Report Highlights 10 Sites Unfairly Blocked By UK Mobile Internet Censorship 94
Mark.JUK writes "The Open Rights Group (ORG), which works to raise awareness of digital rights and civil liberties issues, has published a new report that examines the impact of internet censorship on UK mobile networks and lists an example of 10 legitimate websites that often get unfairly blocked (PDF) by adult content filters (over-blocking). The study is important because similar measures could soon be forced upon fixed-line broadband ISP subscribers by the UK government. Some of the allegedly unfair blocks include censorship of the 'Tor' system, a privacy tool used by activists and campaigners across the globe, and the website of French 'digital rights' advocacy group 'La Quadrature du Net.'"
Some of the most popular sites... (Score:3)
...could be blocked! What about www.expertsexchange.com? Oh yeah, forgot the hyphen: that should be experts-exchange.com.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
... and nothing of value was lost.
that is truly one of the worst sites on the web, cluttering up every coders google searches with it's spammy SEO paywall.
Re:Some of the most popular sites... (Score:5, Informative)
I've had Experts Exchange blocked for years now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Oops, sorry. I thought you were replying to this person:
Manage Blocked Sites: https://www.google.ca/reviews/t [google.ca] [google.ca]
I've had Experts Exchange blocked for years now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
By which I believe you mean the Sears catalog. ;-)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
You were allowed to read Fiction at such a young age?
Re:Some of the most popular sites... (Score:5, Funny)
The 10 blocked sites (Score:5, Informative)
1. ‘Tor’ (www.torproject.org). We established that the primary website of this privacy tool (meaning the HTTP version of the Tor Project website, rather than connections to the Tor network) was blocked on at least Vodafone, O2 and Three in January.
2. La Quadrature du Net (www.laquadrature.net/en). The website of this French ‘digital rights’ advocacy group was reported blocked on Orange’s ‘Safeguard’ system on 2nd February. La 13 Quadrature du Net has become one of the focal points for European civil society’s political engagement with an important international treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
The block was removed shortly after we publicised the blocking.
3. Shelfappeal.com was reported blocked on 15th February 2012 on Orange. This is a blog that features items that can be placed on a shelf.
4. Septicisle.info was reported on 7th February, and was blocked on Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile. This is a personal blog featuring political opinion pieces. It does not contain any adult content.
5. The Vault Bar (www.thevaultbar.co.uk) in London. We established that the home page of this bar was blocked on Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile on 6th February.
6. St Margarets Community Website (www.stmgrts.org.uk), is a community information site ‘created by a group of local residents of St Margarets, Middlesex.’ Their ‘mission is simple - help foster a stronger community identity.’ We established it was blocked on Orange and T-Mobile on 8th March.
7. eHow.com is an advice and educational site. It provides tutorials on a wide range of everyday issues, from ‘navigating after-school care’ to ‘small space garden tips’. We established it was blocked on Orange on 9th March.
8. Biased-BBC (www.biased-bbc.blogspot.co.uk) is a site that challenges the BBC’s impartiality. We established it was blocked on
O2 and T-Mobile on 5th March. It is classified as a ‘hate site’ by O2’s URL checker
9. Yomaraugusto.com is the home page of a graphic designer, offering a portfolio of his art and design work. This was found to be
blocked on Three and Orange on 6th February.
10. Exquisitetweets.com allows users to create one-page threads to save or share from conversations on Twitter. This site was
blocked on Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile on 15th February.
(Posting anon to avoid karma-whoring)
Re:The 10 blocked sites (Score:5, Funny)
Shelfappeal.com was reported blocked on 15th February 2012 on Orange. This is a blog that features items that can be placed on a shelf.
While at first this may seem innocuous, the truth behind this website is that it is a vipers nest of Al Qaeda militants, making money off of selling miniatures of the British flag burning and pictures of the queen with a bullseye painted on her. The proceeds of these shelf-items then go to an Al Qaeda trainingcamp hidden deep in the wastelands of Sussex where they are trained in operating micro-UAVs (preferably capable of resting on a shelf while not in use) aimed at miniature Big Bens (also preferably shelf sized).
