UK Prime Minister David Cameron demanded that ISPs opt their customers into "adult content" filters (and now Sky is opting in everyone whose account predates this announcement), ignoring all the people who correctly predicted that these filters would block important sites.

Thanks to the bullying of UK PM David Cameron, everyone who signs up for an Internet account is asked "Would you like to keep 'adult content' blocked on this connection?" It's a misleading question.

Redditor LolBoopje discovered that the UK's Great Firewall of Cameron — the national censorwall put in place by the prime minister — was blocking updates to the game League of Legends. The update archive contained two files, "VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj" and "XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj" — Read the rest

In my latest Guardian column, I explain how UK prime minister David Cameron's plan to opt the entire nation into a programme of Internet censorship is the worst of all worlds for kids and their parents. Cameron's version of the Iranian "Halal Internet" can't possibly filter out all the bad stuff, nor can it avoid falsely catching good stuff we want our kids to see (already the filters are blocking websites about sexual health and dealing with "porn addiction"). — Read the rest

The unaccountable, multi-million-pound feel-good porn filters that UK ISPs were ordered to install by the Prime Minister are (predictably) grossly overblocking the Web. Among the (predictable) victims: sites related to sexual health, sex education, and pornography "addiction." Also, rape crisis centres. — Read the rest

The NYT's "Room for Debate" section asked a variety of people for positions on the UK's Great Firewall of Cameron — a new rule whereby ISPs must slap an "adult content" filter on every Internet connection in the land, which is meant to stop everything from porn to gambling sites to "esoteric material" (whatever that is). — Read the rest

Britain's Great Firewall of Cameron has just made the jump from "voluntary" to "mandatory." The UK government has announced that the demand that all ISPs offer an opt-out "adult content" filter will soon be a requirement, covering even small ISPs and ISPs that advertise themselves as censorship-free. — Read the rest

In honor of the UK's Great Firewall of Cameron, the Prime Minister's autocratic decree that ISPs must censor their subscribers' connections by default, I've recorded my 2012 Guardian column There's no way to stop children viewing porn in Starbucks, which set out all the reasons that this is a stupid idea the last time it came up, in the Lords. — Read the rest

Update 2: And Here's the Open Rights Group's petition.

Update: Here's another, broader petition that hits on issues the other one misses

Here's a Change.org petition to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, calling on him to withdraw his plan to censor the Internet in the UK, blocking huge numbers of legal sites from "forums" to "circumvention tools" to "alcohol information" and (legal) pornography. — Read the rest

As the UK government, courts and entertainment lobbyists turn the national network connection into a termite-riddled mess of blocked and censored sites to rival Iran's "halal Internet," Britons are questing about for a way to get access to the free,open Internet enjoyed by people in countries where censorship is not considered a legitimate response to political problems. — Read the rest

Last year the US Congress passed SESTA/FOSTA, an "anti-sex-trafficking bill" that has resulted in the shuttering of all the services formerly used by sex workers to vet their johns, massively increasing the personal physical risk borne by sex-workers and reinvigorating the dying pimping industry, as sex workers seek out protectors.

The UK Prime Minister has doubled down on his Great Firewall of Cameron, which is an arrangement whereby the UK ISPs "voluntarily" agreed to block websites that had been secretly ruled to be pornographic, unless customers specifically asked them not tp.

My new Guardian column, What is missing from the kids' internet? discusses three different approaches to teaching kids information literacy: firewall-based abstinence education; trust/relationship-based education, and a third way, which is the proven champion of the offline world.

That's not what he says—all porn sites will have to gather and retain proof of customer identity. But everything leaks, so it's what he meant.

The Great Firewall of Cameron is supposed to block "extremist" websites, and somehow, the website of the respected, excellent Chaos Computer Club, one of Germany's foremost centers for technology research and political analysis, has been blocked.

David Cameron says that the reason Britons are fighting with IS is that they were hypnotised by unstoppable sorcerous "extremist" words on the net and that the best way to fight this is to get the big UK ISPs to agree to block any "extremist" content that's reported by the eagle-eyed public and added to (yet another) secret, unaccountable, extrajudicial list of websites that can't be reached from behind the Great Firewall of Cameron — and the big ISPs agree with him!

But they're going to be on-by-default, opt-out-only in the near future anyway, because the Great Firewall of Cameron is based on lazy populism, not evidence.

The parental filter on Sky Broadband, one of the largest ISPs in the UK, blocked jquery, the widely used Javascript library, without which many websites cease to operate. While the block was in place, Sky advised customers that they could get the Web back by disabling the filter, or switching off the "phishing/malware" category. — Read the rest

The Great Firewall of Cameron is going live, with all British ISPs defaulting their customers to an "adult content filter" — meaning that you have to call up and say, "I demand pornography!" or all the sites on the blacklist will be off-limits to you. — Read the rest

As the UK government continues to roll out the Great Firewall of Cameron (by which ISPs are required to opt their customers into an "adult content filter" that is meant to block sites related to porn, gambling, "esoterica," "forums" and more), an official report reveals that the Houses of Parliament network logged 300,000+ attempts to access online porn last year. — Read the rest