The Great Firewall of Britain

[Taith]

The Great Firewall of Britain has hit the big leagues by appearing on boingboing this morning:

Britain's "Great Firewall" set to restrict access to Wikipedia

How the Great Firewall of Britain works

And also an article on the Register.

This is the first time this has really popped up on my radar. I was feeling a bit smug about not being behind the one they're creating back home in Australia, but it appears I may be behind one after all.

My specific ISP, Pipex, isn't mentioned, but in the two years I've been a Pipex customer they've gone through several changes of ownership and infrastructure, so really I could be affected.

A few weeks ago I replaced my D-Link wireless router with a Belkin one (my brother had it spare). About a week ago, I noticed intermittent though frequent problems with Google image searches and Youtube. Google images hardly ever load, and Youtube thumbnail pics also tend not to load. This is both when I'm on Youtube, or when I'm looking at a top 20 clip site. Occasionally it works fine. Often it doesn't.

So while I've been wondering if it's the Belkin router (hell, maybe I just need to upgrade the firmware) I'm now wondering if my ISP is trying to filter my content. Nothing else I do seems to be affected, mainly it's just these two things.

This may also have been the real cause of what I thought were my antivirus problems.

Is anyone else more deeply into this than I am?


EDIT: It' occurs to me I should add this is when doing any kind of Google image search, not a search for the topics mentioned in those linked articles.

[Rubino]

It can be one of many things causing the problem.
Make sure the software on your machine is current (update Windows and firefox).

Often Browsers will load images using separate connections and sometimes routers can't handle many connections being opened at once.
Modern routers also can do a prioritization of what is fetched - which can make some things slow down - but you'd need somebody to look at the settings to see if and what could be improved.  Updating the firmware is a good idea.

Are you running Vista or XP?

Vista comes with a new approach to networking that responds better to general network congestion - the flip side is that websites can respond slower to XP users as more and more visitors are Vista based. 

Many ISP use something called traffic shaping - which allows some types of traffic to have a higher priority than others - web surfing often comes down the list.
You could also be behind a proxy (some ISP's use something called an anonymous proxy) to reduce bandwidth further up the pipe.  There are some websites that tell you if you're behind one or not.  You can also try opening the page using HTTPs - which while slower to start - will bypass the proxy (SSL can't be proxied without compromising the security of the connection).

[Baptiste]

Thanks for bringing this up, I hadn't heard about this before. It's bullcrap like this and Phorm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm that made me subscribe to a proxy service so now I can choose for my surfing to be anonymised through a number of international proxies.

[Rubino]

Chained anon proxies is a good idea if you're worried about your privacy - but the first link needs to be in the UK.