I like to read blogs on the train. I recently bought a Palm T|X primarily so that I could read both blogs and check my Gmail while on the train and elsewhere. It's a good experience actually. Quite a few blogs really need to remove a lot of the bloat that is attached to them so that they are more accessible from mobile devices like Palm and PocketPC machines. 
I get online using Orange World (their branding of GPRS). I was browsing away in my aggregator (I've gone back to Bloglines because it has a reasonably good mobile version - though I'd love to hear recommendations of other online aggregators that have mobile versions) and I looked at Scripting News, as any educated tech svengali wannabe should, and followed a link to John Robb's website - Dave linked to a piece he wrote about RSS aggregators called My thinking on RSS readers only for a screen to appear in my browser from Orange telling me that the content may be "adult" and that it had been filtered for my convenience.
I had to phone them up and pay 26p (1p in 'adult verification charge' and 25p in phone calls) to prove to them that I am in fact an adult. John: according to my phone company, you are peddling porn. Or perhaps TypePad is. All I know is that now, if it has all worked correctly, I can access both John's blog and goat fisting JPEGs from anywhere.
There is something humiliating about this. It's feels a bit like having to go in to a sex shop or something. If you go in to a sex shop because you want to buy a sex toy or video, that's fine, but if you've got to go in there to buy something innocent, there's something very strange. Of course, I didn't phone them up from the train carriage - some busybody probably would have overheard me and rolled up their copy of the Mail on Sunday and battered me over the head for reading about syndication technology. Think of the children, focus on the family, all that jazz.
I haven't tested to see whether I can now get to John Robb's blog. But both him and Dave should rejoice in being RSS pornographers of the finest degree. And everyone else should just remember: filtering doesn't work and is a pointless waste of time implemented only so that people can be seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something (no wonder politicians are always first to suggest filtering the net - it fits right on the agenda next to boiling the ocean and forbidding the existence of Wednesdays).
It's good that it's relatively easy to opt-out of this censorship scheme - it's bad that innocent material is being censored, and really bad that there is seemingly no information about this given to customers, nothing on the web site, no email sent around. Perhaps Orange need a blog to communicate with their customers...
