NZ interloper to commercialise UK internet blocking |
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John Ozimek 16th November 2009 11:14 GMT
Arguments over just how successful government attempts have been in keeping child porn off the internet may be little more than a storm in a teacup – but such discussions highlight a shift in the way indecent material may be blocked in future.
The story begins with a shocking claim from internet filtering company, Watchdog International, that "known illegal content is not blocked by 88 per cent of UK ISPs". Since the Home Office recently abandoned plans to bring filtering up from a claimed 98.6 per cent of connections to 100 per cent by passing a law that would make filtering mandatory, this is at first sight a staggering discrepancy.
In fact, the difference is far slighter than it appears. The figure published by government is for consumer connections, of which the vast majority are handled by a very small number of ISPs. The count provided by Watchdog adds in ISPs who specialise in handling B2B connections.
There are an estimated 400 such ISP’s and the majority of these appear not to make use of the blocklist provided by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to prevent users from accessing indecent content.
This explains why Watchdog found such a high proportion of ISP’s not blocking illegal content. However, industry sources suggest that once these connections are factored in, the government figure for blocked connections is still 96.9% of all connections. These will include SME’s and SOHO set-ups, as well as larger enterprises. It is therefore likely that some of these connections will achieve de facto blocking of most illicit internet content by applying other net filtering packages, such as Net Nanny, at a corporate level.
The exact figure for Business-to-Business (B2B) connections is not available. According to a spokeswoman for Ofcom, this is because they were asked by government to look exclusively at Business-to-Consumer (B2C) connections – and not B2B. There is therefore room for the block figure to vary slightly from that published.
The difference between the two figures may be spun, according to taste, as the non-blocked connection level being double what was previously thought: or that the real figure is very small, and not significantly larger than the very small figure that it was previously believed to be.
The most significant aspect to this story may be the growing role of Watchdog International in patrolling the UK internet. Their first claim to fame is as suppliers of the routing protocol filtering system – Netclean Whitebox - used by the New Zealand government.
They have argued strongly in the past that their model of filtering is superior to all others on the market and, unlike the model currently adopted by UK ISP’s, it is an approach that small ISP’s can tap into without any significant investment in their own infrastructure.
Speaking to El Reg, Peter Milford, UK Country Manager of Watchdog International explained: "the Netclean solution uses the IWF’s blocklist – so is 100% compatible with existing UK initiatives. It sits offline from the ISP’s main server, and only kicks into action when a blocked URL is identified: otherwise, the end user links directly to the internet through their ISP as usual."
This business model will undoubtedly be attractive to those ISP’s wishing to make use of the IWF blocklist – but unable to do so because of the costs involved. It also adds pressure to any ISP’s holding out from joining up for other reasons.
In the longer term, the Watchdog International solution may prove attractive to other ISP’s who currently incorporate the IWF blocklist into their own. This suggests that those keeping an eye on the evolution of internet blocking in the UK should now keep tabs on the Watchdog model as well as the IWF one.
At present, they achieve almost exactly the same end result, and there is very little difference for the end user in practice. However, it would not be surprising if a company whose focus is on the commercial exploitation of filtering products does not in time develop functionality that goes some way beyond that developed by an industry-supported body created for the sole purpose of regulating the flow of certain types of unlawful material. ® |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 17 November 2009 08:40 )
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ECPAT New Zealand Formally Launch Internet Hotline |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 27 August 2009 11:02 )
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Watchdog Filtering Expert Opinion in UK Press |
net.wars: The 5 percent solution by
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| posted on 07 August 2009 So much has been said about Australia's Internet filtering this year that nearby New Zealand's project has mostly escaped notice. The plan is to implement filtering sometime in the next couple of months. Unlike the UK, where the blocklist is maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation under a voluntary arrangement, in New Zealand the list is being administered by the Department of Internal Affairs. Wendy M Grossman It turns out that the technology New Zealand is putting in place is coming into use in the UK, courtesy of Watchdog International, which recently signed a deal to supply it to Talk Internet.
Watchdog's managing director, Peter Mancer, says the idea for the technical implementation comes from Sweden. "I was impressed at the cooperation of police and NGOs," he said of the work he observed there, "but I don't like DNS poisoning. It's not effective enough and it's too broad a brush, and my ten-year-old can bypass it by putting someone else's DNS servers in the browser settings. But it's easy to employ from the ISP's point of view." DNS poisoning – or rather, blocking selected domains – is, of course, what is implemented in the UK through BT's Cleanfeed.
The system Mancer was shown by the Swedish royal technical college and now supplies via his company relies instead on Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, the core routing protocol of the Internet. Users don't interact with it directly; it's used among ISPs to route traffic correctly. In New Zealand's case, the necessary servers are all managed and hosted by the government. Mancer's explanation: "All ISPs connect to those servers via Internet tunnels using BGP, so the URL list is managed independently of the ISPs, and there is very little cost to the ISP – a few configurations and they're connected to it."
The point for the UK: Cleanfeed requires implementation effort from the ISP. If you're Virgin or another huge ISP, you have sufficient resources and in-house expertise to do it. But the difficulty and expense is, says Mancer, one of the reasons why smaller ISPs haven't adopted it – and why the percentage of British consumer broadband users covered by the IWF blocklist has remained stuck at 90 to 95 percent for years.
Smaller ISPs, says Mancer, "find it quite a challenge. Cleanfeed is not suitable for a lot of ISPs, and there's no commercially available system." So, he says, to the "remaining 5 percent tail which the Home Office and the government keep jumping up and down about a commercially available solution is more attractive." Watchdog's system starts at €2,000 per year, or about £200 per month, and the cost per user goes down as the number of users goes up. Despite the horrid economics of running a small ISP, 5p per customer per month ought in theory to be affordable.
