* Posts by htd

4 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2013

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

htd

It’s not as simple as that

Underneath the hood the EU stopping roaming charges works by stopping operators providing the service you roam into charging extra for that connection back to your service provider

For operators with entities in the country you roam into in the brave new (very expensive) Brexit world they can manage this by not charging extra for your network access back to their subsidiary in the UK

For operators like EE who don’t have a presence there is nothing to stop the local operator charging EE more which they will then have to pass on to their subscribers

It’s highly likely that EE will be squeezed out of handset contracts where the subscriber expects to travel to the EU, but trying to explain this to a Brexiteer is a total waste of time

ISPs: Relax. Blocking porn online won't really work

htd

The internet service providers association would say that the blocking is easy to circumvent, because most of their major members are using DNS or are intending to use DNS. One of the reasons why DNS is the wrong way to do blocking is that it is easy to avoid and it is also very inaccurate. However there are much more effective methods of blocking traffic but they are more expensive to implement.

The TalkTalk system may suffer from issues with its URL blacklist coverage but it at least does do the blocking in a way which is much more difficult to circumvent than DNS which any 10 year old can defeat. There are a number of YouTube videos which seem to have been posted by pre-teens which demonstrate all that is required to defeat DNS.

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

htd

Re: Gesture politics at its worst @Peter Gathercole

Sadly a lot of the ISP's are currently using DNS

htd

Doing this properly isn't cheap which is why some ISP's are using DNS which is cheap but very ineffective.

DNS suffers from a range of problems. Firstly it is easy to avoid, you can enter the actual IP address of the website into the browser avoiding DNS, configure the client to use another DNS service which is a simple 45 second job on IOS or use a proxy. The last two are widely used now to allow Netflix and Lovefilm users to access US content from the UK but can also be used to completely avoid a DNS based protection system.

But even if you don't deliberately try to avoid DNS it will still fail to block a significant amount of content due to the limitations of DNS itself.

DNS works at a site level, but many sites particularly ones containing user generated content have a mix of good and bad content all held under the same DNS address, in this case sites which contain a big majority of good content tend to get classified as good even though they also contain bad content.

Because of this DNS based blocking can be less than 50% effective.

The only way to resolve this is to classify at a much finer level and this is very difficult to do with DNS.

Finally whatever mechanism you use is only as good as the classified list of URL's that you use to generate your blacklists, many of the ISP's have tried to create these on the cheap when in reality having a list with anything like the coverage and accuracy required to be effective is neither simple nor cheap.

You wouldn't buy and use a condom if it claimed to have a less than 50% protection rate. So there is something morally ambiguous about an ISP with a DNS based service claiming to protect children etc from harm. Most parents will think that ticking the no bad content box will do what it says on the tin and will be unaware that protection offered is so ineffective that they still need to monitor their children's internet use.