MPs blocked from ogling 'web smut' 300,000 times – while in Parliament British politicians triggered grumble-flick website filters within the Houses of Parliament more than 300,000 times in the past year. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that ministers and their staff upset the anti-porn blocking systems on the Westminster network 309,316 times in 12 months - a rate of …
Let me fix that for you:
We all know all politicians and politicians in particular are wankers, but 850 times a day for Davey alone?
The only difference between this lot & the last is the reaction. This bunch will find something to perform a u-turn over as a result of this 'revelation'. The last lot would have shoehorned yet another massive database project out of it.
I'm interested El Reg, was February 2013 a parliametary recess month (i.e. no politicians means no wankers in the house), or was this a busy parliametary time with all hands to the pumps (i.e. the parliametary aides were too busy (i.e. the boss was in) to be watching porn?).
Enquiring minds and all that...
I wonder if Nik Dakin MP, or the former steel town which he represents, was in the news. I have not mentioned its name but the first letter is "s" then comes "c" , then "u" then "n" then "t" then "thorpe". My browser and security software is among those which obliterate his constituency from the on-line world and tells that they offend a mythical "acceptable use policy" that I appear powerless to over-ride.
Re Claire Perry - does anyone know if old Guido Fawkes actually sued her?
It seemed he had an open and shut case against her but its all disappeared and she continues to tweet her utter non-sense.
Even if a percentage of these 850 requests a day are down to malware / popups, what on earth is going on within that network!
So they want to implement auto-filters on all of our web-devices, but they can't even discriminate between "News site" and "Porn site". I can see why people are scared about the potential to censor information via the "adult filters" they want to implement if there is prior evidence that this is already happening (albeit to themselves).
About the most pertinent point made so far.
To be honest, we the English people deserve what we get. Our Parliament reflects our desire for a dumbed down version of a political system, and much like the American system, the richer and best looking candidate who implements the daily mail requests for policy will get into number 10
It's more likely that their blocking software is throwing up lots of false positives.
The filters at my workplace block access to all sorts of random but innocent sites, such as the landing page you are sent to when the NoScript plugin is updated by Firefox or even some news sites (can't think of an example off the top of my head).
In fact, about 3-4 years ago even sites like Facebook were blocked. That was until management decided they wanted us to push the company to friends and family ('cos they all have a massive requirement for managed server farms, right?) and then realised the irony of preventing access to the very sites they wanted us to be promoting on. It took them six months, of course, but they did eventually realise.
Not that I know of anyone who *has* promoted the company to friends or family.
She said: "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users. [There are a] variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software."
So they admit that their own statistics for their own filtering software are probably junk, and yet theyre happy to propose filtering and blocking on ALL of us because of some statistics about protecting children and the harm of pron.
"Some parliamentary staffers also hit back at the claims, blaming overzealous smut filters for mis-classifying innocent websites: The problem with the Porn Story Parliament Computers thing is that sometimes PICTs filter blocks news stories as pornographic"
Our elected representatives are researching news of the day on a filtered connection that may or may not be providing them with the full range of results. Then they decide if theyre going to be bothered to vote on a motion that they may or may not be fully informed about?
And they wonder why those of us with a least a passing interest and knowledge of how the series of connected tubes works, are telling them that the proposed new laws are a disaster?
Westminster can't even install the most basic-of-basic web filters, and yet Cameron wants to censor the entire nation?
edit 1: my mistake - I missed a couple of pertinent words in my first read. The requests were blocked. Good.
So now that Cameron knows local blocks work, why not just let folks filter their own connection as they see fit? Just like people censor their movies by (intake of breath) not watching things they don't like.
edit 2: Nice of them to mention that false positives are a problem. Do they understand that they wish to impose that problem country wide? I don't think they do. Idiots.
Except that they don't work because as a staffer said.... "The problem with the Porn Story Parliament Computers thing is that sometimes PICTs filter blocks news stories as pornographic"... In other words their own filters are blocking completely legitimate content which is exactly what campaigners against nationwide filters have been saying so it was nice of parliament to prove and uphold their case for them. It's a shame that they will completely ignore that fact and carry on implementing their Chinese internet wall anyway.
Exactly. A "false positive" (you'll get "false negatives" too). And this is the kind of censorship that they wish to impose on the nation.
The great-unthinking who can't work out how to install a net-nanny will assume this to be a magic solution and not take the time to educate or talk to their kids.
It's not a magic solution, it's pandering to the knuckle-dragging Sun/Mail reader and trying to score brownie points all "for the children".
They want to protect the children? Advise parents to get a clue before letting their kids play on-line.
Tory MP Claire Perry, who is advising the Prime Minister on porn, said yesterday: "The rise of sexting, online bullying, porn and young people documenting their entire lives on the web needs to be a core tenet of how we teach sex and relationships.”
She is shorting Facebook stock or something?
Having managed a number of private company networks and installed similar filters, I can tell you that many sites are inaccurately flagged as adult, some sites include iframes or other external includes which trigger the filter and a number of other non-user-initiated things can cause it.
Porn site?
How do they classify them?
Do they have someone following the MPs around on the web checking every URL after them to see whether it counts as porn?
Or do they have a list of what they count as porn and what they count as non-porn?
Maybe they should see my twitter feed, naughtier than many pron sites, would it be allowed/counted?
..... as all supplied IT equipment should be locked down enough to not allow them to be installed. Anything else should only be allowed on a separate VLAN, but there may be some number of hits which are completely innocent.
At a previous company they started using the filter report to discipline members of staff for looking at social network sites. I actually managed to look at some of the reports and found that when you look at the BBC news website it flagged hits to FB, Twitter et al because of the little share icons, which are pulled from the respective sites.
