More Virgin Media site blocks
Something interesting – and perhaps concerning – when comparing my current ISP to my previous provider is how many websites Virgin Media blocks by default. The blocks appear to be over and above court-mandated blocks in the UK.
I understand Parental Controls are used to block things like adult websites, gambling, social media, etc. It turns out that they are blocking VPNs as well under this group of blocks. All is fine now when it comes to updating my VPN and accessing VPN websites, now that I have disabled Parental Controls.
The next issue that I discovered was that my EPG data was not updating on my set top box. I use epgshare01.online and it was inaccessible. Strange! I logged back into my Virgin Media account and saw that Virus Protection was still turned on, as I had left it. Surely EPG data is not a virus or malware? The more I look at this seemingly haphazard blocking by Virgin Media, the more I think that they must be under pressure by someone to kill access to these sort of “undesirable” websites.
I do wonder… Virgin Media is essentially a reseller of TV content. Sure, they have a few of their own channels but they also mainly operate under licence from bigger fish like Sky. Sky is very powerful – they control most of the sport broadcasts in the UK and they are the major satellite provider, with essentially a monopoly on premium content. They have been known to obtain UK-wide blocks in record time for websites that dare to venture into any part of their territory - see TorrentFreak for how many times they have done this. It never dawned on me before that raw EPG data would also be targeted. And, that it would be blocked under Virus Protection.
Well, it is. As soon as I turned off Virus Protection for my account, what do you know? My EPG immediately updated.
This is getting weirder and weirder! :-) Hopefully, that is all I need to do now to at least have some access to the wider Internet. I do accept that for everything else, there is my trusty VPN.
What is even weirder is that my previous ISP was Sky. With my package, I had the entire Internet open. For example, The Pirate Bay is inaccessible on Virgin Media but through Sky, I could get to it without a VPN. And YTS.lt (and .mx when it still existed). And every other dodgy site I could think of - Anna’s Archive, Libgen, 1337x…you get the picture. And I never once had a single issue with the ultra-reliable epgshare01.online or any other EPG site. Logic dictates that Sky should have the same – or more – blocks than Virgin Media; more to lose and all that. But no, nothing was blocked.
Who knows? I’m still trying to wrap my mind around how EPG data wound up being labelled as a virus or malware.