[Statistics] Blocklisted: are you?

[Stryder]

After a bout of pandemonium over at Sciforums.com in regards to my concerns for the user created content getting the website censored. I decided to ask the question as to whether a site is Blocked/Filtered or Censored by third-party companies or individuals alike.

An example of one of these third parties is CyberPatrol a Net Nanny program which concerned parents can mess their computer up with install



Now this is great in one way, it means every individual on the internet that wants to hide from the things that make them quiver, can do so with a mere slider.

The problem arises however that such companies offer these systems to network administrators to block/filter sites by Domain for Universities, Colleges, Schools, Government facilities. The reason this is a problem is because the Webmaster (Thats me in this case) isn't informed in regards to if the site is blacklisted, why the site is blacklisted an how many individuals are blacklisting the site based upon either a daily Site check or a Site check that occurs Monthly/Yearly/Once in total.

Being blacklisted/blocked/filtered can hamper the potential viewers which might be users to a site, they might be potential advertisement impressions that's a webmaster's source of revenue or a person that would do business with the site if you are running a shop online. Without knowing why a site is block or even that it is block, means you can't curtail a sites content to deal with their filters, either by removing the offending content or placing such content into members sections.

I will continue to investigate this problem and add more in the new future on the subject.

[hilljd00]

Just get your members to use one of my sites, un-blocks filtered websites.

www.silentsurf.co.uk

[Stryder]

Another company I've now become aware of is websense.com At some point in the near future I'm going to have to try and put together an Email for such companies to ask the Questions:

How can a webmaster find out if their content is causing their site to be blocked/filtered?

As currently these private firms have no List to check or Form to test a domain with. (If you are a company that's planning on developing a Form for this, please contact me as I'm currently looking at developing an API method of communicating with such data.)

[Stryder]

I'm still in the process of hunting down companies involved in blocking websites through Web Filtering or Censorship.

So far I've found:

http://www.securecomputing.com/
http://www.web-filtering.stbernard.com/
http://www.mywot.com (http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/www.chatsoba.com)
http://www.websense.com (http://www.websense.com/Support/ use the SurfControl Test-a-Site tool)
http://documents.iss.net/literature/...tabase_faq.pdf (http://filterdb.iss.net/urlcheck/)
www.deepnines.com

[Stryder]

Search Engines can Censor websites via filtering, however in the case of Google since 2005 they leave a comment explaining that the entry has been removed and usually due to legal reasons etc.

Other search engines have similar censorship policies. Obviously some of those search engines have other sister companies or companies within their holdings.
i.e.

Google, Youtube
Yahoo, Geocities, Flickr, Del.icio.us
Alexa, Amazon
Live Search (Microsoft related)
Ask, Lycos, Excite
Ebay, Paypal, Skype

The list goes on.

[Stryder]

So this weekend my aunt grants me the opportunity of using her Orange I-phone for internet access since I'm currently completely offline. After a lot of faffing around with the "User+Pass" combo, the area code of "0', the initialization string of: at+cglcont=1;,"IP","orangeinternet"

I eventually managed to get online and one of the first site I wanted to check, I couldn't access. Apparently orange is now Censoring any site they believe has 18+ content from phones that haven't been identified as in the possession of someone over 18. (Probably in response to all those randy teenagers that go arrested for their paedophilia antics)

In any case the point is that Orange is now using a proxy on it's phones and internet for "blocking" sites. There is no way to argue with their system, you can only click a link and they will either review it and lift the rating or tell you to go to hell in automate words.

Of course webmasters are never told about these evil corporate changes to their proxies, so whats a webmaster to do if their website gets sunk purely because someone says the wrong word too much.