I'm glad he was able to resolve this. I get the feeling most people wouldn't care, because after all they're not blocking instagram/facebook/tiktok.
He is still blocked. According to:
Considered "18+"
11–20 of 156 posts
Re: Considered "18+"
#12im always chuffed and fascinated when tech companies cloister themselves in the robes of moral arbiter. Twitter does this now, albeit it seems like a cheap excuse to pump user numbers by forcing authentication. Why 18? why not 21? or 23? What qualifies as explicitly "adult" content? violence perhaps could disqualify most military recruiting sites from my vodaphone. Alcohol? its certainly a moral vice in the UAE but i…
These content filtering schemes are usually legally mandated, and the age of 18 is set by law.
More likely than not, this got caught up in a regular job that scans DNS zones for new domains to "filter". It's just a matter of time before this catches anything related to Scunthorpe[0].
Re: Considered "18+"
#13A number of my personal sites end up blocked by corporate firewalls. It’s slightly infuriating. Even my own company. I got in a literal fight with IT needing to justify the why in why I needed access to my own website. Like I can live without it, but it’s nothing but my blog where I rant about tech. The why should be why is it blocked to begin with. The default state should not be blocked.
Re: Considered "18+"
#14im always chuffed and fascinated when tech companies cloister themselves in the robes of moral arbiter. Twitter does this now, albeit it seems like a cheap excuse to pump user numbers by forcing authentication. Why 18? why not 21? or 23? What qualifies as explicitly "adult" content? violence perhaps could disqualify most military recruiting sites from my vodaphone. Alcohol? its certainly a moral vice in the UAE but i…
Parents want parental controls on their children’s devices, and that becomes part of their decision on which provider to choose for their children’s phone contracts. Vodafone is reacting to market desire for an optional feature, there isn’t some evil spooky ulterior motive at play.
Re: Considered "18+"
#15It is not totally clear from the article, but it appears Vodafone blocks a site as 'for 18+' when really it is a case of an incorrect certificate. To get round it you need to register with Vodafone.
At least google allows me to click away such warnings (while warning that doom is imminent).
Re: Considered "18+"
#16It's because there are too many x's in the name
I'd bet it's because the filtering vendor (Allot) sells a simple interface to the customer (Vodafone) that mostly consists of allowlist/blocklist entries manually added by support agents when someone complains.
There's probably a policy to dictate what content should be filtered, but in practice: a ticket is filed to block a site, someone looks at the ticket, in all likelihood it is added to the blocklist, and then probably ends up there forever until complaints are raised.
You could be correct that the presence of multiple x's in the URL makes it more likely for support agents to think "yep, this is probably sketchy, there's no harm adding it to the blocklist" - I doubt it's the original reason though.
Re: Considered "18+"
#17Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff.
One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the "violations" that they picked up just weren't considered problematic for a UK / EU audience.
Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocked. Although, again, that may have been by puritanical design.
Anything which looked like it might be used to bypass their filters (VPN, proxies, etc) were also blocked.
Ultimately, the customer isn't the user. It is the network who are terrified that Johnny's parent is going to go to the papers screaming about how the evil phone company corrupted their innocent child. That's all it is there for - to protect the network.
Re: Considered "18+"
#18Why would they bother doing a TLS handshake with a phony certificate?
If you were a school or other institutional user using this filtering service (which isn't just marketing to service providers like Vodafone), you'd probably have their root CA installed so your users see the filter error page instead of just an SSL error.
Re: Considered "18+"
#19It's because there are too many x's in the name
Clearly it's a website of sex hacks. Or a saxophone curse, I'm not sure...
Re: Considered "18+"
#20im always chuffed and fascinated when tech companies cloister themselves in the robes of moral arbiter. Twitter does this now, albeit it seems like a cheap excuse to pump user numbers by forcing authentication. Why 18? why not 21? or 23? What qualifies as explicitly "adult" content? violence perhaps could disqualify most military recruiting sites from my vodaphone. Alcohol? its certainly a moral vice in the UAE but i…
I thought these restrictions were set by UK goverment, not by individual operators.
Edit: I am not sure if age restriction check is responsibility of sites themselves or service providers according to UK law.