Was it my dirty rice recipe?

 
I'm a longtime supporter of the anti-censorware group Peacefire. They do a great job in keeping an eye on the companies like SurfWatch, CyberPatrol, NetNanny and the truly vile CyberSitter that manufacture internet "filtering" software. It was developed ostensibly to protect net.surfing children from pornographic sites and their ilk on the net. Trouble is, this software tends to filter out sites containing ideas their manufacturers don't like ... like information about safe sex, planned parenthood, women's rights, gay rights, political sites. Sites ranging from breast cancer information to The White House have been accidentally blocked by programs like this, but what's chilling is sites that because of their ideas are blocked deliberately, but shouldn't be. Hit Peacefire's site and read more about it.

Anyway ... I'm a member of Peacefire and I get regular mailings from them, and I also visit their site regularly. Just for the hell of it, I entered "http://www.gumbopages.com" into their "Test-a-Site" search engine, and got this result (sorry for the crappy screenshot):

Needles to say, I was flabbergasted.

I was also confused by this option list next to my URL, which said "sexually explicit". Is that what my site supposedly fit into? Or is it just their default? I sent in my URL and email address for review, and then called SurfWatch tech support. The harried-sounding support guy told me that I wasn't blocked at all. I checked the search engine again, and confirmed that I was. He said, to my amazement, that he couldn't check to see if my site was specifically included in the database, but that if I was to send in an email, it would be reviewed and that their filter databases are updated daily. I did just that. I got this reply:

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 12:06:29 -0700
To: Chuck Taggart
From: Amanda Jones <ajones@surfwatch.com>
Subject: Site not blocked by SurfWatch

Hello, http://www.gumbopages.com/

Thank you for your interest in SurfWatch and for submitting the site
above. We appreciate your help in our efforts to keep the Internet free and
safe.

This site is not blocked in our current filters. If you have subscribed to
the SurfWatch maintenance program, you can get the latest filters at any
time by forcing an update.

To update filters in SurfWatch. To update filters using SurfWatch
version 3.0 launch the SurfWatch Manager application and select "Update to
Latest SurfWatch Filters" from the Install menu.

Please contact technical support if you have any questions or any problems
updating, at 408-395-8210 or support@surfwatch.com.

Amanda Jones
SurfWatch, a Division of Spyglass
16795 Lark Ave, Los Gatos CA. 95032
408-395-8750
ajones@surfwatch.com

From: Chuck Taggart
To: Amanda Jones <ajones@surfwatch.com>
Subject: Re: Site not blocked by SurfWatch

You wrote,

>This site is not blocked in our current filters. If you have subscribed to
>the SurfWatch maintenance program, you can get the latest filters at any
>time by forcing an update.

Try going to your own "Test a Site" form on your own web site, at 
http://www1.surfwatch.com/testasite/body.html

Enter "http://www.gumbopages.com/" and you will get this result:

Test A Site Results

http://www.gumbopages.com/
is BLOCKED in our most recent Productivity filters.

Please explain.  Thank you.

Regards,

Chuck Taggart
--
*  Chuck Taggart  \/  Email chuck at gumbopages dot com
|  "Down Home", Regional Folk and Roots Music of the Americas
*  Saturdays 3-5pm, KCSN 88.5 FM, Northridge/Los Angeles
|  Visit The Gumbo Pages, http://www.gumbopages.com -- Louisiana
*  Culture 'n Food, Recipes, Roots Music, Internet Radio & more!
| - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - *

From: Sites <sites@surfwatch.com>
To: Chuck Taggart 
Subject: FW: Site not blocked by SurfWatch
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 20:36:03 -0500

Hello Mr. Taggart-

Thank you for your inquiry.  Your site, http://www.gumbopages.com/, fits our
filtering criteria (Please see: http://www1.surfwatch.com/about/filter.html
for details). It is blocked in our Productivity Filters under hobbies.
Productivity filtering is most often used by businesses, schools, libraries,
etc. to manage Internet usage based on their acceptable use policies.  

Thank you very much for your interest in SurfWatch.

