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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?

#31
post #19

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…

A place I worked blocked hackernews bcs of "hacking". Never had the nerve to try to get it unblocked.

A place I worked blocked Github for "hacking tools." Each new software developer hire had to request access and get it approved by their manager, a process that took a few hours.

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

#32
post #24

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.

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

Not if the site polices user-generated content.

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

#33

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.

It looks like they allow user generated posts on a calendar, and every site that allows user generated content regularly gets used for phishing, spam, etc.

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

#34
post #12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a given because they're not constructed manually ie. no manual verification. Give them some time to react. My wife complained to me she could not visit a website (I run Pi-Hole on our network, and our mobile devices get routed to it even on external networks). I looked through the logs, figured the offending rule, contacted the maintainer, and they fixed it within a few hours. The issue has been up for o…

Yeah, same here, I run OPNsense and make use of Unbound's blacklist feature to similar (and surprisingly potent!) effect, along with Suricata and Sensei. I have had to manually whitelist some stuff though. False-positives, things that are good defaults but advanced users should be able to bypass, or just plain unfortunately necessary workarounds are certainly all issues though. I think user available fallbacks can be…

I don't want to educate my wife about how to circumvent the blockade with an all or nothing decision. I mean, its possible, and I taught her to update Google Play over 4G because else it does not work (on Nvidia Shield and Google Pixel 3a it does not; on all my other devices it works, not sure why). The reason I don't want to teach her that, is that the measure helps her (and our) privacy and security. By temporarily giving that up, we open up the whole attack surface for that time, which is kinda OK if you remember to switch back immediately but people tend to forget... The correct way to solve the problem is by fixing the blacklist and/or whitelist, (temporary) collateral damage be damned.

I use Pi-Hole on EdgeOS with a second server with Docker as backup. I also have NextDNS as fallback. I'll probably switch to OPNsense at some point though.

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

#35
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.

Depending on your place of work, it's a very good thing they block personal email.

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

#36

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…

One of my coworkers ended up blocked because Amazon maintains a block list of bot like users and our WAF was subscribed to it. This coworker was using scrapers for find GTX 3080s.

Surprisingly, Amazon does not block customers they put on this list.

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

#37
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found during Canadian election seasons that green party signs and posters are the only ones consistently vandalized. The people who think the Green party is stealing 'their' votes are unbelievably entitled. If only they knew how much that does to make them not my second choice either.

I am from Brazil, and once there was a Green Party candidate with a real shot at presidential elections, she ended in third, because the candidate that ended being in second made a heavy campaign asking people to vote for him and not "waste" votes on the Green Party that was "never going to win anyway". They missed their chance though, because after that election the candidate in question tried to appeal to everyone…

Don't forget scaring away most of her leftist supporters by getting too cozy with megachurches; At least it sounds like you're talking about Marina Silva lol

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

#38

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…

The funny thing is that they often are blocking the well known sites but don’t block less known and potentially shady sites. I always notice this when I try to download a software I need. Popular sites are blocked but very questionable sites are open.

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

#39

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 should be the top answer -- it is a phishing/spam site, whether due to being hacked or poor moderation policies.

No outrage to see here, please move along

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Probably doing MITM SSL inspection.

Probably not, judging by the gp's use of the term "end to end encrypted". Nearly every site uses HTTPS, so if they were really doing MITM, either everything would be broken (because the root certs aren't installed), or everything works. My guess is that his employer's network has some sort of network filter installed, and "end to end encrypted" is a classification category for sites that is blocked for whatever reason.

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