Is Three censoring the internet?

grubby23

Hi all,

I am on one of three's all you can eat dataplan. I am happy with the speed so far, however, a number of harmless webpages are blocked for no reason at all, e.g.:

https://www.dornbirn.com
https://www.thechive.com
https://www.b3ta.com

When entering one of the above links, the web browser is redirected to:

http://mobile.three.co.uk/pc/Live/pcreator/live/100004/pin/blocked

and the following content is displayed:

The web site you are trying to access is not available.
Links to a number of three internal sex pages...

I called three and they told me that ALL filters from their side should be removed which obviously cant be true. Anyone how an idea how I will to able to get "normal access" to the internet without censorship (and without changing the provider)?

Many thanks!

Hammyman

What is the name of the APN you are connecting via? One is walled, the other is open.

Also change the DNS server address to OpenDNS.

grubby23

Hi,

My APN is 3internet.co.uk. Where do I set the DNS Server to OpenDNS, under the menu point "Server", is this referring to the DNS?

Thanks for your help!

withabix

BT Mobile do it too.

Perish the thought that I might want to buy a National Lottery ticket, bet on a horse race or look at some knockers on MY phone!

asbokid

Three will lift the censorship if you can prove you are over 18. If you are PAYG, I think they demand to see documentary proof. I just looked at those websites. BLIMEY! Don't let the missus know you are feasting your eyes on those beauties!

Three uses a Squid web proxy caching server to perform the censorship. Most ISPs run Squid or something similar.

If HMG ever wanted to pull the plug on our internet freedoms here in Britain, it would do it through Squid.

Using Squid, censorship can be performed at document level rather than site level (which is all you can do by nobbling the nameservers).

E.g. Squid could be configured to let you retrieve any of the news articles on The Times of India website, except for the article about Ryan Giggs shagging Katie Price while Mr Justice Eady and Andrew Marr looked on and clapped.

That webpage, even if you had a direct URL for it, would be redirected by Squid to either a 404 or a completely different document. You can't even prove that your internet access is being censored. That's how internet censorship is achieved in repressive regimes in China, the Middle East and elsewhere. The twisted irony is that Western IT corporations install and configure the censorship on behalf of the fascist governments! Rant over and out!

http://www.squid-cache.org/

KillerWatt

asbokid wrote: »

That webpage, even if you had a direct URL for it, would be redirected by Squid to either a 404 or a completely different document. You can't even prove that your internet access is being censored. That's how internet censorship is achieved in repressive regimes in China, the Middle East and elsewhere. The twisted irony is that Western IT corporations install and configure the censorship on behalf of the fascist governments! Rant over and out!

So what do we censor and what do we allow?

sandford6016

Had the same happen to me. Ring them up and they take it off. It took about an hour to become 'live' on my phone and let me access all the apparently naughty stuff!

[Deleted User]

T-mobile do that sort of blocking also by default..

rmg1

So do Vodafone and I'm on contract. Apparently, I need a credit card to probve I'm over 18.
Problem being, I don't have a card and I don't want one.

free4440273

many of the mobile operators do this/ gambling and spread-betting sites too //

asbokid

KillerWatt wrote: »

So what do we censor and what do we allow?

Who knows? That's the beauty of dressing up censorship as a fault or failure - it is plausibly deniable.

Bill Ray of The Register penned a recent article about net censorship in China....

More interesting were the results of a contentious search [performed via a 3G connection in China]..

Google's URL forwards to Hong Kong from China, and mostly works, but search for "Tiananmen Square" and suddenly the cellular connection drops out entirely and has to be reconnected, not a browser error but a disconnected data session...

After performing several such searches our cellular connection started playing up quite badly, dropping out at random and requiring a complete power cycle of the dongle before we could reconnect. There's no way to tell if that was down to our activities, or unrelated, but one did follow the other.

China reckons that its site-blocking is no different than our own attempts to block sites hosting child pornography, albeit on a larger scale. But the comparison isn't really fair – at least not yet. We block child pornography because of the harm its production does to children, but moves are afoot to widen the UK's own firewall, and if that's allowed to happen then it becomes harder to attack China's on ideological grounds.

Tiananmen what?

In full at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/20/china_firewall/page2.html