Best Regards,
Emily 
SurfWatch Content

I couldn't believe what I was reading. SurfWatch had just flipped my pissed-off button. My reply:

To: Sites <sites@surfwatch.com>
From: Chuck Taggart 
Subject: Re: FW: Site not blocked by SurfWatch
Cc: Amanda Jones <ajones@surfwatch.com>
Bcc: 
X-Attachments: 

On 30 Jul 1999 at 9:11am, you wrote:

>Thank you for your inquiry.  Your site, http://www.gumbopages.com/, fits our
>filtering criteria (Please see: http://www1.surfwatch.com/about/filter.html
>for details). It is blocked in our Productivity Filters under hobbies.
>Productivity filtering is most often used by businesses, schools, libraries,
>etc. to manage Internet usage based on their acceptable use policies.  

This is an outrage.

An unbelievable, teeth-grinding, throw-something outrage.

In the last five years, I have spent countless hours and a lot of money building 
this site, which is devoid of sexually explicit content, advocation of violence, 
hate speech, and anything else which would make it belong in any censorware's 
filtering list, only to have you include it because you have a *hobby* filter?

Read what you wrote:  "schools, libraries, etc."  Can you tell me what would 
justify ANY school or library -- a library, for God's sakes -- to filter my site?  

I've gotten emails from an incredible and very gratifying number of students, 
from college level down to elementary school, thanking me for all the information 
I've put on my site regarding Louisiana culture -- my site has been used as school 
research material for many student projects.  It is, among other things, a 
cultural and educational site, not a "hobby" site.  

A school is a place to learn, and a library is for everyone, and everything.  
A library is a place for people to read.  A library is not a place where you 
filter sites like mine.  If public libraries want to filter pornographic sites, 
that's another argument.   But there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON for a library or 
school to filter the content in my site.

I insist that you remove my site from your filters at once.

>Thank you very much for your interest in SurfWatch.

My interest in SurfWatch is now very, very intense indeed.  

Chuck

From: "Salomon, Alexandra" <asalomon@surfwatch.com>
To: Chuck Taggart
Cc: Sites <sites@surfwatch.com>
Subject: Gumbo Pages web site
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 16:34:44 -0500

Hello Mr. Taggart,

Emily has brought your site and our blocking decision to my attention.
First I'd like to assure you that your site is not part of SurfWatch's
Sexually Explicit, Violent, Hate or other "objectionable material" filters.
We offer unique content management solutions for various customers and our
corporate customers have requested that entertainment/city guide/music
material be something they CAN turn off if it's not work-related.

We have reviewed www.gumbopages.com again and find that it fits as part of
our Entertainment category rather than Hobbies (we do have both as optional
categories).  Both of these filtering categories and 13 others are only used
by companies that have SurfWatch filtering products installed and the
specific category turned on.  Their goal is to enforce an Acceptable Use
Policy and limit access to non-work-related sites during office hours.
Libraries and Schools do not generally have these same guidelines and
therefore do not employ these category filters.  

I hope that this brings some clarification about our work and our decision.
Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Alexandra Salomon
Director, Content Services
SurfWatch.com

I must say that I'm amazed that anyone can say, with earnest seriousness and without cracking up, something like "unique content management solutions."

I was once again assured by tech support that regular SurfWatch users (i.e., parents who want to filter porn sites on their kids' computers) will not be blocked from seeing my site, which is a relief. I suppose I can understand if whip-cracking types of employers don't want their employees surfing certain types of sites, but it's easy enough to monitor net.usage via a workplace proxy server to see if an employee is wasting all day surfing the Web without blocking any and all sites of a certain category. Plus, just because libraries and schools "generally do not have these guidelines" it doesn't mean that someone can't turn these filters on. It still just galls me to be in their filter list at all.

However, I'm in good company. Two of my three favorite online food sites are blocked by SurfWatch's "Productivity filter": Epicurious and The Food Network, but the other one, The Global Gourmet, is not.

This whole hoo-hah just got me thinking a lot of how I dislike this type of software due to its incredible potential for misuse, by the people who make it as well as the people who use it. I hope you've gone to Peacefire's site to read about the many well-documented abuses of censorware; now, how 'bout we take a little poll?

Filter everything! Let SurfWatch decide what we see.
Filter pornographic/etc. sites at work, schools and libraries.
Filter pornographic/etc. sites at work only.
Filter "entertainment" sites like mine at work.
Freedom of speech. No filtering.

I've never played with the free reader polls offered by ArsDigita, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. This is, of course, unscientific, and just out of curiosity.  

And thanks to Peacefire, here's instructions on how to permanently disable and uninstall SurfWatch without requiring the password. If you can't get through to their site, try this.

While I'm all for keeping porn away from little kids, I'm very very leery of most of these censorware companies. We definitely need to keep an eye on them.