

Virgin Media, why are you manipulating my traffic? - jackpea
https://jackpearce.com/virgin-media-why-are-you-manipulating-my-traffic/

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mysteriousllama
The answer may surprise you.

We all know the UK has internet blacklists managed by various agencies such as
the IWF[1]. These blacklists are highly granular and allow blocking of
individual HTTP resources.

Virgin is intercepting your DNS traffic and putting you through a proxy to
Google. In this way they can block individual pages and images on Google
without denying you access to the entire site.

UK ISPs are being forced by the law to filter certain content. Doing it in the
manner detailed above angers their customers less. It also leads to
interesting situations for site owners. If a site has even a single URL on the
blacklist the entire UK will appear to be coming from a small set of proxy IP
addresses.

[1] [https://www.iwf.org.uk/](https://www.iwf.org.uk/)

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matthewmacleod
This is not correct. There is no law on the books in the UK which compels ISPs
to filter content. There are a couple of court orders in place on some larger
ISPs to block access to a few sites, however.

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mysteriousllama
My apologies. Being unfamiliar with UK law I mistakenly made the assumption
that the blacklisting is legally required.

However it might as well be. According to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation#Blac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation#Blacklist_of_web_pages)
it is in effect on 90%+ of UK ISPs and there is significant pressure on ISPs
to implement this technology.

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matthewmacleod
This is almost certainly a poorly implemented CDN.

They probably shouldn't be doing it at all, though. They're not known for
great skill in maintaining a functioning network.

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deepandmeaning
Does this still occur if you put your virgin media hub into modem mode and use
your own router?

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danpalmer
I'm using the "super" hub in modem mode and can confirm the same results on my
network, even when using OpenDNS/Google DNS, although no DNSCrypt yet.

