Boing Boing to net-censors: Get bent!

The good folks at BoingBoing discovered that their site was being blocked in many US organizations and foreign countries by a ham-handed content filter. Their response? Compile an extensive list of ways to defeat censorware.

At fault is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn’t very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity—even Michaelangelo’s David appearing on a single page out of thousands—as a “nudity” site, which means that customers who block “nudity” can’t get through.

…In fact, out of the 25,000 Boing Boing posts classed as “nudity” by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all… Why is SmartFilter content to deliver a product with a 99.5 percent false-positive rate? Because it has promised its customers that it will stop their users from seeing nudity (fat chance—it’s a dead certainty that Smart Filter has failed to class innumerable sites containing nudity), and punishing 24,875 nudity-free posts to get at 125 that contain mild or “art” nudity is fine by them.

…The fact is, there’s no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in. Having a human being review a few pages on a site every couple months is a perfectly adequate classification system, in SmartFilter’s lights—which is convenient, since a genuinely thoroughgoing review would be ruinously expensive.

…[W]hy should we let a company that helps corrupt dictatorships oppress their citizen dictate morality to us?

So instead we’ve decided to help put Secure Computing out of business.

Take a look at BoingBoing’s impressive list of resources for bypassing net censors. There are an awful lot of great minds in the tech community who are dedicated to ensuring the free flow of information.