Submitted by media girl on 9 August 2005 - 11:12pm
After a tip from Pennywit, who had trouble visiting our humble pages from Panera Bread, I went to take a look at a website "content filtering service" that apparently has rated mediagirl.org as:
Category 1 - Violence/Hate/Racism
Isn't that interesting? I wonder, what does it take to get that rating? Not much, apparently -- especially since this site advocates no violence, and only speaks of it in terms of violent crime and violent wars, really has not addressed anything about racism, except for its pernicious persistence in our society, and has expressed hate only for hate.
Is this one new facet we'll see of "a better internet"? Helpful services that will wash the web of content that is uncomfortable for the masters?
But don't feel left out! You too can play the game! Find out your favorite website's rating and share it here!
Sorry, I already spoiled the fun for:
- Trish Wilson: Category 4 - Pornography
- The Goddess: Category 7 - Cult/Occult
- Booman Tribune: Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment
Category 54 - Advertisement - The Tattered Coat: Category 22 - Games
media girl gets a clue
Typical of me, I'm so behind the times, I was just oblivious of others who got the jolly pleasure of having their website censored.
- Conservative Eric of Classical Values got in on the fun by early February of last year. (I assume he's a conservative, as he immediately checked Instapundit's blogroll and found some 50+ sites, from left and right, were blocked by SonicWall. If I have mischaracterized Eric, my apologies.)
- Halleyscomet found not only his personal site was blocked, but financial pages of his company's website labeled as pornography. (No comment.)
- Technology site Walking Paper was branded as occult.
- Pipilo discovered that SonicWall was blocking all Buzznet sites.
I asked one of the Panera employees about it and he said that it's a "Christian company" and they don't put up with things like swimsuits on the Internet. Oh my god. Are these people crazy? Are they worshipping the same God I know? Somehow I doubt it. Somehow I wonder if the employee really knows what he's talking about. It can't be true. I know the "Christian Right" sometimes goes a little overboard, but this is ridiculous. - Scott Hagaman learned that Ektopos is "occult," too.
- RandomActOfKindness got a pornography rating. "Well, the ducks are naked I guess."
- Apparently vegetarianism is deemed too offensive as well: the Veg Blog was blocked.
- Chris Pirillo offers this:
I've got readers out there who wanna see my disgusting pictures of hangnails and zits, and you're blocking them because you believe (and I quote) that this site contains "Adult/Mature Content." Uh huh. Well, then... might as well make it all official and post naked pictures of your CEO and lead programmers, eh?Interestingly, the Google Ads on that page pitch censoring programs to block pornography.
The wall against free speech
The filtering is also apparently used for political purposes, as noted in this From Now On article about censoring school district content for teachers:
The practice of unfairly blocking teachers (and students) from reading politically oriented materials came to this author's attention when a teacher from a school district in California e-mailed complaining about her district's filtering of an FNO Press journal and Web site criticizing NCLB (http://nochildleft.com).The district and its filtering company allowed teachers to access and read the highly partisan marketing efforts and advocacy on behalf of NCLB issued by the outgoing Secretary of Education but blocked the reading of materials critical of NCLB. Even though the Department had been caught paying a journalist to promote its agendas and even though the Department has a very large PR budget advocating NCLB to parents, teachers and others through Web sites and press releases, the district and the filtering company, SonicWALL left the Department's blatant advocacy unfettered while blocking criticism of "No Child Left."
and notes:
SonicWALL invents the list of blocked sites. They decide who gets filtered. They do not explain their criteria and do not reveal which sites are blocked. Most clients could not thoughtfully select which sites to block if SonicWALL does not tell them. The default setting for blocking sites is determined by the company and the school district electing this filter is complicit.
Is that bread or a gag in your mouth?
In a comment on metrofreefi.com, Chuck Remmell reports that Panera blocks what it wants:
Do a search on "Panera SonicWALL" and you will find many people who have experienced Panera's site-blocking. It is because of this unnecessary censorship that I no longer go to Panera.
