>This UK filter is explicitly not about blocking illegal material, but to block legal website which are deemed by the government as inappropriate for watching. //
It's not about blocking legal websites it's about filtering content for general users and allowing continued unfiltered access for those who wish to have it. It's like putting plastic wrap on pornography magazines in Newsagents - it doesn't stop you getting it it just stops it being seen by those who don't want to [or can't] purchase it.
You may say that's semantics but if you can still access the material legally I don't think you can call it blocked.
There are blocked sites too but they've been legally judged to be contributing to illegal/unlawful activity in the UK - eg ThePirateBay.
This sounds like an extreme over-estimate. Some ISP's, mostly mobile ones, default to blocking "adult material" unless you tell them to turn that off. Some of the larger ISPs are under court order to block some specific other content (Pirate Bay in particular; my old ISP was one of them, my current ISP happily lets me access it, not that I've ever done so other than to see if it's blocked).
Most ISPs block at most a tiny set of sites and personally in 23 years of using UK ISPs I've never "organically" run into those blocks (as in, no site I actually had any interest in accessing has been blocked; I've only seen them when checking whether people were right that a specific site was blocked). And yes, that includes visiting sites with "adult material" without running into any blocks.
I do have a VPN, so it'd take me as long to bypass as it takes me to press one button in my browser address bar, but I only need that to evade IP region/country blocks - never needed it to get around UK filtering.
>>How do UK laws apply to a US hosted website run by a company whose only legal entity AFAIK is in the US?
If you serve content to UK users, UK government thinks you should be bound by this law.
>>What action do you think the UK can take?
Short term it can order ISPs to ban HN traffic until it complies(as it already does with many websites), and prosecute dang if he should ever vist the UK. Of course the chances of that happening are very small given the size of this website, but you never know and it's this permanent state of "everyone is doing something bad we are just choosing not to prosecute it" that creates a surveilance state for everyone. UK ISPs are already required to keep 12 months of browsing history from everyone and it can be accessed warrant free by 17 different agencies including department of agriculture. As a Brit, I can only conclude that the majority of the population doesn't care, or is too mesmerized by whatever is the current topic in the media instead.
> the weird thing is if you want to turn off this child safe internet in the UK, you get a letter and they sent you this letter that tells you, look, you opted out of the filtering. Apparently you want to look at adult material.
I've opted out of these filters ever since they have been in place, Most providers will ask you during sign up if you wanted them on or off, I've always turned them off on day one. Since these filters have been in place I have been with (Who have the filters) Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky, 3 (Mobile internet) and I have never once recieved a letter from my ISP that tells me that I have opted out of the adult content filtering.
>The UK Government repeatedly fails to understand that there are no boarders on the internet
Don't know what universe or timeline you're from, but on this earth today, the internet definitely has borders.
That's why we have those EU cookie banners and GDPR consent forms, and why some of my favorite piracy websites are blocked by all ISPs in my country, or why I can't watch Top Gear on BBC's website because I'm not from the UK, or why Facebook had to remove some politically spicy content worldwide because the courts where I live forced them to, etc, etc.
Mainstream web companies have to conform to local laws in each country or they'll get fined or blocked. Sure, there's VPNs to circumvent that, but the days of the lawless and borderless internet are a thing of the past.
> in England where the government decides what you should be watching
ISPs voluntarily (yes, voluntarily) agreed to ask new customers if they want to block certain categories of content (gambling, violence, adult material, etc.).
This is not censorship. At first I could understand some people being ignorant of the situation and assuming it was some Firewall of China for porn, but now it's taking the piss.
> I bet they've already had anti-CSAM blocklists mandated by law
Not just anti-CSAM, the UK has a mandatory "adult content" ISP filter since years (of which you can opt out, through doing so is annoying).
(Which also was used many times already in a inappropriate way by "accidentally" placing websites which are are not adult-only content but politically unpleasant on them because many don't opt out because "it's just for porn/violence right".)
EDIT: Just to be clear the law formulation seems to be over the top/vague and a extremely strict interpretation could imply that ISPs somehow have to block users access to sides even if the user uses an ISP or Tor, so wtf.
> One example of this is the UK porn filter which is now also used to block jihad propaganda
The article does not support your claim.
EDIT: To clarify, as per the reply I gave further down: There is no country wide "UK porn filter". There are voluntary filters put in place by each of the largest providers that are wildly inconsistent in what they block, and wildly ineffective.
Most of the filtering is also opt-in or opt-out for most of these providers, mostly apart from blocks targeting child porn.
Outside of the top 5-6 providers, many smaller providers don't filter at all.
> In the UK, ISPs are legally forced to block certain types of websites, such as those hosting copyright-infringing or trademarked content. Some ISPs also block other sites at their discretion, such as those that show extremist content, adult images, and child pornography. These latter blocks are voluntary and are not the same across the UK, but most ISPs usually tend to block child abuse content.
