Aug 10


What censorship category is your website?

by Terry 10 August 2005


Sonicwall Internet Security offers internet filtering services to paying customers. From their site:

More and more businesses, schools, government agencies and libraries are connecting to the Internet to meet their organizational and educational goals. In doing so, they are faced with the need to control access to inappropriate or objectionable Web sites. Without that control, businesses risk productivity losses, liability exposure and misallocation of bandwidth due to non-productive Web surfing. Schools and libraries risk forfeiting their federal funding unless they provide the content filtering mandated by the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

SonicWALL’s revolutionary Content Filtering Service (CFS) Standard and Content Filtering Service Premium Editions are scalable, enterprise-class solutions that are both affordable and easy to use. Featuring a powerful rating and caching architecture, SonicWALL CFS leverages a comprehensive database of over 4 million continuously updated Web sites to extend protection and productivity while reducing administrative overhead.

They rate sites, such as Category 1 – Violence/Hate/Racism to Category 64 – Unrated. Customers may then block web sites by category.

You can check the rating of your own site in their database. Mine came up as Category 22 – Games. Huh??

On their web site, I see no mechanism for protesting a rating, which would be a big problem for those incorrectly labeled and therefore blocked.

Found via The Countess, who got it from Media Girl.

Tagged:

8 Comments

8 Responses to “What censorship category is your website?”

  1. Steve Leigh on August 11th, 2005 2:46 am

    Heck, I’m such small potatoes that they haven’t even bothered to check my site. I’m Category 64-unrated.  (Quote)

  2. Terry on August 11th, 2005 8:30 am

    Nah, you’re just too ecclectic to pigeon-hole. :)  (Quote)

  3. Bluegrass Poet on August 11th, 2005 10:49 am

    Okay, I feel better about being eclectic than small potatoes, because I’m 64 too.

    Games?

    I’m pretty sure this trend frightens me.  (Quote)

  4. Sherry Chandler on August 13th, 2005 2:46 am
  5. Idyllopus on August 13th, 2005 6:45 am

    (I’m making my rounds on some of the blogs that have posted on this and leaving the following that contains some interesting information that was left at my site.)

    I had posted about this and my findings were that there were some patterns with people one typepad tending to come up as games and people on blogger tending to come up as web communications. Later a Seth Finkelstein came by my site and posted a link to his page on censorware which is very interesting. And he briefly noted in my comments area that “The system is simple. Roughly, all blogs on a service (IP address) will have a default blacklisting. Then individual blogs may have entries which override that default.”

    So what he said confirms what I was finding, though, as he noted, there are exceptions.

    Anyway, I suggest reading his page. He gave testimony before congress on DMCA Censorware in April 2003 and also was profiled in the NY Times in 2001 in “Cracking the code of online censorship”.   (Quote)

  6. Idyllopus on August 13th, 2005 6:47 am

    Ps. I mean Typepad comes up usually business and economy. Brain glitch. I was thinking of another thing that often came up games.  (Quote)

  7. havecoffeewillwrite.com » WHO STEALS MY PURSE… on August 17th, 2005 10:14 am
  8. Brewed Fresh Daily » Sonicwall’s website classification system on August 18th, 2005 4:49 am

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