Open Rights Group International Says Virgin, Sky Blocking Innocent Sites 83
New submitter stewartrob70 writes with an explanation of the inadvertent (or at least unwarranted) blocking of innocuous sites that UK ISPs Virgin and Sky are engaged in, as reported by PC Pro. The ISPs' filtering systems "appear to be blocking innocent third-party sites with apparently little or no human oversight." stewartrob70 excerpts from a blog posting with an explanation of why:
"In order to understand why this specific issue happened, you need to be familiar with a quirk in how DNS is commonly used in third-party load-balanced site deployments. Many third-party load balanced systems, for example those using Amazon's AWS infrastructure, are enabled by pointing CNAME records at names controlled by those third-party systems. For example www.example.com may be pointed at loadbalancer.example.net. However, 'example.com' usually cannot be directly given a CNAME record (CNAME records cannot be mixed with the other record types needed such as those pointing to nameservers and mailservers). A common approach is to point "example.com" to a server that merely redirects all requests to 'www.example.com.' From forum posts we can see that it's this redirection system, in this specific case an A record used for 'http-redirection-a.dnsmadeeasy.com,' that has been blocked by the ISPs — probably a court-order-blocked site is also using the service — making numerous sites unavailable for any request made without the ''www' prefix."
Re:And this is why (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I say keep it up. (Score:2, Interesting)
I was with Be for years. Excellent ISP, no blocking, real unlimited bandwidth and helpful technical support to boot. I jumped ship to Virgin when they were bought out by Sky as I really hate Sky. Who else was I going to go with? BT?
There are no more good ISPs left in the UK. This is a real shame.
p.s. As this is Slashdot, I would love to be corrected on the last point ^_^
Re:And this is why (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't heard many complaints about the cost, to be honest.
Run no filter:
- lose gov contracts;
Run cheap filter:
- gain gov contracts;
- increase prices slightly for everyone;
- minority of people notice they're missing legitimate web sites;
Run expensive filter:
- minority still complain because they tend to object to filtering in principle;
- lose custom from extra costs which will be passed on to consumer.
So "run cheap filter" is always the profitable option in the UK, which is why everyone feeds the IWF list plus the easiest interpretation of court orders into something in the style of the original Cleanfeed, augmented more recently by DPI by some ISPs.