Ask HN: HN blocked today by a major .gov; your thoughts?

5 pointskmt4 comments

Reportedly, a large US government institution blocked the access to news.ycombinator.com today.

Apparently, the HN site was identified as either a security threat or inappropriate for the government.

Does anyone know anything about it? What are your thoughts?

Is this as trivial as someone being confused by the word 'Hacker' in the page title?

FWIW, other sites such as slashdot, reddit, digg are accessible.

View on HN

Someone mentioned Websense just blocked HN, presumably based on the name:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444958

Maybe they're using their filter.

(Incidentally, I just passively used the new Webmynd search to find that link. I searched Google to find out about Websense. Then I decided I'd better include the link to the HN post in this comment. I was about to search for it, but it was already sitting there as the top HN result for the search I'd just done on Google.)

Looks like it's Websense indeed (and I'm revealing the institution):

http://enterprisearchitecture.nih.gov/ArchLib/AT/TA/AccessCo...

Does news.YC use hardlinks or virtual links in its HTML? If it's virtual links, I bet enough of us would be happy to point a domain at news.yc to throw off websense and the like.

Can you explain in more detail?

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