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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

3UK user here. Came up against this block for what I assumed was a relatively normal site. I phoned the company and had to jump through hoops to prove my age after being asked So, just to confirm Mr Buckley, you wish to access adult content on your phone?.

Eagerly anticipating the end of my contract next month.

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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.

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...

Interesting. Either it doesn't apply to company phones or their filter is shockingly bad.

Likewise, I've got an EE mobile on my company and I haven't tripped it yet. Not even for political satire.

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.

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

I'm on T-mobile (though my phone shows EE as the network) with a 3G monthly contract and I've seen the block message. I can't remember what it was, but it wasn't porn, just some random link I followed that I didn't care enough to work around the block to see.

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://zingongle.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/o2-selling-my-deta... for more details.

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.

Note I said SMS spam (whereas the linked article talks about email as well). I assert that if you port your number out of a mobile provider owned by Telefonica SA, you'll find every PPI ambulance chaser in the country suddenly has that number regardless of your TPS preferences.

All the mobile providers crunch images. T Mobile attempt it for all images. It's frustrating when HN page load is delayed because their stupid proxies are struggling to serve the tiny voting button gifs.

I mentioned before the weirdly broken system they use for this too - 1.2.3.9; 1.2.3.11; etc are all annoying IPs to use.

I too am on an "unlimited" account. Unlimited being the normal definition of "has limits" - they'll insert interstitial warnings about fair use limits and they'll stop flash working.

Interestingly, O2 seem to compress CSS as well. Had a client with a problem on a mobile site I just could not reproduce. Turns out it only happened when connected to O2s data network.

Awful.

T Mobile insert <script src="http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js language="javascript"></script> after the opening <html> on every page. Pretty lousy behaviour.

Well they are amazing though, so I see no reason at all to leave them. Simply nobody else in the UK offers a deal as good as theirs.

They're a no-tether operator aren't they?

I don't often tether but I do like the ability to do it.

To quote amirmc:

"Tethering is permitted on £10 goodybag and will work on all smartphones with an inbuilt tethering feature, except for the iPhone." [1].

Not sure what the deal is with iPhone (I'm on their £12 option). All the other plans expressly say "Tethering is not permitted ..."

[1] http://giffgaff.com/goodybags/10pound-goodybag

You can tether even with their 12 pound unlimited package. I had to do it a few times, it was only for half an hour or so,but nothing happened. People on their forums are saying,that it's basically a rule of thumb - if it's occasional and you are not downloading hundreds of MB of data, it's going to be fine. But start using your phone to torrent stuff,and they will probably limit your speed or cut you off.

This is about O2 so it's not specific to GiffGaff, it happens to O2 customers who also pay much more for service than on GiffGaff.

Hence it doesn't really address the "too good to be true" comment about GiffGaff in the GP.

It's actually about Telefonica SA and everything they own, downwards. They're all considered harmful in my book.

Sure, and I was pointing out that this isn't relevant to GiffGaff's lower pricing. You were responding to a comment about GiffGaff being too good to be true but it's not 'cheap service in exchange for data-harvesting' as your previous comment could be read.

Here, the disruptive Free Mobile (mobile.free.fr) is 20€/mo for unlimited calls, text, and data (incl. tethering) gets throttled beyond 3GB/mo. For 2€/mo you get 2h calls, unlimited text while data is made possible via a dedicated SSID (FreeWifi_secure) on every one of their DSL customer routers, with automatic authentication via EAP-SIM. Both contracts can be terminated at any time and will stop at the end of the current month.

£12 looks like surprisingly cheaper.

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.

> "I've never dealt directly with their CS..."

They don't have customer support, it's community based (with rewards for those who help). They do have account agents for dealing only with account/billing problems (the only thing you wouldn't want to deal with on a public forum).

None of their current plans appear to offer tethering. Are you on a grandfather-ed plan?

"Tethering is permitted on £10 goodybag and will work on all smartphones with an inbuilt tethering feature, except for the iPhone." [1].

Not sure what the deal is with iPhone (I'm on their £12 option). All the other plans expressly say "Tethering is not permitted ..."

[1] http://giffgaff.com/goodybags/10pound-goodybag

I believe they cannot allow tethering with the iPhone since the iPhone its self doesn't allow tethering unless Apple unlocks it.

So they might need to pay Apple some £££ to get the ability to simply unlock tethering for GiffGaff's users.

I suspect that an jail-broken iPhone could tether on GiffGaff just fine.

Why would Apple want to restrict tethering? It is the carriers that want to restrict it in order to continue charging differently for different bits on the wire.

Apple obviously provide the infrastructure for enabling/disabling tethering but I cannot see how it is in their interest to discourage it, except to keep the carriers happy.

It's the carrier that disables tethering based on the network profile. An unlocked iPhone can tether just fine out of the box, until you put a SIM card in that doesn't allow it.

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.

I love it, I've been with them for 2 years now. And their unlimited plan is really unlimited. In one month(during the summer) I downloaded 18GB of data, and nobody complained. I rarely call people,so 200 minutes per month is more than enough, and unlimited texts are good as well.

When I was buying my phone, I realized how much money I could save going with them. I could either go with a 24 month contract for 35 pounds per month and get the phone "free", on a contract which included 500mb of data, 1000 minutes and 1000 texts - spending 840 pounds in total, or just buy the phone outright for 500 pounds and go with giff gaff, spending 740 pounds over the course of 24 months, saving myself a nice 100 pounds and getting a better deal.

It's also worth pointing out that they don't charge you for 0800 numbers (free phone numbers, which (I think) every other mobile operator does charge for and exclude from any monthly allowance).

Apparently you can use the Skype app for free calls to 0800 numbers.

I had some trouble getting adult content on my phone on GiffGaff. Their webpage fell over took several weeks and three support tickets to get it fixed.

To their credit though when I made a formal complaint about the issue it got fixed within minutes. Plus its very cheap so I can put up with a little crap support (had much worse from other companies I paid a lot more for)

Meh, orange do the same.

I was at a music festival last summer and wanted to lookup the program on the festival website to see what was on in the afternoon. Blocked as adult content. They block all sorts of weird stuff.

I have no qualms about requesting 'adult content' when 'adult content' includes political satire and festival websites. It renders the whole idea of people being shamed into not requesting 'porn' access moot, because everyone knows it's really not just porn, it's all sorts of content someone has arbitrarily added to a list.

These are good examples to bring up when someone makes the (dumb) suggestion that we should all have mandatory or opt-out blocking on our home connections.

The end of my little story is that to find out what bands were on that afternoon, I had to install Tor (orbot).

Good luck with that. The only time I've screamed with rage down the phone at some poor customer service rep (who was just following the script given to her) was trying to end a 3 contract. They are bastards.

Watch your bank account after you cancel, too. They have a nasty habit of "forgetting" to stop charging you (happened to a friend of mine who didn't realise until he got back from his deployment in Afganistan)

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