Exetel Conclude ISP-Level Filtering Feasible
No frills ISP (Internet Service Provider) Exetel announced on the 28th of April that they would start trialling a mandatory content filtering system. Yesterday afternoon it was announced by the company that the trial was a success and that there was no impact on Internet access to non blocked sites for any Exetel user.
In what came as shock to some end users of the ISP, they decided they would temporarily filter “illegal content” for a period of 1 week as a trial to see whether ISP-level filtering was feasible.
In a forum post from a representative from the company it was warned that it would not be responsible for “moral obligations” or the “right to free-speech”.
This is not a discussion about what it right or wrong about the content filtering, the filter list, or our trial of it. You should use other forums for that – preferably those run by the government.
The company represenatative also added that those wishing to complain should write to their local MP and promise not to vote Labor at the next election.
Any opinions or comments relating to your personal views on government filtering should be directed to your local MP along with your promise that you will not vote Labor at the next election (comments unrelated to actual technical experiences will be deleted from this thread).
The company concluded with the following summary:
This is the result summary:
- 20,000 active hits against the filter list
- no false positives
- no measurable impact on any Exetel router
- no impact on Internet access to non blocked sites for any Exetel user
- there were 56 problems reported that users attributed to the filter trial, each on investigation was a ‘harbour tunnel’ effect
- three people threatened to cancel their Exetel service(s) because of the trial
We were able to determine:
- how we could implement a mandatory non user optional filter system with very little/no disruption
- how we could implement a mandatory user optional filter system with very little/no disruption
- that we could offer a ‘clean feed’ filter system now, as a user pays option (similar to the spam filter) for a price of $5 per month per user
- the cost of a mandatory, non optional filter system would be in the order of $6 per year per user
Exetel’s trial was flawed right from the start as they did not use the ACMA list. The trial results are worthless as Exetel did not conduct the trial in the manner the government wants to deploy their filter. Also, the behaviour of Exetel’s staff on the matter of the trial has been disgraceful. Nothing but arrogance and smugness from the lot of them.
20,000 hits for a week ?? This sounds really low. I would have thought ISP (at least major ones) would do that kind of traffic in an hour.
I have experienced terrible performance recently (possibly coincidentally) on my exetel service since the beginning the trial.
During the trial period, my internet speed was 350kbps max, even though my plan was ADSL2 (supposedly up to 24,000kbps) or 80x slower than my maximum possible connection speed. This was about 6x the speed of a 56k modem.
I had found it difficult to get in contact with Exetel to voice my frustrations and concerns. And when i did log a fault they automatically updated my fault as Corrected (without actually speaking with me).
Although i wasn’t actually expecting it, for the record i Tweeted my complaint and haven’t as yet been responded to.
Overall, poor form…
Here are some other thoughts on Exetel Recently
@JimBoot Blog post: “Why I’m leaving Exetel” My email thread with Exetel re #nocleanfeed http://bit.ly/10MbIC
@Jason Cartwright The 20,000 figure is the amount of times their customers tried to access the list of illegal IPs
@Ben – but doesn’t every site that gets visited have to be checked against the blacklist ?
Also the said there was 0 false positives.. so someone went through 20,000 sites?
If you read extel’s blog on how their filter works, you’ll understand why it doesn’t need to pass EVERY website request onto the ‘filter’ as such.
What the system does as detailed here: http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/186-Content-Filtering.html
Is the following.
One or more of extel’s routers creates a peering session (where routes to different networks are distributed) between itself and the filter companies router.
The watchdog (company providing the filter) router only sends out route advertisments for IP addresses it KNOWS are for servers hosting the banned content.
The connection to extel’s router is made via a tunnel which makes the extel router believe that the watchdog router is the best place to send any of only the IP’s it tells the extel router it has.
So essentially the only IP’s that pass anywhere other than where they would normally on the extel network, are those that have banned content.
For those specific IP’s that ARE forwarded over to the watchdog server (due to the extel server saying “hey this is the best path for me to send requests for these IP’s to” these are THEN (and only then) proxied through a filtering server that allows access to any url’s except for those that are on the black list.
So the only thing I’m unsure of is if the quote ’20,000′ hits is ‘connections to those ip addresses’ or ‘connections to the blocked urls’ if the latter thats an incredibly large figure.
So, “Exetel Conclude ISP-Level Filtering Feasible,” eh?
I guess it is if feasible you can call what they did anything close to the govt filtering proposal, which it wasn’t. Not filtering by the ACMA list, a pokey-few number of participants, no large sites like YouTube filtered, bodging up the figures, no definition of ‘success’ before the ‘trial’, etc etc etc.
What I’m not getting is how we get from THIS Steve Waddington on 12 Nov 2008:
http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/153-The-Internet-Newspeak.html
“How else would you explain the total extravagance of the expenditure proposed. $140M. That is a fine use for my taxes – feeding those parasite consultants and ISP’s that see ‘government sponsored’ as an excuse to dip their snouts in the tax payer funded trough.
So sure, it may well not cost the ISP anything to actually implement such a filter, because the government – actually the tax payer – will subsidize it. As a shareholder in an ISP I guess I can be happy about that. However, as a tax payer, I think the appropriate response to a pointless waste of money like this is outrage, because:
a) as I have pointed out, such a ‘blacklist’ is incapable of stopping anything
b) even if it were, anyone able to spend a 2 hours or less doing basic research would realize that such a proposal would not work – since it has not worked in 15 years since the first standard for RBL’s was implemented.
c) even if that did work, it is completely foiled by any sort of encryption commonly used on the internet today – for banking, on-line purchasing, or any thing else at all other than clear text.
d) That stopping ‘accidental’ access to, alleged illicit web sites is exactly the same as trying to stop a shopper ‘accidentally’ mistaking a kilo of sugar for a kilo of cocaine at a Woolies supermarket – it just isn’t something that can possibly happen.
So aren’t we so glad that our pretender to a Big Brother government is going to spend $140M to prevent that from happening.
And I am so looking forward to our chocolate ration increase from 30g to 20g too.
What arrogance they have to think we are such an illiterate society that their machinations are not so totally transparent.
Here is the germane part of my response to the pilot request. My goals being twofold:
1. Point out the waste of the whole exercise
2. Should the whole waste of time exercise go ahead, demonstrate that it can be done (pointless as it is) at minimal cost.”
….to Steve Waddington, filterphile:
http://steve.blogs.exetel.com.au/index.php?/archives/188-Why-run-a-filter-trial….html
“let me put it in end user terms; would you rather a) pay $2 per month extra for your Internet in exchange for the minor inconvenience of perhaps not being able to access some sites without a work-around, or b) pay 50 cents a year extra for your Internet in exchange for the minor inconvenience of perhaps not being able to access some sites without a work-around?
(NONE AT ALL. EXETEL IS THE GREAT SATAN FOR EVEN MENTIONING IT. RAGE SPIT FOAM. Yes, thank you all you crazies, as always, you have served your purpose.)”
Yep, those who oppose mandatory internet censorship are merely ‘crazies.’
Duly noted, Mr Waddington.