The Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest association of hackers and hackerspaces, has been blocked by several UK ISPs as part of a government filter to block adult content.
Since July, 2013, large UK ISPs have been tasked with implementing what has been dubbed the Great Firewall of Britain, a filter that blocks adult content, content related to alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and opinions deemed ‘extremist’ by the government. This is an opt-out filter; while it does filter out content deemed ‘unacceptable’, Internet subscribers are able to opt out of the filter by contacting their ISP.
Originally envisioned as a porn filter, and recently updated with list of banned sexual acts including spanking, aggressive whipping, role-playing as non-adults, and humiliation, the British Internet filter has seen more esoteric content blocked from British shores. Objectionable material such as, “anorexia and eating disorder websites,” “web forums,” “web blocking circumvention tools”, and the oddly categorized, “esoteric material” are also included in the filter.
A site built by the Open Rights Group is currently tracking which ISPs blocking which domains. http://ccc.de is currently blocked by ISPs Three and Vodafone. Interestingly, this site – Hackaday – is blocked by the ‘Moderate’ British Telecom filter. The ‘Light’ BT filter – and all other British ISPs – still somehow let Hackaday through, despite posts about building shotguns cropping up from time to time.
UPDATE: Upon reflection, it comes to my attention that Brits have a choice of ISP.
The worst part of censorship is #### ##########.
Sigh. Censorship societies- they just don’t know what they’re missing.
“and opinions deemed ‘extremist’ by the government”
So it has nothinng to do with porn, which along pedophilia (P) and terrorism (T) is a convenient matter for justifying every antidemocratic move to silence unwanted opinions. Who would have the guts to fight a law that should protect children and innocent people? He/She would immediatly be labeled as a P or T advocate, which is the exact reason why most antidemocratic laws are associated with P or T.
Any mass filtering is going to get some false positives. As the filtering isn’t mandatory, I imagine there is a lot of effort being put in to make sure the filtering doesn’t have too many false positives or everyone just turns it off.
Despite a lot of tablets and other mobile devices having parental controls it is surprising how many parents don’t use them and are quite happy giving quite young children unsupervised free range access to the internet. They are then surprised when the kids see things they really shouldn’t or purchase a bunch of stuff online by accident. So this is just a fairly predictable knee jerk reaction by certain parents.
And to add. (puts tin foil hat in) It is pretty damn convenient for the government to have this ability overtly, rather than relying on covert means and the associated embarrassment later on when the public find out.
As someone who lives in the UK, I don’t quite understand HOW they can actually censor my access. I never had a problem reaching hackaday. Since they did try to annoy me with “blocking” piratebay, I started using torrents ( from twice a year before the so called block its now twice a week ). I mean the whole concept of the Internet is/was that you can still get the data even if someone drop nukes on parts of the network – and I strongly doubt they want to begin with such harsh measures ( of course you can never be sure with politicians ). Right now we are at the point when they so called censorship cost me about ONE extra click per case to get what I was searching for ( not p*rn ). What will happen when they gonna get better? I’ll need two extra clicks? When they going to get to the point when it will worth for me to actually pay about 5$ a month for a proxy? I’ve seen that google started manipulating its database against “pirated” content. There are distributed indexing projects running for years – I gave a try to blekko and it seems working. There are not one way to counter the narrowing of the information channels but a lot. I am using Internet because I’m not interested in the television – in fact I don’t have one, haven’t had the time for it for decades. Nobody can turn the Internet into telly.
It seems to me that right now there are two kinds of people on the net – the 0s and the 1s. The 0s are only have an email account and facebook. It doesn’t matter for them if CCC is blocked or not – they don’t care anyway. The 1s can get to CCC from wherever they are. There are no crying masses in between who are desperate to reach the knowledge shared at CCC but could not because of the block.
Our global society maybe turning into an information 99/1 analogy? 1% are capable to get to 99% of the information while 99% can only reach 1%? As far as its true nobody cares what the 1% can get – no market significance – they don’t want or need total control, just to herd the masses to the market.
When is the BBC going to drop the TV license fee? The BBC channels do have commercials? End the forced subsidy and let the Beeb depend on the same sources of income the private commercial networks use.
