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Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

Discussions regarding financial software
Sobraon
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Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

#493581

Postby Sobraon » April 11th, 2022, 3:30 pm

I use Vodafone Broadband and the FT Portfolio tool.
Last week the FT Portfolio tool stopped working on my PC, laptop and phone (access time out) on a variety of browsers ( Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.). I contacted FT chat and there is no issue with my account and they can see me portfolio.

As an experiment I tried it on my phone connected to mobile data and I can see the site ok. I tried 'hot spotting' my Laptop via my phone data and FT portfolio works ok. Puzzling?

So looks like a weird Vodafone fault? DNS Look up? Specific latency problem? With trepidation I decided to contact Vodafone, two hours later via the chat bot, an Indian call centre and their online chat I find out that Vodafone have 'helpfully' been modifying content controls last week and markets.ft.com is obviously considered a risk site. The online agent was very sheepish about this and I had to press the person to get the info. The agent also 'helpfully' told me it would take up to 24hrs for the 'content' changes I had requested to be unblocked.

If you have Vodafone Broadband the Content Controls are controlled in the eCare app. After you have downloaded installed and registered the app and entered your account/password and requested, received and entered a security code go to ->dashboard->manage your controls and limits-> contents controls -> and switch off as required. I will report back in 24 hours if this doesn't clear the fault.

Last time I came across site blocking like this was in the PRC five years ago. :mad: Grrrr!

mc2fool
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Re: Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

#493587

Postby mc2fool » April 11th, 2022, 3:50 pm

Sobraon wrote:Last week the FT Portfolio tool stopped working on my PC, laptop and phone (access time out) on a variety of browsers ( Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.)

I note you don't mention Opera. Opera has a free built-in VPN that you can enable, and while I don't use it as my regular browser, I do find it useful in such situations and others where what you get (or can't get) depends on where you are perceived to be coming from.

Sobraon
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Re: Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

#493594

Postby Sobraon » April 11th, 2022, 4:58 pm

Thanks mc2fool, don't have Opera installed as I don't really like the UI but I have just tried to get to https://markets.ft.com/ using Disenter in private mode using TOR - works fine.

Darka
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Re: Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

#493597

Postby Darka » April 11th, 2022, 5:49 pm

You can also change the DNS that your vodafone router uses - this is what I did with some other websites I had similar problems with.

I use google's 8.8.8.8 but you can use any non-vodafone ones of course.

Basically, vodaphone can and does edit the data coming back from certain websites, blocking/removing things at will from it before your browser gets a chance to render the webpage. It's DNS servers do this automatically, hence why changing your DNS will work.

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Re: Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

#493614

Postby Alaric » April 11th, 2022, 7:40 pm

Sobraon wrote:
If you have Vodafone Broadband the Content Controls are controlled in the eCare app. After you have downloaded installed and registered the app and entered your account/password and requested, received and entered a security code go to ->dashboard->manage your controls and limits-> contents controls -> and switch off as required. I will report back in 24 hours if this doesn't clear the fault.


Isn't this just a very good reason not to use Vodafone, or any other provider that would dictate what sites you can use ?

Sobraon
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Re: Vodafone Broadband blocking FT Portfolio Tool.

#494017

Postby Sobraon » April 13th, 2022, 2:38 pm

Just to close this tale. I tried mc2fool's suggestion and attempted to download Opera - and - you guessed it, the Opera download site was blocked. So, I girded my loins and I decided I needed to 'chat' to a real person at Vodafone Broadband support.

After 10/15 minutes of security checks involving a range of 'pins','passwords','phone numbers', 'SMS verification codes', 'personal data' and 'account numbers' I got through to the useless 'chat bot'. The way to get past the 'chat bot' is to answer all its questions with 'talk to agent', don't be tempted to give it info at all just 'talk to agent' - eventually it gives up. Following a further set of increasingly bizarre security questions - e.g. 'state full name' on the next line after the 'chat bot' had required me to 'state full name' I was connected to ( I think ) a human

After some Q and A ( which sites, when, am I using WiFi, airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow) I was required to power cycle my router with 3 minutes in the 'off' state. The next 'gotcha' was if I allowed the 'focus' to go away from the 'chat' window the 'chat' was lost so I had to temporarily 'hot spot' my phone and carefully switch over the wifi network. Added to this if you don't give the 'chat window' any input for 8 minutes it drops.

The Vodafone person had clearly had to do these changes many times because the 'script' he was working to was word perfect. He remotely performed a hard reset on my router and I guess cleared the restricted sites list (at Vodafone? in my router?) and I was once again able to see 'shady' websites at the Financial Times, Hargreaves Lansdown and X-O and my wife was able to connect to her VPN she uses for home working in Police admin.

I don't know maybe they had sent out a policy upload to everyone's router and were just waiting to see who complained. I've just been reading 'A Visitor’s Guide to Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell' and the 'online chat' at Vodafone is ring 6.5. Only 6 months until I can get shot of them.


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