Recently a BT account had a service, unrelated to the internet connection, changed on it. A few hours later their internet stopped working with this message:
“You’re seeing this page because BT Parental Controls is active and you are attempting to connect to a DNS server outside of our network. You may have selected a different server in your network settings or installed an application that uses an alternative service. Click here to find out how to fix this”It looks like whatever account change they made “refreshed” their broadband content filtering settings and turned it on. The customer had their broadband router, sensibly, set to use OpenDNS and GoogleDNS.
BT’s unrequested and unexpected filtering switch on then broke their internet. Thanks.
Unhelpfully the “To delete Parent Controls, log in to..” link doesn’t take you to a page with a simple option. It takes you to the main BT account page with tens of boxes, options, bill information etc… you need to scroll to near the bottom and select the Parental Controls section and then, not click the obvious “off” button but in-fact, click the Delete Parental Controls.. (which gives you a warning about re-setting up needing everything putting in again).
Even that isn’t enough. I then found I had to reboot both the router _and_ the computer still had a cached entry, hours later, for the stupid warning message. Why BT have not set a short expiry time on their hijacking is mad.
Technical Notes: All DNS Queries seem to be redirected to 213.120.234.150 which also listens on http://213.120.234.150/
However, This has made me investigate other methods to stop BT or any other provider breaking things like this in the future.. I will be asking the router software developer to add DNSCrypt to their software.
