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Comment by Quarrel | Hacker News Reader

I travelled last week, and was horrified by how much is blocked by the mainstream ISPs in the UK.

Afaik, my (London) ISP does not block anything. No idea why, as all the others quote high court orders.

Many UK ISPs have "adult content" filters, which tend to be wide-reaching and block a lot more than just porn sites. But these are optional and can be turned off very easily.

There's a smaller set of non-optional blocks (pirate/torrent sites) which you need a VPN to get around.

This seems to be just another small step towards a future where only pre-approved websites are accessible via the method most people will use. It will not be called banning, this is just a measure to "ensure that the content we are serving to our users is held against our high quality standards" or the classic "it's to protect the children" or to "condemn terrorism".

Porn is not really Illegal, just unwanted, which is apparently reason enough to block it. Does this mean any content which is "unwanted" can be blocked just like that?

I have a theory that the ISPs over-block with their adult content filters, so you've got plausible deniability and don't have to ring up and say "I want porn please." Because the alternative is that they lose a customer to an ISP who doesn't embarrass them.

My ISP does not block any of the non-optional blocks either..

While I do use a VPN at times, it is never to get around blocks.

Although I don't use my ISPs dns, so if that is how they're attempting to comply I wouldn't notice.

>There's a smaller set of non-optional blocks (pirate/torrent sites) which you need a VPN to get around.

This https://unblockit.pw/ also does the job too (scihub is at the bottom).

Open Rights Group run https://www.blocked.org.uk/ to make blocking more visible and prompt action to contact ISPs about cases of overblocking.

You can enter any domain to test it, the data is collected by volunteers running an automatic tool.

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