Blue Coat, a censorware company, has blacklisted Boing Boing because some of our entries criticize censorware and describe the means by which it may be circumvented. Boing Boing presently hosts nearly 28,000 entries, and fewer than 100 of those deal with "proxy avoidance." Blue Coat has blocked the entirety of the site.
It appears that Blue Coat's policy is that any site that contains any information about the problems with its business model will be permanently blacklisted. Blue Coat treats sites that explain the problems with censorware as being equivalent to sites that actually defeat it, treating criticism of its rules as a violation of its rules.
If your company, school or government uses Blue Coat's indiscriminate and capricious censorware to block off the Internet, you can get around it using one of the many methods listed here.
If you're a CIO cutting regular checks to Blue Coat for keeping your network "safe" please consider the service's vindictive filtering criteria, and the certain fact that this means that they will block "safe" sites and fail to block "unsafe" sites, and that your users can readily defeat them, and ask yourself whether you're getting what you pay for.
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 15:38:19 -0600
From: filtering@bluecoat.com
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Site Submission ResultsThank you for submitting boingboing.net/ to Blue Coat Systems, Inc.
You suggested the following rating(s): Blogs/Newsgroups
Your comments were: "The category of Proxy Avoidance is incorrect. "This site has been reviewed. However, it was already correctly rated as Proxy Avoidance, and Blogs/Newsgroups.
(Thanks, Dale!)
Update: Neil sez, "It might interest readers to know that Marc Adreessen, cofounder of Netscape, was on the board of directors of Blue Coat since 1999, but refused to stand for re-election in 2005."
