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rmunntoday at 2:02 AM1 replyview on HN

Funny story on porn blockers. Back when I attended college, the college I attended blocked porn sites at the DNS level. It was pretty good at its job, but I did notice one false positive: I was trying to access the website for the Extremely Reliable Operating System (whose URL at the time was eros-os.org, though that URL no longer works). The porn blocker blocked my access attempt; I had to click on the "email the sysadmins" link and send them an email saying "Hey, can you add this site to the DNS whitelist? Despite having "eros" in the URL it's got nothing at all to do with porn." They whitelisted it and I had no more false-positives the rest of my college career. But I still laugh about that one, more than two decades later.


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drnick1today at 8:35 AM

What is the point of such restrictions? DNS blacklists can be trivially bypassed by changing the browser's or the operating system's DNS resolver. For example, and somewhat insidiously, Firefox defaults to using Cloudflare AFAIK.

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