Yes, laugh now, but you'll rue the day when someone told you about this vile plot to collapse British society as we know it and it actually happens.
Exquisitetweets.com
And nothing of value was lost.
Re: (Score:2)
Once again we see that nothing good comes from Sussex.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't you be dissin' mah county, boy, it ain't no wasteland!
Except for Worthing.
Re: (Score:2)
T-Mobile and Orange stopped two of us looking up the menu at one of my favourite (and family friendly) local pubs. We couldn't get to the following site on our iPhones: http://theblacklion-hammersmith.co.uk/eating.php [theblackli...mith.co.uk]
For me that's way worse than any of the other sites you listed :)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
After all, it's not hard to see how their blocking software could innocently misinterpret the misleading, double entendre, and possibly purposely misspelled names of these sites. It is difficult to write such "fuzzy" matching software that will accurately detect all possible cases, and of course they need to err on the safe side in order to protect the children.
1. Tor (www.torproject.o
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
8. Biased-BBC (www.biased-bbc.blogspot.co.uk) is a site that challenges the BBC’s impartiality. We established it was blocked on
O2 and T-Mobile on 5th March. It is classified as a ‘hate site’ by O2’s URL checker
"After Jihad, the premier evil that threatens [the UK] is homosexual fascism."
Yep, seems like the filter was pretty much spot on. This site does not challenge the BBC's impartiality, it simply catalogues every time the BBC runs a story about homosexuals or Muslims and doesn't mention that the prophet Mohammed and a "disproportionate amount" of homosexuals are pedophiles.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
1. Not blocked.
2. Not blocked
3. Not
4. No
5...
Not even the evil TPB.se is blocked.
What gives?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would Expert Sex Change be blocked? You don't want to go to an amateur do you?
If you go to expertsexchange, ametures is *exactly* what you will get.
Re: (Score:2)
...could be blocked! What about www.expertsexchange.com? Oh yeah, forgot the hyphen: that should be experts-exchange.com.
What reason would there be to block a website about sex change?
ORG? (Score:4, Funny)
Am I the only one that was hoping their website was www.org.org?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope :-(
Re: (Score:2)
Three letter domain names under .com, .net and .org were all sold long before the Open Rights Group was set up.
Anyway, it's a UK organisation, so it should be a .uk address, and Nominet don't allow org.org.uk
Personally, I blame Scottish highlanders.
Re: (Score:2)
they need to add another word / that will be another letter to their name then... Open Rights Group of Yonder has a nice ring to it.
"unfairly blocked" (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary, those in favour of the censorship plans consider the blocking of these sites to be quite fair.
Only an idiot would think these measures are about protecting children.
Tor... (Score:1)
Some of the allegedly unfair blocks include censorship of the 'Tor' system, a privacy tool used by activists and campaigners across the globe
That's a bit of a white-wash. What Tor is is a network allowing for file exchange which makes it impossible or very difficult to tell the identity of the file sharers. It should come as no surprise that a filtering scheme would block a network that allowed for content of any type that the filter cannot operate on. It's not 'unfair' in that this is mistakenly being filtered, it's 'unfair' in that unfilterable networks that allow any content will be casualties of any filter worth its salt.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but they blocked the website for the project.
Re:Tor... (Score:5, Informative)
What Tor is is a network allowing for file exchange which makes it impossible or very difficult to tell the identity of the file sharers
Who told you that? Tor is an anonymity system for TCP/IP, which is primarily used for HTTP. It is frequently used to defeat national firewalls in countries like China and the UK; it is no surprise that these countries try to block it. It is embarrassing that a member of the free world is resorting to the tactics that we see out of China, but that is sort of the point of TFA.
Re: (Score:2)
It is frequently used to defeat national firewalls in countries like China and the UK;
There is no national firewall in the UK, it was blocked by a private company on their network.
Re: (Score:2)
A private company that is presumably offering "internet access" to it's customers, but then defining "internet access" to be a subset of the actual Internet.
Trades descriptions appeal anyone?
Re: (Score:3)
>>>Tor is a network allowing for file exchange which makes it impossible or very difficult to tell the identity of the file sharers
What the fuck is wrong with that?
