After receiving an apology themselves, Daily Xtra may owe Canadian coffee giant Tim Hortons a much bigger apology in return after launching public accusations of ‘Censorship’ that spread to mainstream media.

Dailyxtra.com, which launched mid-July to replace Xtra.ca, received reports that readers were unable to reach their LGBT news website when using the free wireless service provided at Tim Hortons coffee shops across Canada.  This WIFI service has been available for close to a year.

On July 19^th (10:41am), Daily Xtra posted an article on their website that explained they had contacted the Tim Hortons WIFI system administrator, requesting to be unblocked, and the system administrator refused, saying, "While there is no way to change this decision, we can assure you that it was not an easy decision to make."

But according to an IT expert, the situation is much more complicated than that, and in fact there may have been no decision at all on the part of Tim Hortons.

"Sometimes it’s not as simple as removing a website from a block list," says Steve Polyak, who aside from publishing GayCalgary Magazine, has over 20 years of IT background and has administered the hosting solution for the GayCalgary.com website and numerous other websites.  Polyak says that keeping the GayCalgary.com website off of blacklists is tricky due to the nature of automated safety measures in place across the internet to prevent Email abuse and the spread of viruses.

"Spammers are relentless," he explains.  "A lot of times they will exploit security vulnerabilities in other people’s servers and networks to send out bulk messages.  They will monitor internet traffic and systematically try to break into each Email account to try to use their mail server as a relay.  They do this because it’s harder to block them when their Emails come from legitimate sources.  So any web or mail server that doesn’t take sufficient measures to prevent this, becomes as much of a threat as the spammers themselves."

A few hours prior to Tim Hortons unblocking the Dailyxtra.com website, I pulled into the parking lot of the Tim Hortons coffee shop nearest to me.  I logged onto their free wireless service and, after accepting their terms of use disclaimer, I tested the availability of a number of websites.  Websites of other LGBT media outlets, like GayCalgary.com, OUTtv.ca, and Fugues.com were not blocked; adult sites like Squirt.org, Gay411.com, Bear411.com, and even Playboy.com were blocked – as expected from their terms of use - with the message: "Access Denied / Access to (website) is not permitted as it is classified as: Pornography/Sex".  But as for Dailyxtra.ca, they had a similar message except instead of Pornography/Sex, they were classified as "SPAM".  (Manhunt.net and apps like SCRUFF were still fully accessible.)

"Many legitimate websites get added to SPAM blacklists because their web or mail servers are not configured correctly, or they have inconsistencies in their identifying information.  This sets off flags that they might be spammers, or might have been hacked and used as a SPAM relay," explains Polyak.  "I’ve found our mail server for GayCalgary.com added to SPAM blacklists in the past, and tried to contact them to remove us, but they would either refuse until we fixed our servers to meet their criteria, or they would remove us and we’d end up back on their lists a few months later.  Some even wanted money to expedite the removal process."

Polyak says some of these third-party blacklists, which include sites like www.spamhaus.org, www.backscatterer.org, and www.barracudacentral.org, are used around the world by mail servers and internet service providers to filter incoming Emails as SPAM, or altogether block potentially dangerous sources from reaching internet users.

Several years ago when Polyak discovered that Emails sent from the GayCalgary.com mail server were suddenly not getting through to users on Email services like Hotmail or Gmail, he took the time to research why this was happening, and discovered the blacklists.

"Blacklists count on spammers doing a quick and dirty hack job, so they look for inconsistencies, such as the originating IP address of an Email not matching that of the mail server it is supposedly coming from.  Some of the corrections I had to make to our server configuration were really picky - a server could run fine without them, but to the Blacklists they made a difference.  It took a bit of trial and error, and a few months of waiting before the Blacklist providers returned to review our server configuration, but eventually they removed us.  I rarely dealt with a human; nearly all of this process was automated."

Polyak says that on July 20^th when he tried a reverse DNS lookup (a type of diagnostic that can be performed on any site) on the Dailyxtra.com domain, it revealed some inconsistencies in their server configuration that may be getting them flagged as potential spammers.  "The IP address for Dailyxtra.com is identifying itself as mail.xtra.ca.  That inconsistency right there is potentially a red flag, it should be identifying itself as www.Dailyxtra.com."  He cites a number of other examples which are not included here for brevity and due to technical complexity.

Polyak says that before he knew about the blacklists, he himself suspected that online services like Hotmail.com might be discriminating against gay content when Emails from GayCalgary.com, Priape.com, and various other LGBT sites were consistently ending up in his Junk mail folder.  However, it confused him that so too did Email from Xbox.com, a Microsoft product just like Hotmail itself.  He says that consumers of these third party blacklists like Hotmail are often helpless to control which sites end up blocked.  Additionally, staying off the blacklists is a constant battle, as methods for identifying spammers are frequently changing to combat the spammers’ latest tricks.

