Open Rights Group International Says Virgin, Sky Blocking Innocent Sites

Posted by timothy on Sunday October 20, 2013 @09:12PM from the no-brush-is-quite-broad-enough dept.

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."

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Old News from August? by stiggle · 2013-10-20 22:01 · Score: 4, Informative

I know Slashdot is usually behind the curve on news, but the linked articles date back to August....
(I know - shocking someone read both linked articles :-) )
Re:And this is why by Joining+Yet+Again · 2013-10-20 22:23 · Score: 5, Informative

"This is why ISPs..."
Oh, what bullshit. ISPs have bent over backwards so they don't lose out on delicious government contracts, which in the UK require satisfactory filtering methods in place.
There are maybe one or two ISPs which have had a backbone in all this - such as Andrews&Arnold. You can tell the difference because their Internet service is 100% unfiltered. They even ask you if you want filtering and refuse to provide you with service if you say "yes".