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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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).
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.
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.
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)
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)
ISP today gets to define what approved content is, and there is no end to the methods use to define it. ISP's will continue to expand the sometimes rather arbitrary rules until either government steps in to regulate the industry, or a anti-censorship open by design system will replace the current industry.
First the network allowed everything. Then ISPs started with forbidding child porn as the one and only one exceptional rule. Then it was everything except "illegal content", being everything before with the added inclusion of copyright infringements. Then extreme porn was added, because anti-porn can always be advertised to end-users as a mechanism for protecting children. Then it is "mature content", including anything an ISP might get a letter of complain about, but which does not hurt any business partners. This meant that they can cut cost on support, but at the same time protect any revenue from advertisements. That mean items such as tor, political satire, all form of porn, unpopular religious sites and (anti)social hangouts get listed, but things like alcohol, commercials directed to children, political advertizements, violence and sexual hinting content will be left alone. After that, they start to add items to the list which competes with the ISPs' own products, such as VoIP, but also products that put a strain on their network such as video streaming. The last bans tend to be less severe, as to show how slow competing products are with their low quality of service. This also allow for a mechanism to extract levies from larger companies such as Google without going with a full blown ban that might create outcry from ones consumers.
The market won't regulate itself. There are too few options of consumers, and there exist a clear asymmetrical information gap between buyer and seller. Lemon laws for services could help here, but it would be the same effort or even more effort than to create industry regulations for ISPs.
Of course, when they first started censoring CP, plenty went, "Well, yes, it's abhorrent, but what about the slippery slope?", and got shouted down by our government, the press, and peers, who all said words to the effect of "Don't be ridiculous, you're hysterical, what are you, a pedophile?".
Even now, as we gracelessly tumble down the well-greased-incline, they will merrily argue that there is no slippery slope.
As to regulation, there already is, and it actively encourages ISPs to censor.
You know these filters are optional, right? Comparing these to the filters for images of child sexual abuse is bizarre - they're operated in very different ways.
Are filters for images of child sexual abuse written into law? It is a industry standard in Europe, but I never heard that UK actually made a law to force ISPs to use it.
as for the linked content-code, it is true that its is not a industry regulation but a rather a industry practice code written by large ISP themselves.
I don't know if it's a law, but it's done differently to the normal filters.
The Internet Watch Foundation provides a list of sites that are involved in images of child sexual abuse. While they're an industry group, they are a bit more serious about their mission than other filter providers.
Back when I was using them, they blocked almost all Romanian news sites on the same basis (I don't know if they still do). I went through their stupid procedure for proving I'm over 18 and instead of unblocking everything, they opened up their own page where they sell porn!
I spent a few months doing general customer support (not technical) for a telco/isp. We had two isp products, a general one 'foo' and a rural-oriented one 'bar'. We could see the homepage for 'foo' and it was helpful in getting customers to the right spot to login (but what they saw after that was a mystery). No dice with 'bar' - our own product. I emailed the management saying "please whitelist 'bar', it's not like we're going to waste time looking at it, and it improves the service". Management droned: "That's not our decision, it's IT's".
I emailed IT with the reply and said the same thing to them. "That's not our decision, it's Management's".
Ah, the life of a drone. Can't say I miss it. The same place had an email quota so strict that I couldn't keep more than 2-3 weeks worth of emails. It also made me a lot more forgiving of callcentre drones.
I've always thought it funny how porn is 'mature' content, but the people who use it are considered 'juvenile'.
I've always wanted to hear the voiceover in a cinema say "This film is rated for mature audiences", and have the film be a political thriller of which juveniles wouldn't understand the politics...
I'm with 3UK, and have rang them up to get this filter removed. The person on the phone assured me it would be lifted within 24 hours - it's still the same. This was about 5 months ago.
When I tried to do it, they added a £5/month thing to my account, but then also added a £5/month goodwill, so I wasn't paying for it. I have no idea what it is doing, but there is no filter anymore.
I had to phone a few times before it worked though.
Be careful with that, I had them do the same thing to me (after I asked them not to) and the goodwill suddenly ended after a few months. Took hours to get it sorted and refunded, and to top it off they put the flaming restriction back on!
Edit: I just checked, and it looks like it was removed again at some point, possibly when I renewed the contract? Ah well.
An interesting side-effect of "cloud browsers" (browsers that proxy your traffic through their servers and compress the data on the mobile data end) like Opera Mini and Amazon Silk is they completely bypass these filters.
