Boing Boing vs. U.A.E.
Superblog Boing Boing is being "blocked by entire countries including the United Arab Emirates, and by many library systems, schools, US government and military sites, and corporations," Xeni says. The reason: a silly little program called Smart Filter, which classified 25,000 BB posts as "nudity."
The problem is, most of these posts don't have any boobies at all. "They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions..."
[Smart Filter maker] Secure Computing offered us a devil's bargain: if we'd change the URLs of images with "nudity" (which, they assured us, included photos of Michaelangelo's David) to something they could detect and block, they'd let the rest of the world see us again. That guy in the UAE who was worried he'd be imprisoned for trying to read BoingBoing would be OK again.
[I]nstead we've decided to help put Secure Computing out of business... We're publishing a guide to evading the SmartFilter censorware. There are hundreds of ways to defeat these censorware apps, and we're going to catalog as many of them as possible. (We'll publish this tutorial shortly, and update the post you're reading with a link to the permanent page).
Fortunately, SmartFilter does make exempting a site from being blocked an easy process for organizations using the product. If the people inside the organization believe the site should be available to all then a few mouse clicks by the SmartFilter administrator makes it so. This isn't so much a technology issue as a policy one.
Posted by: Tom at March 3, 2006 10:31 AM