Why do I have access to twitter when I have blocked Social Networking, and my stats show the site as blocked?

June 11, 2020 14:29

Hello,

I have the Social Networking category blocked, and yet am able to access twitter. If I look in my stats, it shows twitter.com as being blocked, even though I can see it.

I tried adding twitter.com to my blacklist, but can still access it.

I have flushed my DNS cache, so that's not the issue.

Anyone any ideas? Thanks

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8 comments

rotblitz June 12, 2020 07:50

What browser are you using? Do you use AVG or Avast AV?

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aysilver June 14, 2020 13:34

I'm using Microsoft Edge (new Chromium version) on Win10, and use ESET anti-virus, not AVG or Avast.

Why would any of that make a difference? I thought OpenDNS worked at the DNS level, so the blocking happens outside of my machine.

Thanks

P.S. Since restarting my PC, I can now load the Twitter home page, but very little content shows up. The central panel shows a message saying "Something went wrong." Still puzzled how even the basic page loads.

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rotblitz June 14, 2020 14:33 (Edited June 14, 2020 15:25)

“Why would any of that make a difference? I thought OpenDNS worked at the DNS level, so the blocking happens outside of my machine.”

Because these are things which can circumvent or ignore your DNS settings. And yes, correct, OpenDNS works in the cloud only, but only if your DNS queries reach it. This doesn’t seem to be always the case.

Copy & paste the complete plain text output of the following diagnostic commands to here:
nslookup -type=txt debug.opendns.com.
nslookup www.twitter.com.
nslookup whoami.akamai.net.

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aysilver June 14, 2020 14:49

opendns lookup

Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.1

debug.opendns.com text =

"server m41.lon"
debug.opendns.com text =

"flags 40020 0 50 1800000000000000000039505007FC041089CD3"
debug.opendns.com text =

"originid 426773660"
debug.opendns.com text =

"actype 2"
debug.opendns.com text =

"bundle 12734188"
debug.opendns.com text =

"source 81.174.251.160:45351"

twitter lookup

Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.twitter.com
Addresses: 146.112.61.104
146.112.61.104

akamai lookup

Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: whoami.akamai.net
Addresses: 2a04:e4c0:10::70
208.69.34.70

Thanks again

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rotblitz June 14, 2020 15:23 (Edited June 14, 2020 15:50)

This looks all good.

These are the domains being used by Twitter at their portal page.
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/200614_F5_277a6bceeb872a4bf36d8d1a01532d9c/1/domains/

Now post also the output of
nslookup twitter.com.
nslookup api.twitter.com.
nslookup twimg.com.

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aysilver June 14, 2020 15:49

twitter.com
Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: twitter.com
Addresses: 146.112.61.104
146.112.61.104

api.twitter.com
Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: api.twitter.com
Addresses: 146.112.61.104
146.112.61.104

twimg.com
Server: UnKnown
Address: 192.168.1.1

Name: twimg.com

Thanks again

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rotblitz June 14, 2020 15:53 (Edited June 14, 2020 15:55)

Again all fine. It indicates that Twitter should be blocked for you. If not, then something else like your browser or another app is interfering with your DNS or web traffic. Or maybe your local caches, especially your browser cache. No idea what.

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aysilver June 14, 2020 16:36

rotblitz OK, thanks anyway. The main thing is that the site is unusable as it is now, so the fact that you can see the bare bones of the main page isn't the end of the world. I was more bothered that my settings were wrong.

Thanks again for all the help

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