Distributed BoingBoing now available here

In February 2006, the popular weblog BoingBoing was banned from the computer screens of hundreds of US companies and schools, as well as in many repressive countries, by an asinine decision made by a single purveyor of web-filtering software:

At fault in most of these cases 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.

Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a “nudity” site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692—that’s 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618—0.65 percent.

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. They’re stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn’t wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.

In response, Mark Christian created Distributed BoingBoing, which allows users who browse the web from behind the so-called SmartFilter to access BoingBoing via alternate sites. I’ve just set up DBB on this site, and it is accessible at http://dbb.thinkingmeat.net. Enjoy.

And Secure Computing… bite me.