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On 05/05/2012 13:51, Mark Evans wrote:
I fondly remember one absolute classic when I was in ISP Tech Support. We supplied parental control software as a freebie (unsupported) to customers. Among other things it blocked porn sites as per usual. Unfortunately for the ISP I was working for, one of the words it blocked on was coincidentally also the ISP's name - and I'm sure I don't to give you any clues about which ISP's name might also possibly be on a 'pornographic' filter list. It came to light fairly quickly when customers started installing the software and all of a sudden couldn't get their email, news server, access their webspace, and the company's own website - set as the default start page for the browser - wouldn't open. After a few of these started happening it swiftly came to light that all affected customers had just installed the parental control software, oddly enough immediately before it all went belly-up.-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 02/05/12 13:46, Julian Hall wrote:On 02/05/2012 12:24, paul sutton wrote:it is like this argument on blocking children from accessing porn sites, google seems to argue that it is UP TO PARENTS to take control and acually PARENT their kids rather than being lazy and letting someone else do it for them and moan when it goes wrong. I agree with google. on this it is up to PARENTS to do this, install filters not expect others to do it for them.That's a whole new argument, and one I completely agree with you on. At the end of the day all this proposed legislation is being pushed by MPs seemingly without any reference to professional technical expertise to find out if what they are proposing will actually work. Blocking sites (for any reason) won't work because quite simply those who want to circumvent the block will do so with proxies and/or anonymising websites. One minute with an IT technician would tell them that, but they'd rather be seen to be doing *something* than wait longer and actually do something that would work.Also current filtering software tends to have a rather high rate of both false positives and false negatives.
Cue a loud 'DOH!!' across the callcentre :)Sadly because it wasn't our software we couldn't reverse engineer it to remove the offending (or not dependign on your point of view :)) filter, so all we could do is advise customers to take it back off again.
Julian -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq