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An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Such restrictions can be applied at various levels: a government can attempt to apply them nationwide, or they can, for example, be applied by an Internet service provider to its clients, by an employer to its personnel, by a school to its students, by a library to its visitors, by a parent to a child's computer, or by an individual user to their own computers. The motive is often to prevent access to content which the computer's owner(s) or other authorities may consider objectionable. When imposed without the consent of the user, content control can be characterised as a form of internet censorship. Some filter software includes time control functions that empowers parents to set the amount of time that child may spend accessing the Internet or playing games or other computer activities.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
.xxx is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) intended as a voluntary option for pornographic sites on the Internet. The sponsoring organization is the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR). The registry is operated by ICM Registry LLC. The ICANN Board voted to approve the sTLD on 18 March 2011. It went into operation on 15 April 2011.
Internet censorship in Australia is enforced by both the country's criminal law as well as voluntarily enacted by internet service providers. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia, and maintain a blocklist of overseas websites which is then provided for use in filtering software. The restrictions focus primarily on child pornography, sexual violence, and other illegal activities, compiled as a result of a consumer complaints process.
Definitions and restrictions on pornography vary across jurisdictions. The production, distribution, and possession of pornographic films, photographs, and similar material are activities that are legal in many but not all countries, providing that any specific people featured in the material have consented to being included and are above a certain age. Various other restrictions often apply as well. The minimum age requirement for performers is most typically 18 years.
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. (EFA) is a non-profit Australian national non-government organisation representing Internet users concerned with online liberties and rights. It has been vocal on the issue of Internet censorship in Australia.
Ralph J. Yarro is an American business executive, entrepreneur and an activist. He co-founded Atua Ventures and was previously the CEO of the Canopy Group. Yarro has been associated with various technology companies, including Altiris, Caldera, Techcyte, Center 7, Lineo, Linux Networx, and Voonami.
The Internet Community Ports Act (ICPA), created and advocated by The CP80 Foundation, is an approach to HTTP content filtering, leveraging Transmission Control Protocol ports to segregate content between "Community Ports" and "Open Ports." "Community Ports" would be for content that is not considered "obscene or harmful" to children; "Open Ports" would be for all other content, including content only considered suitable for adults, such as pornography. According to the advocates of ICPA, this would enable an individual to, through their ISP's firewall, choose the content they want by port, allowing content or blocking out content individually. Advocates of ICPA would particularly like to remove "objectionable" content from Port 80, the standard port for World-Wide Web traffic.
Internet censorship in the United Kingdom is conducted under a variety of laws, judicial processes, administrative regulations and voluntary arrangements. It is achieved by blocking access to sites as well as the use of laws that criminalise publication or possession of certain types of material. These include English defamation law, the Copyright law of the United Kingdom, regulations against incitement to terrorism and child pornography.
The New Jersey Library Association (NJLA) is a library organization located in Bordentown, New Jersey. It was established in 1890, and is the oldest library organization in the State of New Jersey. The NJLA began in 1890 with 39 members, and currently has over 1,700. The organization states on its website that it "Advocates for library services for New Jersey residents; Provides education and networking for library staff;" and "Supports intellectual freedom and access to books, music, movies, and information."
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a global registered charity based in Cambridge, England. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of online sexual abuse content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world and non-photographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the UK." Content inciting racial hatred was removed from the IWF's remit after a police website was set up for the purpose in April 2011. The IWF used to also take reports of criminally obscene adult content hosted in the UK. This was removed from the IWF's remit in 2017. As part of its function, the IWF says that it will "supply partners with an accurate and current URL list to enable blocking of child sexual abuse content". It has "an excellent and responsive national Hotline reporting service" for receiving reports from the public. In addition to receiving referrals from the public, its agents also proactively search the open web and deep web to identify child sexual abuse images and videos. It can then ask service providers to take down the websites containing the images or to block them if they fall outside UK jurisdiction.
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux shattered-glass effect obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under English law which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist is used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed.
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
An anti-pornography movement in the United States has existed since before the 1969 Supreme Court decision of Stanley v. Georgia, which held that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes, by establishing an implied "right to privacy" in U.S. law. This led President Lyndon B. Johnson, with the backing of Congress, to appoint a commission to study pornography. The anti-pornography movement seeks to maintain or restore restrictions and to increase or create restrictions on the production, sale or distribution of pornography.
Enough Is Enough is an American non-profit organization whose stated purpose is to make the Internet safer for families and children. It carries out lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., and played a role in the passage of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, and the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000. The group is based in the Commonwealth of Virginia. They sometimes refer to themselves acronymically as EIE.
The Authority for Television on Demand (ATVOD) was an industry body designated by Ofcom as the "co-regulator" of television on demand (VOD) in the UK from 2010 until 2015. ATVOD was founded following a European Union directive on the regulation of audiovisual media. It was responsible for regulating on-demand services such as ITV Player and Channel 4's All 4, as well as paid-for content on websites which were deemed to be "tv-like". ATVOD's role with regard to VOD ended on 31 December 2015, when the function was taken over by Ofcom directly.
The precise number of websites blocked in the United Kingdom is unknown. Blocking techniques vary from one Internet service provider (ISP) to another with some sites or specific URLs blocked by some ISPs and not others. Websites and services are blocked using a combination of data feeds from private content-control technology companies, government agencies, NGOs, court orders in conjunction with the service administrators who may or may not have the power to unblock, additionally block, appeal or recategorise blocked content.
The child abuse image content list is a list of URLs and image hashes provided by the Internet Watch Foundation to its partners to enable the blocking of child pornography & criminally obscene adult content in the UK and by major international technology companies.
The Digital Economy Act 2017 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is substantially different from, and shorter than, the Digital Economy Act 2010, whose provisions largely ended up not being passed into law. The act addresses policy issues related to electronic communications infrastructure and services, and updates the conditions for and sentencing of criminal copyright infringement. It was introduced to Parliament by culture secretary John Whittingdale on 5 July 2016. Whittingdale was replaced as culture secretary by Karen Bradley on 14 July 2016. The act received royal assent on 27 April 2017.
Censorship of educational research databases in the United States has been a concerted political effort since 2016. Activist groups that aim to change school curricula and ban books from libraries and schools are applying political and legislative pressure to limit the content in educational research databases to which libraries subscribe to give students online access to educational resources beyond what print collections can offer. In 2017, the American Library Association (ALA) found that 18% of challenges to library content were not book challenges, but about databases, games, and other non-book content. In 2023, ALA received reports of 1,247 localized censorship attempts on library resources, including databases. Recently, however, many of the educational research database censorship efforts take place in state legislatures; Idaho, Utah, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have encoded laws that specifically relate to educational research databases. Several states have failed legislative efforts, while other states have pending legislation in the 2024 season. Experts argue that these laws act on problems that do not actually exist. Where legislating about educational research databases specifically has been unsuccessful, activists have moved to attempting to curtail the long-held legal definition of "obscenity," as defined by the United States Supreme Court in Miller v. California, known as the Miller Test. For example, recent Tennessee legislation removes protections for materials with educational value from being defined as "obscene."
References
- ↑ "CP80 Internet Community Port Act". www.cp80.org. Retrieved July 6, 2006.
- ↑ "Huntsman to sign anti-porn resolution". Daily Herald. Archived from the original on February 14, 2010. Retrieved February 14, 2010.
- ↑ Deseret Morning News | Lawmakers seek ways to block Net porn