First they criticize the Great Firewall of China. Then they start building it themselves. And who better than a Chinese network operator to do it? After all:
"The Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry is an agreement between the Chinese internet industry regulator and companies that operate sites in China. In signing the agreement, web companies are pledging to identify and prevent the transmission of information that Chinese authorities deem objectionable, including information that “breaks laws or spreads superstition or obscenity”, or that “may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability”."
As I've been saying for years, the Great Firewall of China is -- or was -- the prototype.
Look at its early history: Built with "Western" technology and consulting.
Did you think all these firms were creating a one-off?
And, the following observation is perhaps stretching the interpretation a bit (or not), but I find it somewhat ironic that, after all this, it is a Chinese company that is pushing this implementation forward. Use domestic market access to acquire the knowledge (sometimes, by hook or by crook), and then use your control of your own labor market to undersell the competition.
If the block itself is only a technical measure, it only boosts alternative access methods. But if they make it illegal to do things like watch port or download torrents without government permission, like they do now with the requirement to hand over private encryption keys to the officials require them, then GB will become worse than China in the freedom of information flow aspect.
Us hackers need to make a new "web" a web where censorship is not possible and everything is encrypted, a "web" with no single points of failure, a "web" where domains cant snatched or censored, a "web" like the web used to be :(
I'll throw in another anonymity network (I2P). Its design is similar to Tor, created in 2003 and is mostly interesting due to some of its properties (tunnel based/garlic routing, everybody-is-a-router, etc).
It's already there, developed by the US military no less. It's called Tor. If the installing and usability was improved it might catch on for normal people concerned about their privacy.
For what it's worth, it's actually as easy on Linux and Mac as well. There is a prevailing myth that Tor has this enormous learning curve and is only for neckbearded hacker masterminds, and it could not be any more wrong. This is by design - The Tor Project wants anonymity to be for everyone who desires it.
Running a relay to help could be a good start. It's pretty simple[0][1]. The risks associated with being a Tor exit node do not apply to all relay types and the network can be helped greatly by running a standard relay too (standard relays only pass encrypted traffic from A to B).
If I were to run an exit node or a relay node, how would I mitigate the rare-but-potentially-life-destroying risk that my machine is identified as trafficking in illegal bits, due to relaying/exiting traffic of that nature from the anonymized network? I would be happy to donate bandwidth, but that risk is something which I don't feel is acceptable.
That isn't a risk for relay nodes, because you would be relaying encrypted traffic. It would just be noise.
For exit nodes, the issue of legal liability for routing other's traffic is less clear. You'd basically run the same risks as providing an open wireless network: https://openwireless.org/myths-legal
A normal, non-exit relay node will not be identified as "trafficking in illegal bits" by any sane police force. A normal relay will trade from A to B in only encrypted traffic and will not touch websites on the behalf of users, only other relays.
It is rare that an exit node is raided but there has been no known occurrence in which a normal relay was raided.. nor would it make any sense for there to be. Many people run non-exit relays as they are uncomfortable with the risk of exiting for the Tor network, perhaps you should be one of them.
Which is, of course, an excellent reason such projects should never be tolerated in the first place. Government-mandated filters simply should not exist. Full stop. It's an easy question: Does the law in question require that access to publicly-available information be blocked in any way? If yes, then it is a bad law.
The reason you're struggling is there has been no bill published yet. I'm fairly sure this is mostly political bluster, it'll be hard to know exactly what is required until they actually publish something real.
I don't know how things are going to change but I ordered Talk Talk a couple of days ago and they only ask you if you want content filter and antivirus filter on; whatever you choose they say you can customise it later in your control panel.
So far I like what I have seen. I just don't want any filter, thanks, and I did't have to say why (ie. porn or anything else).
Absolutely no way they'll ship with social networking blocked by default, it'll be dead on arrival. Every household will want social networking, and will enable that if they just skip through and realise they can't get to Facebook. Once they do that the whole systems pointless unless people actually see some benefit.
At the moment, it's sadly languishing at a mere 21,000 signatures. If it reaches 100,000 then that should trigger a parliamentary debate. I'm also going to send an email to my local MP. Does anyone have any other ideas for fighting this censorship?
The press could mention it, that would be a start. BBC news for instance barely mentioned the proposed blocking. The only stories to hit the front page (and then, right at the bottom in the Tech section) were the links to Huawei and the spat between the minister and the reporter. The actual proposed block has barely been mentioned. Apparently a baby being born warrants continuous headline coverage; loss of civil liberties gets a footnote.