It does give the lie to the "for the children" argument when blocking copyright infringement is mandatory and banning child porn is optional.
> The UK has decided that all ISPs must deploy opt-in pornography filters
Wait, wasn't the big problem being that this filter is opt-out? Then why is everyone being so upset about it? Such filters existed for years after all.
This is not correct. There is no law on the books in the UK which compels ISPs to filter content. There are a couple of court orders in place on some larger ISPs to block access to a few sites, however.
>They haven't imposed DNS filtering - or at least, as implemented by almost all UK ISPs, the DNS lookup performs as normal.
>The user looks up the IP address of the site they want to visit via a DNS lookup and is provided with the correct IP addres. However, if it's for kickass.so (on the blocklist), the ISP detects traffic to the IP of that site as it attempts to pass out of the ISP's network and blocks it.
Different ISPs use different systems to implement the blocks. Some use DNS, some use IP addresses, some do a combination of both. This was all discussed by a judge in one of the court cases.
>Also, most of the work to get sites blocked via court order in the UK (not by some secret lobbying deal, but through the courts) has been done by the music industry, not the MPAA.
Through the courts, yes, but this is a mere formality. The ISPs put up a token defence and then promptly capitulated.
Even then, they already had the systems in place for this censorship precisely due to secret lobbying deals and strong-arming by the government (who knew that any legislation they brought forward would quickly run up against lots of opposition both politically and legally) - see the situation with the IWF and the porn-blocking stuff.
There's a reason an IFPI spokesperson said "child porn is great!" at an industry conference. Censoring it on the wire (as opposed to taking it down at source and hauling offenders off to jail where they belong) is the thin end of the wedge and the copyright industry has a huge hammer they want to use to censor other things.
> What are those facts exactly? If it's just something implemented by ISPs, how is Cameron's government implied?
Cameron has pushed the ISPs to make some form of parental filtering either default on, or what's called "active choice" (which is where it doesn't default to anything, you have to explicitly choose filtering or no filtering). This basically amounts to you getting two options when ordering for the first time, filter (and then options on what to filter) or no filter. There's an example of the signup screen for BT here:
This is not a legal requirement, nor is it compulsory. There are no new laws, that's very important to remember. Not all ISPs are implementing it, though the major ones are. A&A's stance is that your active choice is "if you want filtering by your ISP, don't buy our stuff".
There is no particular filtering tech they're required to use, each ISP may use their own settings/lists of sites/etc.
"Websites and services are blocked using a combination of data feeds from private content-control technology companies, government agencies, NGOs, court orders in conjunction with the service administrators who may or may not have the power to unblock, additionally block, appeal or recategorise blocked content."
"The technical measures used to block sites include DNS hijacking, DNS blocking, IP address blocking, and Deep packet inspection, making consistent verification problematic. One known method is ISP scraping DNS of domains subject to blocking orders to produce a list of IPs to block."
"There is a private agreement in principle between leading ISPs and rights holders, made with encouragement from government, to quickly restrict access to websites when presented with court orders. The court orders are not made public and "overblocking" is sometimes reported"
"In 2019 an in-depth investigation into overblocking by the Open Rights Group and digital privacy site Top10VPN.com found that thousands of websites were being incorrectly blocked. These included relatively harmless example from industries such as wedding planning and photography, to more damaging and dangerous mistakes like official websites for charities, schools and mental health support."
"Cleanfeed originally targeted only alleged child sexual abuse content identified by the Internet Watch Foundation. However, no safeguards exist to stop the secret list of blocked sites being extended to include sites unrelated to child pornography. This had led to criticism of Cleanfeed's lack of transparency which gives it considerable potential for broad censorship. Further, Cleanfeed has been used to block access to copyright-infringing websites after a court order in 2011 required BT to block access to NewzBin2.[30] This has led some to describe Cleanfeed as the most perfectly invisible censorship mechanism ever invented and to liken its powers of censorship to those employed currently by China."
"The Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), which was set up in 2010 by the Association of Chief Police Officers and run by the Metropolitan Police Service, maintains a list of sites and content that in their opinion incites or glorifies terrorist acts under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2006. This list is passed to the public estate institutions so that access to the sites can be blocked. ISPs BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media incorporate the CTIRU block list into their filters. The CTIRU also issues removal requests if the Internet content is hosted in the UK. The UK is the only country in the world with such a unit."
"In response to the increasing number of file sharing related blocks, a number of proxy aggregator sites, e.g. torrentproxies.com, have become popular. In addition to the following, proxy sites designed to circumvent blocks have been secretly blocked by ISPs, driving users to proxy comparison sites. [...] On 5 August 2014, City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit arrested a 20-year-old man in Nottingham on suspicion of operating a proxy server that allowed internet users to bypass blocks on many popular sites."
I live in the UK this is not correct, these are voluntary agreements by ISP's and you can opt out of the default filtering.
I think the only time something has been blocked here it was due to a Court Order: https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders
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