Sky Lifts Block on TorrentFreak After Censorship Accusations

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Sky has removed a block on TorrentFreak, after its new network-level filter misclassified the news outlet as a file-sharing site.

The ISP launched its parental controls two months ago in response to a controversial government campaign to boost child protection online.

Though intended to block unsuitable content for children such as porn, gambling or violent sites, the filter also appears to be blocking legitimate sites. Sky doesn't categorise sites itself, instead working with Symantec.

The ISP was accused of censorship after TorrentFreak's editor, Ernesto Van Der Sar, reported his site had been classified by Sky's filter as "anonymous, file-sharing and hackers", resulting in it being blocked under certain circumstances.

He claimed TorrentFreak had been blocked on Sky's "13" setting - the default option for new customers.

TorrentFreak does cover file-sharing and piracy extensively, but isn't itself an illegal site.

Sky said it has now removed TorrentFreak from its block list. "The categorisation of Torrentfreak.com has now been updated so that the site will no longer be filtered by Sky Broadband Shield," the company said. "If at any time a website owner believes they have been unfairly filtered or miscategorised by Sky Broadband Shield, they can contact Sky and we will look into it as soon as we can."

TorrentFreak co-founder, Andy Maxwell, described ISP site blocking as "nonsense" and called on Sky to improve its filtering processes. "ISPs exist to provide us with unfettered access to the internet, not the version they or their technology partners feels is appropriate for us."

"Their 'parental controls' do not achieve their stated aim of "protecting children" and are already causing collateral damage by blocking totally innocent sites such as the one you are reading now," he added.

Familiar problem

Other ISPs have also been dogged by accusations of overblocking since rolling out their network-level filters in recent months.

BT's filter was found to block sex education websites, while O2's filtered out Childline.

The controls were introduced in response to intense government pressure on ISPs to curtail children's access to porn sites. But the filters can also weed out other unsuitable content - including file-sharing outlets, social media, violent content or gambling sites.

That, according to the Open Rights Group, considerably widens the margin of error for false positives. "What you can guarantee is that filtering is error prone," the ORG wrote in December. "The sheer number of classifications to make means that costs have to be kept low."

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security/386383/sky-lifts-block-on-torrentfreak-after-censorship-accusations