Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Of "Porn Filters" and Agendas

Remember July this year, when Joy Smith stood up in Canada's Parliament and suggested we should follow the UK's example and implement a "porn filter"?

Well, Cameron's filter is about to go live, and as one might have expected, it's blocking a heck of a lot more than just "adult content" websites:

Included in O2's "parental control blocklist" are such hotbeds of hardcore porn as Slashdot, EFF, Linux Today, Blogspot, No Starch Press, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and, of course,Boing Boing
A more complete investigation is here.

None of the sites listed above are exactly hotbeds of porn.  In fact, more worrisome is that in the list of "blocked sites" are civil liberties groups like the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), and a stack of open source technology sites.

I smell an agenda at work here.  This isn't controlling access to pornography.  This is an attempt to control access to information and technologies that enable people to sidestep the government's surveillance programs, and access to information that could cause people to challenge the government.

The only governments that engage in this kind of activity are the totalitarian regimes that feel they have to control their citizens and fear access to information.

Now... Ms. Smith, would you care to explain to Canadians how this is a "good thing"?

[28/12/13 Update]
Someone has already built a Browser Extension to Chrome that bypasses the UK Porn Block.
[/Update]

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7v_v7xbagY

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