Access Control White List Still Being Blocked

[BoorishBird]

Hi, I’ve been trying to troubleshoot an issue that has arisen in the past couple weeks with accessing https://search.brave.com/. I had no problem with using this search engine for several months, but recently, it seems that the access control filter is blocking the site. Interestingly, https://brave.com/ works just fine. But as soon as I go to the pages for the search engine, the browser (Brave) returns an error code of NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. When I click on the error, it expands to show the following:

Subject: pcWRT
Issuer: pcWRT
Expires on: Jul 15, 2030
Current date: Jun 22, 2023

When I go into Access Control, I can see that the pages are being blocked with N/A port a reason of just “Blocked”. I did some troubleshooting with the various checkboxes in the access control settings and found that if I un-check “Enforce Access Control”, then the issue resolves and I can access the site again. However, then this disables all the logging for the device. Since that device is another router that I have several devices connected to, I’d like to continue having access control enforced. I tried to add search.brave.com to the White List; however, that does not prevent the blocking when “Enforce Access Control” is enabled.

Any ideas what may be the issue here? This is the only webpage that I’ve had this issue with, and it only recent began to occur. It seems as though the issue may be coming from the access control settings, but I’m also checking with Brave support to see if they know why it is only the search pages that result in these errors.

[support]

@BoorishBird search.brave.com is implicitly blocked when you enable Safe Search. As it stands today, white listing the domain does not remove the block. You can turn off Safe Search to allow the domain.

We’ll add the functionality to remove the block via white listing in the next firmware update.

[BoorishBird]

@support thanks for the help on this. When it comes to the Safe Search feature, can you elaborate on what this is doing? Does it just block the ability to turn off safe search in other search engines, or is there anything else I should be aware of when turning this off while I wait for the next firmware update?

Then my other question is regarding the delimiter for the Black List and White List. Should I be separating these with a comma, a new line, or something else? It may be a good idea to put that info somewhere around those boxes.

[support]

@BoorishBird When you turn on Safe Search, the router will force safe search on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex. Other search engines, which can’t force safe search at the network level, are blocked. The next firmware update will allow you to white list the search engines that are implicitly blocked.

For the block/allow lists, the entries are separated by a new line. More info here: https://www.pcwrt.com/2020/01/how-to-allow-or-block-web-sites-on-the-router/

[Author]

Posts