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.

I hate to be the one telling you all this, but this is a bigger problem... SOB:s are monitoring traffic between clients and servers. This is only a symptom of the Orwellisation of the entire network. Welcome to the future.

The cheap way to fix it is to write a script that generates /b/:s at reqular intervals. Luckily moving things in unix is pretty easy and generating the link is no harder. You can also use a symbolic link. They can ofcourse ban the whole site, which they probably will given some time.

Which brings me to the real solution: SSL and gateways. By proxying(gateway) the server instead of the client the admin can know the IP:s of the clients. SSL means the ISP has a harder time spying on the packets - even if you keep the encryption pretty trivial like RC4 or DES, I doubt they will ever notice. This will ofcourse cost, but it is preferable to the annihilation of /b/.