Censorship as a Network Failure

There’s an old saying about the Internet: It treats censorship as a network failure and routes around it.

Here’s my contribution to that routing: the web site BoingBoing[*1] , a blog before weblogs even existed, is being blocked by countries, companies, etc., etc. I think that’s silly. So, I’ll give our friends at BoingBoing a hand with this snippet from their web site:

  • First, we’re publishing a guide to evading the SmartFilter censorware. There are hundreds of ways to defeat these censorware apps, and we’re going to catalog as many of them as possible.
    Link to “BoingBoing’s Guide To Evading Censorware.”
  • Next, we’re compiling a list of SmartFilter’s dumb classifications. Send us your misclassified SmartFilter sites[*3] so we can add them to the list[*2] .
  • Finally, we’re producing a guide to convincing your employer to ditch SmartFilter. It consists of parts one and two above: a list of bad SmartFilter classifications and a list of ways that SmartFilter can be shredded like wet kleenex. Why spend money on bad technology that doesn’t work?

Signed, the BoingBoing team:
– Cory Doctorow
– Mark Frauenfelder
– Xeni Jardin
– David Pescovitz
– John Battelle

My old pals in the network security business are going to hate me for this . . . but it’s just the latent libertarian in me, peeking out from the conservative veneer . . .