Tech Forum

There is a problem right now in California (I don't know if it is happening everywhere) where all the wifi in the meetinghouses blocks "Apple.com."

Since the mission here is an electronic mission. All of the missionaries have Ipads. They are unable now to update apps, or even sync their area books due to this block in the system. It is causing a whole load of havoc. They are also unable to update the software on said ipads due to this block.

Does anyone know why magically all of the sudden the church blocked apple.com?

The missionaries should be letting the mission president know of the problem, and he should be relaying the message to Church headquarters. If the site they need to access has been blocked, I would think it would be quickly unblocked as soon as the Missionary Department learned of the problem.

It's not just happening in California, the same thing is occurring in the Philippines. While the missionaries here don't use iPads, it is reeking havoc with my iPhone, iPad and laptop.

This is not simple problem of specific area, the firewall policy was change to restrict the access to the youtub.com, *.apple.com domains. I think there must be some kind of mistake in the settings, because there wasn't any announcements about that any where. Where can we get information why and what for those resources was put into the black list?
Brothers please be patient with us, you need to explain because members asks us about that, so that we are able explain them why and for what reason the Church Tech department made that rules.

Best wishe,
Nicholas Balabanov
Russia, Saint-Petersburg Stake

This issue is also affecting us in Salt Lake Valley. We'd appreciate any updates and news on a resolution.

Balabanov.Nicholas wrote:I think there must be some kind of mistake in the settings, because there wasn't any announcements about that any where.

There usually never is an announcement. I do not have any inside information. If I were to hazard a guess, I would suppose it was determined that there was too much YouTube and iTunes activity going through the firewall when members were supposed to be at Church.

I know that headquarters reviews firewall logs from time to time, and I would suspect that this change is a result of those reviews. YouTube has been blocked at the firewall for quite a while. The Apple block is new. I do not think I can make a case for opening it up if so many members are using the Church Internet to download apps from the iTunes store onto their iPads and iPhones. That is not why the Church provides meetinghouse access to the Internet.

I can understand restricting things like that to cut back on bandwidth usage, but blocking Apple content also prevents situations such as downloading/updating LDS Tools or Gospel Library without switching to mobile data and burning a lot of data.

jamiep39 wrote:I can understand restricting things like that to cut back on bandwidth usage, but blocking Apple content also prevents situations such as downloading/updating LDS Tools or Gospel Library without switching to mobile data and burning a lot of data.

That would only prevent updating the app itself, right? I wouldn't expect the data to flow though Apple.com.

russellhltn wrote:

jamiep39 wrote:I can understand restricting things like that to cut back on bandwidth usage, but blocking Apple content also prevents situations such as downloading/updating LDS Tools or Gospel Library without switching to mobile data and burning a lot of data.

That would only prevent updating the app itself, right? I wouldn't expect the data to flow though Apple.com.

It wouldn't prevent updating the content on the app (syncing LDS Tools, downloading Gospel Library content) but it would prevent downloading the apps if they weren't already on the device. There have been a lot of times where I've been at the church and shown people how to download Gospel Library, LDS Tools, etc. on their device and how to use them. If the Apps Store and Play Store stay blocked, the people without the app would either have to switch to mobile data to download them or wait until they are somewhere else.

There are also dependencies with the apps themselves. Think Apple maps in LDS Tools. Mormon messages are blocked via YouTube as well. Church Media Library files are hosted by the church.

Can we request throttling instead of zero?

Was the recent regional conference load also a decision point?