It seems that Secure Computing's Smartfilter isn't so smart. I ran across this on WWdN in a post about a grilled cheese sandwich.
So basically, it turns out that BoingBoing is blocked by Smartfilter which means that you can't get to it from several countries as well as many corporations. Their idea is to have everyone make their webpages 'offensive' to Smartfilter and cripple the web so much for its users (the countries and companies that purchase it) that they stop censoring what people can see (highly unlikely) or Secure Computing starts doing a better job on their blacklist (only very slightly more likely).
Seth Finkelstein has an interesting little analysis of the Smartfilter blacklist. It's from back in 2000, but I doubt much has changed. The SmartFilter Where tool is still available, so I looked up some URLs. Affirmation, which Seth mentioned, is still listed, but has been moved to Politics/Opinion. Then I selected some likely candidates on my own.
- BoingBoing - Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies, Nudity
- Apple - Business, Computing/Internet
- Badpuppy.com - Pornography
- Nifty - Pornography, Text/Spoken Only
- Gay.com - Portal Sites
- American Foundation for AIDS Research - Heath
- Electronic Freedom Foundation - Politics/Opinion
I think being on this list most likely means that your site can be filtered, not that it is. Since I've never used SmartFilter it's hard to say what kind of granularity there is. I would guess that as an administrator you just select what catagories you want blocked. So if you want to block Pornography they are all blocked. The only classification that seems inappropriate is the BoingBoing entry. But I tend to be annoyed by filtering in general, so I think I'll participate anyway. Though I probably shouldn't, since on that map over there I actually have a few hits from the middle east.
P.S.: When I went to London we went to the Victoria & Albert and they had a David replica. That guy is much more impressive in person. Pictures just don't do it justice. They don't give you any sense of scale & that thing is huge.
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