Censorware gone wrong.

August 28, 2000 5:31 AM

Censorware gone wrong.
posted by plinth (6 comments total)

They block the Vatican??
posted by rschram at 6:59 AM on August 28, 2000

The funny part of the article is at the end. The censorware wouldn't let her register with her (real) name of Sheryl Babcock...However, she was allowed to register with the username "Babpenis". Cue Butthead laugh here...
posted by Optamystic at 7:12 AM on August 28, 2000

I was once in charge of establishing AOL accounts for several people in my office. One of these people is a Richard Babcock, who usually goes by the name Dick. He also happens to be the highest ranking person at my company. He just wanted his name or some aspect of it, but AOL would not comply. Desparate not to have to go and tell thiss man that AOL considered his name offensive, I called AOL and was bounced around for an hour. I kept demanding to speak to more important people, sure that somebody would listen to reason, they were downright rude. I gave up. I went and told the man. I just told him straight, and explained there did not seem to be anybody with any decision making ability available to the common AOL user. He got a chuckle over it, and cemented his status as a decent guy in my eyes. I would have been pretty furious. In fact I still am. Our slight revenge, we cancelled all those accounts over a year ago, and no longer pay for them, but they still work. The giant too big to care is also too big to notice sometimes. If anybody wants to jump on me for stealing service, I made an equally big effort to alert them about these accounts, but thanks to corporate credit cards and the names on them not being mine, they would not speak to me.
posted by thirteen at 8:35 AM on August 28, 2000

FYI - I had an account on AOL under the name ItShay. Censorware can't work in all cases... :')

posted by plinth at 9:13 AM on August 28, 2000

zeldman.com has been blocked by most censorware since '96. mainly because i once had a page called adult.html.

there is no court of appeals in the land of robot mccarthyism. since my site is banned by netnanny et al, it can't be seen in many libraries and universities. i've had professors write to tell me they wanted to show "dr web" to their class, but were unable to do so because it was blacklisted.

i get letters like that all the time.

i guess i could start an askdrweb.com to break free of this curse of stupidity, but i don't have the time to run another site, and if i did it would not be askdrweb.com.

there are political agendas to some censorware products. others just robotically look for naughty words. the banning of a breast cancer site in '96 was pretty famous at the time. too many occurrences of the word "breast." the site got nipped.

i understand parents' fears and it's reasonable to protect children from "mature" or harmful content. since there are over a billion web pages, it's impossible to check them all. so we get halfway thought-out solutions like this.
posted by Zeldman at 12:53 AM on August 29, 2000

i also found amusement in the subject line for this thread:
"Censorware gone wrong."

like, when has it ever gone right? ;)
posted by Zeldman at 12:53 AM on August 29, 2000