Internet Rights and Blog Censorship In Vancouver
By dfred on April 6, 2008 - 10:16am
If your employer or corrupt, undemocratic, dictator-based government uses a filtering service to block access to any particular blog, ezvancouver.com might be one of them. Here is an excerpt of a press comment from a US source:
"THERE are lots of ways to describe the new ezvancouver blog, the Web's obliquely subtitled "The Vancouver Blog Everyone Talks About" which already attracts hundreds of thousands of eyeballs worldwide to its unappeasable, digital scroll of high-weirdness.
It’s a site where, on a given Friday morning, there were links to video games that helps kids to brush their teeth, Internet rights for Canadian bloggers, “a new design for a washing machine and a toilet all in one” and a new Body Armor T-Shirt made in Japan.
But nudity?
"Access denied by a software filter content category," was the message an engineer in downtown Vancouver said he received last Wednesday when he tried to visit ezvancouver.com from his office computer. A colleague recommended the site to him because there was an interesting post. The message he got is the following: "The requested URL belongs to the following categories: Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies, Nudity."
Yep.
"When it happened I was pretty put off," said the employee, who did not want to be named because the topic involved the Vancouver based company filtering policies, "as I enjoyed the little distractions it provided me during lunch time."
It was a sentiment that, over the last two weeks, united oppressed employees — and citizens — all over the globe.
The culprit is a Software product made by a firm in California. It is marketed to various organizations in Canada such as schools, libraries and government. It provides a way to a system administrator to limit exposure to Web Sites among users of their networks.
The software accomplishes its task with the help of a central database of zillions of Web sites organized into numerous categories — such as "General News" or "Dating/Social" or "Hate Speech."
At some point late last month, it seems, a site reviewer at the software company spotted something fleshy at ezvancouver.com and tacked the Nudity category onto the blog's classification. The company's database was updated and, from that point on, any company client that had its network set up to block sites with a Nudity designation would now automatically block ezvancouver.com.
The impact quickly rippled across the web, which had the ancillary effect of outing corporate and government clients, as their employees and citizens, now deprived of their daily fix of ezvancouver’s weirdness, blasted their overlords in anonymous e-mail messages to ezvancouver's editors, who plans to post them on its blog.
Frederic Desjardins, an ezVancouver.com co-editor residing in West Vancouver, contacted the company to inquire about the classification. In an e-mail message to Mr. Desjardins, a representative of the company pointed out that a post from early January about vintage photos of burlesque adult magazines contained "pornographic" images. The representative also noted a separate image of "a women in lingerie holding showing some sex gadget " all of it in a post titled “ Quebec: Sex Gone Mad”. The post was referring to an article published by the Globe and Mail -- the very definition of a pornographic newspaper.
A company rep says, "We classify Internet content into over 73 different categories so that customers can chose, by category, what types of Web content they want available to their organization," the company's rep said in an e-mailed statement, adding that the company "has no control over, or visibility into, how an organization implements their filtering policy."
If one accepts the above argument, the larger problem of context — a problem that has dogged would-be Internet rating and filtering schemes for years — remains.
"There is far too much content on the Internet for any one company to review manually," said the proprietor of the anticensorship site peacefire.org, "so they have to cut corners. And they're going to fall further behind as the Web gets bigger."
Indeed, as the ezvancouver.com team members noted last week, of the 200 posts made last December, only 2 contained any nudity."
Underneath these clothes, we're all nude. Think about it.
If our American cousins are so damned concerned about nudity on the internet, then why haven't they done something to rid the world of all that pornography coming at us from the San Pornando Valley near L.A.? Here they are throwing crap at us while their own back yards are full of it. Let them clean up their own acts before dictating to the rest of the world.