On Friday 29th of April, The Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) (No. 9) Regulations 2022 SI 2022/477 came into force, requiring all UK providers of internet access services to take reasonable steps to impose restrictions of internet services to, or for the benefit of, persons designated by the Secretary of State.
Schools have a statutory obligation to do "appropriate filtering and monitoring" of their internet traffic in order to protect their children from online harms. There are several requirements of filtering systems laid down by the UK Safer Internet Centre which are relevant to this discussion - the filters must:
We are very proud to have been awarded Corporate Vision Magazine's Best Online Safety Specialists Technology Innovator Award.
Opendium would like to provide reassurance to our customers regarding our ability to continue to operate during the ongoing Coronovirus pandemic. To this end, please read this statement from the directors outlining the steps we are taking to maintain operations. This statement is also available in PDF format.
Opendium has submitted the document below as a proposal for discussion at the UK Internet Governance Forum 2020.
The Birmingham Grid for Learning, Rotherham Schools Connect, Worcestershire County Council and Essex County Council have all announced that they will no longer be providing internet connectivity and filtering to schools after the end of March 2020. These announcements prompted us to consider how we can best support those schools who are now looking for a replacement service.
Since 2005, Opendium has been helping schools across the UK to protect children. The most obvious part of our work is to protect children from the internet's many dangers whilst safeguarding and promoting the huge number of ways that the internet can be used for their benefit. Beyond that, people live much of their lives online these days and our products are perfectly placed to spo
We have submitted a consultation response, which is published below, to the Government's recent Online Harms whitepaper. The response answers several of the consultation questions, but also aims to provide some insight into the work we do and the problems we face helping schools to safeguard the children who are under their care.
We have recently rolled out some updates to our default web proxy overrides, which are explained in this blog article.
Both Web Gateway and UTM provide the same overrides system under the Web Proxy -> Filter Override Editor and Web Proxy -> Filter Overrides & Walled Garden pages. The overrides allow parts of the system's functionality to be disabled for requests to certain types of content. Overrides are usually used for the following purposes:
We recently attended a conference held by the Police Service's Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU). The conference was intended to provide an opportunity for a wide variety of organisations involved in online safety to get together and discuss topical issues. There were delegates from online safety suppliers, such as ourselves, as well as from the Home Office, SO15 Counter Terrorism Command, CTIRU, internet service providers, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and the UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC) to name a few.
