BoingBoing BannedBanned
Our friends over at BoingBoing recently reported that their blog was being blocked by libraries, governments, and other institutions using Secure Computing’s SmartFilter reporting and filtering software. The problem, apparently, is nudity. A handful of posts containing nudity — constituting 0.5% of their total content over the past two months according to BoingBoing — were enough for SmartFilter to consider BB a nude site. And so, banned. Not only by government-funded institutions, but also by ISPs and entire countries such as Qatar and the UAE.
Today, the BoingBoing editorial team posted a screed against Secure Computing and any other would-be censors. Here’s an excerpt:
The fact is, there’s no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in. Having a human being review a few pages on a site every couple months is a perfectly adequate classification system, in SmartFilter’s lights — which is convenient, since a genuinely thoroughgoing review would be ruinously expensive.
At the end of today’s post, the team has supplied a list of links and a short tutorial on how to bypass censorware on LANs and on ISPs. They are also publishing a user’s guide on how to convince your employer or opressive overseers to ditch SmartFilter. Join the fight by sending in other misclassified SmartFilter sites.
