How do ISPs do a page in front of their service? Do they have a DNS blacklist, resolve to their servers first and then let the users pass when accepting? How is this acceptance working and persisted?
And could you not circumvent this by either using another DNS provider?
They can't block a customer-premises recursive resolver. But the SNI is on the TCP connection, not the DNS request; if you have that sort of ISP, they can filter based on SNI.
Why would the location of the DNS resolver matter? If I am running a local DNS resolver, presumably it recurses to an outside DNs server. If my ISP blocks that, I can't use it.
It recurses to the root, and then down the tree. So yes - the final query is a lookup for the name you are targeting, and yes, it goes through your ISP, like all your other traffic.
But it doesn't go through your ISPs DNS infrastructure, it goes direct to the nameserver for the parent domain. And even that doesn't happen if your local resolver has the result cached. The easiest way to block DNS lookups is at the DNS server; using DPI to block DNS lookups is straying into sledgehammer/nut territory.
Or just redirect any outbound port-53 traffic to the ISP's DNS which will pretend to be the server you're talking to while silently applying the filtering.
You're right; that's a very simple firewall rule. But if I can't access a working DNS server over the internet, then I don't have internet service, and whatever kind of provider I have, it's not an "internet service provider".
Each ISP get's to make its own rules, but its the norm where I've lived to have some services blocked. For example, my ISP blocks GRE. At least one in the past I had blocked inbound SMTP & DNS.
In short (and from my own layman understanding as networking is not my strong suit) the packets still go through the ISP and can be analysed - data contents itself not as much with encryption, but they can still often figure out the destination.
Most mobile ISPs in the UK use Procera Networks (now Sandvine) products that do basic deep packet inspection to filter traffic.
You can allocate users to pools and provide contectivity based on the pool, ie allowing you to limit speeds of high usage users or have different filtering lists like this under 18s list.
With these devices you are able to block traffic to specific domains even if SSL is used with relative ease.
As it is done at network level, you can't bypass via different DNS provider, only vpns can bypass
ISPs in the UK mitm TLS connections and use SNI sniffing in order to block banned sites. You can see this is happening by either visiting a banned site and seeing the connection being reset after the client hello is sent or you can check the TCP SYN packet your client sends on 443 vs the TCP packet the server receives. Oddly enough on the O2 network they are not simply sniffing the packets on the wire but doing a full TCP proxy because the TCP syn packet has been heavily rewritten. For example when using an iPhone the order of the SYN flags is very different from Linux. the SYN packet the server receives will look like it came from Linux even though it originated from an iPhone. This is not what you would expect if they were just doing normal NAT.
I misdescribed how you can detect the OS from the TCP packet with the SYN flag set. The order of the TCP options is often different between different OSs.
I said MITM reading the client hello and using SNI sniffing. They are fully rewriting TCP flow not just what NAT does when they adjust the address and ports on the packets. I'm not exactly sure the reason for this. It could just be a technical choice they made. But it does make it easier to flip a switch to do a full MITM that includes decryption using root certificates or using protocol attacks to decrypt traffic.
It doesn't have to be perfect - the blocking thing is only a regulatory compliance and PR thing about how they're "protecting" children. As long as the regulators are happy and the PR is working, nobody internally cares or wants to make it 100% bulletproof (also because making it so will increase the support burden helping users who can't use the bulletproof verification flow despite being over 18).
I've only ever used PAYG, I don't like the idea of a contract for my mobile - I like being able to dump/swap numbers at near zero cost by just going to a corner shop and getting a new SIM.
I also don't believe in registering my mobile number to my identity. Anything to claw back a bit of privacy.
Well you can get a ham radio license, spend $1500 on a basic radio and antenna and accessories, erect it in your garden, get on air and feel the joy of open communications all over the globe.
Or more realistically get blasted by people on contests or doing DX, hear about numerous health problems and waltz into casual racism, homophobia and sexism. The last bastion is CW (morse) where it's too much effort to be an asshole.
Well established UK Wholesale operator Simwood had not one but TWO very good goes at establishing an independent low-level UK network (or at least as low-level as is possible, they wanted to become as close as was humanly possible to a full MNO).
They ended up hitting obstacle after obstacle in the usual protection racket vicious circle between so-called regulator OFCOM and the incumbent operators. IIRC they encountered difficulties at every step, be it obtaining an independent allocation of mobile numbers or anything else.
In the end, they threw in the towel on the mobile project because they refused to be "just another" MVNO reselling someone else's rebranded service.
> Do you have more info on the Simwood attempts? I'd be interested to read more.