Was a cleverly chosen publication day to be honest. I wouldn't be surprised if there's other bad news that we haven't even heard about that was completely blanked off the news by baby discussion.
You're kidding yourself. It's fully possibly to establish complete control over the Internet. If these power hungry sociopaths have it their way, there will soon be no free network to run a VPS on.
I don't think they care about it enough to want to go even that far, unless VPNs become totally mainstream.
But you can tunnel encrypted data over anything that can carry a signal, and stuff IP datagrams inside it. This will only stop people that are "casually" looking for stuff and don't really care.
Latency might suck. But if the filters become a problem, you'll start seeing VPN applications with "UK filter modes" that use whatever the current simplest circumvention method is. Heck, I'm in the UK and I'd go into business selling VPN solutions like that myself if the filters get obnoxious enough for that (through suitable shell companies somewhere more favourable). The trouble with a business like that, of course, is that the market will be limited as long as the filters are not mandatory.
But just as an illustration of how ludicrously infeasible turning this into full censorship is: If they allow HTTP through at all, you could easily create a VPN were the packets are exchanged by ensuring every Xth character is lowercase for 0 and uppercase for 1, and serialise your packets by downloading / uploading hacker news comments to the VPN server, with the case changed. Or you could use a thesaurus on both ends, with an algorithm for assigning 0/1 to words, and rewrite the text by looking up the next word and deciding whether (and if so what) to rewrite it to.
Of course that'd also be ludicrously slow and waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but it's an example on the far extreme end. More likely if they ever try to make this mandatory and actively filter, it'd likely start out with just be a matter of changing port numbers. The next step up in escalation would likely be wrapping the data in something that looks like you're talking to a DNS or mail server or similarly slightly massaging the data.
It'd only be somewhat tricky if they get to the point of trying deep packet inspection and validating that the contents matches expectations from the protocol and doesn't look "too random" for every protocol people might use.
A possible silver lining - if you're against the filters that currently exist (blocking child porn), someone might infer you're a paedophile, which would be bad for you. If you opt out of porn filters, you'll go down on a list of people who want porn. If you opt out of everything-filters, the only thing that can really be implied is that you want access to something, which is somewhat less easy to blackmail with.
Exactly. If I disable all all those filters, I can credibly argue that I'm against filtering on principle, not necessarily because I want to view any of those things.
I just wonder how long until they start using this infrastructure to compute a profile that determins things like your social security contributions or security clearance. They could also threaten to take the children away from people who disable the filters or force them into some kind of "re-education" program.
This deserves a lot more of a response but for now I'll just leave this:
Liberty is about the ability of the individual to do things that others disapprove of. You don't need liberty if everyone else approves of your actions. As a corollary, the exercise of liberty does not require a justification, because it's a liberty, practicality or "usefulness" or what-have-you play no part in it. It's onerous to require someone to justify their right to look at porn. It's even more onerous to ask people to put their name on a list as someone who desires the ability to look at porn. And indeed this is how freedoms are eroded. Because once you put things on a different footing and you require people to justify their freedoms then it becomes ever more difficult to justify anything. Can you justify eating a cheap, greasy cheeseburger? Can you justify watching "Jersey Shore"? Are you willing to?
These are precisely the same sorts of tactics that have been used since the dawn of time for busybodies to rein in individual freedoms of others, and thereby to obtain greater authority over others.
People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once (if) we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so.
> People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once, if, we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so.
Jesus fucking christ you people should go look at what happens in real dictatorships sometime.
A voluntary filter is not tyranny and it's fucking disgusting to compare optional filtering of semi-random webcontent with governments who murder and torture their citizens.
This perfectly illustrates my point. Of course this is not full on tyranny. It's just baby steps toward something which could represent a diminution in individual liberty every bit as severe and oppressive as full-on tyranny. As I said, maybe when that day comes people will have come up with a better name for it. For now we either call it tyranny and risk people dismissing it, as you have done, or we dare not call it tyranny and risk people not seeing it as a serious threat.
P.S. At what level of infringement of individual liberty between "just a little" and "full on raging tyranny" is it acceptable to take notice and be seriously pissed off?
It will be. "Security" and "child protection" are two most effective weapons of the tyranny right now. You can pass nearly anything on a wave of moral panic in the name of security or child protection.
The GP did not say we're living in a dictatorship right now, merely that such a possibility in the future should not be dismissed out of hand.
