{"id":9047,"date":"2006-02-27T16:52:45","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T23:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2006\/02\/27\/boingboing-declares-war-on-smartfilter.html"},"modified":"2006-02-27T16:52:45","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T23:52:45","slug":"boingboing_decl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/02\/27\/boingboing_decl.html","title":{"rendered":"BoingBoing declares war on SmartFilter"},"content":{"rendered":"

SmartFilter is nannyware that can block “bad” sites. It’s used by various institutions — and, evidently, countries, such as the UAE and Qatar — to block “undesirable” sites. In the case of BoingBoing (which I link to from here a fair amount), it’s because they’ve had a trivial number of “nude” photos there (including, apparently, Michaelangelo’s David<\/em>). BoingBoing is striking back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Secure Computing offered us a devil’s bargain: if we’d change the URLs of images with “nudity” (which, they assured us, included photos of Michaelangelo’s David) to something they could detect and block, they’d let the rest of the world see us again. That guy in the UAE who was worried he’d be imprisoned for trying to read BoingBoing would be OK again.<\/p>\n

We considered their offer, and decided not to do it. What happens when the next censorware company comes along with another editorial process they want us to engage in to help them censor the site?<\/p>\n

More importantly: why should we let a company that helps corrupt dictatorships oppress their citizen dictate morality to us?<\/p>\n

So instead we’ve decided to help put Secure Computing out of business. We’re doing this in three ways:<\/p>\n