Orange UK have a similar overenthusiastic filter - I've noticed it blocking online dating websites, a beer festival website and even reddit, in it's entirety.
It's also opt-out, and although this can be done through their mobile app, it has the annoying habit of occasionally re-enabling itself. Very annoying.
indeed no isp or gov't should be allowed to censor any information, unless that information's critical to national defence or something (and even then, i would be really dubious of the claim). Whether it is porn or not doesn't even come into the argument, because the issue is not with the contents, its with censorship itself as a concept.
If an ISP web filter is the only thing stopping people from accessing classified military documents then I would be very concerned for your national security.
It's an optional filter. People can ask to have it turned off. It's a voluntary filter that the companies chose to implement before government forced filtering on them.
It's baffling to me to see this described as censorship. The content is still there. People can still get the content, they just need to say that they want to get the content. Sometimes they need to prove their age. (In the UK we have some legally mandated minimum ages; when a cinema says '15' it means you're not allowed in if you're under 15.)
As I've said, there's a problem with the filter being opt-out rather than opt-in; and there's a problem with the filter being too broad and blocking things that it shouldn't.
I just change the APN to 3internet from three.co.uk which gets rid of the censoring. Settings / Wireless and networks More / Mobile networks / Access point names on my Nexus S.
So far (nearly two years) no ill effects with billing, I'm on the one plan which allows tethering YMMV.
The only gotcha I'm aware of is that bits of three infrastructure such as the MMS server and I think the "mythree" stuff don't recognise the phone anymore but thats no big deal for me. So the couple of times I've received an MMS I've changed the APN back.
I'm on 3 and it once blocked a page on the NME (New Musical Express) - I just thought it was a one-off and couldn't really be bothered digging into it. It appears that I was wrong.
Not that the ISP should be doing this anyway, but it's worth noting that porn as political satire has a long history. The Marquis de Sade, for example, used to write stories featuring politicians of the day finding... creative... uses for the French Constitution.
GiffGaff has been doing this as well, couldn't access reddit, 9gag or any of the sites that "might" have adult content. Had to go to my account settings and input my passport number to get the access unlocked.
>First, because many people will be unaware that this kind of "mature content" censorship is taking place at all, and therefore won't ask for it to be stopped.
You get a huge interstitial page telling you that the site is being blocked and telling you what you need to do to have it turned off.
I agree that the block should be off by default. Sellers could ask the customer if they wanted the block turned on when the phone is bought. I agree that the blocks are too broad.
T-Mobile didn't ask for any ID. I guess I'm pretty obviously over 18. They did ask for my name and address.
This is Not News. Many mobile networks offer content filtering, and it's often turned on by default until you turn it off (this is true in the UK at least).
Just like the crappy filters you had to fight constantly at school these are extremely broad, badly curated lists of sites that they get from a third party. Three hasn't gone "let's block political and sex education sites", they just subscribe to a list made by another organisation, and often that list will mark a site as adult content purely because it has swear words on it.
They block lots of non pornographic things. They also told me it's to protect children who have been given a phone by their parents (who would have taken out the contract). Pretty ridiculous.
I would like it very much if you'd block any malware sites. I don't even mind if there's a reasonable number of false positives caught in the mix when a new exploit is found and I might not have updated my software yet.
Apart from that, please don't block anything. I am an adult and the sole user of the account.
Among other sites that are blocked is also reddit.com/r/sex . I cannot understand how preventing children to access educational sex-related materials could be construed as "protecting" them.
I agree that the filters are overly broad, but in fairness /r/sex isn't just about education. There is educational material on that sub, but there is also "adult" content in the strictest sense.
I always viewed these filers as being in place for actual children (age 1 to 11), teenagers (12+) should have them removed. If I had kids I would have no issue with them watching porn (aside from 3G data usage) and I wouldn't want to accidentally stop them from accessing information on sexuality.
I think a lot of parents have this strange idea that if you stop kids getting at the information (or condoms) that that will somehow stop them from having sex (or doing other stuff). But the research and statistics are contrary to that.
Frankly my biggest concern would be so called "sexting" (i.e. sending erotic pictures or video to their teenage love-interest). Which unfortunately only education can combat, there are no workable technological solutions that I am aware of.
Sort of - you need to prove your ID to them (and contracts include that ID). But I was using a 3 contract broadband SIM in my phone and that wouldn't let me access stuff on the phone's browser.
Eagerly anticipating the end of my contract next month.