Air Canada Blocks Access To Any Google Hosted RSS Feed (Including Techdirt) For No Good Reason
from the you-had-one-job... dept
Friend (and frequent Techdirt contributor) Derek Kerton passed along a screenshot of his own recent experience trying to follow a Techdirt link at the Toronto airport and having it blocked:In this case, it appears that Air Canada has (for reasons unknown) wasted good money on a company called "Datavalet" which offers "Guest Access Management" for companies who offer WiFi access to customers. Datavalet proudly highlights Air Canada and famed Canadian donut chain Tim Hortons among its customers.
And yet, despite its sole business apparently being building systems to let people access the internet, Datavalet's tech geniuses can't figure out that Google's RSS feed service is not, in fact, an "Anonymizer" but merely a system for hosting RSS feeds.
These sorts of stupid false positives are not at all uncommon in the filtering business -- and Datavalet is not alone in stupidly filtering out and blocking access to things it should totally allow. This story just demonstrates, once again, the ultimate stupidity and futility of trying to block internet access. No matter how well-meaning you might be, you're going to do it wrong and you're going to block plenty of legitimate content, including (in this case) tons of well known news publishers who rely on Google's feedproxy service to serve up links to RSS readers, Twitter, Facebook and more.
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Filed Under: blocks, filters, proxies, rss
Companies: air canada, datavalet
Reader Comments
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Are you sure that you have this the right way around?
So far as I can see the active name is Feedburner, not Feedproxy.
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I have had that happen
the rogue website was for Netscape navigator downloads which back in the day was what we recommended they use.
I had to explain how I could not help them if I could not see the website to find the download (they changed it like every six months)
in the end I won out but for 6 weeks I had to tell people sorry cannot help you
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Sure this is air canada?
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Trchcrunch too
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Re:
So far as I can see the active name is Feedburner, not Feedproxy.
Yes. The service is still called Feedburner, but all of the RSS feeds show up under the feedproxy.google.com URL...
http://www.janleow.com/life/remove-and-get-rid-of-feedproxy-in-feedburner.html
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Re: Sure this is air canada?
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Re: Trchcrunch too
Not an embryo discussion.
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datavalet
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What did you expect?
Can you fault them?
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Re: Re:
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Re: Sure this is air canada?
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Datavalet aka spam'R'us
They have been known for ad insertion and as a vector for malicious code as well.
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What would happen
216.58.220.142 feedproxy.google.com
On Linux it's /etc/hosts, on Windows it's buried somewhere in C:\Windows\System\etc\hosts if think, it's been a long time. Mac is probably the same as Linux
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Re:
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Re: What did you expect?
Laywers (accountants, other paid advisors) give advice to companies.
Managers make decisions.
The managers run the company, not the lawyers (accountants and other paid advisors).
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?
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