Y Combinator is prohibited

Perhaps the bank wishes to avoid brain-drain... and hopes to prevent its IT people from discovering more enlightened employment opportunities in more open parts of the world economy? :/

I expect it was the use of 'Hacker' in the page content and meta tags.

Try <a href="http://hackerne.ws/" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws/</a> or <a href="http://icombinator.net/" rel="nofollow">http://icombinator.net/</a> or use your phone.

Big companies often use an off the shelf content filtering setup whose support contract includes blocked site lists with regular updates. I used to work for a bank that used one called SurfControl (who apparently have been acquired by WebSense: <a href="http://www.websense.com/site/scwelcome/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.websense.com/site/scwelcome/index.html</a>).<p>So every now and then at work I would return to a site I'd been visiting regularly and it would be blocked after a new URL database update had come through. Sometimes it would eventually be unblocked again some time after that.

I got bitten by this when I worked at an Investment Bank in London. It made me realise how much I valued my freedom to choose what and where I browse. Sad really, as IT staff in big mega-corps could probably do with an injection of entrepreneurial spirit.

You should also be aware that many large companies have tools to see what you have surfed, and for how often you do so.<p>If you can ssh out, just forward a port to a Squid proxy on a machine at home or use one of the low cost VPS providers. Then setup your browser to use said proxy on the local port.<p>You can forward ports on Windows using Putty, and of course you can use Linux/OS X to do this easily.

You can always browse off the mobile network using an iPhone (like I frequently do)

This message is just from Trend Micro's Interscan Web Security Suite product (that's the "IWSS" bit. It's typically hooked into existing web proxies via ICAP.)<p>Trend have an "interesting" track-record of site categorisation, but it's possible that the URL is correctly categorised and the operators of the IWSS have chosen to block that category.<p>Then again, the people that Trend employ to visit websites probably just saw the name "Hacker news" and filed it as 'hacking'/bad stuff. They probably don't spend too much time on any individual web site.

perhaps the staggering volume of content to keep up with on HN is proving a distraction to their workers.

Shouldn't these people be working when they are at work?