Publicly it could be tricky. It's been a while and I'd have to refresh my mind as to what bits were confidential and what was public. Simwood are generally fairly open about talking about most things, but mobile was a somewhat special project for obvious reasons.
There is, however this blog post from back at the time (2015/2016) when they were going for it though https://blog.simwood.com/2015/04/why-simwood-mobile/ ... which contains a couple of hints at what they were attempting and the associated difficulties.
There is also a 2015 presentation lurking on YouTube that includes coverage of, in the presenter's own words, the "bureaucratic, political and just plain incompetent roadblocks that we've experienced, and continue to experience" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN-DXL8fRsU
Thanks for the info - you mentioned a second attempt - is there any public info about it? I remember their first offering which was based on a company called Limitless which ended up going into administration, but I'm not aware of any other attempts?
This was certainly true for many years with their awful 4G network. But their 5G network is excellent if you are in an area with good coverage.
I’ve regularly seen over 800 Mbps in London, consistently faster than any of the other networks.
(On the other hand, I wouldn’t pick Three if you value good and consistent coverage. But if you are using it from a fixed location with a good 5G signal, it’s great)
Unfortunately phone manufacturers (even Apple) are in bed with the carriers and still don't provide VoIP as a first-class option in 2022. VoIP is not as well integrated into the OS as normal cellular calls are, and you can't verify a VoIP number as outgoing number for iMessage/FaceTime either.
Since LTE and IMS, all phones internally have a built-in SIP client already. If you're on LTE or using Wi-Fi calling, you're using SIP under the hood. There is no reason that client can't be opened to allow people to add arbitrary SIP accounts if it wasn't to protect the carriers' monopolies.
Oh, that kind of phone. Apple doesn't make "phones"; they make mobile devices.
We were speaking of fixed-location phone services. You don't need a mobile device to do fixed-location telephony; my VOIP-phone is made by Gigaset. It doesn't do iMessage/Face-whatsit, but neither do I.
I'm usually at home; I wouldn't need a mobile device, except that some commercial and government services refuse to believe I exist unless I can spit out a mobile number. I don't carry my device with me; it lives on my desk at home.
In terms of standard voice telephony, my Gigaset phone works better (and is much cheaper to use) than my mobile device. And the battery never goes flat.
The problem with a non-iMessage/FaceTime capable phone is that you sacrifice confidentiality and quality. Unless both sides are a good VoIP provider that interconnects with others over IP (which would ideally pass through RTP as-is and allow both sides to negotiate a good codec like Opus) - which is unlikely among the non-technical crowd - you're stuck with a fairly narrowband codec, where as FaceTime is something everyone has (and Android has its own options, including cross-platform ones).
> "If you're in a fixed location, you don't need to use a mobile network. Get wired internet connectivity"
Not always the best option in the UK.
5G mobile broadband is often both faster and cheaper than old-fashioned DSL, which is still all that's available in some areas/buildings. Even when you can get fibre to your home, it's often significantly more expensive and requires 12+ months contract commitment etc. Unlimited 5G data, on the other hand, can be got for around £20/month with no contract.
5G also tends to be more reliable. There’s a lot of redundancy built in to mobile networks that you don’t get with fibre.
Is that so? I didn't know. But I require internet connectivity anyway; being in a fixed location, I use a fixed connection. So I have FTTC. My VOIP-phone plugs into my router, so all I pay for is a local number, and maybe a local POTS connection at the other end. 5G may be cheap, but it's not as cheap as not buying 5G.
I've been in many cities. I live in Manchester and go to the city centre very regularly (in fact, used to work smack bang in the middle). London, Berlin, Barcelona, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, etc etc etc I haven't ever had an issue making a phone call
I picked three because they had free EU data roaming before it was the law. Now it is not the law anymore it seems that they no longer provide it to new customers (or those that made the mistake to "upgrade"), but so far I have been grandfathered in. I'll switch the moment is no longer the case.
Three is fine. Been with them for years. I'm grandfathered into an old plan with enough data for my needs, tethering, unlimited calls and texts and free global roaming.
I only ever have signal problems in places the other networks also have problems.
IMO it's dependent on your location as network performance can vary wildly. Might be worth getting a PAYG SIM from EE and Vodafone/O2 (they share networks) to test speed, signal strength etc.
If you are on a contract I would wait until next April when the yearly inflaton price hikes are announced.
FWIW I am paying Vodafone £7 pcm after cashback for 200 GB 5G data, unlimited minutes and texts.
What are your requirements? I'd suggest grabbing a pre-paid SIM from each of the major networks and see which gives you the best signal and speeds in the locations you frequent, but this may seem excessive to most.
