In a move of spectacular incompetence, BT Broadband has hacked the HTTP data stream to customers in order to pop up a message concerning it’s “Parental Controls”. It’s done this without seeking any permission from the customer, and to add insult to injury, the code they’re injecting is buggy.
The injected popup says “How to protect your family online with BT Parental Controls”, with an “Are you keeping your family safe?” online in order to worry the ignorant. It goes on “Safeguard all the computers, tablets and phones(sic) connected to your Home Hub”. The “Home Hub” is the weak and feeble excuse for a router they send you “free” when you sign up, and which anyone who knows anything about networking will have kept in the shrink wrap.
As you can see from the pop-up above , there is a “No thanks” option, but it simply doesn’t work. Several commonly used websites such as Amazon have become unusable as a result – you just can’t get rid of the BT popup. Even clicking on “Yes please, Set it up” leads you nowhere except to a login to which the credentials are a mystery. Quite possibly because I’m not one of the lusers with a “Home Hub” (or business hub).
And this is on a standard Windoze 7 PC running the current version of the Chrome browser. And no software firewall to blame it on.
I called BT to complain and ask for it to be removed. They don’t even know what I’m talking about, which is odd because there was a spate of this stupidity earlier in the year. Fortunately they stopped before a full roll-out, but you can’t keep a good idiot now – the same idiot has resurrected the idea and rolled it out, possibly wholesale this time. Whoever it was should be publicly named and sacked.
I bet it screws WAI…..