30000 child porn sites blocked a day

9 Apr 2009

BT has revealed that it blocks between 35,000 and 40,000 attempts to access child pornography sites every day.

It warns, however, that the use of botnets and UK proxies makes it hard to judge how many of these attempts are made by real people.

A spokesman for BT said : "The number has stayed roughly the same in recent years even though use of the internet has increased."

BT, like many other ISPs in the UK, uses the Internet Watch Foundation's list of child abuse sites as its basis for the blocks.

However, this has caused problems in the past by attempting to limit access to content on legitimate sites too. The recent block on Wikipedia is one such example.

Only 5% of UK ISPs have not yet adopted a filtering system like this. Mainly these are the smallest ISPs who do not do so due to cost or technical concerns.

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