Recently, I noticed that I have been unable to access some of my favorite sites. In some cases, I would get pop ups on my screen explaining that the sites were blocked because they contained pornography. That is shocking, because I only come to this site to chat in the forum. Who knew that there were images of naked men on this site?

Anyway.. I found out WHY I was getting blocked. It was due to DNS servers. One way to get around that is to use a proxy server - at the cost of having very slow speeds. A much better way is to run the utility DNSBENCH (remove the redirecting servers) run that, and select the 2 or 3 fastest DNS servers. Then, go into your ethernet and wifi adapter, and insert those DNS addresses into the IPV4 section. A much better option is if you use a router.. go into it's setup, which is typically 192.168.x.x (in my case it is 192.168.1.1 but it can also be something like 192.168.1.100... the x's always seem to be either a 1, 0, or 100) Then, go to the local connectivity and insert the DNS addresses there. The DNS addresses which were blocking me were 208.67.222.220 and 208.67.220.123 which are identified as being "opendns"

NEVER use your ISP's DNS servers... that you were using OpenDNS tells me that someone (maybe even you, accidentally) turned on their "safe browsing mode" - a specific DNS service designed for people who legitimately DO NOT want to see naked people in their Internet feed (or parents, perhaps)...

Some excellent choices of "alternate" DNS servers are:

• Cloudflare: 1.1.1.1 & 1.0.0.1
• Google: 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4
• OpenNic: 206.125.173.29 & 45.32.230.225
• Level3: 4.2.2.1 & 4.2.2.2 & 4.2.2.3 & 4.2.2.4

And there are the "standard" OpenDNS (Cisco) servers (without the filtering): 208.67.220.220 & 208.67.222.222

I personally use the Cloudflare ones: 1.1.1.1 & 1.0.0.1

The UK blocks certain sites, for whatever reason; porn, radicalism, torrents, etc, etc.

Using a VPN to show you are outside of the UK works to view the sites.