Someone should make a telly completely incapable of receiving any BBC channels then sell it as not requiring a license because it only receives non-government produced content.
Last time I checked, the BBC didn’t have commercials. The closest think you see in the UK is promotion for other BBC content. Providing you don’t tune in to live broadcast content, you can have a TV without a licence.
In austria, the national TV and Radio channels do have a fee on them, even though they have commercials, and even worse you have to pay this fee also just for having any device technically capable of recieving these channels
LoL, you have it good then. Over the border, having electricity is enough cause to pay the broadcast fees. No TV? No matter.
At least the second channel shows a good small movie from time to time.
At work I browse through a foreign gateway outside the UK. I was able to get some pages from the BBC international.
Inside the UK I cannot access these pages. Due to licensing apparently.
The story from the BBC goes that these international pages are funded not by the license fee but by selling BBC programmes abroad. And due to restrictions (probably advertising on the webpages?) cannot be shown to people in the UK.
But it’s OK as they are funded from sales not the license fee.
Hang on, those programmes they made, who paid for them??
Sounds like hollywood accounting to me.
So I’m legally obliged to pay the license fee, but I cannot access all of the content the BC are producing. Unbelievable.
This is all documented via google and has been happening for several years now.
BBC channels in America might have commercials, but then American’s don’t pay the license fee, in the UK they don’t carry any commercials. All the profits the BBC makes go back into the BBC.
Also the BBC is not government produced content, it is an independent body, in fact it spends a huge amount of air time holding the government to account. It dedicates more air time to news than all the other channels in the UK put together.
Using a TV that is unable to pick up BBC channels would still require a TV license.
Most people in the UK are happy that we have a commercial broadcaster which is taxed in such a way that the government can’t cut its funding every time it gets caught with its pants down, or wants cheap votes. They don’t particularly like paying taxes, but then most people don’t like paying taxes.
The Daily Mail and anything remotely connected to Rupert Murdoch on the other hand, would prefer the BBC to die, because they don’t like competition. And they will pick on any slip by anybody remotely connected to the Beeb and bash it over the head with a stick until the stick breaks, and then get another stick.
I laughed out loud, reading the stop condition for the bashing.
I presume ‘the stick breaks’ means that someone shows that it’s terminologically inexact, sufficiently for it to be embarrassing to use.
Firstly, the Licence Fee is set by Government. They collect it, deduct a handling charge and give the rest to the BBC. In addition Government sets the fee. Secondly the Licence fee pays for 4 Digital TV Channels and at least 10 Digital Radio Channels, including the Word Service. Thirdly the current level of the License fee would just about pay for Sky Sports on its own. IMHO, not only is the BBC more than worth it’s cost, it is cheap. In fact if the Licence Fee was spent on just documentaties by David Attenborough it would be more than worth it. I suggest that in future if you want to comment on the BBC you should do some research. BTW I am a pensioner, but not yet old enough to get any discount, so I pay the whole fee, plus my BT landline, and BT YouView. It is well worth it.
Back on topic, the BT Broadband Parental Control filters don’t work with Linux. I suspect that none of the filters which require a download will work with Linux.
I thought the filter was opt-out? How is a download that enables the filter opting out? *goes off to read more out of curiosity*
Yep…here we go with the opening of the movie V for Vendetta. As soon as we start surrendering freedoms in the name of “safety”, “decency”, or “insert catch word here” we open the door for being controlled by the government.
As V says in the movie, we should not be afraid of the government, the government should be afraid of us.
*sigh*
In what literally no-one calls “The Great Firewall of Britain”, ISPs are tasked with providing consumers an “unavoidable choice” as to whether they want parental controls on their broadband. In other words, when you sign up, you have to answer the question “Do you want adult content filtering?”. ISPs can’t assume an answer for you.
What form the filtering takes is up to the ISP. They can filter porn, or provide multiple options to block different types of content (gambling, sex, drugs, Facebook). The categorisation of sites is done by existing companies who have been doing this sort of thing for years.
There is no reference implementation. There is no master list. There is no government blocklist.
The nearest thing to a single list that everyone uses is the IWF Child Abuse Images (“child porn”) list. But that is specifically limited to child abuse, and isn’t some back-door for sneaky government blocking.
