UPDATE2 UK ISP Sky Broadband Shield Blocking Critical jQuery Website

Customers whom enable Sky Broadband’s Shield (Parental Controls) service, particularly if they select the blocking option for “malicious or phishing websites“, will also find that the often essential jQuery (http://code.jquery.com) JavaScript CDN site also ends up being restricted (this is used by many websites).

The jQuery JavaScript library is designed to work across multiple website browsers (e.g. IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc.) and works to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. Most ordinary website surfers probably won’t have any clue what this is but many websites, such as ours (local copy), make use of it to perform various automated processes.

Officially Sky recommends that even their customers who don’t want to enable the network-level filtering (Sky Shield) service should still make use of it but “rather than turning it off, you change the setting to 18. This means you can access sites suitable for adults while still being protected from malicious or phishing websites“.

However Thinkbroadband spotted that Sky Broadband customers whom follow this advice might also be unable to access the jQuery CDN source website, which is crucial because it’s one of the remote sources for the library. Not only does this cause an annoyance for webmasters but it might also create a few page / service loading problems for many sites and their visitors.

At the time of writing it remains unclear why Sky’s Shield would be blocking such an obviously important website. But the advice is, as usual, to disable their filter entirely or just the option for “malicious or phishing websites“.. at least until the issue is resolved. We hope to have an answer from Sky shortly and will conduct our own tests later this morning.

UPDATE 8:04am

A quick test using a Sky Broadband connection confirms that, once enabled, the filtering does indeed block http://code.jquery.com, although the direct http://jquery.com website is unaffected.

However when we tried to click the splash pages “Report incorrect category” link the process sadly failed and Sky Shield said: “We could not process your request. An error has occurred, please try again later.” Switching the filter off fixes the problem.

UPDATE 9:58am

The block appears to have finally been removed, although we are still awaiting a comment from Sky.

UPDATE 28th Jan 2014 – 7:30am

A Sky Spokesperson has now confirmed that the website “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.” This seems to overlook the fact that the original report surfaced on Sunday evening and not yesterday (Monday) morning, the latter being when it was picked up by TB and then ISPr.