t-mobile internet access- content lock

skintjenny

ive just bought a wen n walk usb thing for t mobile from the carphone warehouse and am using it to finally connect to the internet at home- hurrah!
all is working well except that when i try to get onto facebook (sad i know) it come up with a page saying " Content Lock has barred this service because this site is rated 18. If you are over 18, you can access this site and others like it if you register to remove Content Lock.
Register"
when you click register it tells you to put your credit card details in so that it can verify you are over 18....
i find this highly suspect... nothing like this was mentioned to me in the shop and i cant find anything about it on the t mobile website, plus the page that come up looks really unofficial... just the sentence in a line accross the top

has anyone else had this experience?
is it a scam? how can i check my precious facebook?:cool:

thanks
jenny

weegie.geek

It's legit. You can get around it ludicrously easily though.

It works on the domain name you're accessing, and nothing else, so for example I can't access myspace but if i make a subdomain of one of my domain names and make it redirect to myspace I can access myspace. If you don't have a domain of your own, sign up at http://freedns.afraid.org/ and make yourself some subdomains that redirect to sites you use.

You can call them up and verify over the phone though.

Annoyingly, it doesn't work with a debit card, only a credit card.

Pretty easy to find the info that says it's legit on the t-mob website though.

http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/help-and-advice/phone-support/content-lock/

Doublespresso

yeah, it's legit. Annoyingly it also classify youtube as an "adult" site.

An easy way round this is to use a proxy and then you can browse anywhere.

An even easier way is (at a small cost) is to use onspeed (the software that is meant to speed up your browsing) which acts as a proxy, check
http://portal.onspeed.com/

Doublespresso

oh, and by the way, I also use Onspeed for watching BBC iPlayer when I'm abroad although I must say that I find the software buggy and it tends to generally slow things down for me, so I disabled the default "load at start up" (not easy to do, you'll need tech support for that) and I only activate it for the 2 purposes above

MilkyJoe

Just tried the subdomain suggestion and it didn't get past the block.

buglawton

I read somewhere that using Google Translate to translate the page to another language might work....

S0litaire

I used to be on T-Mobile.
The request for credit card details is just to confirm you are over 18. they do NOT charge anything to the card (well the didn't with me.) It's a hassle but a lot less than trying to play about with the Proxy programs

buglawton

Hehe most under 18s will know thru their grapevine how to get past this instantly, only the over 18s are flummoxed!

wanye

phone them on 150. i had this content lock, but no credit card to unlock it.

one call to the extremely helpful scottish man at the other end, and i was browsing without restriction a few minutes later...