Does Your Company Censor the Content for You?

JAZ asks: "A few days ago a friend of mine and I were discussing this story. He was trying to make a joke about some content in the article that might be considered 'inappropriate' (the bit concerning 22,000 files). I didn't get his joke because the interesting bits weren't there. With a little investigation, I determined that my company's proxy server was delivering a modified version. Is this a common practice? Has anyone else noticed something similar?"

"In this case, words were not just filtered out, but the text had been changed so that the document still made sense. I suspect that someone monitoring a log and suddenly saw a document show up a bunch of times with the offending text in it. Then they modified the cached copy (I was viewing it a day after it hit the Slashdot front page) to make the alarm go away.

I have mix feelings about this, on one hand, even though the text in this case was meant as a joke and the content wasn't very offensive, I was using company equipment. But on the other hand, this company is a government regulated entity which isn't above pressuring its employees to vote the way management thinks is best (whether it is or not is a question for history). So I guess I'm scared that the company could push an agenda though 'stealth channels'. I realize that the information I read online can't always be trusted, but there are many people who don't know that. It's probably important to note that, while there is a policy of acceptable computer use, there has never been a notice that they might change the content we see online.

What are the feelings and/or experience of the Slashdot crowd on this?"

Comments

Content (Mis-)management?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know my Cisco PIX firewalls can block the page altogether after the first infringement which is a cause of headaches for some in the IT dept at our company, but censoring portions of pages- that is new to me (besides blocking content within 'iframes' which is done within the browser settings...)

Someone should provide the link and we can all see who gets filtered and who doesn't...

Re:I doubt they were filtering...

[Saint Stephen]

Sometimes I turn on Captions just for fun. One late night, I was watching the Kids in the Hall rerun on Comedy channel.

When they had bleeped out the word "fuck" (or something), the captions had the unedited text! I searched the net about it and said for budget reasons sometimes they don't censor captions.

Re:Anonymizer

[exhilaration]

Or just install CGI Proxy on your own server. I'm using it right now.

teaching high school

[bigbigbison]

Several years ago when I was teahing high school they would censor out "objectionable" words. However, the censor that they used was so dumb that it would not only censor out typical words, but it would censor out parts of words. So if I were to types something like "I wish it would stop," the censor would see the "sh" at the end of wish and the word "it," and think it was an "objectionable" word leaving blank spaces in my text and rendering it pretty unreadable.
I only found out about it after a friend responded to me asking me what I was trying to say.

Re:Uh oh

[canajin56]

Hehe, I once encountered a filter that wouldn't let me say "assistance." It was really annoying. It also wouldn't let you say "button," but it DID allow "butt." Nobody knew why...