...my school's Internet Content Filter!
August 24th, 2006
Guess what: due to containing material that has been deemed inappropriate for viewing, this page, as well as deviantART in its entirety, has been censored by my school district, as well as Fur Affinity and Photobucket.
Wait a sec...I thought dA had a no-porn policy or something. And I thought my website is porn-free. Maybe not FA, but I see no reason why Photobucket was censored, either.
In general, the students at the school believe the censors are getting ridiculous. Correction: censors generally ARE ridiculous, but my district's takes the cake.
Back when I was a freshman, the only sites blocked were the obviously pornographic sites, as well as StupidVideos, Maddox, and maybe Fred Phelps. Now here's a partial list of sites they are censoring.
- The University of California in LA
- MySpace, Xanga, Facebook, and Livejournal
- Wikipedia (again...)
- Anything hosted by Xepher (that's fixed)
- The National Coalition Against Censorship (ncac.org)
- Half of PETA's sites
- Feminists Against Censorship
- Peacefire.org (one of the foremost against Internet censorship)
- Geocities and Angelfire
- AIM and YIM
- Bob and George
- Kaerwyn
- Drudge Report (though this is an important subject in journalistic history)
- Google searches for "Nazi," "nazism," "games," "chat," "butt," "death," "Dick Cheney," "blog," and "proxy"
- Any proxy server they can find (even though the students are getting faster)
And my favorite...
The official site for my school's band.
My second-favorite:
My school's official lacrosse site.
The Verdict:
I hereby announce my support for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their campaign for blogger's rights. Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign today!
UPDATE 4/7/06: I don't know how, but somewhere, the filters got a glitch. Several "evil" sites, including The Best Page in the Universe, Ebaumsworld, and even deviantART can be seen from my school's computers without needing a proxy server. I'm quite sure the school will find out they screwed up and cover everything once again in no time.
UPDATE 4/12/06: Whoops! Spoke too soon! This page (well, technically, only the deviations) is censored again, as well as all the pages that were un-censored over the past week. At least they fixed that goof with the band site. Wikipedia's out of the picture again, God knows why.
UPDATE 4/13/06: Okay, now whatever was left of deviantART is ker-blocked...including this journal. This page comes to mind.
UPDATE 5/11/06: The filter bites itself in the ass again. My school's official lacrosse site has been banned, and so was Livejournal. Why Livejournal? Yea, I put a couple more sites in the list.
UPDATE 8/24/06: I'm not going to my high school anymore, so I asked a junior there how the filters are holding up. Seems my beloved site, fenrisdesigns.com got the boot. Two-faced bastards...
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