<story><title>Considered &quot;18+&quot;</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/02/considered-18/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edent</author><text>Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff.&lt;p&gt;One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the &amp;quot;violations&amp;quot; that they picked up just weren&amp;#x27;t considered problematic for a UK &amp;#x2F; EU audience.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocked. Although, again, that may have been by puritanical design.&lt;p&gt;Anything which looked like it might be used to bypass their filters (VPN, proxies, etc) were also blocked.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the customer isn&amp;#x27;t the user. It is the network who are terrified that Johnny&amp;#x27;s parent is going to go to the papers screaming about how the evil phone company corrupted their innocent child.  That&amp;#x27;s all it is there for - to protect the network.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmlorenzetti</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocked.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I had a colleague whose surname, Sextro, was part of his email address. He occasionally had messages blocked by blanket filters like that.</text></comment>
<story><title>Considered &quot;18+&quot;</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/02/considered-18/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edent</author><text>Many years ago, I used to work for Vodafone - and had some responsibility for their filtering stuff.&lt;p&gt;One of the main problems was that, at the time, it was all managed by Blue Coat. As they were a US company, many of the &amp;quot;violations&amp;quot; that they picked up just weren&amp;#x27;t considered problematic for a UK &amp;#x2F; EU audience.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, they would use blanked keyword blocking. So sex education resources would frequently get blocked. Although, again, that may have been by puritanical design.&lt;p&gt;Anything which looked like it might be used to bypass their filters (VPN, proxies, etc) were also blocked.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the customer isn&amp;#x27;t the user. It is the network who are terrified that Johnny&amp;#x27;s parent is going to go to the papers screaming about how the evil phone company corrupted their innocent child.  That&amp;#x27;s all it is there for - to protect the network.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joosters</author><text>Oddly enough, vodafone filtering is less restrictive in other ways. For instance, they never blocked The Pirate Bay, but I just switched ISP from vodafone and my new ISP (Sky) blocks the site via some TLS tricks. It&amp;#x27;s odd because while adult content blocks are purely a per-ISP choice (they offer it as a service&amp;#x2F;choice to customers), I had thought that TPB was blocked because of court orders. So how come one ISP blocks it, and other doesn&amp;#x27;t?</text></comment>