They Always Suck: UK ISP 'For The Children' Filters Block Disney And Educational Websites
from the it-never-works dept
Website blocking is now all the rage across much of the world. The way such website censorship happens is, however, as varied as the countries in which the censoring occurs. While some nations enact laws for internet filtering on all sorts of grounds -- be it porn, extremist content, or political dissent --, other countries have ISPs that proactively do this kind of filtering for their host countries. In many cases, this results in "parental filters" designed to keep harmful content from finding the eyeballs of children. In reality, when Comcast tried this here in America, it managed to block TorrentFreak for some reason.
But nobody does collateral site-blocking damage like UK ISPs. The stories about "for the children" and "but...terrorists!" ISP website filtering are legion, but recent reports put any focus by ISPs on the well-being of children in heavy doubt, given the amount of purely innocent children's content that is getting blocked by ISP filters.
What really stood out to us is that some sites which are targeted at kids, or at least useful to them, are blocked too.
One prime example is the official UK Disney website, located at disney.co.uk, which is blocked by BT’s Strict filters. That seems a bit cruel. The same is true for disneymoviesanywhere.com, which is not very useful, but certainly doesn’t seem harmful to us either.
Apparently, BT doesn’t want children to visit these Disney sites.
One can only imagine the rampage Mickey Mouse went on when he discovered this travesty. But this collateral damage went far beyond the House of Mouse, and across multiple UK ISPs, too. BT and Virgin Media blocked the website for Internet Safety Day, because apparently kids shouldn't be safe on the internet. Kidsandcode.org is also blocked by BT, while Three and Sky are blocking vikingsword.com, a site dedicate to history education.
None of this should really be a surprise, of course. Large organizations trying to accurately filter out unwanted content for parents, rather than having parents actually policing their children's online activity, is always going to fall prey to mistakes, laziness, and collateral damage. Always, always, always. What should be immediately apparent to witnesses of this is that if ISPs can't get this right, at least to the degree of not blocking Disney, what hope do legislators have in crafting site-blocking legislation that does this any better?
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Filed Under: collateral damage, copyright, filters, site blocking, uk
Companies: disney
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Perhaps the filter was protecting the children from Disney...
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Of course, Frozen supplanted that role of most annoying earworm some years later, but the overly sanitized, idealized view of adolescent interaction is absolutely poisonous to children.
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It is because of their stars' poor behavior!
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I don't know anybody who has these filters enabled.
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Back when I was doing end-user support for ISPs and retailers, I couldn't keep track of people who were having problems with something they specifically agreed to have during a sales call, then shouted at support staff because it was doing exactly what they asked it to. Look through the account records and suddenly they vaguely admit to agreeing to something but had no idea what it actually was.
The silver lining is that if they are indeed causing an increase in support calls because they're blocking things that are clearly acceptable, those costs will get management to rethink the implementation more than a thousand tech staff telling them how stupid it is.
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.. I know this having used 3. It was not publicized - I only found out when I site I followed via a Google link was blocked (over zealous censorship as site was about prostate issues, so some mention of "male parts" there but in a medical context)
It may well be the case that other UK ISPs have the on by default approach.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Bottom line - you can't get machines to legislate morality, and when you try getting them to they will get it wrong a lot of the time. The answer, as always - parents need to be involved and caring, and that's a societal problem when it's not happening, not a technological one.
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What idiotic is the idea that the child will never find something out or see it so long as a parent or authority figure blocks them from seeing it. Don't they actually remember being children?
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As a cautionary tale, my friend lets her kid play around with a phone/tablet but only supervised (the kid is almost 8 years old). These days she was telling me that some internet pedo/weirdo realized he was talking to a kid and started spewing a whole load of filthy crap through the chat of the game. Luckily (and out of a sense or responsible parenting), she caught when the guy started saying weird stuff, took the phone from her daughter and kept the conversation going for a while. In the end she threatened to call the police and blocked the moron.
No amount of filtering is going to protect a kid whose parents couldn't care less about parenting.
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I can imagine several different ways, but what are they using?
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That was in 1995. It's never worked.
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Maybe the filters are working correctly
So there you go- the piracy issue is solved!
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Re: Maybe the filters are working correctly
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Re: Maybe the filters are working correctly
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disneymoviesanywhere.com - This one was a bit tougher. I can't find anything offensive in the title. Then it hit me: "movies anywhere". Clearly a pirate site!
Good try, filter! But you're going to have to up your game to fool me with the reason why you blocked a site.
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That would be extra hilarious if true, because not only is it utterly moronic, it would mean that the filter for UK ISPs is by default blocking all businesses with a standard UK domain.
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