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Bypassing EE’s Content Lock system without a credit card or identifying yourself

When you buy a service from EE it will be filtered at their moderate level by default, the other options are Strict and Off.
Strict is designed to be safe for children and Off is for Adults.

Of course even if you were to request that all filtering to be turned off it is still possible that you’ll fall foul of an incorrect IWF filter and be presented with the following page;
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Putting the IWF and their secret blocklists aside there are many reasons you may not want to disclose information to EE or handover a credit card (you might not have one for instance) but still need to get past their filters that will block a female centric “adult” site that blogs about Censorship due to the content of the copy but will quite happily let you visit LiveLeak.com and watch people get killed.

The good news is that the EE Content Lock is quite easy to circumnavigate.

DNS Spoofing: No
MiTM SSL: No
Deep Packet Inspection: Yes
Destination IP Transit Interference: No
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Unique Reason for Block: No
Categorised Block: No
Ability to report incorrect block: No

The goto advice is always to download Tor as it will not only bypass all filtering but it will also help mask those who need to use Tor to aid in protecting their privacy.

If you aren’t comfortable with installing software such as Tor then you could follow our guide on Creating a SOCKS5 Proxy which also works perfectly.

Finally the EE Content Lock system cannot MiTM SSL so even for blocked URLs such as http://reddit.com/r/nsfw (note that reddit.com isn’t blocked but /r/nsfw is!) can be accessed by using SSL.
Unfortunately reddit relies heavily on Akamai so the SSL certificate will be incorrect and you really shouldn’t get in the habit of accepting incorrect SSL.

Whilst this post proves it is trivial to bypass Government co-erced filtering it is likely that there will soon be a call to make filtering mandatory and criminalising attempts at bypassing them.

The best way to prevent this is to write to your MP and tell them that you don’t believe that any form of filtering has any place on the Internet.

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More Overblocking for reasons of “Sexual Orientation” – This time at Costa Coffee

It didn’t take long for more high profile websites to get overblocked by overzealous filters.

PinkNews.co.uk reported today that it is blocked at Costa Coffee locations due to “Sexual Orientation”.

Yes, we’ve got to protect those kids from the childhood corrupting influence of Gay news.

But don’t worry, in the event that someone then planned on browsing to Stonewall to report what they may feel is an inappropriate block bordering on discrimination they’d find that Stonewall is blocked too.

Things are only going to get worse…

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EE – Your Internet must be Filtered if *anyone* under 18 has access

So as an Adult it appears you are contractually obliged to be filtered if anyone under the age of 18 is going to “use” the SIM.

And yet EE still don’t tell you exactly what else it is that you’ll be blocked from seeing as their block lists aren’t public.

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U.K. Government Willing To Block EU Net Neutrality Deal

BuzzFeed has reported that the Government is so intent on continuing to block online material, that it is willing to block the EU Internet Neutrality laws;

We wouldn’t support anything that restricted our ability to block illegal material.

We do not support any proposals that mean we cannot enforce our laws, including blocking child abuse images.Government spokesperson

Note that is no longer just about protecting children, it’s safe to say we’ll start to see the blocking of “extreme” material soon enough…

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InternetMatters PR Campaign Starts Up

As part of the plan to filter the Internet the big ISPs also agreed to fund an awareness campaign to educate parents (the cynical among us believe this to be a PR ploy to gloss over the surveillance impact of DPI, filtering & the expansion of CleanFeed esque silent censorship).

The InternetMatters website itself ( http://www.internetmatters.org/ ) contains a lot of actually useful advice and doesn’t resort to scare tactics for sensitive subjects like Grooming or Bullying to encourage the use of filters.

Furthermore the website even tells visitors that No Filter is 100% effective;

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This leads onto a point highlighted in a recent tweet for the campaigns twitter account;

96% of parents believe it is their responsibility to keep their children safe (so not the ISPs) and no filter is ever 100% effective.

So why did David Cameron and Claire Perry insists that ISPs start filtering the Internet?

Why has TalkTalk deployed surveillance grade Deep Packet Inspection equipment on their network? Why does Sky and others interfere with in-transit packets to spoof responses to legitimate requests?

One answer is that this equipment makes it easier for the Police & GCHQ to intercept traffic. It also enables rights holders to arbitrarily choose where your packets can go by blocking ThePirateBay.org and others like it.