Message on screen - BT blocked site

andygb

I logged in as usual an hour ago, and went on a couple of news sites and MSE.
Then I tried going on to a car owners forum, and immediately a message filled the screen, saying that BT had blocked the site because the account holder had put parental controls on.
I am the account holder, and I have been on this particular owner's forum for years, and never had a problem.
I am using Firefox as a browser, and have never had any site blocked at any time in the past.
As you may have guessed, BT is the ISP.
There was an option to change the parental controls, but it did not accept my username and password (to be fair I may have forgotten it, because I have not used it for at least four years).
Has anyone else had this problem with BT?

Strider590

Phone them up, tell them if they don't stop filtering your internet you'll f**k off to another provider.

If what I hear is correct, then Google will also have stopped listing the website in search results.

This is going to start affecting everyone soon, I fought hard to make people realise what all this meant years ago, but the responses were always "it'll only affect people who go looking for bad stuff".

The fact is, the internet is slowly falling into the control of unknown commercial entities linked to the govt, who will have a terrifying amount of control over what we can and cannot have access to.

Some super rich businessman wants the competitions websites blocked? done. The major political parties want the other parties websites blocked? done (just like in Russia).
It's not about us, it's not about protecting copyrights, or protecting our children, it's about control and making money.

I went on Holiday recently in Europe, I decided to check back on the UK news, found a European news website which has some really interesting stories about protests going on back home, the BBC news website barely mentioned this and put a "the protesters are evil" twist on the the story.
When I got back home, I went to look at the same European news website and got the blocked website message.......

They're also launched a media backed campaign against proxy networks and such (like Tor) which bypass all this censorship, all under the guise of preventing crime.

andygb

Strider590 wrote: »

Phone them up, tell them if they don't stop filtering your internet you'll f**k off to another provider.

If what I hear is correct, then Google will also have stopped listing the website in search results.

This is going to start affecting everyone soon, I fought hard to make people realise what all this meant years ago, but the responses were always "it'll only affect people who go looking for bad stuff".

The fact is, the internet is slowly falling into the control of unknown entities linked to the govt, who will have a terrifying amount of control over what we can and cannot have access to.
They're also launched a media backed campaign against proxy networks and such (like Tor) which bypass all this censorship, all under the guise of preventing crime.

It is a bit weird though, it let me look at the "Daily Mash", and let me look at a couple of political sites - but a car forum?
I would have understood if it had been Pistonheads or Barry Boys:rotfl:

Strider590

andygb wrote: »

It is a bit weird though, it let me look at the "Daily Mash", and let me look at a couple of political sites - but a car forum?
I would have understood if it had been Pistonheads or Barry Boys:rotfl:

This is the thing, it's not all fully implemented yet.
In Australia it was a complete farce, they tried to gain control via filtering and ended up blocking innocent websites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia

The problem is certain people who want control of the internet, they don't understand the technology, they use big words and brown envelopes to convince a bunch of politicians who also don't understand the technology. They rally the public via the media, then pay IT "experts" to come up with a solution, these "experts" just see £££ signs and don't care if the solution can ever really work as long as they get paid.

The result will be a complete mess, which will achieve nothing but limiting our access to free information.

neilwoods

Strider590 wrote: »

This is the thing, it's not all fully implemented yet.
In Australia it was a complete farce, they tried to gain control via filtering and ended up blocking innocent websites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia

The problem is certain people who want control of the internet, they don't understand the technology, they use big words and brown envelopes to convince a bunch of politicians who also don't understand the technology. They rally the public via the media, then pay IT "experts" to come up with a solution, these "experts" just see £££ signs and don't care if the solution can ever really work as long as they get paid.

The result will be a complete mess, which will achieve nothing but limiting our access to free information.

Bit early in the day for tin foil hat time.

zaax

It never too early for the tin foil hat, if you want to stop the voices

andygb

Well, I have done a bit of Googling, and it seems that they had a shedload of problems between October 2013 and June this year, and then seem to have sorted them. The problems seemed to affect all kinds of forums and social networking sites.
The fact that I never seem to keep up with fashions probably means that I get everything quite late in the day:(
I really don't want to ring them and speak to several numpties in India (the old musical chairs tryong to answer the problem).

Strider590

These attitudes are why this is happening.......

You don't realise just how serious this really is.

It can be compared to privatisation of services, they tell you how great it'll be, they promise everything, nobody protests, they go ahead and do it, within 10 years it's all gone down the sh*tter.

They keep trying it on with the NHS, but fail because it's impossible to get public support to take away something thats free and make people pay for it.

kwikbreaks

Give https://www.tunnelbear.com/ a try while you are waiting for BT to remove parental controls. All parental controls that I've ever had the misfortune to come across are a crock o' brown stuff. I remember years back paying Vodafone to disable them on a dongle only to find that periodically they would screw up and reactivate them. Even one of my own websites got blocked.

Uxb

Strider590 wrote: »

They keep trying it on with the NHS, but fail because it's impossible to get public support to take away something thats free and make people pay for it.

Its not "free"
Its free "at the point of use"
We are all paying for it though our taxes.

Never mind; try and learn a bit by going to South Korea which seems always to be held up as an excellent example of how to manage an economy - and with excellent broadband to boot.
....and you will find ALL the hospitals and doctors surgeries are privately owed and private run: there's a thing.

andygb

Just a quick update.
Everything is now seemingly back to normal, despite the fact that I have not done anything.
I assume that this is merely the BTBlocker having a fit.