BT, Sky, and Virgin Enforce UK Porn Blocks By Hijacking Browsers

An anonymous reader writes with this story at Ars Technica, excerpting: BT, Sky, and Virgin Media are hijacking people's web connections to force customers to make a decision about family-friendly web filters. The move comes as the December deadline imposed by prime minister David Cameron looms, with ISPs struggling to get customers to say yes or no to the controversial adult content blocks. The messages, which vary by ISP, appear during browser sessions when a user tries to access any website. BT, Sky,TalkTalk and Virgin Media are required to ask all their customers if they want web filters turned on or off, with the government saying it wants to create a "family friendly" Internet free from pornography, gambling, extreme violence and other content inappropriate for children. But the measures being taken by ISPs have been described as "completely unnecessary" and "heavy handed" by Internet rights groups. The hijacking works by intercepting requests for unencrypted websites and rerouting a user to a different page. ISPs are using the technique to communicate with all undecided customers. Attempting to visit WIRED.co.uk, for example, could result in a user being redirected to a page asking them about web filtering. ISPs cannot intercept requests for encrypted websites in the same way.

Comments

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

They enforce the law by breaking the law. Sounds like a good plan if you want to piss everyone off.

You want a family friendly internet?

[Opportunist]

"free from pornography, gambling, extreme violence and other content inappropriate for children"

And I want a user friendly internet, free from governments, corporations, extreme advertising and other content inappropriate for ANYONE.

Cameron, please, for sanity's sake: Stop talking. Or, better, stop breathing.

Utter waste of time.

[Chayat]

My brief experience with this was really rather annoying. the filters activated a couple of weeks ago. A bunch of websites (inc my porn) just gave 500 errors. I was not taken to a page to explain what was happening. I only realised that my Cameronwall had been activated when my friends confirmed that they could still access the sites I could not. I logged into my BT account, found the part where I turn them back off again and did so only to be told that it would take up to 24 hours for the change to take effect. Additionally my partner's Macbook started to give a range of weird errors when connecting to a variety of webpages. I'm not overly techy but it seemed our router was remembering the redirect and still using it for a bunch of sites (even though the block had been removed by this point) and the macbook was refusing to display the sites it was being redirected to because it had detected a suspicious re-direct.

as someone having a religious objection to porn

[gillbates]

I must say I've never needed a filter to avoid porn on the internet. I'm not sure why the government feels it must block access to something I don't wish to see in the first place, unless it ultimately has ulterior motives, intending to derail the free flow of information necessary for a participative democracy in the name of public morality. It's ironic that a government which recently ruled that health practitioners must refer patients for abortion in spite of their individual moral objections is now suddenly concerned about access to porn. I find it more believable that the ultimate goal is to restrict access to information embarrassing to the ruling party, using the ostensible reason of porn filtering to silence dissent.

Re:as someone having a religious objection to porn

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good question, and it may be instructive to look at how these blocks came to be. AIUI it involved pressure from a very few very vocal (I'd say "hysterical") pressure groups that wished The Government Do Something because they're apparently entirely incompetent to do any such thing themselves. Such as getting a home network router that does the filtering, or getting internet service from an ISP that sells "filtered" internet access like those catering specifically to religious users, for example. No, the entire country must be filtered because, well, every family has children, no?

Whether there are also ulterior motives, I cannot say, but I don't hold it beyond the British Elite to be simply really that moralistic and also stupid. Compare how English judges will pass Judgement, including sometimes long diatribes denouncing specific deeds in tedious detail.

There is another angle and that is that there already was a country-wide filter in place, run by "the internet watch foundation", seeking to block child pornography but inevitably ending up blocking much more, including parts of wikipedia (and due to implementation details, slowing all of it and causing further collateral damage and confusion). This was promised to be the only thing to ever be blocked. Turns out that no, that was an outright lie, and the British aren't even stopping with porn, or whatever else they'll come up with as "unsuitable for children". The list of things blocked on behalf of the MAFIAA is growing steadily also.

I would not at all be surprised if soon we'll see the first de facto, if perhaps not in name, blocking on political grounds. The first conviction for "terrorism" on the grounds of possessing a copy of the Anarchist's cookbook (which is mostly a joke, and moreover most of the recipes are outright dangerous for the would-be anarchist) was some time ago already.

Also compare the (secret) blacklists in Australia and, of all places, Germany. I'm sure there's more blocking in ostensibly enlightened countries that I haven't heard of yet. That points to a possible "because we can"-motive, which I take as evidence that "because we can" is no longer a defensible reason to do anything: We simply can't afford the cost.

Re:Prohibitions do not work!

[AmiMoJo]

The UK ISP filters are completely voluntary as well.

Nope, Cleanfeed cannot be opted out of except by blocking it with something like a VPN.

David Cameron pushed the market into providing such a service. The market obliged.

He threatened to legislate, the ISPs decided to develop a crappy, ineffective token service to shut him up rather than deal with being legally required to do the impossible.

If you really have a problem, you can always choose one of the dozens of ISPs that doesn't offer this service.

Nope, Virgin Media is the only choice available to me. My BT line can only get a very unstable 1-2Mb/sec.

Re:MITM legalized at last

[statusbar]

Until relatively recently, these re-directions would adversely affect a debian/ubuntu linux system update procedure. A cron job would apt-get update and pull in new index files. Since the transport was not encrypted, the index files would not be what the apt system were expecting. It would store the content of the redirected web page instead of the proper index files into a cache and then apt-get update would be forever broken until you manually figured out how to delete the corrupted files someplace in /var/*/apt

ISP's and WiFi Access points that do this redirection are the reason why HTTPS everywhere is a good idea.