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Web Censorship on the University Campus?
Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"
This is disgusting and misguided.
Every Canadian University I know of has unfiltered access to the Internet. This US-based universiy obviously has no concept of "academic freedom". How can they expect their academics to be able to do any valuable/legit research if they are censoring what they can read?
You open with a complaint about 'horrendous bandwidth issues' and then bitch and moan about the admins attempts to free up some bandwidth. Jeez, what a bunch of babies we have in modern universities. Not many provided examples, but yea, blocking mp3 is something that I can see happening. And 10 to one the winging about "Electronic Art", especialliy considering the capitalization is really about "www.ea.com" Again, duh. You want to game you might be forced into buying your own connection for that if they are really short on bandwidth.
The days of everyone just buying more and more bandwidth are coming to an end as everyone realizes it is a dead end. Buy more and the users will simply USE more. P2P apps will react to increases in bandwidth by making you a supernode and simply laying claim to every bit per second available to them. Sooner or later, and it is looking more like sooner, the free ride ends.
Democrat delenda est
How is blocking the Village Voice (an online newspaper) not about censorship? You are a total tool.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
As a system administrator of a web host that servers over 220,000 domains I COMPLETELY agree with the campus in blocking certain sites and mime types etc. This isn't an access to information question, this is a network issue. You don't let your network get clogged with crap because people want access to everything. This is a network not a free speach issue. Come on?!?! Next thing we will be hearing about how they can't accesss their porn and gambling sites that they need for "research". Enough of these ridiculous posts!
i'm sure "private" means christian, and probably more fundamentalist. i've met some people from other fundamentalist christian colleges and the colleges have rules against drinking (even off campus and even for their employees who are well over 21). i wouldn't be surprised if they have rules against viewing certain websites.
frankly, if i was a faculty member at one of these colleges (which will never happen), i would be in an uproar over academic freedom. the village voice website is not high bandwidth and when you couple that with anatomy sites, it sounds more like censorship to me. college students are adults and should be allowed to choose to view what they want regardless of the beliefs of a college's administration. if those sites use a lot of bandwidth, then block what's causing that. HTML does not do that, but streaming audio and video might. sometimes i can't stand these christian colleges that force their beliefs in every way possible.
please me, have no regrets.