I signed up to a 2 year 5G deal with EE shortly before moving out of London, now the signal and speed are junk and I'm stuck in a 2 year deal.
Given the absurd amount our "contracted" price increases by each year (my monthly payment went up ~15% on a SIM-only plan thanks to RPI or whatever excuse they use) I'd be tempted to go with someone like GiffGaff or similar next (they're an MVNO on O2 network) and just get monthly goody bags, then you can ditch them the minute you've had enough and want to get better service/signal/data etc.
GiffGaff have been great. I've used them for years with basically 0 faults. not encounter any stupid policies or reasons to need to contact support everything is just so easy. signal could be a bit better in small british towns (the city is fine, 5g is fast when it works) but not so bad that i'd ever consider switching away + they increased my data allowance twice without increasing the price.
did a brief stint with vodafone, as i got staff discount. it was shit. not because of the actual phone service but because it's so difficult to do anything admin related with them and if you think you'll just go into a store to do admin think again. the stores can't do anything other that sell you stuff. STAY AWAY
I've been paying for Giff Gaff for two family members for several years so I've been a customer indirectly. It's been nice to keep getting emails from them saying they're increasing allowances without changing the price and I've not had any complaints about the signal and service from the family.
Vodafone are on my blacklist, I had a few bad experiences with them years ago, over a decade ago now I think about it, and vowed to never use them again.
Does anyone else keep a personal blacklist of companies you won't buy from / do business with? I feel like I should write it down some day.
O2 is the only provider that still has reasonable plans with global roaming included, if that's important to you.
Grab a PAYG SIM card and test out each provider's network before you go through the pain of porting. We switched and found the signal to be literally unusable near our house, so we're back on Three. And O2 incorrectly charged us a £200 early termination fee when we switched away. Took a few months of hassling to get that resolved.
If you're going to get SIMs for testing make sure you get them via the website, not in store. You have an automatic right of return for 14 days for things bought online. Something like that.
giffgaff. SIM only, reasonable prices, works well, never had any coverage issues anywhere other than remote bits of the peak district. Been with them for 5 years now. It's basically O2 without the risk of being upsold to constantly or ripped off.
Recently I used their 100G option as my main internet connection for a couple of months because OpenReach ballsed up a house move. Was completely usable all day.
If you are a light user (in the UK) then 1p Mobile is excellent value. I've no links with them (apart from being a happy customer). They use the EE network, so coverage is good. Costs are 1p/minute calls, 1p/text message, and 1p/MB data, and you must top up by at least £10 every 120 days. Unused credits rollover to the next period.
They have also introduced a newer scheme: £36 per year for unlimited talk and texts, and up to 250MB data/month. Again, I think that unused credit rolls over (i haven't used this option, so check the details).
If you use a fair bit of social media, Voxi is not a bad shout - its Vodafone network - and they seem to bump up the data allowance at random points (So they double it for the same price kinda thing) as well as the unlimited social use (on certain sites)
I want to see the shock on the faces of the people who support legislation like this for the sake of the children.
Of course this was going to happen. If it gets enough blowback there will be a statement claiming this was a mistake. But people warned everyone, scope creep is real, if you allow governments to restrict access for one reason they'll use it to restrict access for any and every reason. This starts with pornography, then it will be anonymous services to get around the anonymity, eventually it will be "please verify your identity to access internet services".
Can't you just verify your age and be done? I don't see the issue, plenty of things end up being blocked, so it seems like this is just something you'd do anyway, it's no big deal.
Uhm.....you don't? With my provider here in UK(GiffGaff) I had to send them the digits from my passport to have "adult" content unlocked on my sim, it's all blocked by default otherwise. There are several other types of ID you can use for this.
There's at least one standard in the works about such a thing (blind signing) - https://privacypass.github.io/. IIRC there's also an EU proposal for such a thing.
Basically you submit your ID to a service (could even be a local app with the biometric IDs we have in the EU, which have NFC) which validates your age on request in a "blind" manner (the service doesn't know what they're validating it for, the what for doesn't know anything beside an "it's OK, they're 18+).
This doesn't give them any information they didn't already know, phone operators in the UK require at least one form of ID for you to open an account. They already have your details on record, this is just a formality - recording your consent to opt-in. The Snooper's Charter bill is far more dangerous.
On the flip side, in the UK a mobile phone bill can also used as proof of identity in many cases.
> This doesn't give them any information they didn't already know, phone operators in the UK require at least one form of ID for you to open an account.
That's not true for many prepaid/PAYG users in the UK. Anyone can still walk into a mobile store or supermarket and buy a PAYG SIM card, which isn't the case in many other European countries.
