Usage of ISP Proxys and DNS resolvers

Tue Apr 22 16:38:15 UTC 2003

* steve at telecomplete.co.uk (Stephen J. Wilcox) [Tue 22 Apr 2003, 18:24 CEST]:
[..]
> Of course if you want to filter certain IPs, why not do it in routing rather 
> than messing with these applications?

The objective probably is content filtering.  Name-based virtual hosting
breaks filtering certain IP addresses.

> Bit of a can of worms if you ask me tho.. censorship, freedom of
> speech, and once you start actively policing you need to keep it up
> else surely your liable if you allow a bit of the type of content
> through that your aiming to stop? (eg if you claim your dialup is
> children safe then allow porn thro that makes you at fault, at least
> being a pure "network operator" keeps you out of this legal mess)

Given:

>> Background:
>> 
>> I'm writing a research paper on government mandated web filtering in 
>> germany (see http://www.politechbot.com/p-03983.html for an overview

I daresay there'll unfortunately be little harm in the government
claiming to operate a Nazi relic-free network but failing at it.

Sane network operators do not wish to filter content.

Back to the subject: In my experience most leased-line customers use the
provider's caching nameservers, virtually all the dialup customers do
(you can't change it in Win9x anyway), and almost nobody uses a web
proxy out of their own will - or if they do, they stop doing it the
minute it has a small outage or they find another excuse to blame it for
a web page not loading correctly (users like to play with their settings).

	-- Niels.