A month ago it was Orange, now followed by T-Mobile.

Already time ago there were cases when some (maybe can mostly name them local or minor) providers were blocking torrents, if not completely, then during daylight or for the cheapest versions. Or they were limiting traffic of users who wanted to download more than someone decides, even if they paid flat program with fast access. (To keep balance: also big players, T-Com, used limited upload speed, which has influenced torrents download.) All of this could be easily labeled as a way to lower network traffic, with the intention to minimize the price the provider needs to invest to it.

Now comes something new with the great idea of blocking child pornography.

To achieve this goal, both providers are using the British Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) database to avoid connection to some web pages - so people really interested in them must make a bit more effort to avoid this blocking.

People who responded to an online poll at SME.sk (say liberal) newspaper mostly voted ‘Yes' for “Do you want your internet provider to block access to pages with child porn?”

If I remember well, people in China have similar opinion in case of porn generally. But things are not so simple - and not just in China. (GV posts on the “internet cleansing movement” in China are here and here.)

The IWF database is not public. (That's why it is a non-governmental organization, I think. At least in Slovakia, if it is part of the government, they must reply to citizens' questions about what and why they're blocking.) And they operate in the British, not Slovak, law space.

It blocks also many general and legal pages for file downloads and there is no guarantee they will not block anything else they decide (the complete Wikipedia was already on their list).

Users have no official way to stop filtering. Last month, T-Mobile made initial filtering of their own adult services, but it was necessary to activate it by SMS. (Understand: of course T-Mobile's business is not related to child porn and its blockage will cover approximately about 0% of such internet services.) Now both providers are talking about no exceptions for IWF.

A question also is why Orange, with such high moral, does blocking of its mobile-network only, while optics-cable connected customers (where traffic already does not matter so much, right?) do not have this “advantage”.

So if you want uncensored mobile internet access in Slovakia you must move to O2, the newest provider here. Yes, this one is the leader of IWF filtering in the Czech Republic.

This is the actual state of things 20 years after the Czechoslovak Gentle revolution ended the Soviet-based system here.

Here's a selection of anonymous netizens' reactions (SLO) posted at SME.sk portal:

randy10:

Internet has to be free, open and uncensored. No company should start filtering, can offer it only as an extra part that needs to be switched on explicitly. Today it is child pornography, tomorrow it's the pages of right-wing parties, the day after tomorrow - academic segment or all religions except Christianity. This is not correct.

***

real name:

I've already reported this [to IWF]. [Orange's page with pictures for mobile phones with ‘Angels and Devils' theme.]

***

čisté ruky [clean hands]:

So we will join the list. Google in China, Youtube in Turkey - and Orange in Slovakia.

***

archi731:

Child porn is the worst thing that could be found on the internet and those responsible for it have to be jailed for long years, but this is an absolutely incorrect way, because here what is being questioned is the freedom of individual united with responsibility for own acts. After all, we are a democratic country, adult persons and not some small children, and the internet provider is not some tutor to have the right to deal with us this way.

***

archi731:

In addition, this is a dangerous precedent and no one knows where it will end. Tomorrow they will start to block other forms of criminality at internet, that it will become something normal, state will adopt the right to deal with people preventively like with potential criminals, enter their privacy and the day after tomorrow we'll have here censorship like in China.

***

osc:

I personally do not care. When they are blocking porn pages focused on child pornography (if there are such), I vote for it. Maybe some people from Catholic church will miss them. [The person quoted here is referring to the much publicized pedophilia cases involving Catholic priests, but I do not remember any real cases that took place in Slovakia.]

***

Mikaco:

And after a short time we all will need to learn the Chinese language. :(

***

sanity inside:

And do not be surprised that no one trusts IWF - in Slovakia, we have a rich experience with censorship. That one before the November [Velvet revolution] also had a different function officially. Filtering should be good in principle, but requires credible institutions.

***

lubo.flynt:

The problem is IWF does not block child porn only. If “by chance” a serious page appears on their list for removing they require a sponsor's check. [Note: This anonymous commenter has not provided any proof for this.]

***

všetci do žatvy [all to harvest]:

In that poll under the article, 27% of readers do not like child porn blocking, what kind of creatures are they?

***

ABBE:

All tragedies start with great ideas.

Hungarian news sites report (HUN) on the “vaccine tourism” from Slovakia to the pharmacies at the border and news agencies confirm that Hungary doesn't plan to seal its borders with the neighboring Ukraine (see the latest GV post about Ukraine and swine flu here).

Observer, a Hungarian blogger living in Kyiv, wrote a post (HUN) about her trip to Budapest:

In Pest, I came home for one week. Arriving to Borispol Airport, I put on a mask: I got it in store from a Hungarian colleague and kept it for the airport. There were fewer people at the airport than on an ordinary Friday. […] The number of passengers has decreased, it can be seen from the traffic of the border crossing points, the number of those leaving the country decreased by 23%, and of foreigners entering by 40%.

The ground service crew was working in “maskara”, but most of the passengers weren't wearing masks. It had been part of our preparations, that we'd vaccinated ourselves with Hungarian serum (yes, I have read the enormous debate on the net about the Hungarian vaccine, I had called up two doctors in Hungary - none of them had dissuaded me - in my judgment the risk there [in Ukraine] is bigger than the risk of the Hungarian vaccine - I thought rather to face the latter). […]

One part of the “enormous debate” mentioned by Observer is between the authorities and general practitioner doctors. One of them, Gyula Keszthelyi MD, a family practitioner in eastern Hungary, attracted the attention by his blog (HUN) where next to writing about prevention (HUN), and informing parents (HUN) about their right of not answering the letters they get from their children's school - which imply they're obliged to vaccinate their children while in Hungary it's not in the category of obligatory vaccination - in several posts he pointed at the mistakes ÁNTSZ is committing in its vaccination campaign. This generated a movement against his functioning. A Hungarian weekly Heti Válasz published an article on his case:

[…] 50 years ago, Mr Keszthelyi would just have been a village doctor, quietly grumbling under his breath and complaining to the elderly ladies among his patients. Today - thanks to giulio.freeblog.hu, the debating website he set up - his influence on people is comparable to that of the Hungarian Pandemic Commission. Tens of thousands of laymen read his fuming remarks on the site. In addition, he is also a regular visitor adding comments to several internet forums visited by other members of the profession, where the contradictory actions of the government are critically analysed to the tiniest detail. Keszthelyi found himself in the middle of a whole movement, when Ferenc Falus, the National Medical Officer threatened him with a fine of HUF 1 million and the withdrawal of his license, because he refused to administer the state-provided flu vaccines for free. […]

It wasn't only Dr. Keszthelyi who raised the question of administration and of the origin of the Hungarian-made vaccines, but also a consumer protection-blog Tékozló homár had a post (HUN) on it:

[…] The hospitals and pharmacies, anyway, didn't want to receive the vaccines delivered without an expiration date, since it's illegal like that, but the stuff should be sold out if the state had already paid for it. […]

Dr. Gergely (Greg) Bognar, assistant professor at the Center for Bioethics at New York University also reacted (HUN) through his blog dealing with bioethics questions on the swine flu debate turned to party politics, and raised the thought of a big experimentation:

[…] According to fresh research, voters supporting the governing party are rather on the side of vaccination than those of the opposition. […]

Politicians helped a lot for the population in knowing the way about the question: while the prime minister and the minister of health care vaccinated themselves in public, Péter Szijjártó, the deputy-floor leader of FIDESZ [party in opposition now], “considering every circumstance” won't vaccinate himself. […]

Why is the set-up of things like this lucky? Well, the situation is that there's a big question mark related to vaccines against flu. The question is not whether they're harmful - experts agree that they're harmless - but whether they're useful, and if yes, then how far. Does the defense against the new flu really worth 6 billion forints for a society? How efficient are the vaccines against flu financially? […]

We can try with not doing a clinical examination, but vaccinating half of the population, and the other half not, and then keeping the tabs on how many are getting ill, or dying from these two groups. […]

But this kind of research is not free of ethical problems either. […]

I suppose, it's already clear where I'm leading up to. The Hungarian society voluntarily, with enormous self-devotion, by the wise encouragement of politicians started an experiment similar to the one in Tuskegee. The population is dividing itself into two groups by political party sympathy: one group is getting the vaccine, the other, as a volunteer control group, is not.

The experiment plan is very promising, since ten million subject in a research is fair enough to exclude every kind of disturbing circumstances, and the distribution following party sympathy is more or less random. So everything is given to get serious scientific results from the Great Hungarian Experiment!

So it's not by chance that the world is looking at us with great attention. Observers will be sent by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prestigious periodicals as the New England Journal of Medicine, or the Nature, will report on the newest results. […]