Oh and by the way, you are familiar with the fact that the American government has murdered its own citizens, and that a hundred of them have been detained (and I suppose it's safe to assume, tortured) in Guantanamo? Yes, I know they are most likely not random innocent people.
A voluntary filter is not tyranny and it's fucking disgusting to compare optional filtering of semi-random webcontent with governments who murder and torture their citizens.
You are the one that made the equivalence, not the person to which you replied. Nice straw man.
This UK porn filter is a step on a path. Yes, that current position is not tyranny, but it's a step on the path to it. Frogs can't be dropped into boiling water, but you can turn up the heat a little bit at a time until they boil. That's what's happening in the US and UK right now. The end result will be tyranny, and it will end with murder and torture of citizens.
Btw, in the US, we've already started murdering our citizens[1].
"but you can turn up the heat a little bit at a time until they boil."
This has been called "kettling" in police jargon regarding crowd-control. For an older example, look to Roman general Fabius Maximus (from which the Fabian Society took its name) who used a new tactic [1], consisting of attrition, to defeat his enemies. Also, might as well mention that Sung Tzu (correct me if I'm wrong) said the weakest and dumbest way to enact political change is via military action, preferring subversion instead.
> governments who murder and torture their citizens.
What about governments that murder and torture citizens of other countries? The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed by the US is pretty high - this fact alone is enough to make the US one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.
But what if you transcend into something like modern day Britain? You let people start tweaking with some aspects, others will want to "modernize" its notion of free speech. It could be such a slippery slope.
If the people allow for something to happen and do nothing, then that is what will be (until otherwise confronted). The people who inhabited the world before us were no less immune to the philosophical issues that plague us today. Slippery slopes will always present themselves before us, as it has always been in our nature to create our own problems, but it matters more what will people do when the moment arises.
I'm not condoning the actions of our nation states (Britain in this case), but as we have seen people and companies are standing in opposition with the issues at hand, and if people continue to do so to a point where it is agreed upon by more members of the community, then it will become the law of the land. Even the ideals brought forth in the constitution we're hardly original to it and we're fought for with the blood of about 1% of the population in the colony at the time [0]. But by no means does that some how make them more moral then the people who came before and those afterwards.
The founders were hashing out how each state would be represented by Congress. They decided each state would have representation proportional to its population. The problem: some states had tons of slaves. Slaves weren't allowed to vote--that was never in question--but slave states still wanted them to be included in the population count to get more representation.
Giving slave-owners more votes by counting their slaves fully would have been much worse, not better, for the slaves.
(An irrelevant tangent, I know, but this historical event is always mentioned in the wrong context and I think the truth is more interesting.)
Interesting indeed. But as you noted, it is irrelevant to how people have been (and continued to be by some) treated according to he "original" law of the land, which is no less the "truth".
People can learn many lessons from an event in history.
>People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century
I think that the two most famous tyrannies, the Nazis and the USSR, have given us a very narrow impression of how tyranny can take hold. We think, as long as there isn't a charismatic Hitler/Lenin figure agitating for revolution and preaching a radical ideology, that we're safe.
We should be concerned the about the general erosion of the republican immune system - 1. Judiciary: Laws weakening judges in favor of prosecutors, vast unfilled judge vacancies, the FISA court. 2. The Legislature: The utter contempt shown for the people's branch by the military/executive, the troubling trend of the public echoing this. 3. Worshiping the guys with rows of medals and funny hats, giving them massive political power (Keith Alexander).
EDIT: I found two relevant James Madison quotes:
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations"
"The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. "
>We think, as long as there isn't a charismatic Hitler/Lenin figure agitating for revolution and preaching a radical ideology, that we're safe.
i think this is exactly the delusion most suffer from, because there are many people consolidating power instead of just one the concept of tyranny seems farfetched and alien. there isn't a clear target beyond "the government" that is the source of the power creep and so people struggle to fight against it, much like a lion trying to catch a zebra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra#Stripes)
Also, it's the difference between people who are hungry for power on their own and people who seek to limit personal freedom and devolve power to the state for everyone's "own good". The Mussolini/Stalin route isn't the only way to destroy freedom, it can just as easily happen at the hands of less flamboyant folks believing their acting in everyone's best interests.
It's not the risk of Voldemort taking over, it's the risk of Dolores Umbridge doing so.
You make a number of excellent points, but the distinction you're drawing is actually more broad than just justification of liberty.
