Slashdot Mirror
Does Your Company Censor the Content for You?
"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?"
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The real Gzip Christ is user number smurf
When you consider how labor intensive it would be to come up with a sensible rendition of the article with "bad stuff" omitted - how do you propose it could be done.
Programatically? Has anyone heard of a proxy/filter doing this? I haven't.
I work at an extremely repressive Financial Services company that does extremely thorough and restrictive web filtering -- websites are white-listed, and are white-listed on a per-individual/group basis, so the vast majority of the people in the company can't even go to, say, Google.
:)
We don't do content filtering/alteration, though, though I'm guessing our proxy can do it. If you can get to the site, you'll see what's on it. Period. Well, assuming what's on it is available on port 80/443
Comment removed based on user account deletion
that you must work at such a place :(
When the current government of ghana was elected, the new govt won every district where the TV and radio had been deregulated, and the old one won every one where they were state controlled.
The power of media is very real, and very scary.
Well at my school, they use NT servers which has many security holes, so instead of patching those, they install little brother software, and merely observe the pages, I find it quite comical tripod pages are listed as sex/porn on it.
More than likely, the article had changed between the time your friend saw it and you saw it. One or both of your proxies are probably caching different versions of the web page, and now when you both go to that site, you both see two different versions of the web page.
It's highly unlikely your company has someone sitting around reading every web page requested through your proxy and quickly censoring it before allowing it to get to you.
Debian Corn
Bottom line: if the company informs you of this, even if it's on page 356, Appendix B of the employee handbook or way down at the bottom of the Rules of Use, then you can't complain about this.
Now if they didn't inform you, that's bad. But before asking Slashdot, I'd ask your sysadmin. Or your BOFH. Or your PHB. Of course, that would involve admitting that you read /. at work, which may or may not be a problem at your company. You may find out it was some overzealous PFY in the systems group who was afraid that the PHB might see "lesbian" on an employee's computer and tomorrow there might be a FOX News story "Employees at Company Foo use corporate networks to access porn." Sure, that's a little far-out, but PHBs are primarily concerned about covering their asses.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Yes... I'm not really sure it matters "how I feel" about this idea of content editing, because what's more important is where the law stands on it.
As far as I can tell, it's probably still under the umbrella of "legality" for a corporation to censor incoming email content, since they can argue they own the network and the systems, and add the assertion that "your email at work is not private".
I've always felt that email should have the assumption of being private, since it's just the electronic equivalent of postal mail, which IS private and protected by law as such.
At the very least, it's used daily by people in a manner much like a casual phone conversation, which also is considered private and protected by law as such.
The "catch", of course, is that it requires resources on the part of the recipient to provide the service. In the "real world", the cost of delivering a piece of mail is beared solely by the sender. The destination has to do no more than provide a physical address and a place for the mailman to toss the mail.
I'm still not convinced that the existance of expense and a need for resources on the part of the receiver automatically negates people's expectation of privacy in the medium, though. Unfortunately, the courts (and apparently, the majority of people running mail servers) disagree with me.
So ultimately, I'd say - if you want to keep email between 2 people secure, use encryption like PGP. Otherwise, anything can happen between points A and B - and there's precious little you'll be able to do about it.
but I'd like to praise my employer for having a very clear, upfront, and open Internet and E-mail use policy.
Chain letters = fired
P2P apps = fired
Harassment = fired
Using Internet resources to maintain your own business is also against the rules, but it is very clear that it does allow casual web browsing, news, industry things, even personal websites so long as your duties at work are not interferred with. Coming previously from Big Blue, I found this to be an amazing change.
At my old company it used to piss me off that I would always receive "emails from the filter", that said an email could not be delivered or was not received because of offensive language, when it turns out there was no offensive language. Just a crappy filter. That was rectified by using PGP encryption ;)
;)
:p
I'm glad at the company I'm at now, I was able to justify my own DSL connection for lab use
As for the PGP, the company I'm at now, encourages the use of PGP for email
It is becoming more and more common to see this sort of filters. The reasons, in my view, are a bit complex, though kind of obvious.
You have companies that are hypersensitive about any sort of lawsuit involving "sexual harasment" or anything resembling it. Since the court cases have been siding on the side of people who are far too sensitive for their own good, there is some cause for it.
Another part of the equasion are control freaks who worry about what people do at work. They want everything filtered to only allow "work related" things. They want to produce and produce and produce with no thought to anything else in your life while you are there. (These are also the same people who tend to take long lunches and have all sorts of porn on their computers.)
Yet another set are the moral control freaks who think that they need to prevent anyone from seeing anything "naughty". (These tend to be rarer, but I have seen places where this has happened.)
All in all, it just creates contempt and dissatisfaction for the company by the employees. Adults do not like being treated like children, for the most part. People who get treated like this are more likely to bail when the opertunity presents itself. Of course, since MBAs are taught to try and turn all of their employees into interchangable parts, they don't quite get a clue how bad it hurts them in the long run. (Or the short run, for that matter.)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
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This is what anonymizer.com (and others) are for. You can view any web site in complete stealth, since the data is SSL encrypted and the URLs are scrambled. Unless your company blocks anonymizer.com entirely there's no way for them to stop you from viewing whatever you want in complete uncensored privacy.
