Thursday 2 February 2017

When Microsoft DNS Broke YouTube...

School IT departments have an interesting life.

The Internet is simultaneously incredibly useful for education, but also carries significant risk - and it is often a regulatory or other legal requirement to filter content for minors (or just something you know parents want done, or you believe is ethically desirable in less "controlling" regions of the world).

Google (having deprecated header-based mechanisms, which didn't even work properly) offer a number of very useful DNS-based mechanisms for enforcing control of questionable content for your users, both on YouTube and for Google search.

Of course, this requires some DNS hacks.

And when Microsoft changes the way their DNS hacks work, things break...