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Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

blocked.org.uk

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Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#21

Post by namos »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #18
namos wrote: post #2

For the past 8 months we've been working on building a series of probes; - Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.org.blocked... - Python https://github.com/openrightsgroup/OrgProbe - Raspberry PI images https://github.com/openrightsgroup/lepidopter ) And an open API to power them: https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Censorship_Monitoring_... This is helping to build a picture of what the UK Gover…

Please consider freeing the data and make it downloadable as a simple CSV. I'd like a list of all of the sites blocked by particular ISPs...

Snapshots are made available: https://www.blocked.org.uk/assets/data/alexa_100k_isp_latest...

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#22

Post by gone35 »

namos wrote: post #2

For the past 8 months we've been working on building a series of probes; - Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.org.blocked... - Python https://github.com/openrightsgroup/OrgProbe - Raspberry PI images https://github.com/openrightsgroup/lepidopter ) And an open API to power them: https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Censorship_Monitoring_... This is helping to build a picture of what the UK Gover…

Whoaa why the hell is The Brights' Net being blocked by BT??!? Since when is atheism considered "censorable" content in the UK??

This is madness.

https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://www.the-bright...

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#23

Post by vidarh »

keithpeter wrote: post #17
vidarh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal website is blocked by Talk Talk apparently. I guess compiler writing must be harmful for children.

Here we go. If a lot of harmless or potentially even useful material gets blocked, people who want to use that material will simply opt out or route round the blocking, hence making it pointless.

I kind of hope they overreach drastically for exactly that reason. It'll be a lot easier to get the filters dropped entirely if we can attack them with "useful website X is blocked for no good reason" over and over and over again, than if we have to argue using examples that many people would actually have a problem with.

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#24

Post by blueskin_ »

AlyssaRowan wrote: post #20
blueskin_ wrote: post #11

I just learned that one of my personal sites is blocked on BT and TalkTalk... there is zero adult or other inappropriate content on it. Time to complain, I guess, but I'm sure they will just go straight to /dev/null :(

Have you considered legal action?

Nope. It's a medium sized site I don't get any money out of, not linked to any business. I suppose I could theoretically small claims court them, but I'm not sure if I'd win as they can probably piss about with their customers' connections in whatever way they please due to their T&Cs :(

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#25

Post by lucb1e »

Wow, I had not expected this. My personal blog (which is about technology) is being blocked by one of the ISPs. I don't host porn nor have I ever, so why is it blocked behind their porn filter? Interesting....

https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://lucb1e.com

Edit: TalkTalk live chat support reports that I am not being blocked. Citation:

> I can confirm that is not blocked by our Adult Filters as your website does not have any adult content.

So it seems blocked.org.uk has a false-positive...

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#26

Post by namos »

justincormack wrote: post #6
spingsprong wrote: post #4

I've been checking various websites I go on that are completely fine for kids. It's amazing what's getting blocked. One example according to that website is, TalkTalk blocks " http://www.writingexcuses.com/" It's a podcast that teaches story writing. Blocking that is insane! And the blocked website itself is blocked on two ISPs https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblocked....

If you test www.blocked.org.uk it doesn't show as blocked so either it changed between scans or there is an issue here. Maybe someone can test.

www.blocked.org.uk vs blocked.org.uk AFAIK

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#27

Post by blueskin_ »

lucb1e wrote: post #25

Wow, I had not expected this. My personal blog (which is about technology) is being blocked by one of the ISPs. I don't host porn nor have I ever, so why is it blocked behind their porn filter? Interesting.... https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://lucb1e.com Edit: TalkTalk live chat support reports that I am not being blocked. Citation: > I can confirm that is not blocked by our Adult Filters as your website…

TalkTalk are a completely awful ISP. Not sure what the US equivalent would be, but they're the kind who do promotions of "Broadband for £3/month"-level. You get what you pay for service-wise, but they are also by far the most enthusiastic ISP around when it comes to censorship; they have a spider that follows their users to all URLs they visit to categorise the sites[1] (giving them the nickname StalkStalk), and have been doing this long before the current set of idiots in Parliament forced censorship in (at least since 2011).

I'm in a similar situation, one site I run is blocked both by StalkStalk and BT. No porn, no other 'adult' content; it's deliberately kept PG-13 to use the US ratings.

[1]Check your logs for HuaweiSymantecSpider. It obeys robots.txt though, so a quick "Disallow: /" in robots.txt stops it, although they still grab content from unencrypted pages via DPI.

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#28

Post by namos »

lucb1e wrote: post #25

Wow, I had not expected this. My personal blog (which is about technology) is being blocked by one of the ISPs. I don't host porn nor have I ever, so why is it blocked behind their porn filter? Interesting.... https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://lucb1e.com Edit: TalkTalk live chat support reports that I am not being blocked. Citation: > I can confirm that is not blocked by our Adult Filters as your website…

TalkTalk has more than one filter setting.

Ask them if your site is blocked at the "Kid Safe" level (the default) which is what the probes run on.

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#29

Post by lucb1e »

blueskin_ wrote: post #27
lucb1e wrote: post #25

Wow, I had not expected this. My personal blog (which is about technology) is being blocked by one of the ISPs. I don't host porn nor have I ever, so why is it blocked behind their porn filter? Interesting.... https://www.blocked.org.uk/results?url=http://lucb1e.com Edit: TalkTalk live chat support reports that I am not being blocked. Citation: > I can confirm that is not blocked by our Adult Filters as your website…

TalkTalk are a completely awful ISP. Not sure what the US equivalent would be, but they're the kind who do promotions of "Broadband for £3/month"-level. You get what you pay for service-wise, but they are also by far the most enthusiastic ISP around when it comes to censorship; they have a spider that follows their users to all URLs they visit to categorise the sites[1] (giving them the nickname StalkStalk), and have…

No HuaweiSymantecSpider in my logs in the past 8 months (grepped access.log), but the site is available over both http and https so they might have classified it using DPI (talk about evil...).

Re: Open Rights Group has launched a UK Censorship Monitoring API and Botnet

#30

Post by finnn »

namos wrote: post #2

For the past 8 months we've been working on building a series of probes; - Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.org.blocked... - Python https://github.com/openrightsgroup/OrgProbe - Raspberry PI images https://github.com/openrightsgroup/lepidopter ) And an open API to power them: https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Censorship_Monitoring_... This is helping to build a picture of what the UK Gover…

Have you considered setting a user agent other than Python Requests default? Probably not necessary, but good practice. Also, ironically, the app is not available on any of my devices.
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