Whilst schools have long been required to do something “appropriate” when it comes to online safety, official guidance on the specifics has always been very weak. However, this year the Department for Education has published brand new Filtering and Monitoring Standards for Schools and Colleges.
We were recently contacted by one of our customers to investigate some popups that were appearing on one of their users' workstations.
The user, who was thankfully a member of staff, received a popup notification asking "Do you like big girls?" and featuring some fairly risqué pictures. The customer was obviously concerned that this had not been picked up by their filtering and so asked us to investigate why this had happened.
A number of large internet services use Oracle's Dyn service to host their domain's DNS. This service has had an outage overnight (27 May 2022). This problem was caused by a DNS misconfiguration and, although the underlying problem has now been resolved, it will take some time for the broken DNS records to be cleared from DNS caches around the world.
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
