Cool Voice of America censor-buster b0rked by idiotic anti-pr0n measure

The US International Broadcasting Bureau (Voice of America, basically), created a proxy service to allow Chinese, Iranians and other oppressed people to circumvent their national firewalls, relaying forbidden pages behind the silicon curtains. However, the IBB decided to kowtow to unknown bluenoses and install a filter that would block foreigners from gaining access to pr0n: to do this, they came up with the bright idea of blocking any URL that contained naughty words. This is a stupid, stupid idea:
IBB's list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov).
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Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
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* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
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