Why is SpyBlog being censored by WebSense ?
We have had an email report that SpyBlog appears to be being blacklisted at the easyInternetcafé internet café franchise within the McDonald's fast food restaurant in Earl's Court in London.
Apparently, the WebSense censorware software has been configured to blacklist SpyBlog under the category of:
Illegal or Questionable
Sites that provide instruction in or promote nonviolent crime or unethical or dishonest behavior or the avoidance of prosecution therefore. [sic]
We consider this false accusation presumably being published to lots of WebSense's customers worldwide, to be tantamount to libel !
It is interesting that WebSense's marketing claims that using their product helps in "decreasing the risk of legal liability", but neglects to the mention the increased risk of being held legally liable for promulgating a libel.
We would appreciate some help from our readers (many of whom will have multiple ways of accessing the internet) to see if this is, as we suspect due to an error in WebSense's master blacklist database, or whether SpyBlog is being specifically censored by either McDonald's Restaurants Ltd, or easyInternetcafé Ltd, or their franchisee Internet Access Ltd.
Please let us know if you are blocked from accessing either
or our current web hosting space
http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/
by WebSense or any other censorware software.
It is ironic that we wrote recently about the collateral damage which censorware invariably causes to innocent third parties:
See: Response from the European Commission regarding the policy of censoring "terrorist" web sites - part 1 and the following 3 blog articles.
Comments
SpyBlog is being blocked by WebSense because WebSense is a great steaming pile of crap that simply isn't up to the job that it purports to do - that blocks legitimate sites while singularly failing to block (for example) poker sites. We have the same software at work, and it even blocks some of our _own_ sites.
Posted by: Pete in Dunbar | October 22, 2006 1:00 PM
WebSense started blocking Spyblog on my computer at work (I work for the Department of Transport) a few days ago. I guess it's the WebSense master list that is the problem rather than just McDonald's or anything.
Posted by: Mark | October 22, 2006 3:23 PM
Any organisation or individual is perfectly at liberty to block access to SpyBlog or any other website according to their own internet use policies e.g. to reduce bandwidth usage or to force employees to only use the internet for business purposes.
What they are not at liberty to do, is to falsely defame the reputation of SpyBlog, by displaying the "reason" for blocking as per the false WebSense category, thereby implying that SpyBlog is somehow in any way "Illegal or Questionable".
That is tantamount to libel.
Posted by: wtwu | October 22, 2006 4:26 PM
Gosh - Websense being libellous? They should block themselves...
Posted by: Sam | October 23, 2006 5:32 PM
Being blocked today from my work which uses websense. While I'm not sure you have a libel action here, it is damn annoying. Websense randomly blocks vast tracts of the Internet for seemingly no reason.
Posted by: Clayton | October 23, 2006 8:07 PM
I wonder if the other blogs on spyblog.org.uk are being blocked - e.g. mine at http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/drk/ or RevRats etc - because we are all being tarred with the same brush ... I can't check here - but next time I am in a Spanish cybercafe I will check spyblog
Posted by: drk | October 24, 2006 6:08 PM
I can vouch that Websense blocks at least one of the two urls. Probobly the longer one. I was unable to access it from school.
If you take this to court best of luck to you :)
P.S. Websense dosn't give its clients an increase risk of libel dose it? I don't think you have any legal grounds to sue my school. It didn't tell me you're an illegal or questionalbe site, websense did so thats the only entity at risk.
Posted by: Ben | October 25, 2006 2:10 PM
@ Ben - you will find that newsagents such as W.H.Smith etc. have to scramble quickly to remove copies of editions of newspapers or magazines which are judged to contain libellous articles - they are at legal risk, even though they have no controil over the content of the items which they display or sell to the public.
So yes, we think that all the customers of WebSense, who are the actual people responsible for exactly what their own computer systems display to their users, not WebSense, are also liable for promulgating the libellous claim that SpyBlog is somehow "Illegal or Questionable"
If you read the small print in your software licence contract with WebSense, you will probably find that they try to deny all legal liability, and dump all the legal risk on you, the customer.
It is perfectly possible for the administrators of your computer systems to manually add SpyBlog to their own local WebSense "white list" of sites not to block.
Posted by: wtwu | October 26, 2006 12:01 AM
blocked at our work (local govt), not sure if we're using Web Sense, message:
Access Denied (content_filter_denied)
Your request was denied because of its content categorization: "Illegal or Questionable"
This happens on http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/ and http://spyblog.org.uk/ but NOT http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/
Posted by: dc | October 31, 2006 3:38 PM
p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/ blocked by websense at my university as "Phishing and Other Frauds" at the moment.
Posted by: Poly | January 16, 2007 6:09 PM
@ Poly - which University is that ?
http://www.spy.org.uk is categorised by WebSense under "Advocacy Groups", which is tolerable - the categorisation, not the censorship of such a vague and all encompassing term.
To imply guilt by association with criminal frauds websites in this way is libel by WebSense, promulgated by their customers, who all too often, negligently do not bother to review or locally amend the default censorware settings.
Posted by: wtwu | January 17, 2007 2:02 AM
I don't know which university dc was refering to but p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/ is currently blocked by Websense at Brunel University.
It is being categorised as "Phishing and Other Frauds" at the moment.
When it was previously classified as "Advocacy" it was not blocked at Brunel, since the university does not block that category.
(Websense classifies - then organisations can subscribe to different block categories)
Posted by: Bob. | January 30, 2007 10:01 PM