Do you mind checking l̶i̶c̶h̶e̶s̶s̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ lichess.org? It's a popular online chess website, as the name suggests. A Reddit post from a month ago claims it is also blocked. [1] I think that would be hilarious.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/r0r2jh/tmobile_blo...

I can confirm! It seems lichess.org (the legit url) is blocked, but lichess.com is not.

FWIW, I'm on an MVNO of Tmobile, and I can reach lichess.org but not lichess.com.

I can't reach lichess.com on my home internet either (Service Electric, a subsidiary of PennTeleData, IIRC)

That’s unrelated. The issue here is that SMS messages containing particular links are blocked, not that the sites themselves are blocked.

I believe they are blocking links to the websites in an SMS message.

Thanks :-)) lichess.com was a typo on my part, sorry for that.

I was unable to replicate the block of Jacobinmag.com nor itsgoingdown.org. I was able to replicate the block on ddosecrets.com.

This is really weird. They were blocked once, but I tried these again ~40 minutes after my original test, and they went through. Then, when writing this comment, I tried a third time, and they were blocked again.

First run: odysee.com, jacobinmag.com, itsgoingdown.org were blocked. I did these just before midnight EDT.

This second run: odysee.com, and freethestates.com (didn't try it the first time) were blocked, but jacobinmag.com and itsgoingdown.org are not anymore. I double-checked for spelling mistakes, etc. I also checked covidcarealliance.org and lichess.org, also blocked. I also checked goo.gl URLs (previously notoriously blocked by T-Mobile) and they are not blocked.

I did some looking into this, and T-Mobile employees have been surprisingly open about URL filtering in the past on their support forums. One example (see https://community.t-mobile.com/accounts-services-4/tmobile-i...)

> I’m taking care of this right now. I must say the domain is very amusing and creative! It’s flagging for a combination of issues: collocated with Amazon AWS with 5k other domains, registrar to Namecheap (poor reputation with DGA generated domains), and inserting both URL and email address in message body. (double whammy). Otherwise, you are following proper protocol with Twilio A2P messaging. > > I’ll have the vendor reputation resolved in a few hours. Thanks!

It's surprising to me that AWS and NameCheap are named as contributing factors.

In fact, writing this comment took so long that I tried the strange URLs a third time. jacobinmag.com was blocked again but not itsgoingdown.org. So, jacobinmag.com has flipped from blocked, to not blocked, to blocked again in the span of an hour.

I appreciate the openness on their part. I can relate to the difficulty of crafting anti-spam risk assessment rules. It’s common to take these factors into account, and it would explain why .xyz is blocked; that’s on a lot of naughty lists because of early registry rules that were inadvertently amenable to malicious actors.

That being said, they’ve clearly got some serious false positives, so their rules need work.

When it comes to things like this, transparency prevents cancellations, so it makes sense to be more transparent about it.

Please don't take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. It's tedious, repetitive, not what this site is for, and usually turns nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html