Web filters block list includes fashion blog
https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720386112552960
https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720218155835394
https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722059660795904
https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722582921207808
The point about this is that the only reason Ashleigh-Jayne found about about this is because she is a TalkTalk customer. TalkTalk’s own web filters block list had her site down as being adult only.
Now maybe parents wouldn’t want little girls (or boys) checking out nail polish and fashionable shoes. The little darlings grow up too quickly these days. However we hope this is just a mistake. Ashleigh-Jayne will almost certainly be able to contact TalkTalk and get her site taken off the black list.
However if she hadn’t been a TalkTalk broadband customer she might never have found out whether her site was on the list. Millions of people might be wrongly denied access to her site. This is a problem with the system. The blacklists are automatically produced by machines that tbh are inherently untrustworthy because they get it wrong too often.
The following link takes you to an Open Rights Group website that can test your own website to see if it is blocked
http://linkis.com/www.blocked.org.uk/TJZCq
I took a look at trefor.net and the results are in the featured image. The BT and TalkTalk results that are inconclusive don’t necessarily mean they are blocking me buy it is certainly raises an eyebrow or two.
Haven’t actually looked at Ashleigh-Jayne’s blog but I’m taking her word for it that it’s not pornographic. As far as I’m aware she is a fine upstanding member if the blogging fraternity (sorority?).
As I write I realise that I will soon need a new pair of shoes. I doubt I’ll find them on her site mind you but I should be OK. I don’t think that ja.net has the same filtering policy. I’ll leave you with a little story about dubious websites that perhaps should be blocked from viewing by children (once the parents have opted in to the filter of course).
A year or two ago I gave a talk on VoIP security at a ja.net conference. An engineer came up to me afterwards for a chat and the conversation got round to how ja.net would have coped had they had to implement the Digital Economy Act and monitored its hundreds of thousands of users for their downloading habits.
The guy told me a story of how they had one been alerted to a really high bandwidth usage coming out of one room in a hall of residence. They went on an investigative visit and found that the female occupant of the room had moved in with a pal. The room had been painted purple and now had a pole in the middle of it surrounded by 4 webcams. Four enterprising female undergraduates had been paying for their university education by doing some professional internet pole dancing.
Now will that get me on a web filters block list?
