14 Sep 11 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is to call on internet service providers to offer greater security to parents. In a speech at the Royal Television society tonight, Hunt will announce that the government will be looking at protection of children from harmful online content. The government, Hunt will say, would like to see parents have an “active choice”, with ISPs offering users a filtering option to households signing up to accounts.
Ofcom research suggests that just over 40 per cent of households with children currently use filtering software.
21 Dec 10 | Uncategorized
Jillian C York is worried about proposed web filtering in the UK, and she thinks you should be too.
Personally, I’m fairly agnostic about pornography. I certainly wouldn’t miss it, and if I did, I know plenty of ways to get around Internet filters (which is another point: if you block porn, are you going to block circumvention tools too?). So for me, this isn’t about pornography, but rather, about the systems in place to block it. I don’t trust them. Nor do I have any reason to.
York compares the current guardians of the web in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation, to America’s MPAA, which handles film classification:
The MPAA is a perfect comparison to the IWF: two nongovernmental bodies comprised of regular (often untrained, often uneducated) people making decisions for the rest of us. You should be very uncomfortable with this, whether you care about porn or not.
There is a fundamental issue of what constitutes “pornography”. UK law currently operates on a “know it when I see it” basis: which is probably about right: after all, people get their kicks in various, and varyingly odd, ways.
You can and should read the rest of the article here
12 Oct 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has renewed her support for a controversial new web filter, saying the measure was driven by a “moral question“. The proposed filter will block access to material such as rape, drug use, bestiality and child abuse. Internet giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have criticised the plans, saying they set a worrying precedent for further censorship. There are also fears that the restrictions could be applied to legitimate information on issues such as euthanasia, abortion and drug addiction, as well as media reporting on criminal activity.
17 Jun 09 | Uncategorized
Crossposted from the OpenNet Initiative
Last week, as Iranian voters went to the polls to elect the country’s next president, the Iranian government blocked access to number of political Web sites, as well as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Yesterday the OpenNet Initiative profiled the extent of this crackdown. Today we are releasing a new survey of Internet filtering and online content controls in Iran, which details the most recent instances of censorship and provides a basic framework for understanding the legal, technical and institutional mechanisms of filtering in Iran.
