Anti-child-porn update: UK

Timed to the EU's Safer Internet Day, marked in a number of countries today, UK Internet Service provider BT announced its Web servers are blocking 35,000 attempts to view child-porn Web pages every day, the BBC reports. It adds that only .3%, or 20 out of every 6,000 such pages are hosted in the UK – the rest are on servers in many other countries. Here's how the system works: "People who discover a site that harbours suspicious content are invited to report the site to the Internet Watch Foundation," which has a report-illegal-content button on its home page. The IWF passes the reports on to the UK's National Crime Squad for analysis. "Any UK-based site hosting child pornography can be traced quickly and easily, despite elaborate attempts to hide the unique Internet addresses, known as IP addresses, which identify each site. Once traced, the ISP hosting the site is notified and the site taken down," according to the BBC. If the content's not hosted in the UK, the IWF passes the info along to Interpol for cooperation with police in other countries. Foreign-based child-porn pages also go into the IWF's database of black-listed pages. ISP filters like BT's "Cleanfeed" check page requests against that black list, so that child-porn pages are blocked for home Internet users. According to The Guardian , BT – which provides Internet service for one-third of British home Net users – says the number of attempts to view child porn has tripled in the past 18 months. Here's coverage of Safer Internet Day at ElectricNews.net in Dublin.