Censorship or Ownership
The latest rash of whinings from the internet have to do with what they are calling disdainfully 'censorship'. Strangely enough, in this country and plenty of other places, censorship is legal, and indeed a responsibility. Movies are censored, language is censored, pictures are censored.

Suddenly however, bloggers and websites are shocked, SHOCKED to find that businesses and countries are blocking their websites! Wonkette is all in a tissy, Boing Boing is telling you how to get around it, and many others, including instapundit are jumping on the same bandwagon.

It seems obvious to me, but apparently some people don't understand. If you are using an internet connection at work, the business has the right and responsibility to decide what is appropriate use of that connection. Unlike wonkette's hissyfit where the blocking of personal pages was obviously blocking 'people who disagreed with the government', a business is supplying the internet connection and if their usage policy and security policies exclude personal use, they have every right to exclude personal use websites. Going against this policy is essentially stealing the business's internet connection, much the same as the person who takes reams of paper home for their own use is stealing stationary.

So why are such luminaries as Glenn Reynolds, Wonkette and Boing Boing encouraging and facilitating such theft? I guess they feel people have the right to steal.

Boing Boing seems suprised that their site is classed as containing nudity, when they post things that contain nudity. Shocking I know. Yet Boing Boing has to whinge about 99.5% false positives. Bzzt, sorry. This is wrong. The software blocks sites that contain nudity. Boing Boing's site contains nudity. It's a no brainer really... zero percent false positive there.

Suck it up guys
- posted by Alan Grey @ Thursday, March 02, 2006