[LINK] BT puts block on child porn sites

[Adam Todd]

At 00:33 7/06/2004 +1000, Danny Yee wrote:
>David Goldstein wrote:
> > British Telecom has taken the unprecedented step of blocking all
> > illegal child pornography websites in a crackdown on abuse online.
> >  http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1232422,00.html
>
>It's not clear to me from this story whether the list of blocked
>sites is public or not, or what (if any) oversight of the censorship
>there is.  And if users aren't being informed that they are being
>censored, but rather deceived into thinking the site is inaccessible,
>that's a worry.

Is this concept at all possible?  Maybe BT force transparent proxy and 
hence can remove sites by URL.  Although I can't imagine paying someone to 
sit there all day and enter endless streams of virtual URI's into a 
database as they change and grow faster than you can type them into your 
browser.

>No details on implementation, but there's likely to be "collateral
>damage" -- if they're doing IP blocking, that's going to hit a lot
>of virtually hosted web sites that happen to share an IP address with
>something dodgy.

I'd doubt they do it by IP, as simple as that sounds.  However, on the 
reverse side of the argument, if a hosting provider is allowing child 
pornography to exist on their hosts (knowingly or otherwise,) why not block 
them totally, after all, supporting those who support, knowingly or 
otherwise, the distribution of child pornography is not going to slow down 
or stop the increase in material.

Maybe we need a White Ring Thing for kids against Pornography.