I know I’m late to the smartphone party so this could be something everyone has dealt with and gotten over. If so, I’ll return 2006’s call. But in the meantime, WTF?
I’m on a working getaway and need to do some light research for a document (laptop is tethered to it). Google is giving me slightly different and less responsive results than I’m used to—then I notice Safesearch is set to “strict.” I try turning it off (or to moderate), but it stays on strict. A few of the sites that I did find won’t come up either: all I get is a blank page. I try monkeying with my laptop’s settings, but nothing changes. Then I start poking around the Web and find this T-Mobil FAQ:
[
[quote]
** Why am I not able to view certain Web sites?**
Web Guard is automatically active on Web Day Pass purchases and cannot be disabled. Some Web sites may be blocked due to the nature of the site, including but not limited to:
[ul][li]Abortion, Alcohol, Ammunition, Criminal Skills, Cults, Drugs, Firearms Accessories, Gambling, Guns, Hacking, Hate, Knives, Lifestyle, Martial Arts, Mature Content, Occult, Pornography, Suicide, Tobacco, Violence, Weapons. [/li][li]Partially-restricted content includes the categories of Personals/Dating and Sex Education.[/ul][/li][/quote]
](http://support.t-mobile.com/doc/tm24173.xml)
WTF? Hacking and malware-prone sites I can see, but look at the list of subjects. Abortion is off limits? Violence? Sex education?* Gambling*? (The last is particularly absurd since we’re working in Atlantic City at the moment—would be nice to look up basic strategy, but T-Mobile’s nannyware is making that difficult).
Again, this could be an old complaint, but still … if it’s not a common feature of smartphone web access, I will be leaving T-mobile shortly.
Fuckers.