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3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

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Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then join up with who? All of the 3G operators have similar opt-out filters. Orange makes you give them your credit card number. GiffGaff made me give them my drivers licence number. I like that with GiffGaff I didn't need to talk to a person, just do it online, but in general you'll have to deal with this no matter who you sign up with. I think even Imgur (Reddit's image host) was blocked at one stage.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

I love it, I've been with them for 2 years now. And their unlimited plan is really unlimited. In one month(during the summer) I downloaded 18GB of data, and nobody complained. I rarely call people,so 200 minutes per month is more than enough, and unlimited texts are good as well.

When I was buying my phone, I realized how much money I could save going with them. I could either go with a 24 month contract for 35 pounds per month and get the phone "free", on a contract which included 500mb of data, 1000 minutes and 1000 texts - spending  840 pounds in total, or just buy the phone outright for 500 pounds and go with giff gaff, spending 740 pounds over the course of 24 months, saving myself a nice 100 pounds and getting a better deal.

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#42
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

It is. They will collect your personal information, and make it available to their parent (Telefonica, via O2) and one of the other subsidiaries set up specifically to do this, and then re-sell it to the highest bidder. See http://www.fastcompany.com/3002010/telefonica-sell-customer-... for example. If you then subsequently leave them for another network, you will get more SMS spam than you can possibly imagine. http…

Well they are amazing though, so I see no reason at all to leave them. Simply nobody else in the UK offers a deal as good as theirs.

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

In general I find the service excellent. I pay £10/month (1 GB, 250 minutes, "unlimited" texts, tethering allowed) and for what I use it for have never paid 1p in actual overage credit or had any issues. I cannot see myself switching off of GiffGaff unless they changed the terms of the packages. Also the coverage in this area is better than Orange. But your mileage will vary. If I had to come up with a moan about Gif…

> "I've never dealt directly with their CS..."

They don't have customer support, it's community based (with rewards for those who help). They do have account agents for dealing only with account/billing problems (the only thing you wouldn't want to deal with on a public forum).

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

It is. They will collect your personal information, and make it available to their parent (Telefonica, via O2) and one of the other subsidiaries set up specifically to do this, and then re-sell it to the highest bidder. See http://www.fastcompany.com/3002010/telefonica-sell-customer-... for example. If you then subsequently leave them for another network, you will get more SMS spam than you can possibly imagine. http…

This is about O2 so it's not specific to GiffGaff, it happens to O2 customers who also pay much more for service than on GiffGaff.

Hence it doesn't really address the "too good to be true" comment about GiffGaff in the GP.

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#45
post #40

ISP today gets to define what approved content is, and there is no end to the methods use to define it. ISP's will continue to expand the sometimes rather arbitrary rules until either government steps in to regulate the industry, or a anti-censorship open by design system will replace the current industry. First the network allowed everything. Then ISPs started with forbidding child porn as the one and only one excep…

Of course, when they first started censoring CP, plenty went, "Well, yes, it's abhorrent, but what about the slippery slope?", and got shouted down by our government, the press, and peers, who all said words to the effect of "Don't be ridiculous, you're hysterical, what are you, a pedophile?".

Even now, as we gracelessly tumble down the well-greased-incline, they will merrily argue that there is no slippery slope.

As to regulation, there already is, and it actively encourages ISPs to censor.

http://www.mobilebroadbandgroup.com/content-code.pdf

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

In general I find the service excellent. I pay £10/month (1 GB, 250 minutes, "unlimited" texts, tethering allowed) and for what I use it for have never paid 1p in actual overage credit or had any issues. I cannot see myself switching off of GiffGaff unless they changed the terms of the packages. Also the coverage in this area is better than Orange. But your mileage will vary. If I had to come up with a moan about Gif…

None of their current plans appear to offer tethering. Are you on a grandfather-ed plan?

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then join up with who? All of the 3G operators have similar opt-out filters. Orange makes you give them your credit card number. GiffGaff made me give them my drivers licence number. I like that with GiffGaff I didn't need to talk to a person, just do it online, but in general you'll have to deal with this no matter who you sign up with. I think even Imgur (Reddit's image host) was blocked at one stage.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

I had some trouble getting adult content on my phone on GiffGaff. Their webpage fell over took several weeks and three support tickets to get it fixed.

To their credit though when I made a formal complaint about the issue it got fixed within minutes. Plus its very cheap so I can put up with a little crap support (had much worse from other companies I paid a lot more for)

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, how are you finding GiffGaff - £12 for a plan with unlimited internet and texts and no contract looks too good to be true! [Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]

I love it, I've been with them for 2 years now. And their unlimited plan is really unlimited. In one month(during the summer) I downloaded 18GB of data, and nobody complained. I rarely call people,so 200 minutes per month is more than enough, and unlimited texts are good as well. When I was buying my phone, I realized how much money I could save going with them. I could either go with a 24 month contract for 35 pound…

It's also worth pointing out that they don't charge you for 0800 numbers (free phone numbers, which (I think) every other mobile operator does charge for and exclude from any monthly allowance).

Re: 3UK treats political satire as porn and blocks it

#49
post #9

And so we continue failing to protect our freedoms, and slowly we remain in the path that will take us to 1984.

The problem with this line of thinking is that "protecting our freedoms" would pretty much require an immediate full-on revolution, everywhere.
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