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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

#31

Post by UnoriginalGuy » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:06 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #25

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #15

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!]

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 GiffGaff, my only one would be that they send too many SMS notifications that I wish I could disable (i.e. they send me three each month as my package expires and then auto renews).

Orange sent me even more annoying SMS about things like "magic numbers" and other nonsense. So GiffGaff aren't terrible even in that area.

I've never dealt directly with their CS. Everything is online. So I cannot comment on how good they are when things go wrong.

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

#32

Post by iamben » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:11 PM UTC

robmcm wrote: post #13

O2 in the UK blocks craigs list... It's a real issue that this stuff is blocked by default, especially when you sign up to a contract where I expect you have to be over 18 anyway!

They block lots of non pornographic things. They also told me it's to protect children who have been given a phone by their parents (who would have taken out the contract). Pretty ridiculous.

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

#33

Post by gambiting » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:28 PM UTC

GiffGaff has been doing this as well, couldn't access reddit, 9gag or any of the sites that "might" have adult content. Had to go to my account settings and input my passport number to get the access unlocked.

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

#34

Post by vacri » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:28 PM UTC

I've always thought it funny how porn is 'mature' content, but the people who use it are considered 'juvenile'.

I've always wanted to hear the voiceover in a cinema say "This film is rated for mature audiences", and have the film be a political thriller of which juveniles wouldn't understand the politics...

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

#35

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:34 PM UTC

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #18

Peroni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work mobile is on the EE network and doesn't appear to have any issue with adult content. The industry I work in requires me to access explicit content occasionally and I've yet to come up against any roadblocks with EE.

It looks like EE does have it. Maybe they just don't apply it to company purchased phones? http://help.ee.co.uk/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURA...

Or perhaps it's just on their 4G?

EE is branding confusion hell. They're a result of the merger between Orange and T-Mobile, but depending on situation you'll either have them treat you as an "EE customer" or as a T-Mobile/Orange customer. The only ones who are "only" EE customers in their eyes appear to be 4G users.

My contract was entered into with T-Mobile, and is a personal account, and I have never seen a block, including testing just now with obvious candidates.

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

#36

Post by vacri » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:34 PM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #23

Back when I was using them, they blocked almost all Romanian news sites on the same basis (I don't know if they still do). I went through their stupid procedure for proving I'm over 18 and instead of unblocking everything, they opened up their own page where they sell porn!

I spent a few months doing general customer support (not technical) for a telco/isp. We had two isp products, a general one 'foo' and a rural-oriented one 'bar'. We could see the homepage for 'foo' and it was helpful in getting customers to the right spot to login (but what they saw after that was a mystery). No dice with 'bar' - our own product. I emailed the management saying "please whitelist 'bar', it's not like we're going to waste time looking at it, and it improves the service". Management droned: "That's not our decision, it's IT's".

I emailed IT with the reply and said the same thing to them. "That's not our decision, it's Management's".

Ah, the life of a drone. Can't say I miss it. The same place had an email quota so strict that I couldn't keep more than 2-3 weeks worth of emails. It also made me a lot more forgiving of callcentre drones.

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

#37

Post by prof_hobart » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:37 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #25

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #15

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've been on it for about 18 months and I think it's great. There are some problems (e.g. the pages for purchasing the monthly package occasionally don't work, and it seems to have forgotten the fact that I've got my purchase down as recurring at least once, meaning that it ate into my credit).

But for the saving compared with most networks, those pains are almost irrelevant and you can get even more money off by referring people - it's £5 back for everyone who you get to sign up.

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

#38

Post by naz » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:44 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #35

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like EE does have it. Maybe they just don't apply it to company purchased phones? http://help.ee.co.uk/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURA...

Or perhaps it's just on their 4G? EE is branding confusion hell. They're a result of the merger between Orange and T-Mobile, but depending on situation you'll either have them treat you as an "EE customer" or as a T-Mobile/Orange customer. The only ones who are "only" EE customers in their eyes appear to be 4G users. My contract was entered into with T-Mobile, and is a personal account, and I have never seen a block,…

The block only applies to PAYG packages (at least on Three). When I switched to a monthly contract the censorship went away.

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

#39

Post by thedrbrian » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:49 PM UTC

jrabone wrote: post #27

arethuza wrote: post #25

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…

Interesting. Thankfully I signed up with one of my disposable gmail accounts. Another problem with giffgaff/O2 is that they compress and artefact every video or large picture one tries to send over their network. They claim its to save you money/bandwidth/data , which is funny as I'm on an unlimited account.

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

#40

Post by belorn » Thu, Jan 17, 2013, 12:51 PM UTC

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 exceptional rule. Then it was everything except "illegal content", being everything before with the added inclusion of copyright infringements. Then extreme porn was added, because anti-porn can always be advertised to end-users as a mechanism for protecting children. Then it is "mature content", including anything an ISP might get a letter of complain about, but which does not hurt any business partners. This meant that they can cut cost on support, but at the same time protect any revenue from advertisements. That mean items such as tor, political satire, all form of porn, unpopular religious sites and (anti)social hangouts get listed, but things like alcohol, commercials directed to children, political advertizements, violence and sexual hinting content will be left alone. After that, they start to add items to the list which competes with the ISPs' own products, such as VoIP, but also products that put a strain on their network such as video streaming. The last bans tend to be less severe, as to show how slow competing products are with their low quality of service. This also allow for a mechanism to extract levies from larger companies such as Google without going with a full blown ban that might create outcry from ones consumers.

The market won't regulate itself. There are too few options of consumers, and there exist a clear asymmetrical information gap between buyer and seller. Lemon laws for services could help here, but it would be the same effort or even more effort than to create industry regulations for ISPs.

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