Internet filters
May 13 2009 21:44
My school uses websense and one of websense's categories is 'advocacy groups'.
Libcom is listed as one, it's a fairly innocuous listing, surprised that it's been blocked, I'm assuming the school has chosen to block this category of page rather than a blanket ban.
It defines the category as "Sites that promote change or reform in public policy, public opinion, social practice, economic activities, and relationships." It's listed in the 'adult' section along with all the porn sites. It's probably not possible to get libcom removed from the category but I might try to get the category permitted in the school.
websense also lets you block pro-life and, or pro-choice websites.
Not as interesting as I thought really.
May 18 2009 04:49
#2
Did you try to complain? In several hundred German schools there is a similar system called "Schulfilter Plus". We found out, that an anarcho-pacifist paper (Graswurzelrevolution) and a FAU related blog about international workers struggles had been blocked, because they had been categorisized as "hate"-websites. This category seems to be used to block nazi and racist sites. Both Graswurzelrevolution and we complained about this and were eventually removed from the filter. The most interesting thing was, that the software company told us, that the filter lists are maintained by IBM and that the software company selling "Schulfilter Plus" can only modify the categorization but not the filter entries themselves.
The bigger problem with filters are those imposed by legislation in a growing number of countries. German pariliament passed a law under the pretext of preventing access to child porn that imposes all providers to block sites and store IP data based upon a list maintained by the law enforcement agencies. That list is secret, leaking it is qualified as promoting child porn. As we know from Australia, once those DNS blocking systems are installed, they are used for blocking all sorts of "unwanted" sites. The governments all over the planet want control over the internet, the more as we are entering in crisis, so propably they will get it. This means we should at least prepare to build our communication in a way so that we can still communicate once we are on the filters.
May 18 2009 14:17
#3
my school has websense too. i tried to go to jews sans frontiers and it was blocked for 'racism and hate'; i tried to go to cracked and it was blocked for 'tasteless' (well, ...). however, the school admin can override any one of these, even though they're applied by the company.
May 18 2009 17:19
#4
If I get libcom unblocked at school I might do even less work than I do at the moment.
May 19 2009 19:52
#5
I hate websense - it's really crude and ends up blocking all sorts of things. Some of my employers' intranet pages are blocked by websense. 
Regards,
Martin
A few years ago over here, a Radical Youth (there's some stuff about them on here, now-defunct anticapitalist high school group, organised a school walkout over youth pay) member discovered that Infoshop was censored by their school's filtering program. That led to a short lived campaign whereby the company that did the filtering (who were fundy christians) for a whole range of schools in Auckland ended up losing the contract (i'm fairly sure, can't remember 100%), and then the whole school could crap access anarchist websites to their heart's content