June 27, 2007
Lo, I am blocked |
Business yammerings 
, Life. Don't talk to me about life. 
, Stuff n bother 
|
So I frequently park myself at the local Panera to partake of their free wireless, tasty coffee, and comfy chairs. It's also convenient that it's halfway between home and my son's school.
Yesterday, I stopped by just to get out of the heat. Since I had an hour to kill, I worked up my last blog post, put it together and posted it. So far so good. I traditionally look at the site at it's base URL (http://planet-geek.com/) just to make sure everything is okay. This time, apparently everything was NOT okay.
Apparently access to my blog has been blocked by the infamous Sonicwall 'content protection' system. Nice of them, eh?
Further research into this problem, by following their url, showed that I was not blocked for my abysmal spelling, my poor site layout, or my lack of meaningful content, but that I was simply classified as... pornography.
I had no idea geekitude had slipped so far into the internet's dark underworld.
Naturally, I immediately put in a request to have it reclassified, and demanded an explanation as to WHY my little corner of geekness has been classified as Pornography. Alas, Sonicwall doesn't provide such information, you may simply ask for a reclassification, and they might get around to it. In 8-10 days. What do you bet that I won't hear a thing from them in that timeframe?
If you'd like to grease the wheels against this idiocy, please go to Sonicwalls' ratings page, look up 'planet-geek.com', and request to have it reclassified as an "Information Technology" website.
I still would very much like to hear from Sonicwall, or from anyone else, who has had their site randomly excluded from anyone who uses their product, with no notification and no recourse except for a 'request for reclassification', why this occurs and what can be done about it. I'd also recommend that ANYONE who hosts or runs a website to plug their URL into that page and check to see if they're being blocked.
Posted by dbs at June 27, 2007 4:47 PM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt.homeport.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/3463
Don't know if this helps in any way but --
our WebSite Pages are rated by SonicWall
as follows:
"Category 33: News and Media" - includes: http://home.comcast.net/~drbogdan http://home.comcast.net/~drbogdan/more.html http://home.comcast.net/~drbogdan/publications.html http://home.comcast.net/~drbogdan/joanne.html
Our LiveJournal (and Flickr) Sites as:
"Category 31: Web Communications" - includes: http://drbogdan.livejournal.com http://joannebogdan.livejournal.com http://naturallyus.livejournal.com Joanne's MySpace as: "Category 31: Web Communications and Category 6: Adult/Mature Content" - includes: http://profile.myspace.com/joannebogdan
Posted by: Dennis and Joanne at June 29, 2007 5:17 PM
Dear Customer:
You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate planet-geek.com as "27.Information Tech/Computers" at 2007-06-29 16:25:00.360
The request has been reviewed and rated as:
"27.Information Tech/Computers" at 2007-07-02 12:28:28.733
You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.
Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support
Posted by: sk at July 2, 2007 6:41 PM
While researching for more information about censorware and blogs, I happened to notice your post about being blocked by SonicWall.
For rolling updates on the current status of our battle against blog censorship - and for information on what you can do to help - please visit and bookmark this link:
http://1389blog.com/category/blog-censorship/
Also, if anyone here finds out about any more censorware companies, and/or WiFi sites, schools, and other venues that are strangling freedom of expression in this manner, please let us know so that we can get something done about it!
1389
Posted by: 1389 at September 3, 2007 12:45 AM
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