ISP Blocks For Copyright And Porn Denying Access To All Sorts Of Important ...

[Mike]

Just as copyright maximalists are declaring victory in claiming that there's no problem at all with having ISPs censor the internet, reports are flowing in concerning all sorts of serious problems. Over in the UK, ISPs have begun implementing the mandatory porn filtering that Prime Minister David Cameron has been pushing, and the results are about what you'd expect: all sorts of non pornographic sites are being blocked, including important sex education sites and, more troubling, rape and sexual abuse information sites (while plenty of porn is getting through).

Among the sites TalkTalk blocked as "pornographic" was BishUK.com, an award-winning British sex education site, which receives more than a million visits each year.

TalkTalk also lists Edinburgh Women's Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre website as "pornographic."

The company also blocked a programme run by sex education experts, and taught to 81,000 American children, that has been in development for more than 20 years.

TalkTalk's filter is endorsed by Mr Cameron but it failed to block 7% of the 68 pornographic websites tested by Newsnight.

Meanwhile, blockades concerning copyright are wreaking similar havoc. Users of Sky Broadband recently discovered that the megapopular imgur image hosting site (which we use to host many of our images) was completely blocked in a moronic attempt to try to block access to a torrent site. Because both the torrent site and imgur used the same CDN (one of the most popular ones), Sky mistakenly blocked it all.

Sky employs an automated blocking system that polls torrent sites’ DNS records in order to quickly re-block them in the event they switch servers or IP addresses.

“Sky regularly pull IP addresses listed on our DNS servers and adds them to their block list. This block list is then used by an advanced proxy system that redirects any requests to the blacklisted IP addresses to a webserver that the ISP owns which returns a blocked page message,” YIFY explains.

Therefore, when YIFY began using CloudFlare servers in Australia, Sky pulled these IP addresses and blocked them in the mistaken belief that they were YIFY’s. Since Imgur uses the same IP addresses, Sky’s automated blocking took the site offline, to the huge disappointment of countless customers.

Of course, these obvious over-blockages are merely the tip of the iceberg of what people were talking about when they noted that site blocking would "break the internet." They never meant that the entire internet would shut down, but that certain basic functions of the internet would not work properly, including important security tools like DNSSec. But the fact that even beyond that, these attempts at blocking content at the ISP level are flubbing so badly seems like pretty clear evidence that blocking is not a solution, but rather an even bigger problem than expected.

Of course, governments have been warned repeatedly about what a bad idea such blocking plans are, but when you deal with technologically illiterate politicians and pro-censorship extremists, they seem to think that it's the perfect solution, without realizing just how much harm they're doing, not just in the collateral damage, and in guaranteeing that basic internet functions (like DNS) don't perform the way everyone expects them to, but also in general access to important health and safety information.

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[Mike]

The warnings were there from the very beginning. Installing any sort of internet filtering is doomed to fail. First, it's often easily circumvented. Second, it's never as accurate as its proponents claim it will be. Filtering overblocks, sealing off access to legitimate sites while simultaneously allowing targeted material to leak in around the edges.

The UK's national porn filter is already a failure, even before the mandatory 2014 implementation deadline. A single coder has created a Chrome extension that allows the blocked to circumvent the filter with ease by automating proxy access. The filter has also blocked off access to legitimate sex education sites as well as sites offering help to victims of rape and sexual abuse.

But the most fitting collateral damage has finally occurred. Tim Worstall at Forbes points out (via the Independent) that the overenthusiastic filter is sealing off access to the very people and entities who pushed so hard to make this catastrophe a reality.

"The opt-in filters also deny access to the Parliament and Government websites and the sites of politicians, including Claire Perry, the MP who has campaigned prominently for the introduction of filters."

Given what they do with our money I suppose you can indeed decide that Parliament and the Government are forms of pornography. But it’s that blocking of Claire Perry’s site that is just so joyous. For of course the blocking has come as a result of her using that very same site to campaign in favour of the filtering. Leading to her site having a heavy usage of the words “porn”, “sex” and the like and thus being taken to be itself pornographic.

Claire Perry's site being blocked is perhaps the most desirable outcome of this entire debacle. Perry has been a tireless crusader for the government control of the internet and now that she's achieved her goal, her own constituents aren't allowed to access her site. We'll see if Perry finds someone else to blame for this comedy of errors. Her grasp on how the web works seems to have been cobbled together from PM Cameron's assertions that "Google=internet" and mass forwarded technopanic emails.

Back in July, Perry's site was hacked and filled with pornographic images. Perry's response was to accuse the blogger that covered the story of hacking the site himself, or at the very least, "sponsoring" the attack. As the blogger wryly noted then, "At least her website will be blocked when the new rules go into effect…" Eerily prescient, even considering the cleanup effort that followed the discovery of porn on Perry's site.

As has been noted before, filters don't remove content. All they do is erect flimsy, indiscriminate walls that see legitimate and "illegitimate" content as virtually indistinguishable. If filters succeed in blocking unwanted content, it's only because they're equally as "willing" to block content that shouldn't be blocked. No filtering system can do the impossible, and yet do-gooding politicians get a lot of mileage out of claiming they can -- and that society will somehow be bettered by allowing the government to decide what it can and can't have access to.

UPDATE: Techdirt reader Dukepoints out that the filter blocking Perry's site isn't the mandatory "porn filters" that are being deployed by UK ISPs, but rather a "whitelist" filter crafted by O2.

This is a whitelist filter, unlike the new blacklist ones, so blocks every site apart from a few "approved" ones. Thus it is no surprise that it blocks any particular site as it blocks nearly all of them. This is a distinction that has been missed by most of the reporting in this area, including Techdirt.

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[ddoking007]

rofl thank the tech gods at the government for creating the tor engine ^.^ no more censoring