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T-Mobile's Optional Censorship Falls Down
An anonymous reader writes "T-Mobile USA offers a 'feature' to restrict access to certain kinds of content. This is called Web Guard. Supposedly Web Guard is supposed to inhibit access to content that falls under certain categories. The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), developed a tool to detect what sites were being censored. Amongst them were political news sites, foreign sports news sites and other sites that should not have been censored." It's quite an eclectic bunch of sites that are blocked, but then censorware tends to break in interesting ways, even when it's not by design.
Why shouldn't Newgrounds be on that list? Newgrounds is full of crappy porn "games" and other adult content. Blocking Newgrounds makes just about as much sense as blocking 4chan.
When I switched my T-Mobile Sim from a contract to a prepaid sim it automatically enabled this 'feature'. I didn't notice until it blocked access to a 2nd Amendment forum. The process for getting it disabled was fairly annoying as well. They wanted all kinds of odd information from me to verify my age. I suppose they were doing a public records lookup. The guy on the phone said it's because children can buy a prepay sim. If AT&T wasn't worse I'd probably have just cancelled service with them.
... censorware tends to break in interesting ways, even when it's not by design.
In web development circles this is known as the "clbuttic mistake". ;-)
Google it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The author seems amazed that a tool intended to make it difficult for kids to reach certain sorts of content blocks proxy sites. Either they have no clue about what they're talking about or they're prepared to ignore the gaping flaws in their own argument to make a point.
Elgin marbles, Sears catalog, National Geographic, your local art museum. How about the neighbor's bathroom window? What else can we keep the children from being traumatized by? Meanwhile people are beating, starving, raping and killing their own kids even as we sit and read this.
Except the list is so tangential and to be ridiculous censorship. e.g. Westmaster Junction, the discussion site for webmasters, Null Referer, a site that hides your referring page URL from websites you visit, Cosmopolitan magazine, a Russian programmers discussion forum etc, etc.
This is typically what happens when you have secret censorship, the list just grows and grows in ever more tangential ways and before you know it Slashdot is on the list because some commenter pointed out some flaw in some protocol used for some site used for filtering.