All of this leads back to the question we posed in a panel at this year's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: can the Internet still route around censorship? Images of child abuse (the IWF's preferred term) are illegal in most countries. Even the US is beginning to show signs of moving in the hotline-voluntary blocklist direction. Last year, for example, Qwest began blocking access to a list of sites that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has identified as containing child pornography. (This is not, by the way, a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech as far as I can make out. The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It does not prohibit private companies like Qwest from making their own rules, a reality that seems to be widely misunderstood.)
Mancer himself is passionate on the topic: "I sat on a Swedish hotline and took some of the reports and looked at sites. It really does impact you, and it's worth fighting against." He adds, "We're a bit frustrated. We believe we have a good solution that's affordable, but a lot of ISPs are sitting on the fence." There isn't, he concludes, enough pressure.
Given some odds and ends of possible failures – the link to Watchdog's servers has to stay up, the ISP has to configure its systems correctly – Watchdog's system seems likely to be hard for Web users to bypass, although Richard Clayton, the expert in these matters, queries whether the technology will be able to track changes fast enough to deal with the fast-flux technology in use on botnets.
But Clayton also sugests that blocking Web sites is becoming quaintly old-fashioned.
"The IWF list is down to c. 400 sites (from 1500+, of which about 1/3 are 'free' sites – ie: a single phone call would remove the material)," he said by email. In other words, the Web may not be able to bypass the technology – but things like TOR, Freenet, closed peer-to-peer networks, and that wacky darknet-in-a-browser project showed off at Black Hat last week probably can because they were deliberately created to bypass the domain name system entirely. The Web is not the Internet. The Web may no longer be able to route around censorship, but the Internet still can in the time-honored way: by changing technologies. Originally, John Gilmore's aphorism referred to…Usenet. Source: http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/7153 |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 11 August 2009 16:07 )
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NZ Web filter will focus solely on child sex abuse images |
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Web filter will focus solely on child sex abuse images 16 July 2009 A filtering system to block websites that host child sexual abuse images will be available voluntarily to New Zealand internet service providers (ISPs) within a couple of months, Internal Affairs Deputy Secretary, Keith Manch, said today. The Digital Child Exploitation Filtering System, funded with $150,000 in this year’s Budget, will be operated by the Department in partnership with ISPs, and will focus solely on websites offering clearly objectionable images of child sexual abuse, which is a serious offence for anyone in New Zealand to access. “The filtering system is a response to community expectations that the government and ISPs should do more to provide a safe internet environment,” Keith Manch said. “It is not a silver bullet that will prevent everyone from accessing any sites that might contain images of child sexual abuse, but it is another important tool in the Department’s operations to fight the sexual abuse of children. “The distribution and viewing of images of this abuse – wrongly called child pornography – is trading in human misery. It is the result of real children being sexually abused and exploited in the worst possible way. Each time anyone anywhere in the world accesses one of those images, the child depicted is victimised again.” Keith Manch said the filtering list will not cover e-mail, file sharing or borderline material. “Anyone trying to access websites offering child sex abuse pictures will receive a screen message saying the site has been blocked because it is illegal,” Keith Manch said. “The Department is developing a code of practice, which will be publicly available, to provide assurance that only website pages containing images of child sexual abuse will be filtered and the privacy of ISP customers is maintained. An independent reference group will also be established to oversee the operation. Anyone who feels that their access to a website has been wrongly blocked will be able to ask anonymously for the filter to be checked. The filter will not be used for law enforcement.“ The filter was successfully trialled with Ihug, TelstraClear, Watchdog and Maxnet over two years. It filters out over 7000 objectionable websites with no noticeable impact on internet performance. "Internet NZ has requested further information which the Department will provide. The society will be able to review the hardware setup to ensure it complies with industry best practice. “Joining the filtering programme is voluntary and if any ISP subsequently is unhappy it will be able to withdraw. This is another way of ensuring that the Department gets the filter right.” The Department has entered into a partnership with ECPAT New Zealand, part of a global organisation the purpose of which is the elimination of child prostitution and pornography and trafficking of children for sexual purposes. “ECPAT is operating a hotline through its website (www.childalert.org.nz) so that members of the public can report suspect sites, not already identified by the Department.” The Department will not disclose the 7000 objectionable websites which have been compiled through its own forensic work and with its international law enforcement partners. “If we did, inevitably some people would visit them in the interim, effectively facilitating further offending and making the Department party to the further exploitation of children,” Keith Manch said. Media contacts: Keith Manch, Deputy Secretary, Department of Internal Affairs - Ph 04 495 9329; cell 021 227 6363 Trevor Henry, communications adviser, Department of Internal Affairs - Ph 04 495 7211; cell 0275 843 679 |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 31 August 2009 08:45 )
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EU to Create Alert System for Child Porn |
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EU to create alert system for child porn 27 October 2008 at 06h36 The European Union will create its first one-stop-shop alert system to help police crack down on child pornography on the Internet, the bloc's executive body said on on Friday. "The platform will help cybercrime investigators in EU member states share information more effectively and avoid the duplication of their efforts to fight child pornography," the European Commission said in a statement. The Commission will give the European police office Europol €300 000 (about R4,1-million) to set up the system, which for the first time will let all EU states track child pornography investigations taking place anywhere in the bloc and coordinate probes more effectively. "Child pornography represents today more than half of all offences committed on the Internet," the Commission said, pointing out that Internet child pornography networks were often international, requiring cooperation among EU states. On Wednesday, EU lawmakers agreed to allocate €55-million for a 2009-2013 "Safer Internet" plan to improve safety for children surfing the web, promote public awareness and create national centres for reporting illegal online content. - Reuters Related Stories |
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