That’s funny. When he told me he couldn’t bring up FR, I experimented and sent my husband urls to test. Originally, they blocked dKos and FR, but not DU. Eventually, DU got filtered too. He can bring up Yahoo news, but he cannot bring up Yahoo mail. I use an old hotmail acct. to email him during the day and they started to block my emails until I raised holy heck. They fixed that problem. I think he told me that they’ve also blocked You Tube. I used to send him videos from Hot Air, but he can’t access them anymore.
In that case, it sounds like the IT weenies working for NY are doing their job. Those working on the public dime shouldn't be on non-work related sites.
I recently installed a Squid proxy server with SquidGuard content control at my daughter's school. (The little crumbcrunchers weren't allowed Internet access before we installed the proxy.) The teacher and I agreed that no forums should be accessible to the students. There's no schoolwork related reason for them to visit any forum site. The URL blacklist I used blocks this site and all of the others you mentioned. It was politically neutral. This is as it should be. There are other lists, however, that show clear political bias. For example, one blocks NRA sites, but not Brady/HCI sites. I'm betting that what the original poster experienced was the result of such bias.