Bastard. Way to defend censorship. Go saluite your EU flag and then burn in hell, you anti-free speech bastard
Re:Tor... (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>Tor is a network allowing for file exchange which makes it impossible or very difficult to tell the identity of the file sharers
What the fuck is wrong with that?
Well for one it's a wildly inaccurate description of the tor network. File sharing has grown more accepted on the network but it still discouraged as it strains network resources. It's mainly a way to access (exit nodes) and share (.onion sites) information in an anonymous manner.
Re: (Score:2)
Go saluite your EU flag and then burn in hell, you anti-free speech bastard
Are you kidding? The EU and ECHR have done more to protect our freedom than pretty much anyone in the last couple of decades.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>The EU and ECHR have done more to protect our freedom than pretty much anyone in the last couple of decades.
Wow.
That's so wrong I don't know where to start. Maybe goto youtube and listen to some speeches from Nigel Firage and Daniel Hannan. Educate yourself on how the EU operates a lot like the former Socialist Union (where the tyranny came not from the elected leadership, but the unelected bureaucrats, technocrats, and appartchiks).
Random Example: A ruling that if bananas and cucumbers
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe goto youtube and listen to some speeches from Nigel Firage and Daniel Hannan.
You expect to get impartial and accurate information from those guys?
Random Example: A ruling that if bananas and cucumbers do not have at least 45 degree curvature, then they must be destroyed (which hurts farmers and the EU economy).
Oh dear [youtube.com] I'm actually surprised anyone believes in that one any more.
Another ruling that water bottles can not make the claim to cure dehydration (ridiculous).
It doesn't. Dehydration as a medical condition is caused by all sorts of thing, most of then not involving a lack of water intake. Drinking more water will not cure it so it can't be advertised as medicine for that condition.
Or the way that Greece and Italy have been taken over by unelected leaders who serve the Central Bank, not the people.
You mean the caretakers who are in while the organize elections? What is your alternative, anarchy?
Re: (Score:2)
They should have left the previous elected leaders in place. What they did in Greece/Italy was equivalent to kicking-out UK's Prime Minister, and then inserting some random unelected guy that the bankers liked.
And yes I expect that Nigel Firage and Daniel Hannan would know more about the inner workings of the EU bureaucracties than say..... some random guy on slashdot named AmyMojo.
Britain leads the way yet again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Britain leads the way yet again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Both the Labour Party and the Tories in the UK are really into deploying surveillance-tech on ordinary people. So it doesn't matter who wins elections
We have exactly the same situation here in the United States; the two major parties work to further the same causes, and ordinary people are the losers. Unlike the UK, the US adds a special twist: there is a high probability that you will be incarcerated (world's largest prison population), and that probability higher if you are a (not wealthy) man, and even higher if you are black.
Re: (Score:2)
Orwell had a fine sense for his compatriots' mentality w.r.t. the surveillance of a nanny state. He merely pointed this out in Nineteeneightyfour. More often than not, fiction literature is an early warning sign of a society's malaise and undercurrents.
Re:Britain leads the way yet again... (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea that the UK is some kind of surveillance state is a myth propagated on Slashdot by people who don't know better. If I recall correctly the "highest density of CCTV" meme comes from an article in the Daily Mail (aka Daily Fail). They counted all CCTV cameras, including all private cameras, in one very small and specific part of London. Despite the fact that these cameras are subject to the data protection act and typically not even connected to a communications network, they then extrapolated that small area of London to the entirety of the UK and asserted everyone was "being watched all the time", which is about as accurate as saying your email is always being read (by automatic spam filters).
Internet censorship proposals keep getting floated every few years by "save the children" types in the UK, whereas the idea is taboo in the USA. That's good for America. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there's no censorship in the states. US residents and citizens are subject to a comprehensive and effective system of financial censorship instead. For example, when politicians there decided that internet poker was bad, they decided to censor online poker sites. Rather than do it via DNS or IP blocking they commanded banks and payment processors to block financial transaction to those sites instead. The effect was the same - Americans cannot use these sites.
