TorrentFreak: Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are Digital Trade Barriers. “In a submission for the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report, Cloudflare warns the U.S. government that site blocking efforts cause widespread disruption to legitimate services. The complaint points to Italy’s automated Piracy Shield system, which reportedly blocked ‘tens of thousands’ of […]
#ContentBlocking
Moscow Times: Russia Blocks World’s Largest Anime and Manga Database Over LGBTQ+ Content . “Russian authorities have banned the world’s largest anime and manga platform MyAnimeList over ‘extremist’ LGBTQ+ content, state media reported Tuesday. Federal media watchdog Roskomnadzor placed MyAnimeList into its national blacklist of sites banned in Russia last Wednesday without citing a formal […]
TorrentFreak: German Pirate Site Blockades Target Anna’s Archive, FitGirl and RPG Only. “Germany’s voluntary pirate site blocking scheme was overhauled this year, adding proper judicial oversight. In recent weeks, the first court orders were signed, resulting in blockades of shadow library Anna’s Archive and gaming portal RPG Only.”
TorrentFreak: Why a Court Order to Block Internet Archive’s Open Library Was Put On Hold. “Site-blocking orders are usually binary; a court issues an order for a domain to be blocked, or it does not. In Belgium, things work differently. After we reported on a court order that compelled ISPs to block access to the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a follow-up implementation order decided […]
TorrentFreak: DNS Piracy Blocking Orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS Respond Differently. “Pirate site blocking orders issued against DNS resolvers including OpenDNS, Google, and Cloudflare are stacking up in Europe. Since similar demands may eventually surface in other countries, including the U.S., we take a look at how these companies respond to blocking orders. Our research reveals […]
Marijke Luttekes: Blocking domains on Mastodon without visiting a profile. “If you want to block a domain on the Fediverse, you must do that from the profile page of an account on that server. I find that silly, and so did other folks on my timeline. So what if you do not want to find an account on a server? The answer lies in your account preferences: Mastodon’s Import function. In this […]
Texas’s War on Abortion Is Now a War on Free Speech
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/texass-war-abortion-now-war-free-speech
For those of you using recently releases of Google Chrome then uBlock continues to be available as uBlock Origin Lite for your content blocking and security enhancing needs 😊
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/ddkjiahejlhfcafbddmgiahcphecmpfh
Unseen Japan: As Celebrity Online Casino Scandals Mount, Japan Considers Blocking Sites Entirely. “One huge risk with online casinos as opposed to in-country gambling is that you have no idea who’s running a given site and whether it’s fair or a scam. Indeed, some reports indicate the popularity of online gambling sites has already attracted state actors. South Korea’s National […]
Munk.org: 24 Hours with Pi-Hole, the Digital Bouncer at the Gate. “Over the past day, devices, computers and phones attached to my network made some 86,000 DNS queries to translate domain names for outside domains into IP addresses that are the actual address the Internet uses to route requests. That’s a *LOT*. The second surprise was to find that over a THIRD of those requests were for […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2025/02/24/munk-org-24-hours-with-pi-hole-the-digital-bouncer-at-the-gate/
Stop Censoring Abortion: The Fight for Reproductive Rights in the Digital Age
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/stop-censoring-abortion-fight-reproductive-rights-digital-age
#ReproductiveJustice #ContentBlocking #FreeSpeech #BigTech #Privacy
Ars Technica: X is reportedly blocking links to secure Signal contact pages. “X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, is seemingly blocking links to Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, according to journalist Matt Binder and other firsthand accounts.”
Ars Technica: Democrat teams up with movie industry to propose website-blocking law. “US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites.”
Gizmodo: Online Censorship In Schools Is ‘More Pervasive’ Than Expected, New Data Shows. “Virtually all schools use some type of web filter to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires districts taking advantage of the federal E-rate program for discounted internet and telecommunications equipment to keep kids from seeing graphic and obscene images online. A […]
Techdirt: Twitter Briefly Blocked The NY Post, Elon Cried Foul. Now He’s Doing Far Worse. “When Elon Musk took over Twitter, one of his primary stated goals was to ‘bring back free speech’ to the platform. He was particularly critical of how Twitter had briefly blocked links to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. But now, the self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist’ […]
Techdirt: Copyright Industry Wants To Apply Automated Blocking To The Internet’s Core Routers. “What began as a highly-targeted one-off in the UK, when a court ordered the Newzbin2 site to be blocked, has become a favored method of the copyright industry for cutting off access to thousands of sites around the world, including many blocked by mistake. Even more worryingly, the approach has […]
Reuters: Iran lifts ban on WhatsApp and Google Play, state media says. “Iranian authorities have lifted a ban on Meta’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Play as a first step to scale back internet restrictions, Iranian state media reported on Tuesday.”
So, I am a substitute teacher in a couple of school districts. I mostly sub for high school teachers and as such I have a lot of free time on my hands. For example this week I am subbing for an English teacher. In most of my classes this week I am showing a movie (same 45 minutes over and over) and "supervising" the yearbook staff.
So, I bring my laptop with me to not go crazy. The schools all have a public wifi, which is additional to the locked wifi networks for students and staff, which normally I don't have access to.
To amuse myself (and hopefully you) here are some things that are blocked and allowed on the public wifi.
Facebook, TikTok, Xhitter and the like are blocked. Kids don't care, they all have phones. However, in general, Mastodon is not blocked. Most Pixelfed instances are blocked, but most Friendica instances are not. PeerTube instances are generally blocked. YouTube is available, but individual videos are blocked with no rhyme or reason. I have had many Linux instructional screencast videos blocked here.
Google maps is fine, but OpenStreetMap(!) is blocked. Can't figure that one out!
More later...
1/many
#ContentBlocking #Fediverse #PeerTube #Pixelfed #Friendica #OpenSource #FOSS
The X Corp. Shutdown in Brazil: What We Can Learn
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/x-corp-shutdown-brazil-what-we-can-learn
#GovernmentSocialMediaBlocking #ContentBlocking #International #FreeSpeech
Canada’s Leaders Must Reject Overbroad Age Verification Bill
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/canadas-leaders-must-reject-overbroad-age-verification-bill
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst