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"Family Channel" of the Internet?
I had a rather interesting conversation today with a man who works for an
individual who is getting into the ISP business. The guy freely admitted
that he was not a technical kind of guy, and was only repeating what he
had been told. The gist of the conversation: this company was going to
try to position itself as, and I quote, "The Family Channel of the
Internet" by going SurfWatch one better. If you sign up with them as
your ISP, you'll only be able to access sites that they have personally
inspected and approved. He said that they were going to do this, again I
quote, "using the same encryption that Visa and Mastercard use." The
last statment pegged my bogometer, of course.
Now, since I know that I don't know everything about crypto, and I know
even less about the inner workings of IP, I'm going to pose a couple of
questions:
1) Is it technically possible for them to limit access to only approved
IP addresses? If so, how can they do this, and is it possible to get
around these measures.
2) What in the world would SET--I assume that was what he was talking
about--have to do with this?
3) In general, how would you use crypto to ensure that your users only
connected to approved sites, regardless of the platform or browser
software they were using?
I asked the guy to send me some technical details. If I receive them,
I'll share unless he makes me sign an NDA.
Ken