Re: Mozilla are only partly right
Stopping people accessing kiddie porn is nothing like stopping people from accessing guns. Kiddie porn is illegal in the UK; owning a gun isn't. I own several. The purpose of the firearms licensing regime is to ensure that only people who have been background checked, completed an appropriate course in safety/skills, have a legitimate reason to own a gun and are mentally suitable to hold that responsibility can do so. It also ensures traceability of weapons if it is suspected a crime has been committed. With these checks in place, I believe owning a gun is no more dangerous than being allowed to drive a car. Both can cause serious injury or death if used improperly or inappropriately. Gun owners are some of he most law abiding people I know as things like dangerous/careless driving, drink driving and multiple speeding convictions or anything that gives the impression you don't have respect for the law are likely to result in the loss of your firearms certificate; If you don't drive responsibly with regard to the effects of your behavior on others' safety, you can't be trusted to handle a gun responsibly and are unsuitable.
When I moved house, I only had a choice of one ISP that wasn't horrifically slow due to local cabling issues. They aren't particularly good. I have changed the resolver settings in my router away from my ISPs DNS. I didn't do this because I wanted to access illegal or unlawful content but because my ISP's DNS was crap (excessive latency and random failures plus they ignore the DNS TTL value which was a real pain in the arse when I was doing a server migration for one of the services I run and turned the TTL down to 15 minutes before changeover but they decided to return the old DNS record for 2 weeks anyway.)
I have a problem with the lack of transparency of the Cleanfeed system. It's run by the IWF as a closed system with, as far as I know, no independent oversight and it's a violation of the service agreement to open the blocklist and look at what's inside. The standard implementation I am aware of is to redirect blocked requests to a cache that doesn't return content so the user sees a timeout rather than knowing their request was blocked. I would be much more in favour of a system that returned a page stating the content was blocked. In my view, this would give an important safeguard against abuse of the list to block content that the IWF just doesn't like, such as articles critical of the IWF or content they don't agree with politically as it would make the blocking visible. I wouldn't shed any tears if someone leaked a copy of the list to a foreign security researcher who could do an independent audit of it to find out to what extent it may be being abused. I view whether I trust the current government as irrelevant. I have no idea who may be elected in 5 or 50 years so I don't know if they will be able to be trusted. This system mission creep is, in my view, ripe for abuse and has handed every future government an instrument of control if they're bad.
As is stated by others, I also believe that this system does nothing to stop those really intent on acquiring illegal content. Instructions on how to bypass it are almost certainly being circulated by these people as we speak.
Posted AC because part of responsible gun ownership is to not let it be widely known guns may be in my home which might encourage criminals to break in and try to steal them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
