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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Well DUH!

Some of the politicians like to say it'll be the same sort of system that's on mobile phones here. These have two characteristics -

  1. The filter is full of holes
  2. What's blocked is pretty arbitrary

For instance, I was at a music festival last year (Beautiful Days), and access to the online site map and festival schedule was blocked as 'adult' content. The festival itself was full of kids and teenagers (brought along by their parents) for whom the info would have been useful. To get around it, I installed Orbot (Tor for android), because they only care about censoring the web.

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Wait, is there already a government-imposed web filter on mobile phones in the UK? And you can't opt out? When did this happen? What were the justifications given when it was put into place? Does it also apply to GSM tablets and devices tethered to your mobile?

Nah, it's not government imposed and you can opt out. I think all the operators have one though.

Opting out usually requires you to call the operator, though sometimes you can do it through their web portal if you have a credit card (they'll charge and then refund it). I assume it blocks stuff through tethered devices too. Dunno really.

Justifications? Most likely "OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN!".

On which subject - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTeENEQkBKE

It's been in place a while (but I'm not sure it's government imposed). I've moaned about it a bunch - I have no idea why O2 feel the need to block http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/ for instance. Is it because there's a 'fuck' in the URL? Ridiculous.

I'm not sure if it affects all carriers or not. But you can opt-out, you just have to go through an age-verification process - usually providing a credit card number to confirm you are over 18.

There is filtering on most mobile phone data contracts in the UK.

YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO.

Justifications: "Children have too easy access to very hard core porn. Provide filtering, or we'll regulate you".

>YOU CAN OPT OUT. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO OPT OUT OF THE PROPOSED FILTERS TOO.

..Thereby putting your name on a list of people who like to look at $blocked_thing. Why this is problematic is left as an exercise for the reader.

Any such filtering should be OPT IN by default. Not the other way around.

Further, what data children have the ability to access is the concern of their parents, not the government.

Does opt-in vs opt-out make a difference, though, once they have enough data? If oppression or data misuse is the goal, it seems like reversing the set selection criteria would be a trivial way of getting the list of people who like their ${badstuff}, even if they did not opt out of a filter":

    # obviously not real sql
    select * from citizens where (citizen.id not in opt_in_list)

What am I missing?

Probably the fact that only a minority will actually opt in. Requiring positive action almost ensures that miniscule amounts of people will change from the default.

    (defaultsetting_users) > (nondefaultsetting_users)

..regardless of how desirable the non default setting is.

This, for instance, is why Windows Update got a lot more forceful in its later incarnations. People will not update, even when it's good for them, unless you make it hard to not update.

Another example: IE being installed on Windows by default.

How many people still think IE == internet...

Way too many.

I work as an engineer in a small ISP compaly, and for some time had very closely contacted with phone support (sometimes helping them) and heard many conversations with clients.

I'd say there are quite a few people who can't distinguish between Internet, browser and VKontakte (Russian analog for Facebook). Didn't counted them or did any real statistics, though.

Human behavior. If you've got a population and you tell them to do X or they'll be labeled a criminal, you'll still have huge swaths of people who won't do X because of laziness, apathy, and/or ignorance. That's why opt-in vs. opt-out makes a such a big difference. Making this opt-in by default makes it extremely easy to target those who opt-out (and make judgements based on that action), but impossible to say anything remotely accurate about those who took no action.

You have three groups, those who care strongly about seeing ${badstuff}, people who don't care enough to change the default, people who care strongly about not seeing the ${badstuff}.

By making it opt-out, you will get only those that feel strongly about seeing it. By making it opt-in, and following your query, you won't be able to separate those that really want to see it, from those that really don't care.

The group that doesn't care is big enough to make a difference.

But "they" can already put you on a list of people who like to look at $offensive_thing by using PRISM to notice when you look at $offensive_thing.

So given that they can build such a list regardless of the porn filtering settings, and given that people don't change default settings, and given that a porn filter can be somewhat effective at blocking offensive content, and given that we already agree to blocking offensive content in public space as a general behaviour, and given that a porn filter will be opt-out-able, why not make it opt-in?

Yup its the randomness that is the issue.

Health education type material for teenagers springs to mind. I have seen issues in the past with 'walled garden' type software in schools/colleges blocking content of that nature unless specifically unblocked.

Suspect there will be backlash, then weakening of system to the point of uselessness once it gets going. Usual expensive UK government IT mess.

The Government is hopeless at buying IT, and there are many many expensive hopeless government IT projects.

This project is hopeless, and it's going to be reasonably expensive for someone, but as understand it the government isn't paying for the filters.

Thus, it's not going to cost the government anything.

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