Mens sana in fibro sano: Virgin Media network-level smut filters are ON Virgin Media joined the big boys' club today by switching on network-level filters which allow subscribers to prevent perfectly legal material such as pornography from being accessed on their broadband connections. The cable company's rivals BT, BSkyB and TalkTalk have implemented similar censorship blockers on their networks …
sadly for GCHQ no one is using the filters because they don't even block anything (or block to much)
... and in any case, the best DNS filter is not much use against browsing images, which would be blocked by the filter on a direct access, from the google cache using image search. And since google now use https then even a keyword search in requests isn't possible.
Absolutely correct!
I want Sky to know that a policy of applying the filter in a preconfigured "On" state and then expecting me to "manage" it is absolutely abhorrent. I'm an adult and should not have to be inconvenienced by others bad parenting skills.
More importantly I am totally opposed to government censorship or censorship by any other "well meaning" groups as none of these organisations can be trusted and scope creep is inevitable.
Increasingly the only avenue left to us is to vote with our pound and leave.
I want Sky to know that a policy of applying the filter in a preconfigured "On" state and then expecting me to "manage" it is absolutely abhorrent. I'm an adult and should not have to be inconvenienced by others bad parenting skills.
More importantly I am totally opposed to government censorship or censorship by any other "well meaning" groups as none of these organisations can be trusted and scope creep is inevitable.
Increasingly the only avenue left to us is to vote with our pound and leave.
But you already have an account with them, therefore you won't be subject to having a filter pre-configured to 'On'. And even if you did, the answer is as simple as clicking 'Off'.
You quite obviously do not have children. Filters like this should have been a standard option by about 5 years ago, when browsing on other devices such as smartphones, tablets, consoles and smart TV's started to make inroads. Parental control over Internet access these days is not just a matter of either installing Net Nanny or watching little Johnny over his shoulder on the one shared family PC in the living room. It is simply not possible to monitor multiple kids with access to all those devices at the same time, and we use Linux on every laptop in the house - parental control software is as good as non existent for Linux (and before anyone pipes up, as their own website says: Dan's Guardian "is for running on servers", I really shouldn't have to learn how to set up a server just to try and put a few limits on what kind of content my kids see online. If you believe differently you're not living in the real world).
DNS filters aren't perfect, but in combination with locking down Google/YouTube/Play Store safe search etc, I've been using OpenDNS family shield for a while now and it makes things a lot more difficult to get around while providing simple On/Off functionality and whitelists to override their pre-set configurations.
This is not censorship, this is an option, and as long as it's optional I fully support it being there. If you don't want it then just switch it off.
"But you already have an account with them, therefore you won't be subject to having a filter pre-configured to 'On'. And even if you did, the answer is as simple as clicking 'Off'."
Not what their email says - I have to go and manager the B thing. While to you it might be as simple as "turning it off" to me it's an unnecessary imposition on me because of other people failings. People should be free to opt in NOT have to opt out.
Urgh, I couldn't agree more! I have a lovely 60mb download connection yet suffer with a pathetic 3mb upload. So, as soon as I begin to FTP files back to work, the whole Internet connection becomes totally unusable for the rest of the household. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
More frustratingly, Virgin Media have been promising for two years now that an upload speed increase is "on its way", but is it hell - just more headline-grabbing download speed upgrades.
I'm kinda 'stuck' too, as despite living only 2 miles from the City Centre, the best 'expected speeds' on an Openreach-based "fibre" connection is 14mb down, and 2mb up. FFS.
LOL @ AC! BT's pathetic 448 Kbps upstream on consumer ADSL max (50:1 contention) and 832 Kbps on business ADSL max is NOT faster than Virgin's 3 Mbps up (25:1 contention). We're not all on Infinity2 FTTP you know!
I'd still take the Virgin connection over an Infinity connection unless I was had a desperate need to upload tonnes of data.
@AC - You might be able to get 20 Mbps on FTTC upload, but as I said; I currently only have the option of ADSL Max. Infinity doesn't exist in my neck of the woods as Openreach are a bunch of T055erz.
I'm just lamenting the loss of the lovely 60 Meg cable that I used to enjoy 5 miles away nearer the center of Nottingham... :(
Not sure what speed package you're on but my upload is 10Mbit. Love it!
Depends on the person & situation etc but I don't mind paying a bit more each month to get the better upload speed - the increased download speed is just a handy side effect.
@Simon - I'm not on any BT-based product out of a matter of principle. They could only offer an estimated up to 2.5 mbps download, but more realistic was around 512 kbps over ADSL max.
I now get a much more acceptible service with around 7 mbps download and 3 mbps upload out of a Three 3G connection through a mobile phone set up as a Wi Fi Hotspot. Yes, the slow ping lag is annoying at times, but it works well enough until a better wired alternative is available in my area.
Who is suppying your 10Mbit upload?
No i'm an existing customer.. I went to their website and that filter and also a malware/virus filter were both enabled.
Edit..now i'm unsure. It is disabled now but to be honest I can't recall what state it was in when I logged in..I just ensured it was off before i logged out, so you may be right.
If Virgin is your enemy then OpenDNS Crypt is your friend. Dont have to hook up with a VPN with this solution and avoids Virgin port forwarding on their routers. It works by encrypting all DNS traffic between the user and OpenDNS, preventing any ISP spying.
http://www.opendns.com/about/innovations/dnscrypt/
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