BT / NTL /b/ Block - Stuff we know.

What follows has been posted in various other threads and has been repeated in IRC - but I thought it was probably an OK idea to post it all together in one place if only so I could point them to it - anyway:

As far as we have been able to work out someone has informed and organisation in the UK called the Internet Watch Foundation http://www.iwf.org.uk/ of our little place on the net and they have deemed it to be unacceptable due to either race hate OR childporn... probably both. They have place ONE SPECIFIC URL on a block list.

Seemingly NTL and BT subscribe to this block list to different degrees (although oddly some people are still getting through from at least NTL not sure about BT). The URL they are blocking is the main /b/ http://img.4chan.org/b/imgboard.html one which is why you are seeing a 404/403 on that one, but are still capable of seeing links within /b/.

There are quite a few ways to get around this, the two that I employ when Im on my work BT line is by using the IP address of the of the /b/ server, so then the URL would be: http://66.207.165.178/b/imgboard.html - this also works for NTL users. NTL users can also just add a '?' mark to the end of the normal URL to get around it thus: http://img.4chan.org/b/imgboard.html?
You can also use proxies and tunnelling an other crap, such as http//securebar.secure/...
or installing your own copy of squid maybe.

BT users only are currently finding them selves banned completely from the img.4chan servers, I have no idea what that is about as I dont think anyones said.

Are BT/NTL logging failed connects to the boards? No idea. How long is this gonna last? No idea. Is there anyway to ge the block lifted? Having read the IWFs complaints procedure... only if you want the police at your door if its still found to be CPy.

I think thats it, be brave /b/tards. You can get through this.

D.

The thing I don't understand is this - why would BT's proxy redirect to the 4chan banned page?

Browser sends this:

  GET /b/ HTTP/1.1
  Host: img.4chan.org

Web server responds with this:

  HTTP/1.x 302 Found
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:09:38 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
  Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix)
  Location: http://www.4chan.org/banned.php

which is a redirect to the ban page. Browser then asks for this:

  GET /banned.php HTTP/1.1
  Host: www.4chan.org

And server responds with:

  HTTP/1.x 302 Found
  Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:09:56 GMT
  Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) PHP/5.1.1
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.1
  Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
  Pragma: no-cache
  Expires: Mon, 04 Apr 1994 04:04:04 GMT
  Location: http://www.4chan.org
  Connection: close
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Content-Type: text/html

which is a redirect back to the main page. WTF?

If you ask for /b/imgboard.html, this is what happens:

  GET /b/imgboard.html HTTP/1.1
  Host: img.4chan.org

  HTTP/1.x 403 Forbidden
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 18:14:07 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Connection: close
  Pragma: no-cache

Entirely forbidden, and a quite different sort of response from the others in that there is no "Server: Apache/1.3.34" header listed.

I'm on BT - can anyone using NTL share their browser headers please?