Granted, those still don't support the more unusual features such as eSIM and companion smartwatches, but they're still a valuable choice to have.
Exactly this. I mean it starts with one thing, but in the end we will only be able to use the internet if we link your online identity to our passports and gov will know literally every site we've ever visited.
....you do realize that's already the reality of living in the UK, right? Your provider has to verify you are over 18 to enable "adult" content on your connection, so your mobile operator has to see some ID or you need to have a valid DD linked to a bank account, and the Snoopers Charter made it so that all operators in this country have to keep your entire browsing history for a full year, and it can be accessed by 17 different government agencies without a warrant.
I'm not defending it - I'm just saying that UK is already a surveilance state and the population at large really doesn't care, at least I have never met anything other than "meh" when I brought it up.
No you wouldn't. As far as I know VPNs aren't blocked even with the "adult content" filter enabled on your account. So yes you can bypass it if you know what you're doing.
The Online Safety Bill, going through Parliament, is very clear that is not sufficient.
Every site on the internet will need to independently take your credit card details or some quack like face recognition app, or make it's content safe for thirteen year olds.
And it will achieve nothing, but be a disaster. But this is real. This is before Parliament, right now, and the only opposition is that it's not draconian enough.
Absolutely. And pretty much no one in mainstream media is talking about it, other than some very surface level articles about how it will "finally" make social media companies responsible for the less savoury content. Which it will, sure, but at an incredible price.
The UK has always had this prison camp mentality. The mummified body of the Jeremy Bentham is literally enshrined in the London School of Economics and the government operates a panopticon whose primary purpose is making sure that everyone affirms that Britain is great despite being literally cold and hungry.
Opinion columnists fulminate about injustice but studiously avoid suggesting what anyone should do about it; hence the very British style of saying 'Authorities must do X Y Z' which lets their readers enjoy a good harrumph at the start of the day and then quietly return to helpless impotence. In the evening there are TV shows that let everyone enjoy a good larf at their rulers and then shiver themselves to sleep under the blankets.
I have to say this reads like satire. It's completely surreal.
I'm starting to see the wisdom of the founding fathers regarding the second amendment & tyrannical rulers. They were under British rule back then. Perhaps the years made us forget something they knew.
The leaders who make these decisions don’t even have to face up to any real criticism for the inconvenience they cause - they can palm everyone off on some faceless goon running a customer service chatbot as in the example above.
That is correct. Still, it's enough to establish that you(linked with your driving licence/passport) have visited pornhub 37 times a day on the 12th of December. They dont' store exactly what you were doing, but obviously it's not like the public cares about that. And pornhub is a very mild example, let's say a website you visited pulled some resource from 4chan(website known to harbour terrorists and pedophiles! /s) or somewhere that sounds like it's a terrorist organisation. Or even hacker news(are you a hacker? that's illegal you know). You have no control over your DNS lookups(by default) so you don't actually know what gets written in those logs, nor have any way to inspect them.
And specifically because the logs are so crap and don't actually contain any information beyond the domain name, they can be used to infer pretty much anything the prosecutors might want to see. Otherwise, why even keep them?
I tried to speak to my (then) local MP about this and he was fucking useless because he refused to discuss the topic.
He also supports fox hunting, deporting war heroes who immigrated here legally, benefits cuts for the disabled and a whole plethora of other schemes that harm the vulnerable.
Normally I’d say dicks like that would be voted out but the Tories put him in a safe seat where people will vote Conservative regardless of who is the MP.
An example of how safe a seat this is, the previous MP sent multiple pictures of his cock to female reporters before he was eventually replaced.
I hate U.K. politics. It’s rigged to support a monopoly of power.
It's so telling that politicians that feel free to intimidate others with unwanted dick picks are supporting internet filtering for the general population.
It seems pretty natural to me. Government is dominated by people who want power and people who want power pretty much always want more power.
It's only natural that they don't see themselves as the threat. To them the threat is criminals/terrorists, etc. and sacrificing our civil liberties would typically let them catch one or two more of those.
I can easily agree that the majority want power, sometimes even to do good.
The second point, that they don't see themselves as the threat, assigns them with too much of a lack of self-awareness. I believe many in the current ruling party do see themselves as a threat but they hate the woke/immigrants/workers so they're fine with it.
Yes, this is it. Things like this are almost never due to some inside conspiracy, but rather result from systemic incentives applied to different actors over time. Absent laws that forbid security bureaus from being too cautious, they will inevitably tend in that direction, precisely because the careers of the actors involved depend on it.
Are you sure? Everything from the Snowden disclosures tell us otherwise. Take the US for instance, in which the government ramped up its surveillance capabilities in ways they knew were illegal. They had to rely on secret interpretation of the law to "justify" their actions, an interpretation that even the author of the law was reportedly not aware of. That's no accident. Instead, it was directed by the highest ranks of government who knew very well what they were getting into.
Similar story for other countries as well, apart from totalitarian regimes that does the same thing openly.
If your directive is to protect the public, the best way is to know what everyone is doing at anytime. Think of overprotective parents and their kids. A "the road to hell is paved in good intentions" kind of deal.
I'm talking about the everyday people. Mothers that don't think past "I don't want my kids seeing porn but I don't want to raise them myself so the government must do something about it." The politicians and the loudest proponents, they know what they're up to.
Similar things happened in Russia. Whole traffic control started as “save children” story. Then government expanded it to block any business or political view outside of their control.
I had a Three SIM in my old chromebook for internet browsing while staying in hotels without free WiFi.
It was blocking regular US news sites as "adult content". Supposedly you could enter your driving license number (which also encodes your date of birth) in order to get the restriction lifted.
I'm not surprised, back when I was using them at uni they turned off my mobile data without warning.
Called them multiple times, no-one would tell me why. Went to a Three shop and they told me I'd been disconncted for "security" because I'd been away from the address on my account too long!
Plus their broken app and abysmal coverage in London...
It's widely known that UK ISPs and mobile networks put filtering in place by default. They did this to avoid the government passing a law to make it mandatory.
This often blocks VPNs and sites that may or may not be used to access adult content.
There is always a way to remove the block, typically with credit card/ID verification of some sort.
Three might be blocking some things that other networks aren't, but I imagine you'll find the other networks block some things that Three doesn't.
Wait what? They added a system to filter traffic, to avoid having the government make it mandatory to have a system for filtering traffic? That seems silly.
There are also PR reasons. The general public unfortunately believes that this is a good thing and is indeed "protecting" children. IMO it would've happened regardless of regulatory reasons.
This happens with regulations all the time. For example Apple allowing sideloading of apps on their phones in their own terms before the European regulators tell them how to do it
Say you use ThreeUK and you decide you want an email account. Which are you going to use, Tutanota which requires you to verify your age or any other provider which doesn't?
I nearly moved back to Three recently, but in the end opted not to, which seems lucky in light of this.
This is somewhat similar to the reason I left them back in 2009. They were surreptitiously redirecting me to a different version of Hotmail by fiddling with DNS records. This in turn broke Hotmail on my early HTC phone (unless I was connecting over WiFi as that would bypass their bad DNS).
It may be little better even now, but back in those dark days the prospect of getting support to recognise what this even meant was nigh on impossible - at the point of cancelling my contact to leave them as a supplier, they interjected that they could offer the same services at £4 a month (insanely cheap) which totally missed the point: what good is a service no matter how cheap, if it's fundamentally unusable!
It's a shame, because in many other respects Three are one of the more differentiated suppliers here and they seem to offer more useful services with fewer gimmicks than the others in the UK.
UK's internet seems to be broken to the core for a long while now. How come it came so far? People don't care? How come UK is so progressive in the censoring?
We’re very authoritarian in the sense of being submissive to power and liking parties that appear to be strong leaders, in England at least.
We’re also greatly uneducated in critical thinking, so we’re easily swayed.
Also very prudish.
We love the party which advertises it’s tough on crime (emphasis on advertises) - the conservatives. They’ve been in power the majority of the time since WW2.
Every government would like this, but I think the issue in the UK is that there's legitimately a lot of public support for "protecting" the children in a way that other countries don't have - so while every government would want this, UK succeeds where as most others don't (yet?) because commercial interests override it (this kind of filtering at scale is not cheap, so ISPs would rather not do it unless they are either forced to or get good PR from it).
Is this just the opt out age restriction thing that all ISPs in the UK have? I don't agree with it, but it's not really censorship on the level that is being claimed
There's no evidence to believe this block is intentional and designed to prevent access to encrypted services, as opposed to a false-positive from whatever provider they're buying the "adult domains" list.
If it was an attempt to ban encryption they'd block much more.
Yes, O2 has the same policy - they block a chunk of the internet unless you demonstrate that you’re over 18 & get the block lifted.
I don’t know whether the government leant informally on the mobile providers to do this or whether it’s legally required for them to do so if they don’t know that a user is 18+.
I do using a pay-as-you-go SIM card from three. They enabled adult content filter by default. The only way to disable it is have a chat with online customer service and submit your ID to prove you are an adult.
the title is misleading, it makes it sound like tutanota had an age restriction and three blocked them because of that, but instead three put it behind an age gate.
I went to check my Tutanota email and found it was deleted. I haven’t logged into it maybe 2 years. They may have notices and warnings about this, but I’m not too confident in recommending them to others.
Checked Protonmail which I made around the same time and also didn’t log into for about 2 years, and still had my account and emails. Same with that one meme email provider that starts with a C lol (I have a firemail.cc address), and I’m more surprised at them still being around and maintaining my account.
Ah the good old days, when 10 year olds had full time jobs in the 1800's UK factories and spent their wages on gin unless parents beat it out of them for their gin. So laws came, school until 14 in UK, later 16, same in usa etc. No liquor to kids under 21 or 18 as geography dictates.
So the internet wants similar age rules for age 13 or other age adult stuff and it progresses to that end. We see nothing wrong with kids 'carded' at bars to make sure they are 18 or 21? If valid age rules are set, how do we enforce them? Are we just to allow fully unfettered access to anyone who can hit a key?
Some kids are smarter at 13 than others at 21 - should we have a mental competence test? Should we apply that to voter rules in elections.
Obviously young kids of 12 want to pass as 18 to enjoy the pr0n that 18 years olds access - do we lose by short circuiting maturation?
Island cultures often schooled young boys/girls in sex by older opposite sex partners, which Columbus's sailors found delightful as they were inundated by nubile young women who gave sex for pins/needles/buttons - also VD was passed over in payment, both ways.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadAnd could you not circumvent this by either using another DNS provider?
Generally it’s a good idea to disable ISP content blocking if you can, because they can cause all kinds of problems (slowdowns, false positives).
But it doesn't go through your ISPs DNS infrastructure, it goes direct to the nameserver for the parent domain. And even that doesn't happen if your local resolver has the result cached. The easiest way to block DNS lookups is at the DNS server; using DPI to block DNS lookups is straying into sledgehammer/nut territory.
You can allocate users to pools and provide contectivity based on the pool, ie allowing you to limit speeds of high usage users or have different filtering lists like this under 18s list.
With these devices you are able to block traffic to specific domains even if SSL is used with relative ease.
As it is done at network level, you can't bypass via different DNS provider, only vpns can bypass
Which is taking forever to be standardized.
They do not. As jonas-w points out, they would need a root certificate, which they don't have.
Much of the value of TLS is protection against untrustworthy ISPs.
You have to go into a 3 store to get adult content unlocked by presenting ID.
It is extremely annoying.
[0] http://ask3.three.co.uk/srvs/cgi-bin/webisapi.dll/,/?new,kb=...
Vodafone also require you to opt-in to 18+ content.
I use SIMs for both (30-day contract with 3).
I also don't believe in registering my mobile number to my identity. Anything to claw back a bit of privacy.
Or more realistically get blasted by people on contests or doing DX, hear about numerous health problems and waltz into casual racism, homophobia and sexism. The last bastion is CW (morse) where it's too much effort to be an asshole.
Well established UK Wholesale operator Simwood had not one but TWO very good goes at establishing an independent low-level UK network (or at least as low-level as is possible, they wanted to become as close as was humanly possible to a full MNO).
They ended up hitting obstacle after obstacle in the usual protection racket vicious circle between so-called regulator OFCOM and the incumbent operators. IIRC they encountered difficulties at every step, be it obtaining an independent allocation of mobile numbers or anything else.
In the end, they threw in the towel on the mobile project because they refused to be "just another" MVNO reselling someone else's rebranded service.
Publicly it could be tricky. It's been a while and I'd have to refresh my mind as to what bits were confidential and what was public. Simwood are generally fairly open about talking about most things, but mobile was a somewhat special project for obvious reasons.
There is, however this blog post from back at the time (2015/2016) when they were going for it though https://blog.simwood.com/2015/04/why-simwood-mobile/ ... which contains a couple of hints at what they were attempting and the associated difficulties.
There is also a 2015 presentation lurking on YouTube that includes coverage of, in the presenter's own words, the "bureaucratic, political and just plain incompetent roadblocks that we've experienced, and continue to experience" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN-DXL8fRsU
I’ve regularly seen over 800 Mbps in London, consistently faster than any of the other networks.
(On the other hand, I wouldn’t pick Three if you value good and consistent coverage. But if you are using it from a fixed location with a good 5G signal, it’s great)
I have complaints about Three but coverage is not really one of them.
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14072973814
Oh, that kind of phone. Apple doesn't make "phones"; they make mobile devices.
We were speaking of fixed-location phone services. You don't need a mobile device to do fixed-location telephony; my VOIP-phone is made by Gigaset. It doesn't do iMessage/Face-whatsit, but neither do I.
I'm usually at home; I wouldn't need a mobile device, except that some commercial and government services refuse to believe I exist unless I can spit out a mobile number. I don't carry my device with me; it lives on my desk at home.
In terms of standard voice telephony, my Gigaset phone works better (and is much cheaper to use) than my mobile device. And the battery never goes flat.
Not always the best option in the UK.
5G mobile broadband is often both faster and cheaper than old-fashioned DSL, which is still all that's available in some areas/buildings. Even when you can get fibre to your home, it's often significantly more expensive and requires 12+ months contract commitment etc. Unlimited 5G data, on the other hand, can be got for around £20/month with no contract.
5G also tends to be more reliable. There’s a lot of redundancy built in to mobile networks that you don’t get with fibre.
Is that so? I didn't know. But I require internet connectivity anyway; being in a fixed location, I use a fixed connection. So I have FTTC. My VOIP-phone plugs into my router, so all I pay for is a local number, and maybe a local POTS connection at the other end. 5G may be cheap, but it's not as cheap as not buying 5G.
> if you are in an area with good coverage
In my experience, this is a huge caveat.
As long as you don't want to use Tutanota.
I only ever have signal problems in places the other networks also have problems.
If you are on a contract I would wait until next April when the yearly inflaton price hikes are announced.
FWIW I am paying Vodafone £7 pcm after cashback for 200 GB 5G data, unlimited minutes and texts.
https://pedroc.co.uk/content/vodafone-o2-beacon-1-and-2
In London, the network sharing agreement was unwound due to capacity issues.
I signed up to a 2 year 5G deal with EE shortly before moving out of London, now the signal and speed are junk and I'm stuck in a 2 year deal.
Given the absurd amount our "contracted" price increases by each year (my monthly payment went up ~15% on a SIM-only plan thanks to RPI or whatever excuse they use) I'd be tempted to go with someone like GiffGaff or similar next (they're an MVNO on O2 network) and just get monthly goody bags, then you can ditch them the minute you've had enough and want to get better service/signal/data etc.
Vodafone are on my blacklist, I had a few bad experiences with them years ago, over a decade ago now I think about it, and vowed to never use them again.
Does anyone else keep a personal blacklist of companies you won't buy from / do business with? I feel like I should write it down some day.
Grab a PAYG SIM card and test out each provider's network before you go through the pain of porting. We switched and found the signal to be literally unusable near our house, so we're back on Three. And O2 incorrectly charged us a £200 early termination fee when we switched away. Took a few months of hassling to get that resolved.
Recently I used their 100G option as my main internet connection for a couple of months because OpenReach ballsed up a house move. Was completely usable all day.
Have used it for about 10 months and been very happy with it!
(Like the parent, no links with them, and very light user.)
Of course this was going to happen. If it gets enough blowback there will be a statement claiming this was a mistake. But people warned everyone, scope creep is real, if you allow governments to restrict access for one reason they'll use it to restrict access for any and every reason. This starts with pornography, then it will be anonymous services to get around the anonymity, eventually it will be "please verify your identity to access internet services".
So let's block even more and turn country into China
And how, exactly, would you propose to do that in a way which is privacy-preserving?
Basically you submit your ID to a service (could even be a local app with the biometric IDs we have in the EU, which have NFC) which validates your age on request in a "blind" manner (the service doesn't know what they're validating it for, the what for doesn't know anything beside an "it's OK, they're 18+).
On the flip side, in the UK a mobile phone bill can also used as proof of identity in many cases.
That's not true for many prepaid/PAYG users in the UK. Anyone can still walk into a mobile store or supermarket and buy a PAYG SIM card, which isn't the case in many other European countries.
Granted, those still don't support the more unusual features such as eSIM and companion smartwatches, but they're still a valuable choice to have.
I'm not defending it - I'm just saying that UK is already a surveilance state and the population at large really doesn't care, at least I have never met anything other than "meh" when I brought it up.
Every site on the internet will need to independently take your credit card details or some quack like face recognition app, or make it's content safe for thirteen year olds.
And it will achieve nothing, but be a disaster. But this is real. This is before Parliament, right now, and the only opposition is that it's not draconian enough.
> how it will "finally" make social media companies responsible for the less savoury content
Once again, blaming the evil foreign tech companies.
the bbc independent as per its charter, and it is covering thus piece of legislation. but it only reports, doesn’t express an opinion.
the rest of press love it thou. so does the public, the various ngos, all political parties etc.
> Once again, blaming the evil foreign tech companies.
i don’t know if you’ve followed the news but, politically, europe as a whole is firmly against US tech companies.
