TorrentFreak Is Blocked as a Pirate Site and Hacking Resource
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Same goes for the "Piracy and Copyright infringement".
There's no conspiracy here, just the normal incompetence. Calling the number listed on the page will probably allow you to petition to reclassify the site properly, making less likely to be blocked.
Of course, filtering in general sucks, but it's not like this is an ISP, it's a hotel.
Administrators can choose to allow, block, or warn (user must confirm they want to view the page) for each category. The proxy vendor doesn't choose what is or isn't blocked; they leave it to the customer to decide what they want to block.
Hate speech is usually a category for proxy appliances/services, yes. Blue Coat categorizes it as "Violence/Hate/Racism".
Has anyone called the Virgin WiFi telephone number listed on the notice to tell them that this block is a mistake?
+44 (0)330 6601028
Otherwise you'll be stuck at "your call is important to us..." forever.
This sounds targeted : I guess a torrent domain name wildcard would have read something like "pirate downloading".
EDIT : btw, if "hacking news" is a reason enough for blocking a website, I fear for the security skills of future generations of developers.
The word hacker is meant in the somewhat esoteric "someone that likes discovering clever tricks" sense. I doubt that's the definition Verizon is using.
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...
A WCF can be implemented anywhere along the chain from web site (content) to browser. Most commonly, it is a part of a DNS service or a firewall/router.
Think of a WCF as a gun pointed at unwanted web content (porn, hate, gambling, etc.). Like a gun, the WCF needs bullets and a shooter.
The most commonly used "bullets" for the WCF are publicly-available blacklists of sites, categorized by content type. Most commonly, these lists are community-driven and then triaged by admins. So it's easy for a site like TorrentFreak to make it onto one or more of these lists. It takes work to then get off the list, but it's doable.
Lastly, the "shooter" in this analogy is any entity -- ISP, wifi vendor, hotel, etc. -- that thinks it's a good policy to filter the web. You can see where a hotel may filter to reduce bandwidth consumption and/or reduce complaints from parents.
Historically, WCFs have been deployed on corporate LANs, in schools, and in homes. But we are seeing increasing deployment in public-facing networks -- even at the national level. And this smacks of censorship.
I hope that I didn't stretch my weapon analogy too far and good luck to TF in getting off the lists. (The Wikipedia entry for "breast" has the same challenge.)
I guess the hotel opted-in (or never opted-out, which I had to) the government-mandated "pornwall" that all UK ISPs are supposed to "voluntarily" implement.
Hotels are prime candidates for keeping the pornwall up, since they'd really like to sell you their own expensive porn channels as in the good ol' times.
This blocking is a perfectly normal corporate block.
There are many products that will do this type of blocking; they've existed for a long time (long before government pornwalls were suggested); and they all suck because they all block too much stuff.
Shitty corporate blocking is a problem, but it has nothing to do with government blocks.
And well, that's why we have VPN services.
We are going in the direction of idiocrazy (great movie) as a society and people are caring less and less about anyone else. So that makes it easy to spy on people or block sites, specially since Google is still seen as a positive force in tech. :/