I’m leaving pronto for Andrews & Arnold. This BT “Empowering Carrie’s Mom” crap is surely illegal – discriminate against a protected characteristic? Hoo boy, they’re asking for a kicking. Here’s the whole miserable list: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/46809/kw/parental
Don’t you get the option to opt-in or opt-out on consumer grade broadband? Not that that fixes the stupid waste and bullshit or help anyone who doesn’t control the router.
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I considered A&A. Alas, their data is metered and I am a huge data hog; I’d blow through my allowance every month and pay extra.
BT Infinity … yes, they’re evil. But I’m paying £50 a month for static IP, 80mbps down/20mbps up, and all the wonderful bits I can eat, with no censorware. And because I’m self employed and work at home it’s a business expense.
(If A&A introduce a premium unmetered tier then I’ll probably go there once I’m out of the contract lock-in.)
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That’s what I came in to ask.
But in reading the comments - my understanding was that this firewall is opt-out, isn’t it? So the solution to this problem is to… well… opt out of it?
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What about public places like libraries or schools? For people who rely on those places for an internet connection, they have no choice in whether or not the internet is firewalled. Or what about when parents decide not to opt-out, but their kid needs to research information on something like rape crisis centers. The kids might not be feel like they can talk to their parents about such topics, so they are basically stuck in a bad situation.
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Libraries are already using commercial filter products: BB had a story about the British Library blocking a site that hosted Macbeth, and Scots libraries can’t see the Scottish National Library website. These products are as crappy and as oversold as the Springfield Monorail.
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Not just libraries. The college where I did my university access course had a ludicrous filter that wouldn’t allow me, as part of my CS classes, to view programming tutorial sites, as they might contain ‘dangerous source code’. Unimpressed as the IT dept were about this situation it was, apparently, set in stone by Those Above, who liked their filter very much indeed. I asked my lecturer if I could install pingtunnel to see if it would bypass it, but apparently he valued his job too much, or something.
That’s Obscene.
Libraries and schools already have content filters in place, and have had them for MANY MANY YEARS, and those have nothing to do with Cameron’s firewall.
It’s true that children get stuck with their parents’ firewall preferences, which I neglected to consider in my reply… Hopefully those children will be clever enough to figure out the (most often times trivial) workarounds to these shitty filters. Or just go to a friend’s house with less idiotic parents.
Upper management love their filters. The executive reports showing pie charts of “violations” speak to their inner disciplinarian, and if there weren’t so many, the filter wouldn’t be needed, right?
facepalm
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