BT Blocks 10,000 Child-Porn Site Visits A Day 503
jb.hl.com writes "The BBC is reporting that British Telecom, the predominant telecommunications company in the UK, is blocking 10,000 attempts to access child pornography a day. In the first three weeks of the system being operational, BT allegedly blocked 250,000 attempts to view such pages. They apparently have no idea how many of these hits were accidental, or caused by malware. The block affects 2.5m of BT's customers. Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, said with regards to privacy concerns that "we don't know their motives or who does it and honestly we don't want to know"." onion2k reminds us that we first mentioned the block in June.
Accidental vs. Deliberate, Trend Analysis (Score:5, Informative)
The Malware one is harder, but I would have thought some fairly clever traffic analysis would throw up a good guide as to how much of the traffic is from Malware.
Re:How do they know what's child porn? (Score:4, Informative)
From the article:
and
Re:Marketing stunt (Score:2, Informative)
RTFA!
1984 (Score:4, Informative)
Big problem here is 'child pornography' is being used as a stepping stone to censorship on the Internet (as was 9/11 a stepping stone to the Big Brother approach to tagging/wathcing/montoring everybody in the name of terror we have now), and although BT is _not_ a Government owned Company, it is to a certain extent controlled by Billyliars Government.
This to me, although maybe done in good faith, is not the way to go.
What is needed is the sites/ISPs running this stuff shut down - and I cannot see how the FBI/CIA/Scotland cannot find them!
Tracy Lords (Score:2, Informative)
All of these have been forbidden and, should you get her Playboy issue (even now), you wouldn't get her naked pictures because she was below the legal age.
Now, how many access to Tracy's pictures (or pictures/movies banned for similar reasons despite the model's past and present willingness to be featured) were part of these 10000 pages ?
Re:1984 (Score:5, Informative)
There is certainly regulation [ofcom.org.uk] of the telecommunications industry, but I struggle to see how it can be called control.
Small Minority? (Score:2, Informative)
"...a very small minority of people actually into this stuff..."
Is that why: "one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before the age of sixteen" here [darkness2light.org] and here [coolnurse.com].
25% of all children had a sexual encounter with an adult, either PeeWee Herman has been really busy or there are *a lot* of people very sexually attracted to children, not a 'small minority'.
Where are the studies and discussions on this issue? Oh I forgot they are being condemned by the United States Congress [conservativenews.org] and state leglislatures [state.or.us] for NOT toeing the line. Does it have a chilling effect on study of this issue, I'd say so big time.
Re:How do they know what's child porn? (Score:4, Informative)
The idea is that if you create a good self-regulating industry body, you prevent govt. interference.
Knowing British censorship laws, and the attitude of UK governments to consenting porn in the past, if the IWF hadn't been set up, they'd have passed laws to get ISPs to block ALL porn including consenting and non-consenting.
Re:Motivation? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tracy Lords (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Internet Watch Foundation? (Score:2, Informative)
" Protection of Children Act 1978
The law on images of child abuse is relatively clear. It means any images of children, apparently under 18 years old, involved in sexual activity or posed to be sexually provocative."
Obviously both "apparently under 18 years old" and "posed to be sexually provocative" are judgement calls. It's also worth noting that simple posession of these images is a offence carrying a jail term under UK law. Not production, not distribution, *posession*.
I'm not 100% in support of some of their other criteria, such as those for recommending the removal of newsgroups based on "predominantly" illegal content, but I believe that their reports of indivdual images / posts etc are generally pretty accurate.
Regards,
Tim.
Re:1984 (Score:1, Informative)
They seem to cat $bt_complaints >/dev/null in general.
I know this since I've written to them many times about various things BT do and don't do. As far as I can work out they don't bother reading any correspondance unless it comes directly from the police or whitehall.
Re:Interesting job... (Score:2, Informative)
Section 46 of the Sex Offences Act 2003 provides a statutory defence for IWF work and an agreement has been drawn up between the police, CPS and IWF, which sets out our role and is supported by the government. In order to ensure best practice in carrying out that role IWF Board have approved a policy for vetting all Board and staff appointments"
ie they've agreed it with Plod so you don't get nicked for doing your job, and they're going to take a good stab at checking you're not a pervert before they let you do that for a living.
Bear in mind that IWF isn't just a random bunch of do-gooders. They were set up by agreement between the government, the police and the UK ISP community, in effect, they *are* an official organization, if not technically an "official police organization".
Regards,
Tim.
Perceptions (Score:5, Informative)
People don't understand what paedophillia is. Paedophillia is the specific and sole (or overwhelmingly primary) attraction to children who have _not_ entered puberty. Puberlescent physical features as much of a turn off to them as females having beards and bald spots are to the average teenage male.
Many are so misguided that they cry "paedophile" if a 20 year old so much as holds hands with a 15 year old. Paedophiles largely don't care for teenagers. People like that famous Belgian sociopath who raped those teenage girls aren't paedophiles, they just treat young people like this because they're easier to abuse.
