A new tool released today from the Open Rights Group shows that 20% of the most commonly visited websites are blocked by the parental filters imposed by ISP's in the UK. This tool from the ORG is intended to reveal false positives in the filters, and shows widespread misuse of the blocking measures.
Last summer, many ISP's in the UK adopted porn filters that are turned on by default. Subscribers must choose to turn off the filters. Unfortunately, the filters are blocking far more than pornography. The Open Rights Group has set up a site which will allow UK citizens to check which sites are blocked by their ISP's. Here is the link to that site.
Looking at the top 100,00 sites in Alexa, the 20% that are blocked include only 4% that are actually dealing with pornography, according to ORG’s Executive Director Jim Killock. The rest include sites that deal with file sharing, like utorrent.com, and TorrentFreak.com, and even sites that focus on Linux software like Linuxtracker.
Some of the ISP's even block social sites like Reddit and Facebook.
Constriction of free speech through these blocks is not something to tolerate. For those affected, I'd suggest contacting your ISP and opting out of the filters.
You can read more on the story at TorrentFreak.