SSH client, X11Forwarding yes, Mozilla, and (if required) Cygwin Xwin. There is no way of stopping you without completely shutting you off from the Internet (at least that I can see).
The company my father works for has an MTA that wouldn't let him send mail with the word "Dick" in it. It bounced it back to him explaining that it might be offensive.
As in
Dear Dick,
We enjoyed dinner the other evening...
1) No one posting so far is familiar with such filter, which seems plasusible to me. Blocking on content is routine. Dynamically rewriting content and making it sound correct would be an ambitious doctoral project in CS, not a routine piece of network control software.
2) "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'." Honestly, if your concern is that democracy is being subverted by your employer's policies of mind control you may want to just work elsewhere.
3) No, whatever filters you have aren't there to surreptitiously insert pro-Arianna Huffington messages in Something Awful. They're there because if you and your friend discuss the NumLock article and say "lesbian porn" loud enough for a coworker to hear, she can sue the company for sexual harassment over the creation of a hostile workplace environment, and take money out of everyone else's pockets.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Choose the least likely two options out of the following:
A) A person at the poster's company edits incoming web pages to sanitize them.
B) A program is able to remove offensive language while leaving a result that makes sense.
C) Two versions of the article were posted on the original website at various times, and due to caching the poster and his friend are seeing different versions.
D) The poster is in error about or inventing what they saw on the page.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
HUGE yes i can ERECTION
Same thing happened to me. The company put in a new proxy filter and now I AM VERY HAPPY HERE. So, I went to one of the system administrators and told him THAT HE'S DOING A GREAT JOB. Just the other day a friend sent me WORK RELATED MATERIAL. If this keeps up I'll just have to THANK MY BOSS FOR THE PRIVELEGE OF WORKING FOR THIS FINE COMPANY AND ASK IF I CAN WORK FOR FREE.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
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.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
If my company censored my incoming messages, websites, or email I would do a few things.
First I would stop any "above and beyond" performance. I would do my job as it was expected of me but I surely wouldn't work weekend or late hours anymore. The office is a 2 way street. I supply my abilities and do the work, they pay me. Thats the usual way it goes. But I also am willing to go above and beyond without complaining because I'm given the leeway in my internet and personal time while at work. If that went away so would the extra stuff. I give them more, they should give me more as well.
Then I would start looking for a new job. Its easier to find a job when you have one.
Didn't Dialectizicer get sued and temporaroly removed for this sort of thing?
Once you edit content, you as the ISP lose your "no liability" status as to what gets sent and received by your system. That's why some colleges got sued by the RIAA when they tried to slow (but not stop) file sharing.
Yes snail mail is private, to both businesses and private individuals. Now think about the anaology, I do not expect anyone to open my mail at home, but the office is different, When you recieve snail mail at your office, and you leave/quit/get fired/retire/etc and mail arrives at the company addressed to you, you can be sure your sucessor will open that mail, especially if it appears to pertain to company business. Say you recieve an important contract that you have been working on for the company, a secretary may likely open it. No granted their may be the rare incidence where you have something personal sent to you office, but aside from an occasional signature required package, why would you do that?
So to compare, many businesses do open and read snail mail addressed to another person in the company. There is even a word for them, Gatekeepers. It is chapter 1 materical in a business communication class to know that people other than the person you address a letter to are going to read that letter.
I think the real issue is that any snail mail that arrives at a business is property of the business, and that any email that arrives at a business mail server could be considered the same.
Of course if you want to get your personally mail at work, then you could use one of those fabulous web based services, but then that goes back to the issue of surfing/emailing on company time.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
The problem with filters is that they [help business and productivity] because it [encourages] the flow of information. Of course, I've found [it helpful] by [complying]. You should try doing that, too, if filters [help] you.
[Vote Bush]
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...
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
No my company does not censor content.
It is a good company with excellent benefits and competitive pay.
They support the community and donate generously to local charities and organizations such as [@orglist@].
@companyname@ is an equal opportunity employer.
%UNDEFINED: @companyname@
%UNDEFINED: @orglist@
%CHECK FILTERBOT_GLOBALS.INI
Somehow the link got space characters in it. Try this:l ize2.cgi?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sco.com%2Fco mpany%2Fexecs%2F
http://www.pornolize.com/cgi-bin/pornolize2/porno
Really now. You guys are supposed to be the cream of the crop when it comes to technical stories. Some schmuck sends a submission with a highly outrageous claim and you post it for discussion like it's a legit concern?
I bet if I sent mail to Wired News asking the same question this guy asked, if someone was to write back, they would probably inform me of the fact that the pages was modified, then cached.
In these days of companies losing money, laying off workers, etc there's no IT department I've seen who has the funds to hire an army of people to dynamically change content for their employees.
