top | item 28114503

Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?

89 points| oriesdan | 4 years ago |github.com

48 comments

order

notafraudster|4 years ago

My trivia league was blocked by Heathrow's airport wifi because of "games/sports". I contacted Boingo, who told me they don't block websites (? okay, so then your client operates a rogue blocklist that uses Boingo headers for the error page -- that's even worse). I also tried contacting some sort of pseudo-government safe browsing list to see if it was their blocklist being used by Heathrow and got no response.

The annoying thing is not the false positives: these things happen, and mostly it's not all that urgent to resolve immediately. The annoying thing is a total lack of obvious appeals process to resolve a false positive. At least the OP's example is on GitHub and thus can easily be issued.

pricechild|4 years ago

My static home IP was blocked by my new energy supplier.

It took almost 4 months to get through to someone who would accept my problem wasn't forgetting my password.

In the end, I was pointed to their third provider and told "sort it out yourself, not our problem". Thankfully that other company had a reasonable-ish appeals process...

...obviously I got relisted in their db a few times but things seem to have calmed down now.

https://pricey.uk/blog/connection-reset/

tokai|4 years ago

A place I worked blocked hackernews bcs of "hacking". Never had the nerve to try to get it unblocked.

reaperducer|4 years ago

The company I work for blocks Google Translate. IT claims it's the default that comes with the filtering software it uses.

Fortunately, since I build multi-lingual web sites, I was able to get an exemption from the security department.

(No, I don't use Google Translate to translate web sites. The company has three internal and two external professional translators for that. But sometimes when I'm copying-and-pasting between versions, I like a little reassurance that what I'm pasting is what I think it is.)

deepsun|4 years ago

Does UK honor "net neutrality"? If yes, that could be a way to hold them (ISP, whoever it be) accountable.

bcoates|4 years ago

Yeah, the airport provides the Internet uplink and contractually it can be as locked-down and broken as they like. Boingo just manages the WiFi infrastructure and payment/login. Usually they're extremely lazy and just use a DNS service with business-style blocking rules and unblock popular stuff one at a time when people notice and complain.

herbst|4 years ago

I've worked with several kinds of public blocking lists and one thing I learned is that they are all full of false positives. For whatever reason, I would not be surprised if just nobody ever noticed the mistake.

Fnoord|4 years ago

Yeah, that's a given because they're not constructed manually ie. no manual verification.

Give them some time to react. My wife complained to me she could not visit a website (I run Pi-Hole on our network, and our mobile devices get routed to it even on external networks). I looked through the logs, figured the offending rule, contacted the maintainer, and they fixed it within a few hours.

The issue has been up for one hour thus far.

nerdponx|4 years ago

Or someone quietly slipped it onto a block list knowing that it'd take a while to get noticed.

bencollier49|4 years ago

They probably got hacked ages ago and it was added at that point. I wouldn't be assuming malice here.

Vaslo|4 years ago

I can no longer visit End-To-End encrypted sites anymore at work. It sucks because I use ProtonMail and end up having to use my phone to forward things from there or to my Google email, which I wanted to stop using entirely.

rPlayer6554|4 years ago

I am confused? Does your employer just block any https site?

unethical_ban|4 years ago

Depending on your place of work, it's a very good thing they block personal email.

aaron695|4 years ago

They are a phishing site

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HWH6z4...

Perhaps they have fixed it in the past 3 weeks, maybe they haven't.

From yesterday, so not fixed -

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rMUgla...

Also love the way it's signed, the persons online profile is "I'm Black Hat SEO Expert" if anyone wants to write any Green policy I guess contact them?

nkozyra|4 years ago

This is just streaming spam and any site that accepts user-generated content is susceptible to it.

Having been on their side it can sometimes be very difficult to mitigate without manual approval. This is not automated - it's done by humans and they adjust their patterns against any automatic mitigation attempts.

jonnycomputer|4 years ago

Hmm, that doesn't look like content the GP would put up intentionally.

shantnutiwari|4 years ago

This should be the top answer -- it is a phishing/spam site, whether due to being hacked or poor moderation policies.

No outrage to see here, please move along

hhlbf|4 years ago

[deleted]

SuoDuanDao|4 years ago

I have found during Canadian election seasons that green party signs and posters are the only ones consistently vandalized. The people who think the Green party is stealing 'their' votes are unbelievably entitled. If only they knew how much that does to make them not my second choice either.

marcinzm|4 years ago

Given the last 10 years of political "discourse" and third party election interference calling it "paranoia" seems like a very naive view of the world.