Sky parental controls break jquery website

The Sky parental controls system recommends that customers leaving on the phishing and malware protection even if disabling all the other elements, but as of 22:30 on Sunday 26th January 2014 this is leading to all HTTP access to code.jquery.com being blocked for Sky customers with the parental controls returning an access denied page.

code.jquery.com may not sound like a mainstream website, as it is really aimed at web and javascript developers but it is pretty common for websites to link to the released javascript (.js) files for jquery and a host of other tools on jquery.com as the site is a CDN for these files, the result being that it is possible many sites may not be performing as expected today.

The advice appears to be for Sky customers to log into their web account, and in the Sky Broadband Shield section turn off the Phishing/Malware filter, or alternatively disable the shield completely.

We will update as and when we hear of any changes and why code.jquery.com has been blocked, i.e. how did it end up categorised as a phishing domain.

Update 8:45am Sky still appears to be blocking code.jquery.com and all files served via the site, and more worryingly is that if you try to report the incorrect category, once signing in on the Sky website you an error page.

We suspect the site was blocked due to being linked to by a properly malicious website, i.e. code.jquery.com and some javascript files were being used on a dodgy website and every domain mentioned was subsequently added to a block list.

For any webmasters affected by the blocking, the solution is to switch to a locally hosted copy of the file, or utilise another CDN e.g. Google jquery CDN.

Update 9:45am It appears that the jquery CDN is unblocked once more on Sky connections where the phishing filter that is part of the parental controls system was enabled.

Update 5:30pm Our enquiry with Sky has elicited a response "“JQuery was temporary blocked this morning having been misclassified. Our review process kicked in shortly afterwards and the site was unblocked just over an hour later." Sky also note they identified the problem at 8:30am, and resolved it by 9:45am. As for why code.jquery.com was categorised as Malware nothing has been confirmed but Sky are talking to Symantec who provide the contest list and updates.

Norton ConnectSafe sounds like a simplified system of what Sky has implemented but since the free service requires you to just change your DNS servers it may prove useful for webmasters as a way to check whether their site is blocked.

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