You'd also think, if there was software that was intended to do wide scale dynamic changes web content the moderators of one of the biggest geek sites on the planet would know about it.
Be wise.. !
You were using company property and company bandwith for personal use, discussing a slashdot story. In some companys they would have flogged you, in others fired you.
I know I am taking it far, but the real truth here is that you really don't have a lot to say about how a company uses it's equipment and if you don't like it your options are limited, put up with it or leave.
It may not seem right but perhaps that is because we feel freedom should extend into our jobs but the reality of it is that we sell some of our freedom when we accept a paycheck. We all know this and have to somehow accept it and live with it.
There should be a law against middlemen altering content without notifying the reader of such content. Anytime this is done to a page, the page should contain a big and bold sentence warning the user that the contents have been altered from the publisher's source, or other obvious notations like "[expletive deleted]".
It's the company's network and computer, so they should be free to BLOCK any content they want, but they shouldn't be able to use that power to mislead the reader into believing the publisher was saying something that they didn't. It's fine if they want to ban me from using their phone to make personal calls; but if they allow me to make personal calls they mustn't secretly use voice processing hardware to alter the words I hear or speak.
It is a violation of free speech because it *secretly* robs the content publishers of opportunities to deliver their intended message. If they block a web site or inform the user that the content has been altered, the user still knows they can go elsewhere and access the unmodified content. But when it is altered secretly, the user is misled into believing the content had certain information, without the knowledge that they need to go elsewhere to see the real infromation.
I can smell a lawsuit from the content publishers brewing.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
As much as I agree that the workplace generally isn't the time and place for pr0n (unless that's your work, of course) -- don't you think that someone might find your repeated use of "sick perverts" offensive? (I mean, if you want to get into the "my ears/eyes are too fragile to hear/see that" nonsense).
Don't you think that making a threat against an employee might be a bit over the top just because they wanted to browse their friend's recently-poseted photos of their hiking trip, on a site that might actually not let their pictures be indexed or just hasn't been crawled recently?
Oh, and you must have a WONDERFUL work environment, wherever you are, with the constant threats of lawsuits against employees, throwing the word "pervert" around all the time, as well as generally inspiring work effort with the fear of a lawsuit. Can you send me an application?
And, for what it's worth, the only thing that I noticed in the article in question was a text phrase of two words, each by themselves perfectly legitimate in daily conversion.
This is a simple issue of Corporate Rights.
1. It is their computer.
2. It is their network.
3. It is their monitor, it is their hard drive.
4. They paid for it, they can do what they want with it.
5. You are their whor^H^H^H^Hemployee.
6. They paid for you, they can do what they want with you.
Simply put, your rights as an employee are subservient to their rights as an employer in terms of the information you access in their emplyoy. Yes; you have rights over theirs when it comes to discrimination issues (age, gender, race, creed) but, in terms of information, censorship is entirely their right.
7. You have the right to leave at any time without notice and without fear of reprisal.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Actually, no. Not at all. I don't force them to watch those sick pictures of disgustingly humiliated people. They like it. Therefore they are perverts. It is not my fault. This is a fact. If they don't want to be called perverts then why won't they stop being perverts in the first place?
Oh, and if someone likes strawberry ice cream with crushed Oreos on top and you find the taste disgusting, then I guess that would qualify them to be a pervert?
'll take the liberty to answer your question with another, much more interesting question: Don't you think that browsing their friend's recently-poseted photos of their hiking trip during the time I pay them to work is a little bit unfair, to say the very least? They get what they are asking for if you ask me.
You pay them to eat lunch, too? As long as your acceptable use policy allows personal use during lunch hours (checking mail, etc.) or at other times, then I'm still of the opinion that threatening someone and their employment and labeling them a "pervert" simply for viewing an image that is assumed to be pr0n simply because it isn't indexed on google is over the top, and may be grounds for legal action against you.
Please... No one has ever told them it will be easy job. If they want to quit I have lots of other people waiting in the line. I'm not forcing anyone to work here, although I have to admit they will be lucky if they get even a web monkey job not violating the NDA they signed here. But they were not forced to sign it and that's what's important -- free will.
True, but I'm guessing nobody ever told them they'd be abused and threatened, either. I'm certainly NOT an advocate of socialism -- I believe that you need to put in a day's work for a day's pay. But it works both ways -- you need to have some respect for your employees, too. Contrary to what you apparently believe, you don't OWN them. It's people with attitudes like yours, IMO, that drive a lot of people to what seems to be an ever-increasing socialist "you owe me" mentality against business owners/bosses, etc.
Somehow I highly doubt you'd get the required security clearance.
BTDT -- TS/SCI, and at at time when they actually CARED about it. These days clearances are given away like promotional items at a trade show, IMO.
Do you have a resume published on the web somewhere? I could see what I can do. (Especially if hiring you is good for me, if you follow my drift.)
You obviously have a problem recognizing sarcasm. And yes, I do have my resume published, but not for people who want to take advantage of me.