Plans to force ISPs to filter content branded 'disproportionate'

Yep. It's a pretext

For then saying 'well you can do it with kiddie filters, now you have no excuse not to do it for our generous donors in the entertainment industry'

They are happy to block non-child friendly content on the internet, but (in the UK) cable and satellite channels have fewer restrictions on content (ie 9pm watershed) than terrestrial channels - surely to 'think of the children' this must now also be amended.

If it saves one child......

There were people involved in the creation of that report. People so separate from the society most live in, so insulated from the need for basic rights, or fearful of people learning anything other than their truth that they had no problem sitting in a meeting where it was decided that access to the internet needed to be controlled to protect the "Children".

Will start a legal minefield

They say a safe and filtered internet, but why has that PC picked up an encryption virus?

That is NOT safe.

Break out the solicitors.

If you cannot use the internet on an old unsecured version of Windows without getting owned that filter is useless.

But they say that is not the aim.

But it endangers computers.

Define...

Define "non-child friendly content".

So does that mean Game of Thrones? MMA coverage? Panorama specials on ISIS atrocities?

It's a slippery slope trying to replace proper parenting. It's a Rabbit hole with the only possible outcome being stealth censorship.

Give me the switch.

This may surprise people who read my occasional posts, but I'm not wholly against filtering. What I am against is STATE CONTROLLED filtering.

By all means make it a law that ISPs should make filtering software available to all their users for free. By all means even have that filter set to "on" by default. But give the account owner the right, and facility, to easily switch it off, or on again, as they see fit.

Surely this approach would suit everyone? It might even get some of the less tech savvy parents more engaged with the tech?

I think the filters should be categorised as well; after all, whose morality are we going to use to decide what sites are filtered or not? Americas, where tits are forbidden but mass gun-murder-kill is perfectly fine. Gotta be honest, I'd rather my daughter saw a few tits than people being eviscerated on the Walking Dead, and I'd rather she saw that than became a fan of the twisted, gender defining nonsense of most modern music channels! Hoes, Money, Guns, are all good in the US, but a boobie isn't.

I want the power to decide, for myself, what my children can or can't see, or even what I don't want in my internet experience.

Give me that switch, and I'm a happy camper with the filtering plan. Fail to give me that switch and think you can make my moral decisions for me and then we have a problem.

So the first time that someone's SSL VPN or whatever cuts out because they've put a filter on a business connection, are they going to pay for the support for that?

Also, why would you filter at the end-point, if you have both adults and children in the house? How do you distinguish between the two machine types/user types? You don't. So you leave the main connection unfiltered and apply filtering on the premises if you want that.

And, what are the statistics on how many homes with child-friendly filters opt-out, or how many opt-in when it's not the default?

Given a completely arbitrary survey here (800+ parents on a school site, working in the IT department), the last three times we asked, nobody was interested in any help buying, installing, advising, etc. them on how to apply a filter to their Internet connection. Literally NO-ONE even turned up. And we have parents turning up after work for EVERYTHING, it's a private school. Parents give the same answers - they don't want to be filtered, but they'd like their child to be. They enforce that by making them go online in front of their parents, and they know the school blocks everything else.

We are required to stay with KCSIE guidelines. We are required to deploy filters. And yet we want those filters under OUR control so have unfiltered Internet VLANs and connections. Because when something is blocked accidentally, it could take our business down, so it needs to be under our control.

Enforcing a child-friendly filter on every home is stupid.

Enforcing it on every business is even more stupid.

If they ever think about enforcing it for back-end and technical connections (business leased lines, datacentres, etc.) it would be so incredibly dumb I couldn't mention.

Especially when a £2.99 VPN app will bypass all that for you. Usually by connecting to one of those back-end technical connections in a datacentre that is almost entirely unfiltered and unmonitored.

P.S. Yes, I opt-out of every possible "child filter" for my personal life as possible. 2 x giffgaff blocks, and the ISP opt-in one. Not because I intend to do anything naughty, but because I want to make it quite clear that it's up to me if I do.

