Webwasher versus Web Content Creators?

rjnagle asks: "While trying to access a recipe web page of a friend Mary Anne Mohanraj from work, I was dismayed to find that Webwasher, my company's content filtering application, had blocked it. It's true that Mohranraj's site contains some tastefully written text-only erotic stories, (Mohanraj has published several distinguished books and anthologies ), but apparently Webwasher's filtering rules block everything from the domain--including her writing diary, Sri Lanka travel photoessay, poetry and yes, her reading list of Indian writers. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work. Please answer these questions: How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content? Given that Webwasher's corporate customers rarely tweak Webwasher's default blacklist settings, doesn't this imply the need for Webwasher to make their filtering algorithms readily available? (Apparently, even the product's installation documentation is password-protected). If content filtering programs like Webwasher have a tough time distinguishing between a teacher's educational philosophy and hardcore erotic fiction, shouldn't the software company offer an online form for content creators to appeal being blacklisted? Having lived in Eastern Europe, I've seen firsthand how content filtering (ostensibly for reasons of social utility) has produced a society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens."

Comments

proxies

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a similar situation where I work. There's not much you can do about it, unless you have a solid work-related reason to use a particular blocked web site. At least officially.

What I've done is create a squid proxy on my home system. Then I used proxy auto-configuration file to use that proxy only for sites that I've wanted to visit that are blocked. (I was already using such a file to block advertisements, adding in a section to use a proxy for selected sites was trivial.)

Begging to be fired, anyhow..

[zcat_NZ]

Do what I do;

Download 'putty', and SSH to your home machine.
From there you can run links, epic4, slrn, or basically any other text-based app. Nothing gets filtered, nothing incriminating shows up in the logs at your workplace, nothing ends up in your work cache or your local cache. And if you're worried about the boss walking in run screen first and have a 'top' session running that you can quickly switch to.

The problem is, your workplace is between a rock and a hard place; they can be sued for 'allowing' porn in the workplace but there are simply NO content filters that can reliably decide what is or isn't porn. Hell, even people's views of this differ. The best they can do is just block anything slightly dodgy, and if you really need to go there you'll have to get it all OK'd by the higher-up's.

Re:Ummmm...

[zcat_NZ]

Put the content on another domain. EG in this particular case all the filtered content is already hosted on asstr.org, so she could simply link to the archive and NOT have it hosted on her homepage.

At least they're not blocking by IP address.

Re:Unquestioning citizens?

[C10H14N2]

He posed a very erroneously loaded question based on false premises. If someone asks "How do you screw in a lightbulb," you might expect a literal answer. However, if someone asks "how do you screw in a lightbulb in corrupt communist China where I was oppressed and the bureaucratic barriers to light-bulb screwing resulted in the oppression of the masses and widespread brain-washing," it is perfectly reasonable to give an answer that addresses more than "get screwed."

it's not all that complicated

[hak1du]

Leave aside for the moment the question of whether employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work.

But that is the key question. If it was actually blocking work-related material, you could complain to your network manager that Webwasher is blocking content that you should be able to get at. Then, your network manager would either complain to the Webwasher company or switch to a different product.

Given that it is recipes you are trying to read from your work machine, that path is blocked. Therefore, Webwasher works within the requirements of the people who chose to install it, namely your company. Why should anybody unblock anything then?

As a practical solution, use ssh and/or VNC to connect to an outside account and you can do all the surfing you want there.

From the other side...

[Jonny 290]

as a manager, i must say that my company filters stuff for a reason. all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources. Respect your employer a bit, for god's sakes. surf on your own time.