Importantly, however, there is no law which requires an ISP to block anything (a handful have been subject to specific and generally unsuccessful court orders to block the likes of The Pirate Bay, which is a slightly different matter). Any ISP which uses the IWF list (or any other URL categorisation service) is doing so on a voluntary basis and can turn it off or override it if it thinks any list or categorisation is overreaching itself.
It’s fairly clear from the blocked.org.uk link in the article that ccc.de is *not* blocked in the UK, except for a couple of mobile companies with their default (and admittedly quite restrictive) adult content filtering turned on. Personally, I have a Vodafone phone, and ccc.de isn’t blocked, but I selected to unblock adult content years ago.
Having seen the impressive skepticism which Hackaday displays towards hyperbolic Kickstarter campaigns, it would be nice to see this same degree of common sense levelled towards other outlandish claims
‘ISPs can’t assume an answer for you.’
Yes, yes they can. the ISPs can be opt-in or opt-out.
that is what the Gov has told them to be. as in the law. not by choice of the ISP themselves.
You should name yourself “Web reputation office of an ISP”. Actually, the 2 ISPs you mentioned received bailouts from the UK government, so once they have the equipment available, they HAVE to obey orders , official orders or not.
None of you have the right to complain about censorship as long as you are self-censor by refusing to subscribe to public surveillance.
Censorship is more than just what you as an individual want it to be.
Incorrect, sir.
The internet is already here. It is freely available, and is simply an open exchange of information. Preventing access to selected parts of it is censorship, whether desired or otherwise. I would go so far as to suggest that a “default” censorship is as bad as total censorship, since the average idiot isn’t going to go out of his way to be exposed to ideas that were deemed “inappropriate” by whoever controls the filter. Ideas are not bad. People that do bad things with ideas are the problem.
Large-scale public surveillance is a totally different matter. This is no “public surveillance internet” where you can log in and search through all of the surveillance in the world. Suggesting that there should not be such a thing (because it would most certainly be abused) is not a call for censorship– it is a call for the retention of personal safety and integrity of law enforcement (since, hey, if the video is there, why not prosecute everyone all the time for minor infractions of the law?).
Go back to whatever socialist nation you belong to. You have no business being in a forum of creative individuals who live for something other than The State.
Actually there is a surveillance you can log into, its called Intellipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia
Very interesting. I hadn’t seen that before.
However, I will point out that none of those platforms are open to the public- a marked difference in comparison to “the net”.
“Ideas are not bad.”
I would argue that no, some ideas are in fact just… the worst.
http://amyereichert.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/The-Lego-Movie-Double-Decker-Couch.jpg
I am a British Telecom customer, reluctantly because it’s the only way for me to get a decent connection where I live in a rural area. I opted out of their censorship scheme because I trust myself not to look at websites which might shock me(not sure what they would be, but whatever). I knew it was likely to be poorly implemented, and this just confirms it.
How sad. I think they’re just trying to protect kiddies from nasty Porn but just don’t have a clue about how to do it.
If you can get BT, you can get a competing ISP over their lines.
I want a decent speed. No other ISP will provide one, and yes I have tried very hard. BT will never admit it, but they nobble the speed of all their competitors. None of which has anything to do with the subject of censorship which these comments are about.
You must differentiate open reach and BT consumer. Open reach will provide the line (that any of the operators can use), BT consumer are the people you pay as a residential customer.
Have you tried A&A? They have a pretty good history of leaning on telcos to get things fixed.
The other companys use BT’s equipment and lines. The confusion is because you take a line rental out from Openreach, and its BT retail that sell you internet subscription. If BT ever got caught treating the packets from Retail preferentially, it would be the end of them, they escaped break up by the regulator because they operate under a massive regulatory regime (“the undertakings”) which erected massive chinese walls between the different lines of business, which breach of would result in them being broken up as a group or significant fines. And any competing isp would absolutely love to have their day in court proving a breach of this.
The other ISP’s can’t guarantee you speeds, but then, neither can BT retail (they’re just better liars, along with the incorrect assumption that they get preferential treatment which is implied but never stated), under the undertakings retail can’t have any extra information or knowledge not provided to other isp’s.
Anon, because you know why. But the above is fact.
Nooe.
