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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?

#41

Post by heelix »

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…

Hah! I have used Google Translate to do some naïve translations. Was creating portlet code that supported i18n, and took a crack at a few of the labels. Much to the amusement of the folks I demoed to, I used the French word for a person's back, not back in the context of navigation.

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

#42

Post by whatatita »

speeder wrote: post #10
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #4

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…

> 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".

This always happens in single vote systems. Any options who draw from the same subset of voters will divide the vote and weaken their own, and one anothers, chances of success. It's one reason many countries have a few large parties, with internal "subparties" rather than lots of seperate parties that differ only slightly.

Ranked choice voting solves this problem beautifully. It's a real shame it's not widely used for elections.

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

#43

Post by oriesdan »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #39
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 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

By that logic, any site that allows to display third party content is a phishing/spam site and should be blocked - including twitter, facebook, HN and of course gmail.

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

#44

Post by nerdponx »

shadowgovt wrote: post #27
nerdponx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I clicked the link (and when the link was posted), only the original comment was present: https://github.com/blocklistproject/Lists/issues/453#issue-9...

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

#45

Post by ClumsyPilot »

dkarl wrote: post #31
tokai wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A place I worked blocked their own website, we never found out why

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

#46

Post by licebmi__at__ »

sithadmin wrote: post #26
rPlayer6554 wrote: post #23

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.

I had a problem once when I was testing setting up a central VPN for all my devices to go through, but I forgot to exclude the work laptop. So I got a call by security that they got an alert of somebody trying to connect using my credentials on an overseas location.

I explained the guy on the other line the reason why that happened and he told me not to worry about it, but warned me that they were going to monitor my traffic by protocol for a few hours, so I should avoid looking at porn in the meantime. I replied that I wouldn't look at porn on the work laptop, and he told me that the warning was also routine and that I wouldn't believe what people watch during working hours.

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

#47

Post by aaron695 »

nkozyra wrote: post #24
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.

> This is just streaming spam

It's fraud not spam, you never got to watch the fight after paying - https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/2140/adcenter-hy...

And 6 weeks ago it might have been ISIS spam or a link to a exe or phishing.

> and any site that accepts user-generated content is susceptible to it

This site doesn't have user-generated content/events/calendar, it's employee generated.

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

#48

Post by sithadmin »

gruez wrote: post #40
sithadmin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sit…

HTTPS is not an obstacle to this.

As I mentioned before, the methodology requires publishing a trusted cert to endpoints. This is done with GPOs or whatever RMM tool is used to manage workstations + MDM to push to mobile.

You will find this implemented in nearly any high-security network environment (finance, government, etc.), primary schools, and a lot of miscellaneous businesses.

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

#49

Post by nkozyra »

aaron695 wrote: post #47
nkozyra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 It's fraud not spam, you never got to watch the fight after paying - https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/2140/adcenter-hy... And 6 weeks ago it might have been ISIS spam or a link to a exe or phishing. > and any site that accepts user-generated content is susceptible to it This site doesn't have user-generated content/events/calendar, it's employee generated.

> This site doesn't have user-generated content/events/calendar, it's employee generated.

That's incorrect. There's a call to action to register to submit an event here:

https://www.gp.org/earth_day_to_may_day_events_calendar

That's how the spam got in.

Edit: here, I made one for you: https://www.gp.org/janon/aaron695_hello

Edit2: it's deleted, looks like someone is finally doing cleanup

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

#50

Post by aaron695 »

nkozyra wrote: post #49
aaron695 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just streaming spam It's fraud not spam, you never got to watch the fight after paying - https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/2140/adcenter-hy... And 6 weeks ago it might have been ISIS spam or a link to a exe or phishing. > and any site that accepts user-generated content is susceptible to it This site doesn't have user-generated content/events/calendar, it's employee generated.

> This site doesn't have user-generated content/events/calendar, it's employee generated. That's incorrect. There's a call to action to register to submit an event here: https://www.gp.org/earth_day_to_may_day_events_calendar That's how the spam got in. Edit: here, I made one for you: https://www.gp.org/janon/aaron695_hello Edit2: it's deleted, looks like someone is finally doing cleanup

Apologises. You are correct. Good find

They did the same with a 'job ad' on the hosts web site -

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2Uw0_n...

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