Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Virgin Media blocking website of Parliamentary group on rendition

Virgin Media appear to be blocking the website of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Extraordinary Rendition. As Chair of the group, Andrew Tyrie says, the
"APPG is a Parliamentary body with over sixty members, both Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
You can visit the APPG’s website here"
Except you can't as a Virgin Media customer since you get re-directed to a page saying

Sorry, Web Safe has blocked this site

This site has been blocked by Web Safe because it's listed as having malicious content. It could put your personal and financial information at risk or cause damage to your files.
Find out more about Web Safe Sign in to My Virgin Media to change your Web Safe settings If you don’t think this page should have been blocked, let us know.
For information, Virgin Media, your web labyrinth is too tortuous for sentient human beings so I'm letting you know from here.

Interestingly, when I attempted to post two separate messages on Twitter about this, Twitter blocked me too:
"This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can't complete this action right now. Please try again later."
 My messages:
" blocking website of All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition  Tell Andrew Tyrie MP?"
and
"Twitter blocked me posting  blocking website of All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition "
I've made several later attempts to post the message all resulting in the same blocking message - the Twitter bot accusing me of spamming or engaging in malicious activity.

Is it possible the APPG website has been compromised and Twitter and Virgin Media are right?

Either way Mr Tyrie, who I heard doing a valiant job of trying to educate some BBC broadcast journalists on extraordinary rendition this evening, should be informed.

3 comments:

PAKennedy said...

I would let him know, but I'm on Virgin :)

Ray Corrigan said...

:-) Got a response from Virgin Media on Twitter to say they are not blocking the site. So did a quick shufti at lunchtime to check and the site is still being blocked on my home PC. So I've written to Mr Tyrie suggesting he have his techies check it out.

Anonymous said...

Emails mentioning extraordinary rendition -dot- org are being rejected by sites that use SURBL.

A check of http://www.surbl.org/surbl-analysis shows it is still being listed as "malware".