Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Did Secure Computing lie about amount of net porn to tout SmartFilter?Interesting tidbit from the Yorkshire Ranter about a 2004 "porn study" issued by Secure Computing (makers of SmartFilter, the censorware company that sells tools of oppression to dictators and labels every Boing Boing post as "nudity," even though 99.5% of Boing Boing's posts do not contain nudity.)
Secure Computing are very keen on pushing their product, even if some might consider it unethical. Take this report they put out back in 2004. Apparently there were 307,000 pages of feeelthy pictures in the .st domain, Sao Tome's TLD. Which would have been mildly interesting, if it had been the truth.Link.st was managed at the time by a major Swedish ISP, Bahnhof.net. According to their executive VP and General Manager, Jon Karlung, the claim was absolute nonsense. "We had at the time only 6,000 .st domains, of which 1-2 per cent contained any porn. A simple search on Google could have confirmed this. I wrote two letters to them but they never removed this info," he says. If those figures are accurate, each host would have needed to hold 5,116 pages of smut for SC's numbers to add up.
Previously on BoingBoing:
- PRI's "The World" on SmartFilter's BoingBoing "nudity" ban
- Is SmartFilter blocking Google's translation service?
- NY Times on SmartFilter's not-so-smart "nudity" block for BoingBoing
- Saudi Arabia joins league of BoingBoing-deprived nations
- BoingBoing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere. Our response to net-censors: Get bent!
- ISPs in Iran, Tunisia also use SmartFilter (which blocks BoingBoing as "nudity"
- Stick Michelangelo's "David" on your blog to protest censorware
- BoingBoing now censored in the UAE (and elsewhere)
- Argonne National Laboratory is blocking Boing Boing
posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:48:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments
