Finally, A Firewall For All The Porn On The Internet

porn

The current UK government is proposing an Internet porn firewall. Unlike other countries with Internet firewalls, such as North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the citizens of the UK are so especially helpful some of them decided to help code the new porn filter. The idea behind the Great Firewall of Porn is simple: if a user wants to visit a NSFW website, let them. If, the user wants to visit the other 19% of the Internet, block it, and forward them to a page with hand drawn cockswains a baubles as the background.

The way the firewall works is actually pretty clever – it checks each request against the OpenDNS FamilyShield filter. If the request is denied, load the page, and if the OpenDNS request is allowed, block the page.

The genius behind this filter, [sicksad], provided all the tools required to get your own porn filter up and running over on his git. There’s also a great setup tutorial video available below, with a little social commentary thrown in for free.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJfyNwM6Lw8&w=580]

34 thoughts on “Finally, A Firewall For All The Porn On The Internet

    1. And where exactly would you run that VPN server these days? Its exit goes to the regular internet, so it needs to be located where there is no censorship, and unless we stop the idiots in the world governments in the end none will be left. In fact even the UN had people asking for a global censorship, so you’d need to have a server on the moon, but it could not connect to anything but itself though if the entire planet earth is censored.

  1. Frickin’ brilliant ;-)

    Apparently, TalkTalk (one of the UK ISPs) has had some sort of filter like this in place since last year, and over half of customers opted in to view porno material! So much for restricting it.

    What the hell does the government think it’s trying to do, restricting our access to what _we_ want to see on the internet. If we want to see boobs, that’s our own affair, and we shouldn’t have to _request_ it from an ISP.

    As usual, the motivations and objectives are deliberately made obscure. On the one hand, they talk about blocking access to child pornography and other illegal/obscene material. While I agree with that, I don’t see how it’s actually going to help – perverts will just find it somewhere else, or it’ll get pushed further underground (e.g. Silk Road). But on the other hand, they talk about restricting access to _all_ pornography, in case children at home “accidentally” see it. Which is it to be?

    Emperor Cameron also seems to be confusing search engines (like Google) with ISPs (BT, Plusnet etc). On the one hand, he’s on about Google being “complicit” in allowing access to abusive material. On the other hand, he’s requesting that ISPs implement blocks on porn. Again, which is it to be?

    Somebody mentioned that it would be impossible to restrict/modify seach results from Google since they all come from a secure server, I’m not sure how true that is.

    Besides, this will presumably be very easy to get around by using a proxy (just like viewing piratebay, for example).

    The real aim is to get a foothold into _really_ controlling what we see and search for on the internet – porn today, slightly out-of-favour political parties tomorrow?

    1. And who’s to say that such a block would not also prevent _legitimate_ access to sexual-related information – STDs, contraception, abortion etc. – where people are looking it up for perfectly valid reasons and not for any nefarious purposes?

      1. I have a good example of that.

        Soem years ago I was on a school campus and had looked up a site with technology information on it. The home page had the following statement: “There is no porn on this site!”. It was both the first and last time I was able to connect to that site.

        Yep, the word “porn” was sensured by the school’s firewall filters. So students could not access legitimate information that was related to electronics because the site owner wanted assure people that there was no porn on his site.

    2. The weird thing is that at first cameron came with ‘make all computers come with a free filter so parents can filter stuff’ and then you say ‘well OK, that way it’s just one of those free software packages and it’s in the hands of the user, so that seems sort of OK, if they HAVE to have such stuff’,
      But then he just could not stop his fascist streak that seemingly 99% of the politicians are ‘gifted’ with, and he has to go and try to make ISP’s censor stuff, the damn idiotic monkey.
      People should never have told the politicians about the internet, it’s obviously not something they can handle to be aware of.

    3. I wonder if Cameron actually thinks this will block child pornography or if he knows that he’s full of crap. Unless they’ve discovered an alien supercomputer that can detect illegal content it just won’t work. A filter that uses keywords on the page would have horribly high false-positives and crippling results, it would have to rely on a premade list with some degree of human interaction like OpenDNS does. But that would mean that the CP site is already known, in which case it would already be shut down with a party van outside the admin’s house.

    4. Of course. It’s just an excuse to get the technology in place that will allow them to do massive-scale monitoring and tracking of everything you look at on the Internet.

  2. “the other 19% of the internet”. Hilarious. LOL.

    On the other hand, I think I should write a book titled “to control a populace”. The examples of such are far more common than most realize and this only adds fuel to the fire, imho…

    1. +1

      Ultraviolent movies like Saw are bad enough, but it’s more the constant diet of Coronation Street, Eastenders, Hollyoaks, River City, Waterloo Road. Any time I’ve been unlucky enough to flick through them, it’s always been someone screaming their head off at their partner (or downing endless pints). As for video games, don’t get me started. Yet nobody seems prepared to admit that there is a connection between televised (or computerised) violence and people’s real-life actions. ‘Course there’s big money in selling violent video games, so that’s probably why.

      If politicians were really concerned about this, they would start thinking about putting an end to some of the revolting drivel that is shown on TV. People seem to like to wallow in misery – Channel 4 is especially good at this. Botched plastic surgery, embarrassing bodies, real A&E, true life murders (when Ian Brady made his recent appeal, the showed THREE documentaries and one drama about Brady/Hindley. How revolting is that.)

      Sorry, I’m getting off track. Let’s just stick to big tits ;-)

      1. +1

        I also feel the depressing storylines and the constant arguing of the characters in British soaps are doing more harm to society than porn is, because it’s mainstream more people are susceptable to the subconcious influence of the negativity spewing from the ‘entertainment’ tv shows. Too often they show characters having blazing rows over things that should in all honesty be talked over and resolved in a calm state of mind, and kids growing up on this crap will think that’s the way to deal with situations where you feel you’ve been wronged.

      2. Ban paintball, football, fencing, and all other team sports- ban hunting, ban red rover; ban dodge ball. Ban motor sports.

        Fuck you for being a dusty old hypocrite. If shitheads like you would stop USING MEDIA AS A SCAPEGOAT maybe we could get some REAL PROGRESS and people would realize the violent and disgruntled youth are that way because we are DISENFRANCHISED.

    2. New Zealand recently put a ban on the sale of a 2012 Elijah Wood film caled “Maniac” due to it’s POV graphic violence, which is no worse than any of the Saw films.

      Any guesses as to what one of the top most pirated films in New Zealand currently is?

      Banning stuff doesn’t make it go away.

  3. How do you even define what pornography is? Some judge allegedly once said that he couldn’t describe it but he knew it when he saw it. So what is David “call me dave” Cameron going to watch and vet all porn by himself?

    The images of child abuse is already illegal, so instead of better education and increasing the resources available to detection and enforcement bodies, putting serious effort into building cross border cooperation with law enforcement agencies not only within the EU but 3rd world countries where the risk of child exploitation is higher because of poverty and corruption, he just gets some one else to “ban” things because its easier than actually dealing with the problem.

    If this is so important than why have they cut the police and education as well as NHS budgets? Is it not the health and social services one of the 1st organisations that would detect signs of abuse? Is it not the police that works to catch those responsible? And is it not the teachers that will try and educate children to try and prevent it happening in the 1st place?

    I think that besides the arguments put forward about censorship, this is one of those ideas (yes its stretching the meaning of the word somewhat!) that doesn’t cost any money and is not something that they have to do any work on. Also the cynic in me thinks that they have ran out of ideas and people are not happy with all the cuts and the appalling state of the economy, the massive bail outs to banks that are now state owned and still incur penalties that the public have to pay, so they roll this out to distract the populace with more scaremongering….

    ……Oh and while all that is happening they are trying to give themselves a 30% pay rise.

    1. > Some judge allegedly once said that he couldn’t describe it but he knew it when he saw it.

      That was justice Stewart’s decision in Jacobellis v. Ohio.

      Keep in mind this was before the Miller test, so the only “real” way to find if something is pornographic is, “I’ll know it when I see it.” We don’t use this test anymore, and instead use this one

  4. Anyone that thinks the government really cares about protecting you from boobies is a deluded fool. They only want to rally public acceptance and in some cases roaring approval from do-gooders who will do the extra work of trying to shame people into accepting this.

    The government only cares about getting a firewall in place; how they sell it to you is up to them. But ultimately it’s to control public access to ALL information the government doesn’t agree with.

    Sure it may be an opt-out program. Then it will be a shaming exercise on anyone left. Then it will get progressively hard to get full internet access.

    The brits have already slipped in some verbage around the other material they intend to quietly filter. You fools will cheer and celebrate your own demise.

  5. Funny story…

    A teacher of Microsoft certs at a tech college set up a new filter to keep his students from cruising porn during class. He had a four hour lab right after he turned it on and oddly enough his students could not log into the assigned website for Microsft Exchange Server certification.

    One of the filters he created looked at the URL for words on a nauty list.

    msexchange

    anybody see the problem? It took him the whole class to figure out the problem.

  6. My question to the UK and governments that filter pornography is why? What does a government as a whole achieve by preventing people from watching pornography…? Does blocking porn increase work productivity? Does it prevent cancer or murders , maybe something else? I’m confused at the benefit of spending government money and time on this project. Are people so offended by others having sex? Have people become so prude? I guess I’m just missing something here.

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