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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

That is disgusting. ISP have no job of interfering with any traffic to the end user. Their role is to be just dumb pipes that provide bandwidth.

They should not inspect or monitor their users traffic for any reason short of court order.

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It's not the ISP, it's the router doing the blocking. The ISP is still just being an ISP. This is, from a technical standpoint, no different to configuring a proxy/filtering server yourself. Going off what the articles have said, the ISP themselves are not doing any filtering or monitoring it's all happening on the router.

A distinction without a difference if it isn't configurable by the user.

It is configurable but opt-out.

It is turned on by default on a router that the ISP is capable of upgrading (which is scary enough) and that the ISP forcefully upgrade without notifying the customers.

If the title was - French ISP upgrade routers to block porn it would have been an uproar. It is the same.

So the ISP is not being just and ISP it is assuming the role of a gatekeeper with a device on which they have root access.

Is it that rare for it to be possible for ISPs to update their provided routers? My ISP (O2) has the ability to forcefully update firmware at any time.

It is fairly common for routers to be backdoored like this. Best get your own... or disable it if you feel like it (the O2 one has a telnet interface with available password that can control stuff not on the web interface).

No to update the firmware you have to explicitly reboot the box (router).

This just made me realize that for the majority of people that use their ISP's router, there is effectively an easy backdoor (with a firmware update) into their private LAN. What would stop a government agency (w/ or w/o a subpoena) from requesting the ISP provide access to your local network w/o your permission, accessing resources you otherwise thought were secure? Or really, any malicious entity that can figure out how-to forge the certificate required to do this.

Technical subtleties aside, I'm actually siding with Free here. I have a Freebox myself, and every computer in my household already uses some kind of ad block, but nonetheless I find the move to suit Free pretty well.

As said already, Free is trying to disturb industries, to break the status quo. €60 per month for 512Kbps vs €20 per month for 20Mbps... €60 per month for unlimited calls plus 1GB fair-use data plan vs €20 per month for unlimited calls plus 3GB fair-use data plan...

It's all about disrupting the big players. Lots of people try to access Google's services, I'd argue it's only fair if hugely-profitable Google help ISP's users better access their services.

If 20Mbps for 20EUR is passing as good plan in France, then your disruptor is ripe for becoming the disruptee.

Where do you live and how much do you pay for what connection? I've lived in China, Canada and France and France was by far the cheapest and the fastest (with Free) connection I had in my life.

I live in Bulgaria - here is usual to have 70-100Mbps for 20 euro in the big cities.

That was the price in the early 00s, Free has fiber plans for the same price I think.

These modems are rented out by the ISP and you are more than welcome to install your own modem. They aren't your property and they never were.

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