Friday, September 16, 2005

Sex and violence

I mentioned in an earlier post that an evil web-filtering software called Fortinet had classified my blog (and a few others I know of) as “Pornography”. Well, it seems Fortinet enjoyed casting aspersions on my present state of being so much that it’s now tracking my life’s archives to wreak more damage. When I attempted to access the official website of my old school, St Columba’s, from my office server (which, alas, uses Fortinet), a familiar message appeared: Accessing this site is in violation of your user policy. The classification this time, believe it or not, was “Weaponry”.

Now Columba’s has a spotless reputation: no gun battles have been fought in its corridors, so far as I know, and the most dangerous instruments on the premises in my time were the serrated canes employed by the Irish “brothers”. So I investigated further, and the only possible reason for this classification seems to be that the site is hosted by Angelfire. Which probably means they could have debarred it on grounds of “Offensive to religion” as well.

Stupid, stupid, stupid Net monitors.

2 comments:

  1. Somebody on Fortinet has confused it with "Columbine". I remember when good old VSNL decided to block searches on certain keywords back in 1993 and you couldn't get rapeseed oil prices or scores for Sussex versus Middlesex.

    BTW if you want to get past shit like this, surf through an "anonymizer" (US spelling) - if you're on a fixed wireless connection, you are already one step ahead of the game because it's difficult to reverse DNS.

    DD

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  2. ...DD is probably right. Or, whoever makes these decisions has visited the Columban open quiz, where your noble schoolfellows force carbonated sugar down the throats of dieting schoolgirls. (And schoolboys, to be fair)

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