Pete's Eats

If you want to glimpse what the internet could look like in the UK given the latest attempt by the governing classes to protect big business at all costs (I’m talking about the Digital Economy Act 2010) then you should try and use the internet for general use at a David Lloyd establishment. For those who don’t know, David Lloyd is a UK wide network of health and fitness clubs (and to be fair they do health and fitness really well) that generally have lounges where you can access the internet via installed pc’s or via wifi on your own laptop etc. Pretty great, but not really because they have one of the most aggressive url filtering policies out there and generally block anything that involves media sharing (like Flickr for instance). The only way to complain is to fill in an actual complaint card and hand it into the reception of your club – how quaint.

Anyway, I really needed to access something on Evernote just now and I found that this is now being blocked too. I thought it might be an idea to start compiling a list of sites that they block so that the site owners as well as their users can keep a check on how they might be affected.

Here’s a few but if this affects you then please add sites to the comments section (or hit me up on Twitter: @petebw) as you come across them:

I’ll add more as I come across them…

Note: it’s also worth noting that even your Google search results are filtered and tagged ‘ALLOWED’, ‘BLOCKED’ or ‘UNKNOWN’. Given that you have to log in using specific and personal credentials you may want to self-censor any searches or activity that you’d rather wasn’t tracked (and I’m not just talking about pr0n!) as it’s unclear what data is collected and what it might be used for at a later stage (and yes, this could be said to be true of almost any public access point but if David Lloyd are organised enough to block specific url’s then who knows…).

Note2: I know it’s their prerogative to do this btw, but it’s annoying to come across something which is blocked but you actually would like to access whilst there. Hence this list…

Note3: I just noticed that they’re blocking file transfers of over 4mb – hadn’t seen this before…

Note4: Not sure if this is the same for all David Lloyd sites, but the Brighton club has allowed their security certificates to expire (at wifi logon stage)

Note5: There seems to now also be a time limit on how long a VPN will stay connected (it’s about 1-2mins total before you have to reconnect); this has consequences for everyone who needs to connect to a VPN for work purposes, and also for everyone else’s security of course. This kind of policy means it’s very hard to stay secure on a wifi network…