Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

T-Mobile's Web Guard: Lame Criteria Do Not Explain Many Blocked Websites



From the Open Observatory of Network Interference via Slashdot.  

10minutesaperdre.fr/  French funny news website
bbcprofit.com/  Financial advice website
cosmopolitan.com/  Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women.  
el-annuaire.com/  French website index
elu24.ee/  Estonian news portal
girlpower.it/  Italian women advice web
hackbase.com/  Chinese computer security website
hackforums.net/  Computer security Forum
hltv.org/  Sports news website
ir-tci.org/  Iranian Forum
kath.net/  Religious news site
livesports.pl/  Polish sports news website
logicalmedia.com/  Logical Media is an Affiliate Network.
nullrefer.com/  Hide Refer hides the visitors’ refer[er] from being seen by other websites
p.tl/  Japanese URL shortening service
pitsirikos.net/  Greek political blog
                     sougouwiki.com/  Japanese wiki
statsie.com/  Website statistics collection site   
titan007.com/  Chinese sports news website
torproject.org  The Tor Project is dedicated to prov[id]ing anonymous secure communication
whatreallyhappened.com/  [non main stream] ...news site
wiki-live.com/  Online Article directory
wjunction.com/  Webmaster Hangout
www.chartsinfrance.net/  French pop music hit list
yusukebe.com/  Japanese blog
zonebourse.com/  French economics and financial news site

"...Web Guard is supposed to inhibit access to content that falls under the following categories: Alcohol, Mature Content, Violence, Drugs, Pornography, Weapons, Gambling, Suicide, Guns, Hate, Tobacco, Ammunition" says the OONI.   Interesting that sites that would merit an R or X rating were they films are listed twice.  

I know from experience that the inclusion of political websites is so extensive as to imply no error in algorithm.  All prepaid (read: anonymous) accounts are subject to this infantilizing of the T-mobile version of the Web, or the T-Web (pronounced 'tweb'), as Mr. Corporanon dubbed it.  

'Hello.  This is T-mobile.... May I help you?  ....You say you want out of the T-Web?   No problem!  We value our customer's satisfaction and will be happy to remove that for you! What kind of account do you have?  ...Oh, Prepaid, I see.  Hold on while I transfer you.'  

'Hello.  This is T-mobile Prepaid.... May I help you?  ....You say you want out of the T-Web?   No problem!  We value our customer's satisfaction and will be happy to remove that for you! ....To whom am I speaking?  What is your address? Zip code?  How old are you?'

No anonymous accounts with any ability to surf, if T-mobile can help it.  

The OONI has a record of a rather interesting back-and-forth with T-mobile, about what possible justification there could be for having the Tor Project on the list. Well worth the read.

Here's an anecdotal example of the joy of the T-web.  Eleven thirty at night in an urban metropolis: two people who smoke tobacco find they have but one cigarette left.  One has a T-mobile cell phone with T-Web enabled.  Both know there are at least a couple all night tobacconists within reasonable driving distance, but do not know where.  A search is performed on the T-Web version of google.  Keywords "all night tobacconist" and the name of the city.

The results - all of them - are links concerning various aspects of quitting smoking -- not a tobacconist among them.



Be seeing you.

Hack To Circumvent T-Mobile Web Guard And View Any Site You'd Like

UPDATE:  NEW HACK HERE
UPDATE: at end of post
This photo effed with by a female faust.




The following hacks have not been tested in the last year; at least one of them could, however, be counted on for viewing all sorts of banned content, including evil political sites like What Really Happened, Florida Oil Spill Law, and Black Listed News (all of which were, in my experience, banned by T-mobile's Web Guard's 'good intentions.'




In any event:


Method number one:  add "user@" after the "http://" and before the "www" in the url.  Sometimes instead of www: try it both ways.


Method number two: think of another page that you CAN get that has a link to the page that you want.  Go there and click on it.  (I made myself a special page of all my favorite links just for this purpose).  If your page is also banned, try mailing it to yourself.  Or data-encoding it (see the  data-developer tinyurl portal in the sidebar if your URI is too long).  Or both.


Method number three (and the most likely to work after one try): Enter a search term that will bring up your desired URL.  Get ready for some fancy thumbwork.  Click on it; click back, click on some other URL, click back to the one you want, click forward, back two, forward one -- always ending after a flurry of entries on the site you desire.  


... et voilà.




UPDATE

for those not prepaid
this just in from ehow:




Instructions
    • 1
    • Log on to your T-Mobile account (see Resources).
    • 2
    • Click the "Profile" link under "Manage" and click the "Edit" link next to "Phone Controls."
    • 3
    • Click and select the "Turn Off" radio button under each "Web Guard" line. Click the "Save changes" button to save your changes and disable Web Guard.






Be seeing you.

The Pro-Nuke Ad Aimed At Viewers Of The Daily Show (INCLUDES YOUTUBE'S NOW-DISABLED COMMENTS)


...for as long as the link still provides the function, that is.  To see reactions from Youtube and Twitter, hit the "read" button below the video - you will see quickly why they were disabled. Apologies if comments no longer show - leave  a note: if you are interested, I have screenshots of some...


Updates & addenda probable....




h/t to the readers of Energy News for inspiring me to scout out access to these comments.








Be seeing you.