That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘iwf’

The IWF, our self appointed online guardians, publish a list of ‘potentially illegal’ web pages which many of the UK ISPs use in order to determine what content we should be allowed to see. In the past this has caused controversy because images that they deem ‘potentially illegal’ are silently censored by our service providers, the most notable being the Virgin Killer artwork which was blocked on a wikipedia page.

Something that is important to remember, though, is that the blocking is entirely voluntary and you can always change to a different ISP which does not use the block list. An ISP that subscribes to the list must block its entirety rather than picking and choosing which pages to allow but subscription to the list is not currently compulsory, or at least not at the moment.

The NSPCC has decided that it is really bad news that a measly 5% of broadband connections are with service providers which don’t use the list because ”allowing this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted”.

Apparently ”Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites”. This has prompted the NSPCC and the Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety (CCCIS) to call for more government intervention as ”self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing – and in a seriously damaging way for children”.

I checked the maths and if you work on the 2001 census data of 24,479,439 households and OFCOM’s number of 57% broadband penetration then it follows that around 700,000 households are in that 5% who have got unfiltered internet access. Is a bit of ‘nanny state’ intervention going to make a difference to whether people can access child porn? Of course not.

Depending on the ISP, the implimentations differ but broadly speaking the IWF list works like this:

1. People with too much time on their hands find sites with kiddie smut and report them to the IWF.
2. The IWF takes a gander and works out if the content will give a paedo wood. If they think it will then they put the URL on a list.
3. Twice a day the ISPs download that list and their clever technology enables them to return a 404 page not found error instead of the page.

The effectiveness of this plan makes a number of assumptions, the first is that paedos are really really fucking stupid and just turn on their computer and type “kiddies with their bits out” into Google. In reality the ones that don’t want to get caught will employ a number of different and easy to use technologies to circumvent the blocking technology. Kiddie smut on the web is pretty rare because it’s a specialist thing and illegal in a whole lot of places so slightly more underground methods of distribution are most likely used. Usenet, the legacy of the pre WWW internet, will not be blocked by the IWF list. Peer to peer software can enable the distribution of illegal material and even something as simple as an anonymous web proxy can bypass the crude interventions of the IWF.

So what’s the fucking point? It won’t block the hardened paedo from getting his rocks off and it won’t stop people from abusing kids and taking pics to share by email, P2P, usenet etc. It’s a good way of being seen to be doing something and it might stop the odd idiot from accidentally happening upon a page that contains kid smut while searching for some other form of depravity but I suspect that most people would just hit the back button and go off looking for their dwarf/foot fetish/squirting/big cock porn elsewhere instead.

Of course the cynics will say that this is a back door way of getting the censorship infrastructure in place so the government can then use it to silently quieten dissent; people who say stuff like that are ignorant cunts though, it’s not a conspiracy it’s just lazy politics and a waste of money.