I have also found a number of adult blocks were caused by adverts, the page would load but certain ads were replaced with the default blocked message due to the adult rules. Most of the ads served by the agency were for adult sites and services so all ads from them were blocked as porn.
As for parliamentarians though, nah, they are all paid professional liars so would say 99.9% were actual hits.
If my local MP wants to wank himself silly in the privacy of the plush Westminster bog cubicals then I am jolly well all for it!
Anything to save me from having to look at those glum sexually frustrated backbencher faces every time I tune in for some PMQs!
Messy escape key for obvious reasons!
Tory MP Claire Perry, who is advising the Prime Minister on porn, said yesterday: "The rise of sexting, online bullying, porn and young people documenting their entire lives on the web needs to be a core tenet of how we teach sex and relationships.”
The famous Churchillian quote about 'The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter' deffo works in the inverse. Whenever I see or hear anything that Claire says, I seriously am in awe of the political system that can elect such complete and utter window lickers to represent the people. Take a bow Claire, you are an idiot of the highest possible calibre. And, I bet the good people of Wiltshire return her to the house after the next election to continue to talk bollocks.
"Well yes, you wouldn't want her back in Wiltshire talking bollocks, would you?"
(Speaking as a Wiltshire resident, but not one of her constituents - oh... apologies for the accidental use of "tit" back there Claire...) As long as she's in the middle of a field somewhere (or the Kennet & Avon canal), that'll do me just fine...
I think it would be a public services if the sysadmins emailed a list of blocked sites to the offices where the requests were received.
Just to give MP's a sense of what if feels like to have yourself under constant surveillance.
As Joseph Kenneally commented "If you thought Orwells Big Brother was bad, wait till you meet Big Sister."
Isn't this a universal problem with filters; they block too much or not enough or the wrong things? Every filter implementation I've ever seen had to be constantly managed and even then caused problems.
Besides, it seems to me that members of your Parliament are doing you a disservice by not having access to as much information as possible when creating laws. I mean, all governments go deaf, or stupid, if something contrary to their position comes up, but to build that into the system seems like a really, really bad idea.
"Some parliamentary staffers also hit back at the claims, blaming hyperactive puritanical filters for misclassifying innocent websites:
The problem with the Porn Story Parliament Computers thing is that sometimes PICTs filter blocks news stories as pornographic"
So can we assume that the national porn filters which the Tories want o introduce will also cause problems for the great unwashed? So it’s not only nude pics/vids that will be blocked? So that means to ensure that we can access any content deemed as porn by the filters we must opt out? Seems a bit pointless and a HUGE WASTE OF TAX PAYER MONEY for little return? Well done mums net you too seem to throw away cash which could have been spent on your kids’ education. After all, this is where you get your IT skills from, isn't it, your kids?
I'm sure this will give the average person a chuckle. Reenforce some already held opinions that people have of "the government, politicians, the lot of 'em"
But I too have worked in places that threw me 20-30 "innapropriate content" block-hammers per day.
Throw into that the average age, background with "those computers" and technical ability of an MP et al then it's a bit less of a story. I'd also probably add in that i'm sure that in the last few years there have been various new "we have to put it all into the intranet thing now", and "those reports have to go on that cloudy thing here", and "you missed the day where IT showed us how to get into webmail but we couldn't do it either so we've all just put this logmein thing on that Janet found and I just access my computer in my office at home to do X, Y and Z now.." etc etc
Like many on here i've been on both sides of these systems, i've been subject to them when I was a cog in the machine and i've been told to "make them work" as a slightly bigger cog in other machines. When you've seen the thoughtless things other people do at work, and seen the lengths they will goto to get around new security measures,and when you've seen people who just can't function unless things are EXACTLY the same as when they joined "back in '94" i'm not surprised at all.
In fact given that I imagine they will have a pretty strict system in place it'll probably be one of those brutes that blocks news,sports,gambling, sex,social media and any site either specifically entered or unlucky enough to carry a certain keyword or link etc.
They haven't found out "how many people watched porn at work" they've found out "how many time the security gear stopped any sort of web request. We all know a high percentage of them will be relatively innocent search results and lunch breaks.
I'd be more interested in results with data from 1200-1400 excluded (lets be generous, we don't all take lunch, or start it at the same time) Even more useful would be the breakdown showing which flags were thrown. Most systems differentiate, at least at the back end/reporting level.
After al I know if an employee who generated over 5000 "silent" flags (ie they were allowed to do it but it was all logged) in one day because he's a football fan and spent the entirety of transfer deadline day refreshing various news sites, live blogs and social media sites. In this situation he'd have had probably generated 50-80 "flags"while he hunted around trying to find a site he could access before giving up were he an MP.
We also don't know how they've compiled the number - It's likely to be a simple database query which returns that amount of requests for content which the system has prevented. In other words, every element of a page will likely count as an individual attempt, which would markedly reduce the number somewhat. Just looking at this page, there are 91 elements.
There's a game people play online. Find a vocal anti-gay campaigner, note their name, then find them again in a couple of years and see whether they've been caught paying a rent boy to carry their bags up to their hotel room.
The Gubmit's attitude to porn is the same as these people's attitude toward homosexuality, which inevitably means they're trying to hide that they secretly like it a great deal and are embarrassed by it.
"There's a game people play online. Find a vocal anti-gay campaigner, note their name, then find them again in a couple of years and see whether they've been caught paying a rent boy to carry their bags up to their hotel room."
Damm right too.
What consenting adults (note those qualifiers) do in their bedroom is nobodies business. If someone's gay and they don't want to shout it from the rooftops, fair enough. When they start going on (for whatever reason) that it (or whatever their particular bee in their bonnet is that they also secretly practice) they should be exposed, not for the behavior, for the hypocrisy
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