CCC Censored The Chaos Computer Club recently announced that their website was being blocked by Vodefone as part of their participation in the “Great Firewall of Britain”. This is somewhat concerning as they don’t seem to match any of the criteria for blocking that have been announced. This also blocks access to information and tickets for their upcoming conference. Many people predicted (me, EFF, and many others) that this censorship system would inevitable overreach when it was first announced.

This lead me to track down the Open Rights Group which runs a lovely website called Blocked!. I quickly checked on Anonymizer.com, and the results are here.

Anonymizer is blocked by BT (at their moderate setting), EE, O2, Sky (default), Three, and Vodefone.

If you are in the UK, you can still get to us through AAISP, Plusnet, and TalkTalk.

I understand why they might be blocking Anonymizer. There is a category for censorship circumvention and our VPN can certainly be used for that. The bigger question is why is Vodefone blocking ThePrivacyBlog!?!? We are a purely educational and news site.

Fortunately censorship in the UK (for home users) is an opt-out proposition. As long as you are comfortable calling the ISP and telling them that you want access to all the “bad” content, they will turn off the blocking. I encourage everyone in the UK to do so, even if they don’t want to actually view any of that. It is important to assert the rights you have or they may quietly disappear.

There are also often multiple choices for ISP, so make a proactive choice to pick one that does not censor over-broadly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yic-jiSFoUo

[powerpress]

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.