Tom Morris



2007.05.14

  No. 559 

Tim Bray has four words for Microsoft: "Litigate or shut up". (Context) 2007-05-14T06:48:23ZUntitled entry permalink

The woe of misconfigured filters 2007-05-14T11:49:32ZPermalink

My college has recently implemented some really poorly designed web filters. I am finishing on Wednesday, so I'm not making a big fuss about it, but let me just give you a list of the websites that are no longer accessible on the college's wifi network:

Grazr, Reason Magazine, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, CrunchNotes, Digg, Slashdot, WordPress, Creating Passionate Users, DailyKos, Instapundit, Aral Balkan, Guardian (woah!), Telegraph (double woah!), Independent (triple woah!), New York Times (quadruple woah!) Xenu.net, Vecosys, Amazon UK, Open Rights Group, RDFa.info, Wikitravel, .

Some more: 43 Folders, Cubicgarden, the W3C's XHTML2 pages, the W3C Markup Validator, the 'basic HTML' view of Gmail, NBC, ABC News, TailRank, The Sun, ITV, Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the LA times, CNN, FOX News, Daring Fireball, Londonist, Adobe, Remember the Milk and, most ironically, the University of London Union (my college is part of the UoL)... the list could go on and on.

This is why web censorship is doomed to fail. I bet that within ten minutes, I could find some hardcore pornography. But I can't read the goddamn New York Times thanks to a misconfigured filter. This is what the filtering advocates want to give children. It doesn't affect me. if I seriously want to read something on a website, I will find a way. But there are many people who can't do that.

The RSS feeds for a great number of these sites work fine, by the way. The filter seems to be reading the HTML pages for their content and then deciding whether I can see them on that basis. It doesn't seem to be working for XHTML content (any pages I've visited that are delivering back properly MIME-typed XHTML are working fine) - Jyte (XHTML 1.1), my blog and Adactio are working fine. I'm sure someone could do MIME type spoofing in order to get around this filtering system. Except that when I went to make a Jyte claim "Attempts to filter or block Internet resources are doomed to failure", it conked out (probably the word 'filter' or 'block' in the URI being caught by a URI-based filter).

Just remember, British public, the University of London is a public body. Your taxes pay for it, but misconfigured filters are limiting the academic freedom of scholars and students alike. This is something that nobody ever seems to get concerned about.

Comments | TrackBack

Comments
blog comments powered by Disqus


Tom Morris 9f4907d871750fd4c9b9bad7086701b51d6abd10 bd9f81a05283ed85e699175ed057b4a497f20b77 802c68123e12bf69d99a25a87cef360f18813fe4
Currently in: Kent, England
Usually in: East Sussex, England

I am a , an , like to code in and (and Java, but let’s not talk about that), and noodle about with and the .

I have an MA in philosophy from Heythrop College, University of London. My philosophical interests are in analytic metaphysics, ontology, modality, the work of , , , and . I have a strange, unfulfilled interest in . I’ve been influenced by Gadamer, by , , and .

Musically, I like jazz fusion, soul and P-Funk. My musical nirvana would be a mixture of Beethoven, Miles Davis and George Clinton topped with a side-serving of Erykah, Jill and Angie.

I also write for the Citizendium, an online encyclopedia project. If you know about stuff, you should join in. I occasionally produce audio recordings for The Pod Delusion.

Elsewhere:

  • GPG Key
  • del.icio.us
  • Flickr
  • Twitter
  • Jaiku
  • LinkedIn
  • ma.gnolia
  • blip.tv
  • upcoming.org
  • MetaFilter
  • LiveJournal
  • CiteULike
  • Technorati Profile

RSS Feed Subscribe:

RDF

« May 2007 »
SuMoTuWeThFrSa
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031 

View in month context

On this day in: 2006 2008