Current location:	Work
Current mood:	annoyed

So the Web filter at work has entertained me for quite a while. Whether MySpace messaging is available, for example, has always changed every other month for about as long as I've been here. More recently, I've been seeing similar behavior with Facebook messaging, Google docs, and free image hosting sites. (For what it's worth, as I write this, MySpace and Facebook messaging work, Photobucket works but ImageShack doesn't, and Gmail and Google docs are both blocked.)

I think the IT department is using Websense, which basically gives the system administrator a group of fixed "categories" of content to choose to block on the local network. So the variation in what's available and what isn't is due to the administrators of the Websense service changing what sites are included in their various lists rather than any choice by EA's own IT department.

Now, most of the blocked sites are under either the "General E-Mail" category or the "Personal Network Storage and Backup" categories. And that's an understandable thing for them to want people to block, given the need to prevent source code or other proprietary data from getting leaked. (Of course, given that you can't attach files to MySpace or Facebook messages, it doesn't really make sense for those to be blocked under that justification, but whatever.)

Looking at the Wikipedia page and the Websense company's own site, the permissions set by EA are pretty liberal—the software apparently includes categories for, for example, "Abortion" and "Advocacy Groups" which aren't enabled here, as I've been able to go to sites like Amnesty International and Planned Parenthood from work just fine.

Nevertheless, I discovered a couple of months ago—I think when I was trying to visit some sexual health site off of Google for some reason—that our IT people seem to have turned on the "Sex" filtering category. Which irked me a little bit, but was mostly just bemusing. (This is a recent change, given that I spent a few of the dreadfully boring long hours of the 2006 crunch time reading stories on Literotica, which is now blocked.)

Today, however, I got an e-mail from the Obama campaign asking for volunteers for their table at this weekend's Gay Days Expo. Curious about what that event entailed, I clicked the link, and found it blocked. (Although for some reason, the site for Gay Days in general isn't.)

Now, I obviously can't see what kind of scary content this site might have on it from here, since it's blocked. It's possible that there are enough explicit images there make the block justified, at least insofar as blocking explicit images on work computers is justifiable in the general case. (Though it should be noted that Playboy.com isn't blocked right now... WTF?) If I investigate this at home tonight, though, and it turns out that the site in question is completely benign, I think this is about the point where I need to write some angry e-mail to the IT department about Websense's "Sex" category.

ETA: Coincidentally, I just found that the Wikipedia page on sexuality and gender identity-based cultures is also blocked under the "Sex" category. (Plenty of other sex-related pages on Wikipedia are fine.) I tried to access that particular page on a public terminal here, and it timed out; the rest of Wikipedia worked fine, so it wasn't a network problem. (The aforementioned Expo site also timed out, for what it's worth.) What is so special about that particular Wikipedia entry? So strange.