Anytime one makes a differentiation between two things, beauty and ugliness, skill and stupidity, light and dark, one is making a value judgement. The act of segregation, in and of itself, implies evaluation, weighing and judgement.
I believe that prejudgement (or prejudice) is antithetical to democracy. The idea that looking at porn should require justification is so wrong-headed I don't even know where to begin.
Sometimes I feel like in the 21st century, our industry (tech) is focused on making dreams come true, whereas our body politic is only interested in rehashing the same problems we've dealt with since the dawn of time. Why the hell are we even discussing a pornography filter when there are so many real, gigantic problems out there.
Because Cameron and Osbourne have trashed the economy, and are looking for a distraction? Wouldn't hurt to throw in a crackdown on violent video games - or maybe video nasties; New Zealand just banned Maniac, so there's a good one to put across the cover of The Sun.
> The act of segregation, in and of itself, implies evaluation, weighing and judgement.
One of my favorite quotes:
> when you don't create things, you become defined by your
> tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow &
> exclude people. so create.
>
> - _why the lucky stiff
And privacy being liberty's right hand, this is particularly frightening:
"Whether Huawei is linked to the government or not (they insist not), it’s hardly encouraging to discover that even when TalkTalk subscribers turn filtering completely off, their traffic is still routed through Huawei’s system."
Who needs PRISM when ISPs will just proxy all our network traffic through the Great Firewall!
Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics -
1. The filter is full of holes
2. What's blocked is pretty arbitrary
For instance, I was at a music festival last year (Beautiful Days), and access to the online site map and festival schedule was blocked as 'adult' content. The festival itself was full of kids and teenagers (brought along by their parents) for whom the info would have been useful. To get around it, I installed Orbot (Tor for android), because they only care about censoring the web.
Health education type material for teenagers springs to mind. I have seen issues in the past with 'walled garden' type software in schools/colleges blocking content of that nature unless specifically unblocked.
Suspect there will be backlash, then weakening of system to the point of uselessness once it gets going. Usual expensive UK government IT mess.
Wait, is there already a government-imposed web filter on mobile phones in the UK? And you can't opt out? When did this happen? What were the justifications given when it was put into place? Does it also apply to GSM tablets and devices tethered to your mobile?
I'm not sure if it affects all carriers or not. But you can opt-out, you just have to go through an age-verification process - usually providing a credit card number to confirm you are over 18.
Nah, it's not government imposed and you can opt out. I think all the operators have one though.
Opting out usually requires you to call the operator, though sometimes you can do it through their web portal if you have a credit card (they'll charge and then refund it). I assume it blocks stuff through tethered devices too. Dunno really.
Justifications? Most likely "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!".
Does opt-in vs opt-out make a difference, though, once they have enough data? If oppression or data misuse is the goal, it seems like reversing the set selection criteria would be a trivial way of getting the list of people who like their ${badstuff}, even if they did not opt out of a filter":
# obviously not real sql
select * from citizens where (citizen.id not in opt_in_list)
Probably the fact that only a minority will actually opt in. Requiring positive action almost ensures that miniscule amounts of people will change from the default.
..regardless of how desirable the non default setting is.
This, for instance, is why Windows Update got a lot more forceful in its later incarnations. People will not update, even when it's good for them, unless you make it hard to not update.
I work as an engineer in a small ISP compaly, and for some time had very closely contacted with phone support (sometimes helping them) and heard many conversations with clients.
I'd say there are quite a few people who can't distinguish between Internet, browser and VKontakte (Russian analog for Facebook). Didn't counted them or did any real statistics, though.
Human behavior. If you've got a population and you tell them to do X or they'll be labeled a criminal, you'll still have huge swaths of people who won't do X because of laziness, apathy, and/or ignorance. That's why opt-in vs. opt-out makes a such a big difference. Making this opt-in by default makes it extremely easy to target those who opt-out (and make judgements based on that action), but impossible to say anything remotely accurate about those who took no action.
You have three groups, those who care strongly about seeing ${badstuff}, people who don't care enough to change the default, people who care strongly about not seeing the ${badstuff}.
By making it opt-out, you will get only those that feel strongly about seeing it. By making it opt-in, and following your query, you won't be able to separate those that really want to see it, from those that really don't care.
The group that doesn't care is big enough to make a difference.
But "they" can already put you on a list of people who like to look at $offensive_thing by using PRISM to notice when you look at $offensive_thing.