Below that, Greg Thomas comments:
Hello, I am a former Field Systems IT employee at Panera. Panera is a publicly held company, so there is no political agenda behind political site blocking. The reason they block POTENTIALLY questionable sites is because Panera is a family institution. The last thing any cafe manager wants is to deal with someone watching porn in the cafe. Yes, I know there are other ways to do that, but at least Panera makes an attempt to not provide another means to do so. Panera's free WiFi is unlike any other in the US, and is the largest free WiFi network in the world. It is provided via a Savvis network and is also one of the most reliable. It may block certain sites, but it is provided free. You want unfiltered access? Go pay for it.
Aside from the ridiculous notion that a publicly held company cannot have a political agenda -- I mean, what are all those lobbyists doing in Washington, anyway? -- he has a point, which is:
Whatcha gonna do abbowdit?!
The thing is, what's being censored are internet sites not owned by Panera being viewed on privately owned laptops people have with them. Or, as Tinfoil + Raccoon puts it:
Why in the world would a Panera, or any business that offers WiFi to individuals who are using their own machines, filter content in such a broad manner? A google search of panera sonicwall will reveal lots more grumblers. In fairness, WiFi is free at Panera--maybe they need to add employees who can make baguettes and configure crummy filtering software.
Censored where?
The Google hits on SonicWall also led to the Wikipedia entry on 'censorware':
Groups like The Censorware Project begun reverse-engineering the censorware software and decrypting the blacklists to figure out what kind of sites the software blocked. They discovered that such tools routinely block sites that are clearly outside what they claim to block, while also failing to block what they claim to.
The SonicWall page says:
At the core of SonicWALL CFS is a revolutionary content rating and caching architecture that rates and filters millions of URLs, IP addresses and Websites. When a network user makes a request, SonicWALL CFS checks the URL or Web site against its immense database. A rating is returned and permission is then granted or denied based on established access policies. Ratings for acceptable Web sites and URLs are cached within the SonicWALL appliance, enabling instantaneous compliance.
How that rating happens, they don't say. Their ratings categories page describes mediagirl.org's rating category as:
Anti-social websites that advocate or provide instructions for causing physical harm to people or property through use of weapons, explosives, pranks, or other types of violence.
and
Sites that advocate hostility or aggression toward an individual or group on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality, ethnic origin, or other involuntary characteristics; sites which denigrate others on the basis of those characteristics or justify inequality on the basis of those characteristics; sites which purports to use scientific or other commonly accredited methods to justify said aggression, hostility or denigration.
Where they're getting this impression, I don't know. Perhaps a little troll whispered in their ear?
Comments
12 comments postedWell, I guess I'll have to branch out from Panera. How else can I regularly annoy the MediaGirl.org community?
I think it might be the padlocked penis story below. I, for one, could have told you that blog entry was below the belt.
But seriously, folks, remember to tip your waiters and waitresses ...
--|PW|--
And here I got that story from a mainstream media website!
and battery, unless they consider feminist sites as hating men. Have you looked up any other feminist sites there?
I'll have to check it out. Do you only get one category? If you can have more than one rating, they fucked up on The Goddess. Not only do I discuss the Occult - ooohh! - I've got pictures of beautiful naked men and I celebrate ecstatic revelry through sex and drugs as a part of my religion.
Morgaine-ism© #8
"A Woman's Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy is Sacred and Absolute."
I tried Amanda and feministing, who had innocuous ratings.
and I have been noticing lately that a lot of the blogs on the "feminist blogs" feed are labeled pornographic.
I thought it was annoying when mine was marked as "chat" or "bulletin board" and I could no longer blog from work. Now I'm actually pissed off.
On a positive note, the site www.witchvox.com was ranked as "religion", not "occult".
So far I have not rankled the gods of SonicWALL yet, as my humble blog was ranked merely as "web communications"...where they got that, I will never know...
Interesting. Some of this seems pretty random and with others there's a pattern.
I've checked out 7 typepad blogs and they have all come up "Business and economy".
With the exception of one blogspot blog that is certainly mature content, all the blogspot blogs I've checked thus far ar coming up "web communications".
