Upon signing in to the account page on Virgin's website, I was redirected to their 'Web Safe' page where there were options for 'Child Safe' which was off by default and 'Virus Safe' which was on by default.
Well, we all pretty much know what Child Safe is, although the wording of the small print at the bottom comes across as slightly sinister IMO:
'Once you interact with your settings...you will be automatically registered...and subjected to the global white list'. So... presumably by 'interact' the actually mean 'switch on', right? And 'global whitelist'? I thought it was meant to be a blacklist?Web Safe: Web Safe is currently available to all new Virgin Media broadband customers signing up from 27th February 2014. Web Safe will not be automatically be set to on. Users can choose and change their settings at any time in My Virgin Media. Once you interact with your settings via the My Virgin Media logged in overview page you will be automatically registered with Web Safe and subject to the global white list. Web Safe does not block all unsafe or inappropriate online content and is intended only to assist parents with keeping their family safe online. Virgin Media accepts no responsibility for personal online activity.
Also of interest is the Virus Filter, which claims to prevent access to scam/phishing sites and viruses on the net (with the help of F-Secure apparently), but doesn't get remotely technical about how exactly that's meant to work. I wonder if it's just a IP/domain blacklist, as some sort of proxy scanning would presumably be impossibly resource-intensive? Not to mention it would be utterly useless with any form of encryption protecting the traffic. Maybe it's useful as some sort of first line protection against some simpler attacks, but I'd like to know more about how it works TBH.