So given that they can build such a list regardless of the porn filtering settings, and given that people don't change default settings, and given that a porn filter can be somewhat effective at blocking offensive content, and given that we already agree to blocking offensive content in public space as a general behaviour, and given that a porn filter will be opt-out-able, why not make it opt-in?
It's been in place a while (but I'm not sure it's government imposed). I've moaned about it a bunch - I have no idea why O2 feel the need to block http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/ for instance. Is it because there's a 'fuck' in the URL? Ridiculous.
If the concern is actually about enabling people to restrict what their children see, why not create and distribute a free, open-source software package that citizens can run on their own?
Obviously the question is rhetorical, but I'd like to see someone ask it.
They have asked it. the politicians said that people are stupid and don't want to learn how to use complicated software, they just wanted to be protected.
ISPs said they offer opt-in filters (and opt-out on mobile products) that people could use.
politicians now say those filters must all be opt-out.
At least to me, the big problem with porn is that it can rise your thresholds of excitement, make you insensitive, and you can even become an addict. But our kids will (hopefully) live in a world where porn is prevalent. We should teach them (at the appropriate age) that it is something that they can enjoy but should be careful not to abuse it.
Anyway, the idea of getting the government involved on blocking porn (or anything) is really bad. I rather live in a world where we have to teach our children to be responsable than in a world where the government decides what they can and what they cannot see.
I'd like to see some direct information on what was actually said by the ISPs and where it's come from. This article is a lot of speculation based on a statement that they've said something and then an existing service offered by one ISP. Clearly they're not going to block games and dating sites which this service does so it's not clear why we should assume that it's any sort of useful template for what's proposed.
ISPs have a stated objection to these proposals (if only because they understand what's really involved) and it feels to me a little like this could just be spin from their camp. Suggesting that this is the start of wider censorship would certainly be a way of pushing the public against it which would suit the ISPs cause.
None of which is to say that what they're saying is wrong or that it's good bad or indifferent, just that my reading of the article is that it doesn't really have much to support it's claims.
All that said we know for sure that the proposals will block things other than porn if only because it's almost impossible to accurately define porn or build a perfect filter for it based on whatever definition you have. There will be false positives and negatives both in terms of definition and implementation, meaning that stuff will absolutely be restricted which shouldn't be (and let through when it should). Good luck running an on-line site such as Ann Summers or Agent Provocateur, even when you're allowed shops in the high street.
> Clearly they're not going to block games and dating sites which this service does so it's not clear why we should assume that it's any sort of useful template for what's proposed.
Why won't they block games or dating sites?
That Talk-Talk product was put in place in response to earlier requests by MPs to "protect children", which is why mobile content tends to have filters now.
It seems that filter is as good a model as anything else for what the filter will be.
To me the Talk Talk product looks like they pulled it off the shelf - they're pretty standard categories for blocking software.
Obviously that's the likely implementation for the new system but it seems unlikely that they'd enable all that by default - that would absolutely open them up to claims of censorship and undermine what they actually want to do.
Let's see which way the wind is blowing .... hmmm... I sense an opportunity for profit!
I think that I will create a business to develop technology that lets us block undesirable thoughts. We will use an EEG cap as the sensor, some machine learning to detect undesirable thoughts, then a bone-conduction speaker to play distracting and disorienting sounds whenever our detector is triggered.
Perfect.
Do you think I could get some government funding for this?
175 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] thread"The Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry is an agreement between the Chinese internet industry regulator and companies that operate sites in China. In signing the agreement, web companies are pledging to identify and prevent the transmission of information that Chinese authorities deem objectionable, including information that “breaks laws or spreads superstition or obscenity”, or that “may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability”."
-From Wikipedia
Look at its early history: Built with "Western" technology and consulting.
Did you think all these firms were creating a one-off?
And, the following observation is perhaps stretching the interpretation a bit (or not), but I find it somewhat ironic that, after all this, it is a Chinese company that is pushing this implementation forward. Use domestic market access to acquire the knowledge (sometimes, by hook or by crook), and then use your control of your own labor market to undersell the competition.
B.O.L.L.O.C.S
What we are seeing now is a thin end of a very big wedge which once in place will be much harder to reverse.
With this and the recent disclosure regarding fibre tapping, take a moment to remember these words from John Gilmore [1]
>How many of you have broken no laws this month?
>If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody.
>When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot.
But we have hope:
>The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Sadly quote 4 may lead to quote 3.
1. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore
Would an unblocked proxy suffice, or do we think UK internet users would need to purchase a VPN?
