightmare, particularly in years gone by. . . remarkably easy to see other guests laptops, and for reasons that never made sense to me, quite often their own dowload folders were set up to sharing.

VPN is a necessity at a hotel . . . will solve the porn access problem, and almost as importantly, it'll give you at least some privacy.