I have a regular url and I come up "news and media" while a charity/advocacy site I manage comes up "religion" and has nothing to do with religion at all, not even a mention on it there. But another policital/advocacy site I do does come up political/advocacy. The blogs with regular urls are coming up pretty random though, I'm getting results like usenet.groups, society and life and one progressive blog even came up online banking.
Thanks for the heads up on this.
Some new info.
I had posted about this also on my website and my findings were that there were some patterns with people one typepad tending to come up as business and economy and people on blogger tending to come up as web communications. Later a Seth Finkelstein came by my site and posted a link to his page on censorware which is very interesting. And he briefly noted in my comments area that "The system is simple. Roughly, all blogs on a service (IP address) will have a default blacklisting. Then individual blogs may have entries which override that default."
So what he said confirms what I was finding, though, as he noted, there are exceptions.
Anyway, I suggest reading his page. He gave testimony before congress on DMCA Censorware in April 2003 and also was profiled in the NY Times in 2001 in "Cracking the code of online censorship".
Shalom Mediagirl,
The SonicWall Censorship Meme got passed along to me by Terry at I See Invisible People. I posted on the subject on Wednesday and Cleveland bloggers discussed the topic and possible legal action for defamation/slander at our monthly Meetup this week. The opinion of one of the lawyers there was that until damage could be shown, there was no case.
Like yourself, I got hit with the violence/hate/racism tag. As an educator, I was very concerned that this could be spread to my students and parents and cause me no end of grief. SonicWall did respond in three-business days to my concerns and gave me the benign rating of web communications.
What concerns me now is that I'm going to have to undertake a never-ending review of censorware sites to ensure that I'm not iagoed again.
B'shalom,
Jeff Hess
I have not heard back from SonicWall at all. But after seeing your post, Jeff, I thought I'd re-check the rating for mediagirl.org ... and it's now category 31 - web communications.
So either they saw my email, or the meme going around, and fixed the site rating. Still, what a crazy world of corporate censorship we live in!
Being that the technology of content-filtering is what it is to different people (just plain censorships to some, or a service that some businesses feel obligated to provide to their employees/patrons to others) I won't touch the topic of whether it's right or wrong. But since companies, like SonicWALL, who provide content-filtering services have to classify millions of web-sites, there are bound to be errors.
Whether it's automated, token-based classification, real-live human reviews, etymologically-savvy ibis, or all of the above - some fractional percentage of pages will be mis-classified.
Since improper classification does not serve SonicWALL (in fact, higher degrees of accuracy are advantageous) we encourage, appreciate, and are extremely responsive to feedback, and provide a facility for this: http://cfssupport.sonicwall.com.
Yes, I am employed by SonicWALL. We build products designed to stop the bad-guys, not the good-guys. It vexes me to see our products frustrating legitimate users, and I want to improve the situation. We are currently considering adding the above review link directly to the 'block' page. Would that help?
Excepting comments like "stop promoting censorship, you fascists" and in addition to "classify stuff more accurately", any other recommendations you have on how we could improve this service?
I think you've already made an important step by commenting here. Thank you. This is the first public comment I've seen made by SonicWall anywhere outside of your website. That's not to say you haven't been trying to be accessible, but it's not been easy to find.
The biggest complaint that others have made is that SonicWall presents a wall to everyone. No customer service. No appeals process. My own email to SonicWall received an autoreply, and that's it. Without any sort of dialogue with the customers, how can you properly serve the customers? (And "customers" include everyone who experiences the web through your filters.)
How to change this is to establish real transparency in your process. How are sites evaluated? Is there an appeal process for improperly categorized websites? What are the implications of a given categorization?
You might consider adding a blog, too. Business blogging is the forward-thinking approach to public relations. Talk about the issues you face from your perspective.
"A better internet" is something everyone strives for. Some are willing to have third parties decide for them. Some are told by lawyers to have third parties decide for them. But most of us do it on our own, with Bayesian spam filters in our email programs, virus protection, etc. We don't want Big Brother deciding what's fit for our eyes.
Ideally your service could be something a lot of people might want to use -- on their own initiative, instead of on the advice of lawyers or in the interest of protecting children. But they won't trust you if you continue to be an opaque wall, unresponsive to the people who would use it.