[pR0Ps]

I'm unfortunately familiar with similar systems. What has probably happened is that a crowdsourced process has (incorrectly) categorized the website as 2 things: "Criminal skills/Hacking", and "News". The hotel has subscribed to this categorization service and configured their settings to block any pages in the "Criminal skills/Hacking" section because it sounds scary.

Same goes for the "Piracy and Copyright infringement".

There's no conspiracy here, just the normal incompetence. Calling the number listed on the page will probably allow you to petition to reclassify the site properly, making less likely to be blocked.

Of course, filtering in general sucks, but it's not like this is an ISP, it's a hotel.

[kyledrake]

What are these categorization services called? I want to read more about them. Do they do things like block sites known to contain or support hate speech too?

[meowface]

They're called HTTP proxies or web gateways. Blue Coat (now owned by Symantec), a big proxy vendor, has a list of site categories here: https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/category-descriptions

Administrators can choose to allow, block, or warn (user must confirm they want to view the page) for each category. The proxy vendor doesn't choose what is or isn't blocked; they leave it to the customer to decide what they want to block.

Hate speech is usually a category for proxy appliances/services, yes. Blue Coat categorizes it as "Violence/Hate/Racism".