UK: TalkTalk To Offer Centralised Site Blocking

[engine]

UK: TalkTalk To Offer Centralised Site Blocking [bbc.co.uk]

Internet provider TalkTalk is to give customers the option of filtering malicious or offensive material out of their broadband service.

The company claims it is the first major ISP to offer centralised blocking at server level.

As well as stopping malicious software, parents will be able to prevent their children accessing adult material.

[IanTurner]

Hmm wonder how they are going to do that?

Every kids first internet skill is getting content past the schools firewall.

[dstiles]

I've been blocking talktalk's "virus" bot for some time now, pretty much since it first hit. And the US china-owned server farm that tests/tested their system.

The fun thing is: the bot tests your web page AFTER you have it displayed on your screen (unless they have recently changed this). So what point to it? Unless some other mug using talktalk hits the same web page within their cache period it's pointless. Plus, since we know their bot signature AND IP range, it's easy to serve up any content we like. :)

Obviously, it's a prelude to targetted advertising.

Oh - and a way of letting china know what mugs in the UK are looking for!

An item in a UK newspaper today says parental control is not possible using this service.

And, of course, it is completely illegal to intercept transactions in this way in the UK, even though BT were let off for a similar offence (phorm).

[engine]

In recent days it looks like the UA has changed to:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)"

[aspdaddy]

Hmm wonder how they are going to do that?

Cloud filtering has been used in Schools and Colleges for a while now. Ive deployed openDNS to do this and they have not managed to circumvent DNS forwarding rules.

[IanTurner]

Hmm how does it cope with the Google translate trick?

[aspdaddy]

I dont know that one, is it an anti-proxy ? If so its only as effective as the policy. Many anti-proxies are now blacklisted by schools.

There is another solution, that allows students to view facebook but not post. And an augmented reality app that teachers use to locate the kids using facebook on thier phones - even via the toilet - how smart are these kids of yours :)