Consumerist = pr0n
If anyone ever doubted that we made consumerism sexy, here's your comeuppance.
Several readers reported recently that they can't view our site as it's been labeled "pr0nography" by the SonicWALL filter. We'll contact them later today to try to resolve it, but in the meantime you can ping your sysadmins and ask them to manually unblock our site.
Knew we shouldn't have written all those posts about electronic devices stuffed with licentious imagery. — BEN POPKEN
UPDATE: SonicWALL tells us the only way we're getting blocked is by individual companies adding us to their blocklists. So, again, if we're being blocked at your work, give your sysadmin a cookie and ask them to unblock us.
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We'll contact them later today to try to resolve it, but in the meantime you can ping your sysadmins and ask them to manually unblock our site.
Except...if they're being blocked they can't read this to find that out. :(
Damnit! I followed this link thinking it was true.. Damn you to hell Ben Popken. My work day ruined by false advertising!
Hey.. that's a Consumerist article.. sending my email now..
Dear Ben,
Today I was tricked into following a link thinking there would be pornography, there wasn't. That's anti-consumerist! Here's the link http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/filters/consumerist--p...
Sincerely,
Porn Lover (why else would Ron Jeremy have a vibrating cell phone in his underwear, yes that's my avatar).
www.gawker.com is blocked here at work but gawker.com is not (though it looks all weird and you can't continue after the jump. Wonkette is also blocked. Defamer and Consumerist are not. Thank god I have half the Gawker Media Empire to keep me occupied when time allows.
My company uses St.Bernard software.
These sites are blocked by my company as well. Plus they track the time spent at all sites, no matter how innocent. Often the guys setting up the filters and firewalls set up them up in a way they can still use them when you can't (like I am now). Sometimes it pays to know the geeks because they may share their secrets with you.
Our public school has SonicWall and it has blocked consumerist.com. I would ask them to unblock it but due to govt. cutbacks our competent and experience IT staff has been replaced with cheaper clueless employees who barely know how to turn on a computer much less manually configure an internet filter.
My clients have generally given up on content filtering and simply disallow all web access except to sites which the users have specifically requested and made a business case for. I think that companies experiment with content filtering software out of fear of sexual harassment lawsuits, and slowly discover it's not worth a damn thing as their employees are prevented from visiting legitimate sites and pr0n still makes it onto someone's screen.
One client, a few years back, had someone in charge of monitoring what websites people visit. She called my company to assist in preparing a termination document; she had "caught" a user visiting a pr0n site on company time and was having her fired. The site in question was "dicks.com". Somehow the monitoring software picked up on it even though the filtering software had let it through.
We brought up the logs only to discover that the sites the user had visited before and after that one were as follows: "sportsauthority.com" and "dickssportinggoods.com".
This is why I require at least SSH outbound access so I can tunnel somewhere that has no filtering (or monitoring) at all. Nothing like trying to diagnose a problem with some software when you can't even hit Google.
My office has the name "Middlesex" in the address. Some of our e-mails were being bounced back by school system servers. Once we removed mailing addresses from our e-mail signatures, everything went through fine. Yep, the servers saw "-sex" and filtered out all of our correspondence.
couldn't it be the language used around here could it? I don't mind it, but it could be seen as a little edgey
Filter software like this is by and large terrible. They tend to consider even one "pornographic" photo on a site as grounds to place them on their list, even if the picture in question is art and not porn. BoingBoing.net has been having an ongoing ordeal of this type for a while now.