I live on a farm. Every single ISP refuses service to us except BT and virgin. Virgin we tried, no connection at all, their engineers come out, play with things, go back and still no connection. Refunded.
BT works, barely, 100kb/s.
So I get BT, BT, or BT. Competing isps refuse to serve us. Lots of choice.
we should start a not for profit that distributes tor boxes to countries affected by “government content controls” making it harder for them to track peoples history than if they had left it alone.
For anyone in the UK suffering from this, there’s Andrews & Arnold (aa.net.uk), the UK’s own geek ISP. They don’t engage in monitoring or blocking (if you select the “censor my connection for me” option on signup, they respond with “get another ISP”), and have promised they won’t, either.
I don’t work for them or benefit from them, I just like them, and use them for my connection.
Good old /sarcasm/ Blighty. The UK. The Nanny state. Busy occupying itself with trivia while the real issues go un-resolved and the country slowly crumbles. All very pathetic and very very worrying.
So the UK is eagerly roaring down the same track they were from the end of WW2 until the Thatcher years. the lefties just couldn’t get rid of her soon enough so they could “right the course” back towards a socialist nanny utopia state.
If you’re going to post simplistic nonsense like that, at least get it right.
It was actually the PCP who unseated her. Ostensibly because of the Community Charge, but actually because she’d become an electorial liability because a significant proportion of the electorate thought she had dementia.
An Englishman might well write:
“Good old /sarcasm/ America. The USA. The vicious state. Busy occupying itself with crushing defensless forigners while the real issues go un-reported and un-resolved while the country slowly crumbles. All very pathetic and very very scary.”
It might be worth remembering the serious issues that join us, as well as the petty Nationalistic dreams.which divide us.
Ouh fuck. Just a few hundred kilometers and it’s like china? WTF?
I thought germany was bad, but that’s ridiculous. Poor Guys. :-(
Nothing like that at all really. Its been grossly exaggerated in the article.
Basically. Only mobile operators have censored the computer club, mobile operators are censor happy as is and if you log onto your account to verify you are over 18, the censor is lifted.
Otherwise all that has been left in the filters is the pirate bay and a few other torrent sites specialising in piracy, child porn and some violent rapey porn. I want titties, I can get them, I just can’t get pictures of titties of a woman being stabbed because why the hell would I want that anyway? Why would I want to get off to images of an abused 4 year old?
Its not like huge swathes of the internet for normal folk are censored off.
“Its not like huge swathes of the internet for normal folk are censored off.”
…. yet
As stated above, ‘the great firewall of Britain’ (which I’d never heard of until today despite living in Britain my whole life) is completely optional. Furthermore, the recent thing about certain sex acts being banned has nothing to do with firewalls. It is a ban on certain acts being performed in porn produced in the UK. Nothing to do with the internet. Nothing to do with restricting what you can watch. It’s the actual physical performance that is banned.
One of the wonderful things about the internet is that it routes around damage.
+1 arachnidster aaisp
The motel I go to for work once a week blocks hackaday. So annoying. I should ask them to remove the block.
As ever, our (UK) Government are talking the talk, not walking the walk.
“Banning” sites is achieved by removing any offending sites’ entry in your ISP’s DNS server. That’s it. Nothing else.
My ISP is BT, and I was surprised that ThePirateBay.se was never banned. as far as I could tell. I only realised what they’d done when they modified the firmware on their router to prevent you from changing your DNS servers. Please note that they don’t prevent you from using static addressing, or your own DHCP server. As I was using OpenDNS – not exactly the hackers’ secret sauce – I bypassed all the “censorship” without even realising it was there.
If you run a firewall/DNS server/DHCP server etc. inside your ISP-supplied router (most are backdoored) you won’t even notice what’s going on. Depending on your connection speed, anything from a RPi upwards will handle it – In fact an RPi is cheaper than one months-worth of my 72Mb/s link, including the telephone etc., that you have to buy with it.
This together with a recent change in the law which means you won’t get prosecuted by UKGOV for downloading copyright material means that Blighty is pretty liberal as western democracys go. We’re more likly to get prosecuted by USGOV, so thanks for that :(
People’s fears are very much overblown.
