(I don’t need tips to get around this or anything, I can just connect to another network or use a VPN)
Doesn't work as well today, but there were surprisingly few false positives at the time.
In the UK where 20% of the internet is blocked – it's surprising you haven't experienced this before. Call your service provider and tell them you want access to adult material.
This sounds like an extreme over-estimate. Some ISP's, mostly mobile ones, default to blocking "adult material" unless you tell them to turn that off. Some of the larger ISPs are under court order to block some specific other content (Pirate Bay in particular; my old ISP was one of them, my current ISP happily lets me access it, not that I've ever done so other than to see if it's blocked).
Most ISPs block at most a tiny set of sites and personally in 23 years of using UK ISPs I've never "organically" run into those blocks (as in, no site I actually had any interest in accessing has been blocked; I've only seen them when checking whether people were right that a specific site was blocked). And yes, that includes visiting sites with "adult material" without running into any blocks.
I do have a VPN, so it'd take me as long to bypass as it takes me to press one button in my browser address bar, but I only need that to evade IP region/country blocks - never needed it to get around UK filtering.
According to the `considered-18` post linked by a sibling comment:
> It shows that this filter is for this specific host name only [daniel.haxx.se], not for the entire haxx.se domain.
So, even more of a WTF.
That’s not true. I’ve experienced this once before that I can remember, on https://hackmii.com/ and it doesn’t happen on my home network except on actual scam sites which isn’t a government thing but an ISP feature that can probably be turned off. This is a Vodaphone thing, not a UK thing.
I don’t care that much about this specific site, I guess I just want to complain that they don’t have a way to report false positives which maybe isn’t the best reason to post a comment on an unrelated article but still
That must be one awkward call.
Even on those that do, 20% seems rather high??
I'm not sure why you would want your ISP interfering with your traffic like this. To me, it seems like a dealbreaker.
Yes, you can disable it quite easily. Usually by entering a credit card number in their app or website to prove you're 18, or alternatively by contacting their customer service chat.
But of course, only pervs who want to access porn would do that, right?
In my experience it's a good idea to disable it regardless, it as there are often a lot of "false positives", and the filtering can sometimes cause performance problems. (Unless you've got kids and really do want to block porn, but eventually they're gong to discover VPNs...)
No? Why would you say this? I disabled this back with my old carrier and it was pretty painless - I don't recall there being any stigma attatched to turning off the filters. I've since moved carriers and I don't remember having to disable filters - maybe I did or maybe something about signing up turned it off?
Painless based on provider, otherwise what described above is a pain.
Are people actually afraid of some stranger call-center worker silently judging them, but not even saying anything out-loud about it because the call is recorded and they'd be fired if they tried to actually shame you?
The UK government threatened to make it a legal requirement that all internet connections have filters for adult content on by default.
The major ISPs and mobile networks voluntarily put filtering in place by default to avoid the regulation.
The filters can usually be removed quite easily.
While there are some smaller ISPs that don't put filtering in place, they account for something like < 10% of the market.
Not all of them. I’m on Zen, no filters as far as I’m aware, sci-hub works fine. Libgen is fine. Torrent sites that the ‘main’ ISPs block come up just fine, too.
Edit: some of the ISPs that do seem to land on this URL (note http) –
http://www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk
whois shows BT (large ISP and telco) as the owner.
All of the major ISPs and mobile networks now do it on a voluntary basis.
Are we even sure this is vodaphone? This sounds so much like a scam pop up ad.
A better solution would be to tell Vodafone to switch off the censorship on your service.
Knowing about it won't help you if every ISP option you have is doing the same thing.
Where I live, we have laws that prevent people from interfering with the mail. If I send a letter to someone, once it's accepted the mail carriers can't generally withhold it and make demands before they deliver it or open my letter and remove or change whatever words/pages they feel like before completing delivery.
I think the internet should be treated the same. Beyond some basic QOS ISPs should be dumb pipes and be mostly forbidden from messing with things you send/receive over the connection.
If your mail service had a "make sure mail from known pornographers doesn't get delivered to my house" option, and you had kids at home, you might well opt for it.
I would have edited this in to my original comment but it won’t let me any more