blocked by site classifying service

[JerryMuelver]

My cPanel2 sites were blocked today by a portal service. I fired off a query on it, and got this answer back:

The site is being virtually hosted. Virtual hosting is when a hosting
company will put several sites on the same IP address (numbered address
behind all sites). We will delete the IP from our library and you should be
able to access the site in 24 hours. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,
Diana Taylor
mudcrawler@8e6.com

This out fit (http://8e6.com) is apparently a site-rating service, with about 100 categories of ratings. I guess ISPs with portal service subscribe for access-filtering for their customers. It might be good to accumulate a list of such services to monitor their monitoring algorithms.

[ozzi4648]

Originally posted by JerryMuelver
My cPanel2 sites were blocked today by a portal service. I fired off a query on it, and got this answer back:



This out fit (http://8e6.com) is apparently a site-rating service, with about 100 categories of ratings. I guess ISPs with portal service subscribe for access-filtering for their customers. It might be good to accumulate a list of such services to monitor their monitoring algorithms.

Yep, this is becoming more and more of the problem. We just wrote to websense and asked them to remove us from their database because our ip was listed as "SEX". Some of our resellers were complaining that their users could not access their sites from work. It turns out that this outfit http://websense.com is used by many Gov. agencies to filter their employees internet experiences. It took us a whole day to find out who it was that was blocking us. After writing a letter to them to have our ip removed from their db they agreed that our classification was not "SEX" but rather Webhosting. Seems like the last owner of our ip was using it to host sex sites or something. Its not as bad as being blocked for spam though but this seems to becoming more and more of a problem and business hosting ips are being blocked for nothing. Are they asking for permission? Not at all. What gives them the right to block an ip on hear say. Now imagine, you have 200 sites on 1 ip and with one ip block it means every site is now blocked from certain locations. Here is the letter they returned to us.

Thank you for writing to Websense.

The site you submitted is a virtually hosted site that was not in our database. It shares an IP address with another site in our database, however, which caused an unintended overblock.

The site has been added to the database under the category Web Hosting and should be in the next publication of the database.

Thank you for your assistance,

The Websense Database Services Staff

If you suspect your ip is blocked or classifed "SEX" do a ip check on their site.