The mystery of Vodafone's mobile broadband filtering
Whatever your views on porn, I'm sure you will agree with me when I say that content filtering just seems like such a good idea. How nice to be able to decide what you see, especially when it seems that makers of adult materials go through occasional phases of trying their utmost to stick something in front of you when you're looking for something else.
When that happens, I'd like my content filtering services not so much as a way of protecting my innocence, but more so I can just do my stuff without interruption. So I am having serious trouble understanding exactly what is driving the content filter on Vodafone's 3G dongle service.
Some days, whole swathes of the net are invisible - not because they are known to be rude, but because Vodafone claims it can't even decide whether they are rude, or not. Vodafone's content filter is offline, so to be on the safe side it just bars all accesses to marked sites.
On those days you can read the BBC, and that's it. Other days the filter is up - and then it just acts in the most absurd ways. I have an email address on GMail, and another on Yahoo UK: the Yahoo one is blissfully silent, the GMail one gets skiploads of sp*m, weird offers from weird sites, all the usual nonsense (I have the great pleasure of a client who actually work on supporting Pfizer, so we had to test their proxy filters to actually pass "V*agra". That GMail account has never been the same since.)
Naturally, Vodafone decided last week that the Yahoo mail page qualified as "adult", and the GMail one didn't. Even a passing read of the GMail one would, you think, have triggered like crazy because last month I ended up at Moorfileds Eye Hospital being treated for Uveitis, and one of the pre-existing triggers for that is Syphilis!
So (as you would) I went away and researched extensively, using the GMail account as my return point for my questions. Happily for me, I got every conceivable type of all-clear both on the eye thing and on it's possible trigger - and unhappily for Vodafone, their service didn't even whisper about content blocking that site or those messages.
Ah you say, maybe it's smart enough to distinguish medical research from prurient one-handed surfing (or the wages of sin): in which case my response is, if that's so how come it allows in the content of the GMail inbox, but bars the content of the GMail chat service frame within it? And what changed about my Yahoo mailbox between last week (when it was BAAAAAD) and this week, when it is sweet, innocent and blameless?
If the gap between the concept of content blocking and it's execution is this wide, then I think I'll take the option of unblocked access, however irritating that might become. Vodafone may feel it has a duty of care to protect the tender eyeballs of its customers and staff, and I don't disagree with either logic: but the network really has to do a much better job of surfacing its basis for blocking than it's managing right now!