BT hub 3 and 4 both on most recent firmware are letting me change DNS settings. Additionally for me, the pirate bay isn’t a simple DNS removal, if I try to connect by bare IP or use alternative DNS services it still redirects to a site that claims UK legislation has barred access.
But I have other ways.
Really? What package are you on? We have BT Infinity 2, but were early adopters. A friend who lives in central London has exactly the same experience as me.
“Other ways” are good. BT don’t really need to examine the bitstream.
Due to living on a farm and only being able to get 100kb/s on adsl we don’t actually use any of the standard consumer packages which may well influence my Hub 3. The hub 4 is either infinity or infinity 2 at grandparents
Certain sub-agencies of the US Department of Defense also block hackaday under the guise that they are blocking access to “hacking” sites. They don’t seem to distinguish white-hats from black-hats.
I’m on Three’s mobile phone network. I’ve just tried accessing with Opera Mini and my phone’s built-in browser.
Opera accesses the internet through Opera proxy servers that also compress content. Opera Mini fails because ccc.de appears to use a rather esoteric certificate chain. I had the same problem with Firefox on my desktop PC (with a non-blocking ISP, demon.) Accessing worked after importing the certificate.
The native browser seemed to indicate that Three block “Adult” content by default and needed me to prove my age by entering my credit card details and paying 99p (credited to pay-as-you-go account). Credit cards are only available to people over 18 in the UK which matches the age of majority. After entering two credit card (don’t take AMEX) rather than letting me through to ccc.de it then rather seedily took me to a page with a badly segmented picture of a pole dancer and the option to search for porn. I still can’t access the ccc.de page as it apparently takes 24 hours to disable access filters.
Now accessible (with the same certificate chain difficulties as with Opera)
Try Firefox – No problems.
(A Three/Firfox for Android user writes)
It seems that some mobile operators in the UK (and probably elsewhere) not only are blocking obviously questionable content but also blogs, forums and even sometimes more or less all web sites that contain user provided content.
What would that do to people in general, not to mention inspiration for creativity, in the long run?
Speaking about blocking blogs and forums I found these two pages interesting:
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ourwork/reports/mobile-internet-censorship:-whats-happening-and-what-we-can-do-about-it
https://gigaom.com/2012/06/11/orange-censors-all-blogs/
The answer is to step around it.
I have two teenage sons who go to a school where they have cameras, bar-coded access cards, a filtered internet feed and a lot of the other paraphenalia of junior state oppression, which used to bother me – I was fooled into thinking that the kids were being conditioned into accepting all this crap “to keep them safe”.
What has actually happened is that they have worked out how to avoid all this stuff. They know that when the bar-coded card is swiped to go through a door, all it means is that the card, or at least a copy of it, has gone through the door. they also know about “tailgating”, where the person goes through without the card. If the website they want to use is blocked (Their school uses a London Grid For Learning feed. Odd how the tools of oppression are given such saintly names) then they proxy their way around it. If they want to fight, they go to the parts of the school that the cameras can’t see. They use “Mosquito” type ringtones so they can be alerted of incoming SMS in class, without bothering the teachers.
Far from being cowed servants of whaterver authority applies, they habitually take countermeasures – Arguably they’ve been taught to behave covertly – Think of the gay community back before (male only) homosexuality was legalised, with the use of Polari and similar.
I agree with you that there should be public and strident opposition to these government abuses, but I don’t think you should be too worried about them – Society can, and is, rendering them ineffective because, well, that’s what happens.
In my view the best thing anyone can do is help with, and encouage encryption. What Ed Snowden said. Make the internet go dark. In the disgraceful spook sense of the word.
Oh yeah, the best Democracy money can buy!
Use the Hola add-on to by-pass censorship 3:)
I wonder if that is related to HD’s recent format change, because if it is then it is totally understandable…
“spanking, aggressive whipping, ….. and humiliation”
I thought these were what members of the British upper classes paid prostitutes for. Obviously they’ve decided these things are far too good for the peasantry.
The only thing I’ve heard it be called is “David Cameron’s porn filter ™”
The mobile operators have had aweful filters for years, but they’re opt out, so are these filters. That’s not the problem.
What sucks about the filters is if kids can’t get on sites like hackaday because their parents have left the porn filter on, how are they supposed to be inspired by technology, engineering and innovation?