The financial censorship system operates the same as you would expect from an online censorship system. There is a large blocklist [treasury.gov] of questionable accuracy - it includes companies and people who do not exist and performs matching by name only. There is no right to appeal and no evidence is required to be added to the list. It is subject to political manipulation as we saw with the WikiLeaks blockade. It requires pervasive monitoring, implemented via government access to banks financial records. Foreign financial transfers are also available to the US government via the "Terrorist Finance Tracking Program", which basically dumps every wire transfer, credit card transaction etc into a giant database that is queried hundreds of times per day - essentially the equivalent of deep packet inspection.
Of course, like any form of censorship, ways around the system are also censored. Whilst attempting to evade online censorship is typically not treated as a serious crime even in places like China, attempting to evade US financial blocklists is considered to be money laundering and can result in imprisonment for up to 20 years. In fact, being used by third parties as a way to evade this type of censorship is also money laundering even if you're simply an unaware middleman! The original formulation of these laws had a "mens rea" requirement, ie, to be guilty you had to actually intend to break the law and have a guilty mind. Virtually all money laundering cases fell because of this, so Congress simply removed the requirement.
Finally, because censorship systems have to be global to be truly effective, the USA has been persistently "harmonizing" this system onto the rest of the world since its inception. It gets tiresome to read posts from Americans trashing the UK for being some kind of censorship crazy surveillance state when the depressing reality is the reverse.
Re:Britain leads the way yet again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than do it via DNS or IP blocking they commanded banks and payment processors to block financial transaction to those sites instead.
Later on, they seized domains too: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/16/feds_online_poker/ [theregister.co.uk]
Re: (Score:1)
A myth? Really? Here's a challenge...
Get on a train to London. Count the number of CCTV cameras in your train carriage. (On the train I take for example, there are eight in each).
Then get off the train in London and count how many cameras you see in the station. (At my terminus - one of the smallest - there are more than fifty, and I'm sure I missed some).
Get on the tube, and see how many you count on your way across town. Again, don't forget those in the carriages on top of the escalators, platforms, and t
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see your point. For there to be a surveillance state, there'd have to be some capability to follow a specific person around across all these cameras, and as already pointed out, that capability does not exist. It's the modern equivalent of having security guards on patrol. Useful for security, not so useful as a method for the state to persecute annoying individuals.
If you aren't concerned about that specific capability of the state then you're making a more general argument which is very different,
Re: (Score:2)
That more abstract notion of privacy is significantly harder to guarantee
Not really. Just forbid the government from spying on everyone with cameras in public places for any reason. The government doing it and individuals doing it are quite different things, as individuals aren't everywhere at once like the government's cameras.
And it isn't really "abstract." The government does not need to be able to track everyone at once. They simply need to find someone they want to track in public places (to watch their actions), and then use the camera footage against them. If they find su
Re:Britain leads the way yet again... (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps my original post was not clear enough, or you did not read it. There are very few "government cameras". There are a lot of cameras put in places by the owners/operators of that place. Eg at railway stations it's the station operators who pay for, install and operate the cameras with the police having no special or unusual access beyond what is allowed via law. Therefore the UK government is already unable to "spy on everyone with government cameras" because there is no legal or technical mechanism for them to do that.
Re: (Score:2)
The police do have easy access to many of those cameras simply on asking. I installed a few CCTV systems for customers in shops, and typically the police would demand they have them and make the footage available (at the shop's expense) in return for a license to sell alcohol. The cameras had to cover the street outside the shop and as much of the surrounding area as possible. If there was a car park or playground nearby they would demand a camera pointed at that too.
When the police wanted some footage they
Re: (Score:2)
Like this [slashdot.org]?
Re: (Score:2)
Finally, because censorship systems have to be global to be truly effective, the USA has been persistently "harmonizing" this system onto the rest of the world since its inception. It gets tiresome to read posts from Americans trashing the UK for being some kind of censorship crazy surveillance state when the depressing reality is the reverse.
Don't worry. We trash the US at every opportunity we get.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True. And what most people don't know: most banks abroad (not just Swiss banks) and many telco providers are now getting rid of (prospective) customers who happen to be US citizens, exactly because they don't want to be suddenly subject to all kinds of administrative obligations that the US Govt' wants them to adhere to.
