While police around the world are planning to monitor conversations on web chat rooms to stop paedophiles from searching young victims over the net, British Telecom is instituting “Cleanfeed”, a mass-filtering programme to block access to any site on a list of suspected sites containing child porn.

Subscribers to BT’s internet services willing to access such sites will receive an error message as if the page was unavailable.

A list of illegal sites compiled by the Internet Watch Foundation has been available for some time, but so far it was impossible to prevent access since most are based outside the UK.

More in The Guardian.