Blocked

I’m always a little more amused than I should be when I spot in my blog stats some referral URLs that indicate I’ve just been added to a school’s proxy block list.
It’s not as if I even use bad language these days. I’m not sure what the hell they’re worried about really. Whoops, I just said ‘hell’, didn’t I? Oh, now I’ve said it again, godda-
They don’t want people to find out about how to become a favourite.
Go on – name and shame them – you know you want to!
Actually it’s not usually possible for me to tell who’s added it as the referring URLs that make it obvious most often contain IP addresses rather than hostnames.
Sad world. (psst, what’s the ip?)
Trace a route to the IP address / look up its rDNS and see who it belongs to?
I should have been more specific: private IP addresses, from an internal network.
Yes, but still .. things can be traced if one knows people in the right places :)
It’s always made me laugh when our RBC has arbitrarily blocked sites we actually need access too.
One previous instance was when they knocked off access to the live login service, thereby denying us access to Hotmail – and the Microsoft Volume Licence site we use for our school software downloads. That one caused a bit of an uproar across the region though they did eventually climb down.
Another time they blocked access to AVG’s update servers on the basis that it had been classified as a “sales site”. Which was… appreciated.
The teaching staff don’t always realise (or care!) that the reason they can’t get to a particular site they might be using is because of an arbitrary decision made by the RBC rather than the guys working in the IT office.