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Y Combinator is prohibited

26 points by vnuk ↗ HN
I've been reading HN for couple of months now and I'm really happy with the news that people subit etc. Also, I'm working in my own startup for around two years now and doing just fine :)

Recently I've sent a link to YCombinator's HN to all my friends and one of them (who works in multinational bank) replied to me with this:

IWSS Security Event Access to the URL http://news.ycombinator.com/news is currently restricted because it belongs to the Company Prohibited Sites category group.

25 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] thread
CalmQuiet
Perhaps the bank wishes to avoid brain-drain... and hopes to prevent its IT people from discovering more enlightened employment opportunities in more open parts of the world economy? :/
trickjarrett
I expect it was the use of 'Hacker' in the page content and meta tags.
bvttf
That's what happened here, it was even blocked as category: hacking. Only lasted about a week, though. Comforting in a way that they had a human check.
[dead] creynolds
Same thing happened at my work as well. Didn't last long.
wightnoise
Happened at my work too, I emailed the person in charge of the filter to allow access, next day it was unblocked.
eru
I had a similar experience at the company where I write my Diplomarbeit (thesis). My Ubuntu could not update libpcsclite1, because the proxy did not allow to fetch the package. Playing a bit with the URL a bit revealed that libpcsclite1 includes 'clit'. I had to fire up tor to get around that prude proxy.

[I was able to install Ubuntu in the first place, because I work at a department that does software development for rolling stock scheduling optimization. We are nearly the only ones in the company with computer that are not locked up.]

thelonecabbage
perhaps the staggering volume of content to keep up with on HN is proving a distraction to their workers.
brentr
Shouldn't these people be working when they are at work?
RandomPersona
If you're honestly asking this question, I think you've missed the point of a lot of what's said here on HN.

You might even want to pick up a copy of "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen.

brentr
I understand well what is said here. With that said, if you are at work, you do your work. Also, you should not be using corporate bandwith to catch up on your own reading agenda. Do that at home.
mustpax
My annual performance review includes a category for "staying on top of recent developments in web development and software engineering." In light of that, I would not call Hacker News my personal reading agenda.
SamReidHughes_
What he should and shouldn't do is for him and his employer to decide, not you.
brentr
You don't find it ironic that you are now telling me what I should and should not do?
tom
Yes, they should. That said, lunch / coffee break HN is something I look forward to. I get to keep up on with (some parts) of the startup world and generally learn something new every day. Of course my optometrist would freak if he knew I was using my break time to read HN ...
ahpeeyem
Big companies often use an off the shelf content filtering setup whose support contract includes blocked site lists with regular updates. I used to work for a bank that used one called SurfControl (who apparently have been acquired by WebSense: http://www.websense.com/site/scwelcome/index.html).

So every now and then at work I would return to a site I'd been visiting regularly and it would be blocked after a new URL database update had come through. Sometimes it would eventually be unblocked again some time after that.

chacha102
My School has blockers unfourtunately. Blocked me from reading a government website about suicide for an english report.
ntoll
I got bitten by this when I worked at an Investment Bank in London. It made me realise how much I valued my freedom to choose what and where I browse. Sad really, as IT staff in big mega-corps could probably do with an injection of entrepreneurial spirit.
Brushfire
Its likely an automated/keyword filter, or a list they bought from someone else.

Turning off all filtering invites phishing, spyware, malware into your network, so thats not a great solution. My bet is that 9 times out of 10, if you email IT and they check it out, they can get it whitelisted.

wallflower
You can always browse off the mobile network using an iPhone (like I frequently do)
JeremyChase
You should also be aware that many large companies have tools to see what you have surfed, and for how often you do so.

If you can ssh out, just forward a port to a Squid proxy on a machine at home or use one of the low cost VPS providers. Then setup your browser to use said proxy on the local port.

You can forward ports on Windows using Putty, and of course you can use Linux/OS X to do this easily.

jrg_uk
This message is just from Trend Micro's Interscan Web Security Suite product (that's the "IWSS" bit. It's typically hooked into existing web proxies via ICAP.)

Trend have an "interesting" track-record of site categorisation, but it's possible that the URL is correctly categorised and the operators of the IWSS have chosen to block that category.

Then again, the people that Trend employ to visit websites probably just saw the name "Hacker news" and filed it as 'hacking'/bad stuff. They probably don't spend too much time on any individual web site.