Opinion columnists fulminate about injustice but studiously avoid suggesting what anyone should do about it; hence the very British style of saying 'Authorities must do X Y Z' which lets their readers enjoy a good harrumph at the start of the day and then quietly return to helpless impotence. In the evening there are TV shows that let everyone enjoy a good larf at their rulers and then shiver themselves to sleep under the blankets.
I'm starting to see the wisdom of the founding fathers regarding the second amendment & tyrannical rulers. They were under British rule back then. Perhaps the years made us forget something they knew.
I wouldn't think they have access to your actual URLs as this is HTTPS, only the domain name. Or am I missing something.
And specifically because the logs are so crap and don't actually contain any information beyond the domain name, they can be used to infer pretty much anything the prosecutors might want to see. Otherwise, why even keep them?
partly false. it’s only DNS and can be very easily bypassed.
He also supports fox hunting, deporting war heroes who immigrated here legally, benefits cuts for the disabled and a whole plethora of other schemes that harm the vulnerable.
Normally I’d say dicks like that would be voted out but the Tories put him in a safe seat where people will vote Conservative regardless of who is the MP.
An example of how safe a seat this is, the previous MP sent multiple pictures of his cock to female reporters before he was eventually replaced.
I hate U.K. politics. It’s rigged to support a monopoly of power.
It's only natural that they don't see themselves as the threat. To them the threat is criminals/terrorists, etc. and sacrificing our civil liberties would typically let them catch one or two more of those.
The second point, that they don't see themselves as the threat, assigns them with too much of a lack of self-awareness. I believe many in the current ruling party do see themselves as a threat but they hate the woke/immigrants/workers so they're fine with it.
And most upper management, CEOs and billionaires never wanted power but aquired it by accident?
Similar story for other countries as well, apart from totalitarian regimes that does the same thing openly.
If your directive is to protect the public, the best way is to know what everyone is doing at anytime. Think of overprotective parents and their kids. A "the road to hell is paved in good intentions" kind of deal.
There would be no shock. They intended this.
It was blocking regular US news sites as "adult content". Supposedly you could enter your driving license number (which also encodes your date of birth) in order to get the restriction lifted.
It never worked.
I gave up using Three.
Three is named (joint) worst network in the UK by the official telecoms regulator (part of the UK government).
It's not a case of "who is the best" but rather "who is currently the least worst"
Called them multiple times, no-one would tell me why. Went to a Three shop and they told me I'd been disconncted for "security" because I'd been away from the address on my account too long!
Plus their broken app and abysmal coverage in London...
It's widely known that UK ISPs and mobile networks put filtering in place by default. They did this to avoid the government passing a law to make it mandatory.
This often blocks VPNs and sites that may or may not be used to access adult content.
There is always a way to remove the block, typically with credit card/ID verification of some sort.
Three might be blocking some things that other networks aren't, but I imagine you'll find the other networks block some things that Three doesn't.
This is somewhat similar to the reason I left them back in 2009. They were surreptitiously redirecting me to a different version of Hotmail by fiddling with DNS records. This in turn broke Hotmail on my early HTC phone (unless I was connecting over WiFi as that would bypass their bad DNS).
It may be little better even now, but back in those dark days the prospect of getting support to recognise what this even meant was nigh on impossible - at the point of cancelling my contact to leave them as a supplier, they interjected that they could offer the same services at £4 a month (insanely cheap) which totally missed the point: what good is a service no matter how cheap, if it's fundamentally unusable!
It's a shame, because in many other respects Three are one of the more differentiated suppliers here and they seem to offer more useful services with fewer gimmicks than the others in the UK.
We’re also greatly uneducated in critical thinking, so we’re easily swayed.
Also very prudish.
We love the party which advertises it’s tough on crime (emphasis on advertises) - the conservatives. They’ve been in power the majority of the time since WW2.
If it was an attempt to ban encryption they'd block much more.
I would worry about troublesome newspapers and protestor sites being "accidentally" included next.
I'm with a carrier that runs on the Vodafone network. I can't log into my Vodafone settings to disable their parental locks.
Luckily I use a VPN and their lock is more reasonable than Three apparently. But still a nuisance
I went to the nearest branch and loudly proclaimed I was there to "to verify my age because I want to watch porn in my phone".
Absolutely dumb policy - probably enforced by the govt.
I don’t know whether the government leant informally on the mobile providers to do this or whether it’s legally required for them to do so if they don’t know that a user is 18+.
Checked Protonmail which I made around the same time and also didn’t log into for about 2 years, and still had my account and emails. Same with that one meme email provider that starts with a C lol (I have a firemail.cc address), and I’m more surprised at them still being around and maintaining my account.