Orange customers squeezed out of Facebook Orange customers are reporting that connections to Facebook are being rejected, apparently due to some technical incompatibility between the two. We had our first reports around lunchtime, and raised the issue with Orange who have admitted that mobile customers aren't being as social as they should be, and that the problem is …
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Opera Mini uses its own proxy (which specially compresses the data). When using that, Facebook would see an IP from Opera, not from Orange, so that wouldn't be blacklisted, which explains why that would work.
Using a VPN from your phone, if you have one available, would also work.
Orange UK use the private 172.16.0.0/12 range internally, and transparently proxy all of their web traffic through a comparatively small bunch of caching proxy servers (running squid 1.1 pg_squid2_3) in the 193.35.128.0/20 range on AS12576 - and that entire range has been blacklisted by Facebook today from about 8.30am (also, I note, combined.abuse.ch and spam.abuse.ch, as well as uceprotect.net's blacklist).
They do identify that it's been proxied with a via header, and it seems like their only way to differentiate the thousands of users doubtless using each outward-facing IP is by a custom X-Orange-ID HTTP header added by their Squid proxies, which seems to be a base64-encoded MD5 (although I'm not sure what it's a hash of - is it consistent?).
Difficult to speculate why, but that's a lot of users and not a lot of IPs, with most of it I've seen in the 193.35.135.x/24 range. These could look like one really, really big user to a remote website, and IP-blackholed accordingly - a classic problem many people who've used the few poor-quality ISPs (who still use this kind of setup in 2010?!) have probably run into before.
I also have a HTC Desire on Orange and - when I have been able to get the Orange data network to work at all today (hint: their UMTS 3G really really sucks - their HDSPA "3G+" is faster if you get it for a few seconds, but their 2G GPRS may be a better choice for many!) - I have had the same problems today, as you may gather.
Not happy about it (hence the icon)! That's - what - the third Orange data network epic fail in as many months?
Nope, even using Opera on my Orange-branded HTC Desire, I can't properly access Facebook. But I get a more detailed error message, as opposed to the brief note of failure from the official app.
Poor Orange. A week of suffering for customers, stil without the Android 2.2 Froyo update, delayed a third time... See http://peteprodge.posterous.com
Had this all day, it appears to have started (for me) around sometime between 4:00-6:00. Heard nothing from Orange (until now via this article) but Googling finds plenty of people who reported this to Orange and were told it had been identified and would be fixed within 4 hours ... the customers were told this around 9:00 this morning....
A lot of adult sites use one of various systems which count accesses from different IP's / ISP's to detect leaked usernames and passwords, some of them use 'GEO IP' systems.
This could result in false positives on 'password sharing' for websites which also offer mobile content for download as well as the more traditional full sized movies.
"Mobile networks run their internet access behind a huge network address translation (NAT) system,"
Not quite true. The mobile ISP I use does not, and as such my Android baby runs a accessible HTTP server on port 80, with dynamic dns performing updates to it, although I spend most of the time getting the dynamic dns account deactivated for abuse because the updates are too frequent for their liking.
Orange customers are always getting blocked from all sorts of sites thanks to Orange's crap infrastructure and shit DNS caches. Only the high profile sites eventually get their access fixed. When smaller sites are blocked, the people running the sites and Orange's customers have to just give up all hope (as I know well from experience).
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