The UK Open Rights Group has unveiled a distributed tool that lets you discover whether the sites you love are blocked by the filters promoted by the government.
The filters, which are supposed to block pornography, extremism, "esoteric content," forums, hate speech, pro-anorexia sites, information about alcohol and smoking, and other subjects, go well beyond what many parents think of when they think of "adult content." But even more worrying, these filters routinely overblock, putting legitimate and important sites behind a no-kids-allowed fence (especially sites about reproductive health and LGBT issues).
The Open Rights Group's tool checks all the major UK ISPs' blacklists and tells you which ones block which sites. I use the wonderful Andrews and Arnold as my ISP and I'm happy to say that they don't block anything.
(Image: No entry stocks, Matt Brown, CC-BY)
(Disclosure: I am proud to have co-founded ORG and to volunteer on its advisory board)