But on the other hand, not having this form of protection would be catastrophic.  "The internet would be unusable if it weren’t for safety measures like these to slow spammers down," Polyak says.  "It’s not perfect, but it’s necessary."

While the average internet user is free to access potentially harmful websites, Tim Hortons WIFI service goes through a company called DataValet.com, which among other things does filtering to ensure their WIFI users are protected.  DataValet.com is the party responsible for the "Blocked" messages due to Pornography or SPAM that were mentioned earlier in this article.

"Most likely Dailyxtra.com got onto a blacklist that DataValet uses to block pornography and potentially harmful sites from being accessed on their WIFI," Polyak suggests.  He adds that he doubts the person from Tim Hortons who wrote the letter to Dailyxtra.com quoted in their article, truly understood why their site was blocked, or why they believed Dailyxtra.com could not be removed from the blacklist.  "But Dailyxtra.com did not do the same research that I did, if they are concluding that this is ‘censorship’ and blaming Tim Hortons for it."

Although Tim Hortons issued an apology and "unblocked" Dailyxtra.com, Polyak says the news outlet is in for a rough ride ahead.

"Until they clean up their server configuration, this will keep happening to Dailyxtra.com.  It is probably already happening elsewhere."

Indeed, DataValet.com, who provide the WIFI service, boasts "over 5000 customer locations", and "15,000 customer network devices monitored and supported" (as of 2012).  It is unclear whether Dailyxtra.com was unblocked strictly on Tim Hortons’ WIFI service, or across the entire DataValet.com customer base.

"Tim Hortons was unlucky enough to be the first instance that they noticed," says Polyak.  Furthermore, by Dailyxtra.com forcing Tim Hortons hand to unblock the website, Tim’s could be exposing their customers to harm if the website is hacked due to its configuration flaws, defeating the whole purpose of having their safety filter.  "Ultimately, only Dailyxtra.com can fix the root cause on their servers to get off the blacklists.  That is the right way to fix this."

When we contacted tech support for DataValet.com, they weren’t able to confirm Dailyxtra.com had been blocked due to a blacklist in time for this article, but they concurred that Polyak’s theory was highly likely.

Polyak is further appalled by the public outcry that the article caused against Tim Hortons, and how far the story spread in the mainstream media: CBC, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, The Edmonton Journal, and MSN.com have all picked up the story, among others.

"It is obvious that nobody consulted an IT expert in this field before continuing to relay the finger-pointing at Tim Hortons – otherwise this would have stopped," Polyak continues. "There is a whole layer of complexity to this story that is being left out, and it makes all the difference in the question of who is really responsible for this happening.  I think Tim Horton’s doesn’t even realize they may not be at fault, I think they are just taking Dailyxtra.com’s word that they have done something wrong.  Dailyxtra.com may not realize it either."

But Tim Hortons may be paying the price for a ‘crime’ they didn’t commit.

"I’ve seen hundreds of people from the LGBT community saying they’re going to boycott [Tim Hortons] over this.  That is not fair at all.  Even after Dailyxtra.com published that Tim Hortons apologized and corrected the situation, I still saw people in the LGBT community in attack mode."

Michelle Robichaud, a spokesperson for Tim Hortons who responded to Daily Xtra earlier this week, says, "I can assure you we are looking into all of this internally.  If [Polyak’s theory] is indeed the case, then I have no problem contacting Daily Xtra and bringing that to their attention because that's obviously going to be detrimental to them as a publication.  We certainly want to get to the bottom of it, no fingers pointing at anybody, and make sure that it's resolved."

In the meantime, Dailyxtra.com has little to be unhappy about.  Not only is their site unblocked, but the buzz in mainstream media and social networking gained their newly launched website a huge amount of exposure.

And yet, only half an hour after Daily Xtra released the article containing Tim Hortons’ apology (posted Fri, Jul 19, 2013 6:35 pm EDT), the news website released another article containing uncensored, full frontal nude pictures of an Australian rugby player (posted Fri, Jul 19, 2013 7:00 pm EDT).  A number of other LGBT and mainstream news websites carried the same story, but censored versions of the photos were used.

While it’s not our call whether this violates Tim Hortons’ WIFI guidelines of "appropriate for all ages viewing in a public environment", like it or not, this uncensored content it is now fully accessible courtesy of Tim’s on Dailyxtra.com.