I had an appointment early this morning. I was there early and decided to read the news on my Windows mobile phone. I’m a reader of the Irish Independent on http://www.independent.ie. I was reading a couple of pages and then suddenly I could no longer access the site.
I was presented with this error:
HTTP Error 403: The service you requested is restricted.
The service you requested is restricted and not available to your browser.
That was funny because the site was OK 10 seconds before hand and had been since December when I bought the phone.
The page in question is hosted by 10.163.236.214 at http://10.163.236.214/lnk000/=http://imgvip.local/loc/local/home.aspx.  This is not an independent.ie server telling me I cannot get onto their site. Hardly! This is a Vodafone Ireland server blocking me from accessing the site for no good reason.
This is different to the usual block which comes from another server in the 10.163 range. That message blocks access to content for under 18’s (or those who haven’t cleared themselves in a Vodafone Ireland shop). I can easily bring up that different warning when I try to access Facebook or Twitter.
So what is it Vodafone Ireland. I know you read my blog. I get about a dozen hits from you folks every day. Are you censoring legitimate content? This is odd, because my cousin (a IT security expert) did suspect that the dodgy performance on your home broadband suggested that there was a transparent proxy being used. Every Vodafone Ireland employee he and I spoke to denied that there was. Now I am seeing a block – that means there most definitely is a transparent proxy, at least on your mobile network, and I am left to suspect that there is one on your fixed line broadband.
This censoring of legitimate access to a newspaper site that is critical of the ruling (and some would say corrupt) government is very suspicious.
Come on, let’s hear it then? What have you done? Be very honest because you know I will be when I write to the Independent and let them know about this.