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Considered "18+"

daniel.haxx.se

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Re: Considered "18+"

#71

Post by unethical_ban »

donatj wrote: post #13

A 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 .

Counterpoint: The sole purpose of a business network is to execute the requirements of the business. Any extraneous activity on the network is at least noise, and at most a direct threat to the business. The #1 way in which networks get infected is through phishing and employee downloads.

On a corporate network, it can make total sense to block non-business sites by default. As someone who used to help manage the proxies at a bank, some of the arbitrary decisions annoyed me (like blocking gTLDs of all sorts by default) but at the end of the day, it was an inconvenience. There were mechanisms to request access if needed.

To me, it starts to get more shady with behavioral analytics software on terminals that measure your known patterns of access and look for aberrations. It becomes intrusive and creepy in its move from "passive" filtering to active, personalized monitoring.

---

All that is irrelevant here, because an ISP fucking with my TLS connection and throwing up warnings is awful.

Re: Considered "18+"

#72

Post by coding123 »

donatj wrote: post #13

A 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 .

And there's still devs that want the in-office life still..

Re: Considered "18+"

#74

Post by sockmeistr »

josephcsible wrote: post #61
Terretta wrote: post #27

Can’t think what the “ha” would stand for in their analysis, but the se and xx can be indicators of adultness when you have a naive algo for dealing with bot spam domains for adult-content-as-spam: Some even started using multiple X's (i.e. XX, XXX, etc.) to give the impression that their film contained more graphic sexual content than the simple X rating. In some cases, the X ratings were applied by reviewers or fil…

I don't think that has anything to do with it, because of this: > It shows that this filter is for this specific host name only, not for the entire haxx.se domain.

No offence to the other members of haxx, but I suspect Daniel's site is the only one that gets enough traffic to be considered for filtering.

Re: Considered "18+"

#75

Post by nonrandomstring »

Symbiote wrote: post #28
donatj wrote: post #13

A 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 .

Even more ridiculous: several small sites run by my team, from our own public IP space, have been blocked by the corporate firewall. There has never been anything wrong with them, it's just braindead blocking software purchased by incompetent managers.

> just braindead blocking software purchased by incompetent managers.

Having been that IT person early in my career, responsible for networks, firewalls and policies, what you say sounds cruel. But I could not agree more. Today there is a tragic de-skilling in ICT. When I speak to modern corporate or academic IT people I make the best faith assumptions. I assume they are like we were in the early 90s and speak to them accordingly with technical respect. Then I discover they cannot configure a mail or web server, cannot compile a program, or even use a package manager... they don't know how to read logs or change permissions on a directory.... the mind boggles. I've had senior IT people tell me that they're "not technical" and it turns out they've arrived on some "management track" from an arts-history background.

I'm not knocking arts history, or being "elitist" I hope, but this raises serious concerns for me. What is going on in IT? Have cloud services, tick-box webmin interfaces and packaged solutions led to a brain drain?

One could argue that modern IT people don't need "geeky computer skills" any more, because Google and Microsoft have solved everything. But that doesn't pan out, because when simple things go wrong they cannot fix them (which is their job). Right now I am dealing with an international university whose impeccable pedigree is bedrock in computing history - and their IT people cannot fix a simple email issue, to the extent the staff and students have to set up their own servers. The fact is, they just don't have control over it any longer. I think the entire senior ranks are just marking time till they can retire.

Re: Considered "18+"

#76

Post by JoeAltmaier »

unethical_ban wrote: post #71
donatj wrote: post #13

A 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 .

Counterpoint: The sole purpose of a business network is to execute the requirements of the business. Any extraneous activity on the network is at least noise, and at most a direct threat to the business. The #1 way in which networks get infected is through phishing and employee downloads. On a corporate network, it can make total sense to block non-business sites by default. As someone who used to help manage the pro…

BUt some manager's idea of what are business sites, and the staff's idea, can be very different.

I don't mean entertainment; I mean suits making decisions about what engineering needs etc.

Re: Considered "18+"

#77

Post by unethical_ban »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #76
unethical_ban wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: The sole purpose of a business network is to execute the requirements of the business. Any extraneous activity on the network is at least noise, and at most a direct threat to the business. The #1 way in which networks get infected is through phishing and employee downloads. On a corporate network, it can make total sense to block non-business sites by default. As someone who used to help manage the pro…

BUt some manager's idea of what are business sites, and the staff's idea, can be very different. I don't mean entertainment; I mean suits making decisions about what engineering needs etc.

Yes, it is a bureaucratic pain for IT to request access to download a tool for testing, etc. and in many places that may be overkill.

Again, prior experience, we had brainstormed the idea of denying any executable downloads by frontline workers, while permitting it for IT, since frontline workers both were less likely to need to download random EXEs, and less likely to know how to spot phishing or grayware sites.

Re: Considered "18+"

#78

Post by anticristi »

dmlorenzetti wrote: post #39
edent wrote: post #17

Many 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 blocke…

Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocked. I had a colleague whose surname, Sextro, was part of his email address. He occasionally had messages blocked by blanket filters like that.

I wonder how such filters work in Sweden. We often see advertisement like "Sex gym i stan!". Meaning "Six gyms in town!".

Re: Considered "18+"

#79

Post by olyjohn »

rhdunn wrote: post #59
rajangdavis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich?

Richard is often shortened to Dick, e.g. as in "Tom, Dick, and Harry".

I know that Dick is another name for Richard. But Why? They don't seem to even be plays off of the same name, nor do they sound the same at all.

It's like if another name for John was Frank. It makes zero sense.

Re: Considered "18+"

#80

Post by dylan604 »

protomyth wrote: post #37
edent wrote: post #17

Many 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 blocke…

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. You're not kidding. The biggest fear is a parent complaining because a library or school filter fails. People really don't give a damn what a hard problem it is nor…

I can see where filtering just takes the standard US insurance companies policy of deny, deny, deny.
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