Also, is the idea to block porn sites, or any site that contains pornographic content, like NSFW subreddits?
2) Click checkbox by "Filters on [ ]" so that the box is unchecked.
[1] http://cjdns.info/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P
[0] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
[1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en
For exit nodes, the issue of legal liability for routing other's traffic is less clear. You'd basically run the same risks as providing an open wireless network: https://openwireless.org/myths-legal
It is rare that an exit node is raided but there has been no known occurrence in which a normal relay was raided.. nor would it make any sense for there to be. Many people run non-exit relays as they are uncomfortable with the risk of exiting for the Tor network, perhaps you should be one of them.
Especially: is a VPN provider an ISP?
Additionally, what definition of ISP is used in Mr Cameron's proposal?
So far I like what I have seen. I just don't want any filter, thanks, and I did't have to say why (ie. porn or anything else).
At the moment, it's sadly languishing at a mere 21,000 signatures. If it reaches 100,000 then that should trigger a parliamentary debate. I'm also going to send an email to my local MP. Does anyone have any other ideas for fighting this censorship?
If they block SSH tunnels for instance no sysadmin will be able to do their job. Same for VPN. A lot of people work remotely.
I will laugh my ass off if they try to do that.
At the same time I won't be able to access my VPS anymore :(
But you can tunnel encrypted data over anything that can carry a signal, and stuff IP datagrams inside it. This will only stop people that are "casually" looking for stuff and don't really care.
Latency might suck. But if the filters become a problem, you'll start seeing VPN applications with "UK filter modes" that use whatever the current simplest circumvention method is. Heck, I'm in the UK and I'd go into business selling VPN solutions like that myself if the filters get obnoxious enough for that (through suitable shell companies somewhere more favourable). The trouble with a business like that, of course, is that the market will be limited as long as the filters are not mandatory.
But just as an illustration of how ludicrously infeasible turning this into full censorship is: If they allow HTTP through at all, you could easily create a VPN were the packets are exchanged by ensuring every Xth character is lowercase for 0 and uppercase for 1, and serialise your packets by downloading / uploading hacker news comments to the VPN server, with the case changed. Or you could use a thesaurus on both ends, with an algorithm for assigning 0/1 to words, and rewrite the text by looking up the next word and deciding whether (and if so what) to rewrite it to.
Of course that'd also be ludicrously slow and waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but it's an example on the far extreme end. More likely if they ever try to make this mandatory and actively filter, it'd likely start out with just be a matter of changing port numbers. The next step up in escalation would likely be wrapping the data in something that looks like you're talking to a DNS or mail server or similarly slightly massaging the data.
It'd only be somewhat tricky if they get to the point of trying deep packet inspection and validating that the contents matches expectations from the protocol and doesn't look "too random" for every protocol people might use.
(As a last resort we'll just have to implement IP over Avian carriers: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 )
http://code.kryo.se/iodine/
Dirty, filthy sysadmins :)
I just wonder how long until they start using this infrastructure to compute a profile that determins things like your social security contributions or security clearance. They could also threaten to take the children away from people who disable the filters or force them into some kind of "re-education" program.
Liberty is about the ability of the individual to do things that others disapprove of. You don't need liberty if everyone else approves of your actions. As a corollary, the exercise of liberty does not require a justification, because it's a liberty, practicality or "usefulness" or what-have-you play no part in it. It's onerous to require someone to justify their right to look at porn. It's even more onerous to ask people to put their name on a list as someone who desires the ability to look at porn. And indeed this is how freedoms are eroded. Because once you put things on a different footing and you require people to justify their freedoms then it becomes ever more difficult to justify anything. Can you justify eating a cheap, greasy cheeseburger? Can you justify watching "Jersey Shore"? Are you willing to?
These are precisely the same sorts of tactics that have been used since the dawn of time for busybodies to rein in individual freedoms of others, and thereby to obtain greater authority over others.
People often dismiss out of hand the notion that tyranny could possibly take hold over the first world democracies of the west in the 21st century. And to that I can only sigh. Perhaps it will not be known as tyranny, perhaps someone will come up with a different, more apt name once (if) we are in the clutches of it, but it will be every bit as bad and every bit as difficult to throw off, if not more so.
Jesus fucking christ you people should go look at what happens in real dictatorships sometime.
A voluntary filter is not tyranny and it's fucking disgusting to compare optional filtering of semi-random webcontent with governments who murder and torture their citizens.
