Why I Hate WebSense

I was at work and had found a link on a librarian blog to Book Shelf Porn. So I clicked the link. The library where I work uses WebSense on public and staff computers. Normally, this means when you reach a page that has questionable content, a warning screen comes up and you have to click that you're of legal age to view such things. Then you're shown the page.

But if there are questionable images embedded in a page, there is no warning screen. You simply get the page with the questionable images blocked. But sometimes, questionable images aren't picked up by WebSense. A colleague and I tested this out when the library first got the system, and some pornographic user pics on LiveJournal got through without a problem. Yet, as the example below shows, sometimes, WebSense censors harmless photos of books, making it seem as if something really pornographic is there when it's not.

Please note that the images aren't lining up the same in each image here because my monitor at home is a widescreen and the one at work is mostly a square.

Book Shelf Porn with WebSense

Book Shelf Porn without WebSense

So, while I appreciate that people want to protect children from certain content, adults shouldn't have to be restricted because of it. And kids who want to view "dirty" images will always find them. Back when I was in high school, in the dark ages before the internet, it was the anatomy pictures in the encyclopedias. ;)

~~~o0o~~~

Comment Improvements

I just saw this item in Blogger Buzz: They've integrated Google's spam filtering into Blogger's commenting system. The irony would be if this post gets some of the usual crap that all my new posts get on most of my blogs. They're rolling it out slowly for everyone on Blogger. I apparently don't have it yet. We should be seeing a Comments tab between Posting and Settings. Essentially, it works/will work like Gmail, with sections for Published, Awaiting Moderation, and Spam. There is/will be an option to mark things in Spam as Not Spam. The idea of the Published section, which will let us see all the comments on a blog, is interesting. I'm not sure if I'll use it much, but it sounds pretty cool.

~~~o0o~~~

AOL Update

Promoting your blog the Blogger Way. Some good suggestions there.

And for those on the AOL watch, I read in the newspaper that they're concentrating now on content and in phasing out their dial-up internet service. Sometimes, when I read things like that, I feel as if I dropped into a time warp. I know there are still people using dial-up, but it sounds so primitive. And I'm sad, too. AOL was my online home for nearly a decade and there was a real camaraderie on the message boards, even with the drama and angst and flame wars, that I never quite found anywhere else. Facebook, especially the game apps, comes close. So, even if AOL succeeds and continues on as a content provider rather than an internet service provider, it will still be the end of an era because the AOL I knew and loved will be gone and has been, truthfully, gone for a few years now.

There are plenty of communities online now, though so many are fractured by interests, each with their own logins that new services keep popping up to manage all your social media sites. I am waiting for the master master social media site, the one that will manage my social media site managing sites. In some ways, I miss the simplicity of those early days on AOL, and in other ways, I'm jazzed by all the current and future possibilities.

But watch out! You might be rewiring your brain!

~~~o0o~~~