Hundreds of Sites Blocked By Canadian ISP

An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot reported on the blockage of a union website by Telus, a leading Canadian ISP. Since that story, the company has restored access but the fallout continues. The move may lead to new ISP regulations in Canada and a study by the OpenNet Initiative has found that by blocking the union site, Telus also blocked an additional 766 websites including a breast cancer fundraising site." From the article: "While there are a number of different ways to block access to Web sites, the method Telus chose to block the Voices for Change site -- blocking its IP address -- produced massive collateral filtering. Filtering by IP address is efficient since ISPs can quickly and effectively block access to the target site using their existing routing technology. Many ISPs already block certain IP addresses to combat spam and viruses. Large networks, like Telus, have mechanisms in place to block IP addresses almost instantaneously, simply by updating their routers with a "block list" of addresses. However, it is common for many different, unrelated Web sites to share the same IP address."

Comments

Re:i'm confused....

[bmalnad]

Yes! It is. It's called virtual hosting.

Wow

[GordoTheGeek]

A buddy of mine is a desktop admin at Telus in Toronto (the strike is in Alberta and BC). That's a hell of a message to send to the rest of your employees: "We 'support' your right to strike, but we don't want your message to get out to the world."

And he thought he hated his job before the strike. Yow.

Telus ethics

[TeQGame]

Here's an exerpt quoted directly from the Telus Ethics page at http://about.telus.com/governance/ethics1.html

How can they possibly claim that they took an ethical approach when they unilaterally terminated access to a website that depicted Telus in an unfavorable light. Whether the site in question was violating other contractual obligations or law is independent of the actions of Telus.

" Fellow TELUS team members:

Central to TELUS' purpose is to make the future friendly for our stakeholders. One of the critical elements in realizing this ambition is to ensure our individual and collective reputation is above reproach. How we work is just as important as what we do. Our goal is to demonstrate the highest level of ethics and integrity in our business dealings with all stakeholders (customers, shareholders, suppliers, colleagues, community). This is a corporate priority and a shared responsibility for all TELUS team members as each one of our actions and decisions affect our company and its reputation."