UK Porn filters block sex education websites

Anyone here surprised? No? I didn&#x27;t think so. Reposting because I know someone else is about to: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Scunthorpe_problem</a>

Oh for heaven&#x27;s sake.<p>Isn&#x27;t it enough just to install a blacklist system that blocks, say, the top 99% of porn sites? No. Apparently not. Some wiseguy with a smooth line in &quot;meeting legal obligations&quot; sold the ISPs an &quot;intelligent&quot; porn blocker, with all-too-predictable consequences.

Typical ham-fisted conservative&#x2F;authoritarian approach to something which isn&#x27;t even a real problem.

This whole filter is an entirely ridiculous idea. Blocking people from watching sex? It is absolutely asanine that we are so controlling and &quot;scared&quot; of one of the most important aspects of life. Sex shouldn&#x27;t be something that we hide and don&#x27;t talk about outside closed doors. It should be openly embraced as a beautiful thing, not some dark pleasure.

Is this an opt in or an opt out filter? Does any one, even for a moment, think that this is going to stop any kid from looking at porn? The techsavy kids are going to brake the system by using free or paid VPNs or TOR, and then tell their friends. Hell, if I was a kid in UK right now, I would make money selling preconfigured FireFox instances with VPN credentials to my peers. Hmm... maybe really it David Cameron&#x27;s roundabout way of getting teenagers interested in hacking and computers?!?

There&#x27;s a big problem with them blocking gay, lesbian and transgender content as well. Basically labelling any content along those lines as censorworthy, whether it&#x27;s pornographic or not.

This may be an obvious question on HN.. but.. how.. HOW can British people stand for this?

Where are the violence filters? I&#x27;m betting these filters don&#x27;t block beheading videos etc. (Please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong).

EE blocks news.ycombinator.com as adult content too.

Wait, what? That news about planning to block all Porn in UK actually happened?!

Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength!

Fahrenheit 451: Digital Edition

Hooray! Common sense prevailed. Oh wait - wrong thread.

I&#x27;m not shocked. The idea that &quot;pornography&quot; is bad is purely a christian idea. If they block legitimate sources of information, well too bad. Its the tragedy of evils of immorality.<p>If the UK wants the Christians to run their internet policy, so be it. That just made them similar to China and their firewall.

Mission accomplished.

Can this censorship infrastructure be tested from the outside, i.e. non-UK-ISPs? We&#x27;d like to know whether any of our sites are affected (since we don&#x27;t patrol them much for naughty content ...).

I disagree with the law, but why be upset over this specifically? Of course there are going to be false-positives and false-negatives. A half-hearted approach to manually blacklist sites would be trivial to get around, thus defeating the purpose.

An attempt doomed to fail. Iranian government has been trying this type of filtering from the day one, people still manage to go and find whatever they want... and believe me Iran is more aggressive than David Cameron the last time I checked.

Wait for them to sell this as some sort of &quot;collateral damage that we just have to accept&quot;, like the US gov is selling drone strikes, and NSA is trying to sell their &quot;errors&quot; when collecting data on Americans.

Did anyone else see that the purpose of all this was to stop children from accidentally stumbling across hardcore porn? Because, yes, that happens frequently with kids.

Are these filters implemented as real-time DPI filtering by keywords (then it can be circumvented by using SSL&#x2F;TLS?) or it&#x27;s some kind of blacklist?

I thought Europe was less conservative than the US.

I have to say this stuff is a complete joke. If you want to find porn, you can find it on twitter, here&#x27;s a tame search <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=boobs&amp;src=typd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;search?q=boobs&amp;src=typd</a> (SFW)<p>Please feel free to experiment with &#x27;harder&#x27; search terms.<p>The problem is that a medium most politicians use to interact with the public with, is also a medium through which anyone can search and view hard core porn.<p>Will the UK ban twitter?

Oh the stupidity..

They are blocked because they didn&#x27;t file for (or were denied) an exemption. Everyone was told for some time now about this. If they were denied, it is because a three year old could access adult material there (no verification of any type). Where are these facts in the article?<p>It is likely they didn&#x27;t comply to generate a reaction like many of the comments in this thread.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcVkYD3o910" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZcVkYD3o910</a>