British ISPs Respond On Filtering 163
An anonymous reader writes "UK ISPs have responded to culture minister Ed Vaisey's comments regarding pervasive, opt-out only porn filtering, bringing up many of the technical and civil-liberties issues also raised on Slashdot. In response to the government proposal, Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of the Ispa industry body, said: 'Ispa firmly believes that controls on children's access to the internet should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down.' Trefor Davies, chief technology officer at ISP Timico, commented that 'Unfortunately, it's technically not possible to completely block this stuff. You end up with a system that's either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it's just not effective. The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind.' Mr. Davies also feared that any wide-scale attempt to police pornographic content would soon be expanded to include pirated pop songs, films and TV shows. 'If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that's a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see,' he said."
Screw it (Score:5, Interesting)
Politicians needed 20+ years to catch up on the Internet and now they're trying to basically destroy it. Let them. They're great at messing things up.
Let us Slashdot nerds focus on building the future Internet. Whether it's a freenet of NFC capable devices or something other that much brighter minds come up with. Let's focus our energy on designing an impossible to corrupt network unrelated and (at least in essence) independent on what will be the government controlled old Internet.
how does filtering work elsewhere? (Score:4, Interesting)
In Finland they made a kiddie porn filter. It's pretty funny, there is hardly any oversight, no formal investigation by the police regarding sites that get filtered, and thus no process for removal of sites that are falsely flagged. Originally the law covered only sites that are abroad (I guess the idea was that local ones would be handled traditionally by the police), but that did not stop them adding the most vocal critic of the system to the list of filtered sites.
And of course best of all, it's a dns based filter so it's very trivial for anybody to bypass even if they are not technologically advanced.
I'd like to hear a success story from somewhere in the world regarding these filterings, but till now it seems governments participating on these are competing on who has the biggest failure, yet still considering them to be a success. The biggest winners are probably the companies designing the systems, and I would not be in the least bit surprised if the same companies act as advisors when analyzing if it would be worth while before starting.
Re:Its been said before, but ill say it again. (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. You impose a value-judgement, while claiming not to be. You single-out one specific kind of content that you, somehow, find needs to be segregated, then you claim you're not doing what you just did. A big lie.
I personally find the world of Disney more objectionable than the world of Cupido (local semi-pornographic magazine), yet one of these would be fine under .com while the other needs to go hide in the corner.