Re: (Score:2)
At time of posting you were modded +4 Insightful. WTF? I mean, really, WTF?
Can I get unblocked internet? (Score:2)
If I lived in the UK could I ask the ISP to give me an unfiltered version? Or has the Parliament arbitrarily decided to be my surrogate dad, and control what I can or can not see? (It must be fun to be treated like a child.)
Re: (Score:3)
Why was that blocked in the first place? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The state knows best. The state always knows best.
Re: (Score:2)
The state knows best. The state always knows best.
Vodaphone is a private company.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Mobile phone: yes, provide them with a credit card number (which means you're 18), or show ID in a store, and they will unblock it.
Fixed-line: unrestricted by default
There is also a system that blocks some foreign child pornography websites. The large ISPs use it; the small ones don't.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If I lived in the UK could I ask the ISP to give me an unfiltered version? Or has the Parliament arbitrarily decided to be my surrogate dad, and control what I can or can not see? (It must be fun to be treated like a child.)
That's missing the point of the article. This is about websites where there is no good reason for blocking them in the first place. And consider that you might actually want to prevent access to websites that are unsuitable for your six year old child, and the tickle-me-elmo website which is absolutely suitable for your child is blocked. You don't want to remove filtering, you want the wrong filter for that website removed. For everybody.
Re: (Score:2)
False positives are a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any sort of selection or filtration system is going to have TWO very different forms of error: false negatives and false positives. Missed badguys and caught goodguys. Most of the testing is done to reduce false negatives, so that you're not embarrassed by a glaring badguy getting though. As a result, lots of false positives are generated because they are less unacceptable. Do not expect rationality from censors -- that is not their objective.
The real customer's objective is to minimize the total cost both of false negatives and false positives. It doesn't help until people realise the [often high] cost of a false positive -- a large sales order that was missed & lost by a spam filter.
Some areas like police, do not have any notion of a false positive -- "It's all good -- they needed a warning".
Horrendous Typesetting (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, what were they thinking on the 10 legitimate websites that often get unfairly blocked [openrightsgroup.org] pdf? It's horrible trying to read it on a screen, and I'm using a desktop. Good luck to anyone on a smartphone...
Seems painfully ironic that they're excluding mobile users in this way.
We use HTML for a reason, ORG...
To look at it from tanother perspective... (Score:2)
If this is all that there is which has been inadvertentlky blocked by censorship, then it should be fairly trivial to make exceptions for these cases.
Not that I'm saying I agree with this... just pointing out a possible argument that highlighting these sites could be seen as a pro-censorship position.
More than likely, however, I expect that there are considerably more than these ten, so the argument is admittedly a weak one. It's only real strength may lie in absence of any demonstrable proof that the
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't matter how "good" it is.
If the system is there it will be abused.
Re: (Score:2)
The CEOs (Score:2)
The CEOs of these telco companies should step down in shame and go hide in a castle on a Scottish island.
What about Scunthorpe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's not forget the infamous Scunthorpe problem [wikipedia.org]. Does anyone, anywhere, know of a time when blocking domains actually did anything useful?
Dear leaders (Score:4, Insightful)
Odd happenings at Virgin (Score:3)
(that image mentions reddit, as I've lost the pre-edited screenshot and can't be bothered to take a new one, but it was the same page for any page that trips the adult content warning)
Technical ineptitude (Score:2)
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. From the article:
For example, parents may not be aware that network-level blocking systems are unable to selectively filter ‘encrypted’ traffic. ‘Https’ encryption is a way to make traffic unreadable by intermediaries such as ISPs. It is widely used in online financial transactions, for example. It is also increasingly common in routine, everyday Internet use. New browsers are built to check if encryption is available, and if so, to use it. Encryption makes
Workaround (Score:2)
I started using it when I discovered that a (non adult) site I wanted to visit was blocked on O2. It's competitors weren't, which raises two interesting questions - could they sue for unfair restraint of trade as it gives their competitors an advantage, and could they also sue for defamation as they are effectively being accu