Monday, September 14, 2009

Draconian ISP.

The ISP (netopsie) for my hotel here in Bremen, Germany has apparently decided to block access to all "blogspot.com" domains.  If I try to view my blog, I get redirected to a page that says "Banned Site.  You are seeing this error because what you attempted to access appears to contain, or is labeled as containing, material that has been deemed inappropriate."  Ironically, I can post new entries since that is done from a blogger.com page.   I can't view the blog, however, or see comments.  Idiots.  Makes me wonder what they find objectionable on blogs in particular, or whether they are complete puritans and block lots of stuff.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may be reading too much into this. It could be as simple as an overzealous filter for URLs fitting the form "*gspot*".

phelippe said...

Wow!
This is the same procedure used by the Great Firewall of China. Even the irony is the same: you can write whatever you want to the outside world, but the folks close by can't read your reactionary words.
Truly Amazing!

Brad Holden said...

My guess is that the goal is to prevent spam. I would bet a bunch of ports are also wired shut so you don't issue 8 billion Nigerian emails from their network.

I really doubt that Germany has an issue with porn, given that they show it on TV.

Schlupp said...

My university banned access to "www.lanl.gov" once, because of the "xxx".

Douglas Natelson said...

Hallo from the Haus der Wissenschaft. Anon. - I'm sure you're right. They've just decided to take the lazy approach and block all *.blogspot.com pages. It does make me curious what else they filter, though. Schlupp, I ran into the same thing once.

DanM said...

I'm gonna tell your wife that you were trying to read porn on the internet in Germany. German porn. German NANOporn.