One little fact is that males are attracted to females at much younger ages than society accepts. Back in 19th century England, it was socially recognised that no morallistic female could want sex. We now know this isn't true, but there were strong social taboos on the matter and females wouldn't speak up about it, and males dominated public debate. Today, any adult male is terrified to admit he may find an under 18 year old attractive. Yet most do. The social taboos on the issue are made very strong by hysterical media stories. Another factor is that females are so influential now, and as they are usually unable to find males younger than themselves attractive, they're far less understanding that males do, and become more ridged on the subject.
According to scientific studies performed by psychologists, the ages females are at their _peak_ of physically attractivenss to adult males is 14 to 24. This is a severe contradiction with social perceptions. It also doesn't take a genius to figure out that 12 is alot closer to 14 than 45 is to 24. Historically puberty happened later (and we still don't know why), while children were psychologically very grown up by age 13 because of the lack of modern society's failings. We have today the double negative of children entering puberty too early (and confusing males' attractions) on the one hand, while young people mentally grow up far too late on the other. We also seperate different age groups from social contact because of schools and workplaces. If these three factors didn't exist, then we'd think nothing of a 30 year old dating a 16 year old, which is exactly how it used to be since the dawn of time. Girls regularly got married in their mid teens. This was almost the case where I live only a generation ago.
Also, paedophillia is a rare thing. Mathematically, there aren't many of them. Statistically, most child abuse is committed by hetrosexual parents and other close family figures. Sexual abuse by paedophiles only makes up a very small percentage of sexual abuse. One recent survey of prisons where I live found that only a very small minority of prisoners convicted of sexual offenses against children were paedophiles, and most committed these crimes on impulse and because the children were accessable.
Some European countries have such a different attitude about children and sexuality from English speakers that 12 year old girls may literally take their clothes off in a public park on a hot day while playing, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Ultimately, sexual abuse happens because people don't care for others. You have to either lack empathy or be delusional to treat a child in this way. If you want to save the children from these horrible things, have a more caring and open society. Knee-jeck social taboos don't help, no matter how certain you are of the subject.
Re:Accidental vs. Deliberate, Trend Analysis (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, no, it is not.
Child pornography is already illegal. Surfing child porn is illegal. It is not making any new rules or laws. What it is doing is preventing people from accidently surfing to child porn sites. Now if they made it illegal to hit the block then it would be something to worry about. Is BT the only ISP in the UK? if not then you still have the choice to go with one that is not blocking.
Re:How do they know what's child porn? (Score:1, Informative)
The blacklist is generated by the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation, www.iwf.org.uk [iwf.org.uk]) which is an industry funded body which takes reports from the public of 'potentially illegal material' checks it to see if it is so. If it is illegal and on a UK ISPs machines they're alerted so it can be taken down, and by the sounds of things they're now producing a list of kiddy porn sites for BT to filter on.
Generally the IWF does a good job though they tend to err on the side of block block block! if it even hints of something illegal and are in bed with the childrens charities who would be glad to see an ISP go out of business for "providing access to illegal material" as an example to all the others and force the blocking / filtering of sites they want blocked.
Re:How do they know what's child porn? (Score:3, Informative)
I understand that looking stuff up for yourself isn't really the done thing on Slashdot, so let me help you out
According to their webpage [iwf.org.uk] (linked at various other points in the comments as well)
and
See, that wasn't too difficult.
Canada soon to be even worse (Score:1, Informative)
I'm very interested to see what happens to fantasy/SF authors who write about long-lived or short-lived species... what happens with an elf child who is 100 years old, but looks like a 12-year-old human? What about Kes from Star Trek: Voyager? She's damn well under 18, even if she looks like an adult - there's no exception for non-humans. What about time travel and relativity and suspended animation? The law requires us to be able to apply current Canadian law to all conceivable imaginary worlds. I just hope the first prosecutions aren't of anybody I know.
Stuff and nonsense (mostly nonsense) (Score:1, Informative)
2) Fallacy of the beard--even if there's some doubt over whether, say, a 17 year old is a child in some people's minds, that doesn't mean we cannot recognize those who are definitely children.
3) Sigmund Freud may have gotten psychology rolling, but that ridiculous Freudian sort of transference you propose is ludicrous and without any basis whatsoever, whether the basis is alleged to be scientific or otherwise. A pedophile is, legally, one who engages in acts with children which are prohibited. Moreover, the jury, not the judge, renders the verdict. In any event, none of them can be legally considered pedophiles unless they engage in some illegal action wholly unrelated to their service in a hypothetical court case.
4) You're a troll, and you would appear revel in posting flame bait. Positively none of what you've said has any factual basis, but then again, this is Slashdot, where contrarians will moderate up any point of view they think might be being ignored, facts be damned.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Re:Stuff and nonsense (mostly nonsense) (Score:5, Informative)