Over-Censorship
Sometimes our own protection can get in our way. I won’t be launching into a tremendous rant on the authority of government or Homeland Security or police protection in our lives tonight though. I’ll start with something much simpler.
A while back, I started to protect my network with a service called OpenDns. Their site is at OpenDns.org. They provide free protection to your home network by re-routing your internet requests through their servers. If there is content you don’t want to come through, they’ll block it. The nice part for me is that I can set up my router to use the service, and it automatically protects all computers accessing the internet through it. This is especially helpful if I have guests over.
The service allows you to block different categories of websites from coming through – like gambling, pornography, or even online dating or game sites. The only problem is, sometimes it can be a bit too restrictive. For instance, Flickr has been categorized with the “nudity” flag. That mean that I can’t access my pastor’s pics on my network, even though they are FAR from pornographic.
Fortunately, the site lets you customize things down to the tee, so I can add Flickr to my “safe” list and even block out other sites I don’t like that aren’t automatically blocked. The point is, has protection ever gotten in your way?
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try the whitelist feature. you can keep all the categories in place and just let Flickr through.
Yeah, I have added that to the list, along with a couple other sites. I really like the service that they provide. It has been very helpful…
Odd that Flickr was categorized as nudity… Perhaps we should flag that for review. Thanks for replying too, Ron (a friend of the company). As Ron said, the whitelist feature lets you make exceptions when our category blocking makes a decision you disagree with.
I’m guessing that the nudity tag came about as a result of the community filtering that is taking place (which I highly approve of). It would not surprise me in the least that some nudity finds its way onto Flickr.
It’s just like the multiple layers of firewall available to you, or the multiple “safe search” levels on Google. You can protect yourself and your family from most everything, but it may be so restrictive that it hinders some activities. I believe that these levels of filtering are necessary, and have their place. You just have to know how to tweak them to your preference