UK Hosted Filtering Service

Watchdog International New UK Hosted ISP Filtering Service

Watchdog International has launched a cost-effective service to allow ISPs in the UK and Europe to filter web sites containing child sexual abuse material. Powered by NetClean's Whitebox technology, this service can be set up in less than 10 minutes in a typical ISP installation. This allows smaller ISPs to achieve filtering with very little time, effort or cost.
The service uses the list of known child sexual abuse web sites provided by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in the UK.  The UK government as well as a number of charities and internet safety organisations recommend that all ISPs block these sites.  This prevents ISP customers from accidentally or intentionally accessing these illegal sites.  Ninety-five percent of the UK’s residential broadband connections are filtered in this way.  ISPs who block access to these sites are part of the solution to combat the horrific practice of abusing children for the purpose of placing their images on the Internet.

Technology

This filtering service uses a combination of BGP routing, tunneling and URL filtering.

The WhiteBox server hosted by Watchdog in a European data centre is set up as a BGP neighbour to the ISP's BGP router that handles external Internet traffic through an IP tunnel. Thus their network will receive routing information from this server and traffic to the IP addresses that correspond to the URLs on the blacklist will be forwarded to the server for filtering.

No equipment is required on the ISP network.  It is totally fail safe and has no effect on internet performance.  Because no proxying is involved, then the risk of problems such as the Wikipedia blocking incident are eliminated.

For ISP networks with less than 100,000 connections this service is very cost effective.

 

 
 
Costs

The cost of the service is based on the number of customers that the ISP has. The minimum cost is 5000 Euro per annum and can work out to less than 10p per user per month.

Inquire

Send us an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or phone +64-21-366-469 and tell us about your ISP service, the number and type of customers (residential, business…).  
We can provide you with a quote based on the type and number of connections that you have and for any additional requirements such as on-site setup, which is available upon request

Trial the Service First

This is optional and is only available to a limited number of customers.  Typically we require 10 minutes of engineer time for setup. The trial period is up to a maximum of 8 weeks.   Once connected to the service we suggest that it is run in "test mode" for the first month. This logs accesses to sites on the block list without blocking access. We then run the service in blocking mode for the following month providing a comparison for your company and a report back to Watchdog.

We provide a suggested blocking page for your trial. Once you decide to continue with the service you may wish to configure your own blocking page.

To set up a blocking page you will need to create a page on one of your Web servers that we could point to and send us the URL. The Internet Watch Foundation has some guidelines for setting these up and we recommend that ISPs use these.

Watchdog agrees to provide the service to Your Company at no charge for the trial period and to respond in a timely manner to any problems that may occur with the service.
With the filtering already in place the commercial service can commence from the end of the trial period.