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Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

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Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#21

Post by mathewsanders »

Semaphor wrote: post #18
jonnycomputer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that doesn't look like content the GP would put up intentionally.

No, it looks like they have glaring security issues of their website and the site regularly gets used for phishing, spam, etc. So maybe that only has been an issue for 3 weeks (which is bad enough), but all things considered, it’s possible it’s been like this for years.

I read an interesting article on the Big Lie over the weekend and it mentioned an example from 2016 where private non-profit conservative groups were involved in promoting Green and Independent candidates with the intention of diluting vote for Dem candidates.

Probably not related, but worth mentioning the coincidence just because it was such a good article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-...

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#22

Post by Vaslo »

I can no longer visit End-To-End encrypted sites anymore at work. It sucks because I use ProtonMail and end up having to use my phone to forward things from there or to my Google email, which I wanted to stop using entirely.

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#23

Post by rPlayer6554 »

Vaslo wrote: post #22

I can no longer visit End-To-End encrypted sites anymore at work. It sucks because I use ProtonMail and end up having to use my phone to forward things from there or to my Google email, which I wanted to stop using entirely.

I am confused? Does your employer just block any https site?

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#24

Post by nkozyra »

aaron695 wrote: post #13

They are a phishing site https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HWH6z4... Perhaps they have fixed it in the past 3 weeks, maybe they haven't. From yesterday, so not fixed - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rMUgla... Also love the way it's signed, the persons online profile is "I'm Black Hat SEO Expert" if anyone wants to write any Green policy I guess contact them?

This is just streaming spam and any site that accepts user-generated content is susceptible to it.

Having been on their side it can sometimes be very difficult to mitigate without manual approval. This is not automated - it's done by humans and they adjust their patterns against any automatic mitigation attempts.

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#25

Post by reaperducer »

notafraudster wrote: post #6

My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response. The a…

The company I work for blocks Google Translate. IT claims it's the default that comes with the filtering software it uses.

Fortunately, since I build multi-lingual web sites, I was able to get an exemption from the security department.

(No, I don't use Google Translate to translate web sites. The company has three internal and two external professional translators for that. But sometimes when I'm copying-and-pasting between versions, I like a little reassurance that what I'm pasting is what I think it is.)

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#26

Post by sithadmin »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #23
Vaslo wrote: post #22

I can no longer visit End-To-End encrypted sites anymore at work. It sucks because I use ProtonMail and end up having to use my phone to forward things from there or to my Google email, which I wanted to stop using entirely.

I am confused? Does your employer just block any https site?

Probably doing MITM SSL inspection. Basically, a corporate security appliance with trusted certs on the endpoint sits in the middle of everything to inspect for malware/viruses/blocked content.

A relatively common corporate practice, honestly. It's a shame more people aren't aware of it.

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#27

Post by shadowgovt »

nerdponx wrote: post #7
herbst wrote: post #3

I've worked with several kinds of public blocking lists and one thing I learned is that they are all full of false positives. For whatever reason, I would not be surprised if just nobody ever noticed the mistake.

Or someone quietly slipped it onto a block list knowing that it'd take a while to get noticed.

If you're talking about the Green Party site, there is explanation at the bottom of the GitHub issue. It appears they were either compromised at some point in the past and used as a relay for spam ads or somebody with legitimate authority to edit the site abused their privileges and ran a spam ad operation on the side.

In either case, blocklistproject interprets spam ad vendors as damage and routes around them.

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#28

Post by writeslowly »

reaperducer wrote: post #25
notafraudster wrote: post #6

My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response. The a…

The company I work for blocks Google Translate. IT claims it's the default that comes with the filtering software it uses. Fortunately, since I build multi-lingual web sites, I was able to get an exemption from the security department. (No, I don't use Google Translate to translate web sites. The company has three internal and two external professional translators for that. But sometimes when I'm copying-and-pasting…

Google Translate was a popular way to bypass filters when I was in high school since it could be used as a proxy and nobody blocks google.com

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#29

Post by tialaramex »

pricechild wrote: post #16
notafraudster wrote: post #6

My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response. The a…

My static home IP was blocked by my new energy supplier. It took almost 4 months to get through to someone who would accept my problem wasn't forgetting my password. In the end, I was pointed to their third provider and told "sort it out yourself, not our problem". Thankfully that other company had a reasonable-ish appeals process... ...obviously I got relisted in their db a few times but things seem to have calmed d…

Ah, "Reputation" and "Threat Intelligence". One of the things I didn't expect but should have after BeyondCorp and Zero Trust is that some people would decide they need to go the exact opposite direction.

Instead of designing our systems as though they all face the hostile public Internet like Google, why not instead police all of the public Internet as though it's our internal network? That way we don't need to adopt any actual security practices. What could go wrong?

As you saw, basically everything, all the time.

I actually moved energy supplier a few months ago. I had a good quote from a new supplier, and when I tried to sign in to see how close the quote from my old supplier was their site wouldn't load in my browser, tried again a day later, no joy. OK cool, bye then.

Re: Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

#30

Post by bcoates »

notafraudster wrote: post #6

My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response. The a…

Yeah, the airport provides the Internet uplink and contractually it can be as locked-down and broken as they like. Boingo just manages the WiFi infrastructure and payment/login. Usually they're extremely lazy and just use a DNS service with business-style blocking rules and unblock popular stuff one at a time when people notice and complain.
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