UK to have "opt out" Porn filters

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I don't think you understand how this series of tubes works either...

Scarily - children (not teenagers) are developing the wherewithal to hack their PC's - hacking the router or the ISP's server is still (mostly) beyond them

[Andres]

Back when I was a teenager, we didn't have internet.

There were videotapes which our fathers kept hidden. Somehow, we all found those tapes and were able to watch them. We even knew how to copy them. There was this guy in our school who sold such videotapes for hard cash. A few of those in the final year of high school (18 years old or almost) bought pr0n magazines and sold them with profit to the younger teenagers. Yes, kids aged 12 bought them as well.

Those of us with an older brother saw pr0n even before that age, allthough most considered it ewww (an attitude that changed drastically within a few years).

I do not consider myself a deranged sick pervert and most of the people my age with similar experiences don't strike me as perverts either.

If this is not an attempt to gain control over the internet by the government and these people are sincere, then the politicians making and/or voting this legislation are complete and utter morons who need to be removed from any position of power as soon as possible and locked up in the nearest mental institution.

Imho, there are plenty of other fish to fry than waging a war on porn

[Tellos Athenaios]

Scarily - children (not teenagers) are developing the wherewithal to hack their PC's - hacking the router or the ISP's server is still (mostly) beyond them

But here's the funny thing: the ISP's server is not what serves you the porn. This means the ISP does not, fundamentally, have much control over the whole porn watching process. It's by and large just a dump pipe in the delivery of smut.

There's a few key points along the way where the ISP could do something:

• The ISP probably does provide you with DNS servers to lookup the IP address of your-porn-website.com, but switching DNS servers is easy and crucially should not aversely affect any other ISP service and does not require any changes to the your-porn-website.com site. And yes, there are free DNS services available (OpenDNS is one).
• The ISP routes your TCP/IP packets and those packets carry fields to identify recipient and sender. A blacklist could be devised to filter out the porn traffic that way, but: people who do actively opt out must not have their porn filtered. Furthermore due to the network design it is not as straightforward as you might think. TCP/IP networks were originally designed to be bomb proof. A key thing here is redundancy: for every link there's a couple of others, and no link in the system knows the overall topology and pathways of internet traffic. This means your ISP does not know which routers are guaranteed to see your porn, apart from the last/first one: the exchange. Busting filtering at the exchange is easy: just route your traffic via a proxy. And yes, there are free web proxies available (HideMyAss, Proxies.org).
• The ISP could however do DPI, deep packet inspection, and notice that your HTTP traffic is served from your-porn-website.com, filter that way, right? In that case encrypting the traffic should normally ensure that the ISP cannot do DPI. Between a proxy or VPN and encryption an ISP can no longer know whether a stream is porn and thereby filter it. Moreover some proxy services specifically offer the use of SSL between you and the proxy, which means that you don't even need the your-porn-website.com to support SSL in the first place.