P.S. At what level of infringement of individual liberty between "just a little" and "full on raging tyranny" is it acceptable to take notice and be seriously pissed off?
You should just shut your mouth until yours is as bad as theirs.
This is basicly what you are saying.
And no surprise, I disagree with you!
Oh and by the way, you are familiar with the fact that the American government has murdered its own citizens, and that a hundred of them have been detained (and I suppose it's safe to assume, tortured) in Guantanamo? Yes, I know they are most likely not random innocent people.
You are the one that made the equivalence, not the person to which you replied. Nice straw man.
This UK porn filter is a step on a path. Yes, that current position is not tyranny, but it's a step on the path to it. Frogs can't be dropped into boiling water, but you can turn up the heat a little bit at a time until they boil. That's what's happening in the US and UK right now. The end result will be tyranny, and it will end with murder and torture of citizens.
Btw, in the US, we've already started murdering our citizens[1].
1. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/obama-assassin...
EDIT: remove "Boiled" before frogs to clarify my intent. Thanks coldcode.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
The truth is that the myth is true. However they have already censored all of the boiling frog videos from the internets.
This has been called "kettling" in police jargon regarding crowd-control. For an older example, look to Roman general Fabius Maximus (from which the Fabian Society took its name) who used a new tactic [1], consisting of attrition, to defeat his enemies. Also, might as well mention that Sung Tzu (correct me if I'm wrong) said the weakest and dumbest way to enact political change is via military action, preferring subversion instead.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy
What about governments that murder and torture citizens of other countries? The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed by the US is pretty high - this fact alone is enough to make the US one of the worst human rights offenders in the world.
The idea is to transcend, not regress…
But I guess since it was tacked on in the end in the name of a compromise all is forgiven, as people can tell from the current state of affairs today.
I'm not condoning the actions of our nation states (Britain in this case), but as we have seen people and companies are standing in opposition with the issues at hand, and if people continue to do so to a point where it is agreed upon by more members of the community, then it will become the law of the land. Even the ideals brought forth in the constitution we're hardly original to it and we're fought for with the blood of about 1% of the population in the colony at the time [0]. But by no means does that some how make them more moral then the people who came before and those afterwards.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EiSymRrKI4
The founders were hashing out how each state would be represented by Congress. They decided each state would have representation proportional to its population. The problem: some states had tons of slaves. Slaves weren't allowed to vote--that was never in question--but slave states still wanted them to be included in the population count to get more representation.
Giving slave-owners more votes by counting their slaves fully would have been much worse, not better, for the slaves.
(An irrelevant tangent, I know, but this historical event is always mentioned in the wrong context and I think the truth is more interesting.)
People can learn many lessons from an event in history.
I think that the two most famous tyrannies, the Nazis and the USSR, have given us a very narrow impression of how tyranny can take hold. We think, as long as there isn't a charismatic Hitler/Lenin figure agitating for revolution and preaching a radical ideology, that we're safe.
We should be concerned the about the general erosion of the republican immune system - 1. Judiciary: Laws weakening judges in favor of prosecutors, vast unfilled judge vacancies, the FISA court. 2. The Legislature: The utter contempt shown for the people's branch by the military/executive, the troubling trend of the public echoing this. 3. Worshiping the guys with rows of medals and funny hats, giving them massive political power (Keith Alexander).
EDIT: I found two relevant James Madison quotes:
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations"
"The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. "
i think this is exactly the delusion most suffer from, because there are many people consolidating power instead of just one the concept of tyranny seems farfetched and alien. there isn't a clear target beyond "the government" that is the source of the power creep and so people struggle to fight against it, much like a lion trying to catch a zebra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra#Stripes)
It's not the risk of Voldemort taking over, it's the risk of Dolores Umbridge doing so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's a good thing the US doesn't have a widely-beloved charismatic leader sending us running down the slippery slope, then.
Oh, wait.
Anytime one makes a differentiation between two things, beauty and ugliness, skill and stupidity, light and dark, one is making a value judgement. The act of segregation, in and of itself, implies evaluation, weighing and judgement.
I believe that prejudgement (or prejudice) is antithetical to democracy. The idea that looking at porn should require justification is so wrong-headed I don't even know where to begin.
Sometimes I feel like in the 21st century, our industry (tech) is focused on making dreams come true, whereas our body politic is only interested in rehashing the same problems we've dealt with since the dawn of time. Why the hell are we even discussing a pornography filter when there are so many real, gigantic problems out there.