Is there an internet for dummies book they can read?

A filter will not work.

You can do a filter two ways black list or white list, black list the content you want to block but then you would need to know all the content that needs blocking, I hate to say this but the Internets a big scary place full of cat videos, pron and idiots (farcebook/twatter), you can't block everything and while list for the exact same reason.

You could block as you go along but again it's a waste of time.

Unless and the more realistic way of looking at this is they aren't looking out for the kiddies but really they are using that as an excuse to force through the ability to block what they want for everyone at will.

ISP side filters mean bugger all if they get turned off between 2100 and 0600, as Sky appear to do. They class the files section of The Wayback Machine as file sharing/hacking/anonymisers and therefore block it. Similar applies to GSM Arena's forums. Until 9pm, then bam - the DNS resolves properly.

yes blocks because those work

Yup the other day I wanted to grab something from a certain torrent site, oh noes its blocked, tapity tapity, oh look im back on it now using nothing more than a suitable search enigne lookup (because theres more than just google). Anyone can do that, so can kids.

Theres VPN's, proxies, browser plugins, TOR the list goes on blocking wont work.

And why to stop a few kids seeing some boobs? Guess what before most people even know what the internet was kids were seeing boob's using magazine's, copied video's, copied files on a disk, hell even acsii porn was a thing back in the BBS days. It wasnt all softcore either no internet filters woudl have blocked that, so why would any of that?

The only thing it does is make it look like someone is doing something about a percived problem to try and make themselves look good, then when it fails its not because of the idea its the people implementing it or the l33t h4x0r kids bypassing the filters.

Parser error in sub-heading

What is this disproportionate content and why should ISPs filter it?

meh, what happens when your kids goto bed and customer services are down

kids should be using windows 10, and thick parents can enable a filter on their kids windows 10 account, they need admin privileges to shutdown

Restrict how kids learn

All of these technologies for restricting what kids can do have flaws, and kids should be naturally curious anyway...

If something is forbidden, they will seek out ways to get it anyway.. If you're relying on technology to prevent kids from seeing porn then sooner or later they will see porn anyway. But because you've forbidden it, they will be more likely to seek it out and less aware of what it is.

Instead you should educate kids, explain to them what is out there, teach them to behave safely online (ie not giving away personal information or executing random binaries etc). Young kids won't even be interested in porn once they know what it is, but they will be interested in something unknown just because they aren't allowed to have it.

Another good example is alcohol.. Most alcoholic drinks taste quite disgusting to a child, but alcohol being forbidden makes it desirable. When i was a kid and saw my parents drinking alcohol, they let me try some... I invariably disliked the taste and subsequently had no interest in acquiring more alcohol.

Other people i went to school with were always forbidden from drinking alcohol, so they would actively seek to obtain alcohol illicitly (through theft, finding someone willing to sell it to them or buy it on their behalf etc) and consume it. I had no interest in doing this because i knew i could easily obtain alcohol from my parents simply by asking for it, and didn't like the taste of it anyway.

Misread the headline!

Plans to force ISPs to filter content branded 'disproportionate'

I genuinely wondered who was going to be the arbiter of what is deemed disproportionate. Were ISPs going to have to start blocking the BBC once they'd gone on about a dead celeb for more than 10 minutes?

I wouldn't allow a young child of mine to play with a sparkler on their own.

I wouldn't expect for the government to ban normal use of sparklers be default.

I would expect parents to supervise their children when they play with a sparkler.

The exact same thing applies when you substitute a sparkler with the internet...

Isn't anyone going to use the word?

Censorship.

Call it what it is.

Why?

There is plenty of evidence to show that even though there are more and more of these ban lists and blocking filters around the problem of kiddie porn or children viewing porn has not diminished one bit.

The only reason I can find is the afformentioned control over what citizens can see and access.

"lessons about online responsibilities, risks and acceptable behaviour should be mandatory in all UK schools"

...and both houses of parliament