Maddening.
a continuation of the quoted part above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYhmATD8hLk
One of my favorite quotes:
"Whether Huawei is linked to the government or not (they insist not), it’s hardly encouraging to discover that even when TalkTalk subscribers turn filtering completely off, their traffic is still routed through Huawei’s system."
Who needs PRISM when ISPs will just proxy all our network traffic through the Great Firewall!
Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics -
For instance, I was at a music festival last year (Beautiful Days), and access to the online site map and festival schedule was blocked as 'adult' content. The festival itself was full of kids and teenagers (brought along by their parents) for whom the info would have been useful. To get around it, I installed Orbot (Tor for android), because they only care about censoring the web.Health education type material for teenagers springs to mind. I have seen issues in the past with 'walled garden' type software in schools/colleges blocking content of that nature unless specifically unblocked.
Suspect there will be backlash, then weakening of system to the point of uselessness once it gets going. Usual expensive UK government IT mess.
This project is hopeless, and it's going to be reasonably expensive for someone, but as understand it the government isn't paying for the filters.
Thus, it's not going to cost the government anything.
Opting out usually requires you to call the operator, though sometimes you can do it through their web portal if you have a credit card (they'll charge and then refund it). I assume it blocks stuff through tethered devices too. Dunno really.
Justifications? Most likely "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!".
On which subject - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTeENEQkBKE
YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO.
Justifications: "Children have too easy access to very hard core porn. Provide filtering, or we'll regulate you".
..Thereby putting your name on a list of people who like to look at $blocked_thing. Why this is problematic is left as an exercise for the reader.
Any such filtering should be OPT IN by default. Not the other way around.
Further, what data children have the ability to access is the concern of their parents, not the government.
This, for instance, is why Windows Update got a lot more forceful in its later incarnations. People will not update, even when it's good for them, unless you make it hard to not update.
How many people still think IE == internet...
I work as an engineer in a small ISP compaly, and for some time had very closely contacted with phone support (sometimes helping them) and heard many conversations with clients.
I'd say there are quite a few people who can't distinguish between Internet, browser and VKontakte (Russian analog for Facebook). Didn't counted them or did any real statistics, though.
By making it opt-out, you will get only those that feel strongly about seeing it. By making it opt-in, and following your query, you won't be able to separate those that really want to see it, from those that really don't care.
The group that doesn't care is big enough to make a difference.
So given that they can build such a list regardless of the porn filtering settings, and given that people don't change default settings, and given that a porn filter can be somewhat effective at blocking offensive content, and given that we already agree to blocking offensive content in public space as a general behaviour, and given that a porn filter will be opt-out-able, why not make it opt-in?
Obviously the question is rhetorical, but I'd like to see someone ask it.
ISPs said they offer opt-in filters (and opt-out on mobile products) that people could use.
politicians now say those filters must all be opt-out.
Anyway, the idea of getting the government involved on blocking porn (or anything) is really bad. I rather live in a world where we have to teach our children to be responsable than in a world where the government decides what they can and what they cannot see.
ISPs have a stated objection to these proposals (if only because they understand what's really involved) and it feels to me a little like this could just be spin from their camp. Suggesting that this is the start of wider censorship would certainly be a way of pushing the public against it which would suit the ISPs cause.
None of which is to say that what they're saying is wrong or that it's good bad or indifferent, just that my reading of the article is that it doesn't really have much to support it's claims.
All that said we know for sure that the proposals will block things other than porn if only because it's almost impossible to accurately define porn or build a perfect filter for it based on whatever definition you have. There will be false positives and negatives both in terms of definition and implementation, meaning that stuff will absolutely be restricted which shouldn't be (and let through when it should). Good luck running an on-line site such as Ann Summers or Agent Provocateur, even when you're allowed shops in the high street.
Why won't they block games or dating sites?
That Talk-Talk product was put in place in response to earlier requests by MPs to "protect children", which is why mobile content tends to have filters now.
It seems that filter is as good a model as anything else for what the filter will be.
Obviously that's the likely implementation for the new system but it seems unlikely that they'd enable all that by default - that would absolutely open them up to claims of censorship and undermine what they actually want to do.
I think that I will create a business to develop technology that lets us block undesirable thoughts. We will use an EEG cap as the sensor, some machine learning to detect undesirable thoughts, then a bone-conduction speaker to play distracting and disorienting sounds whenever our detector is triggered.
Perfect.
Do you think I could get some government funding for this?
But I already hear constant radio pop-music everywhere I go without triggering anything first :(