"Sex" and Unintended Consequences

Why Blindly Censoring the Internet Is a Bad Idea

The surprise we enjoyed this morning was a sudden blockage of certain web URL's by a newly installed firewall. Gmail, Hotmail, and any other website with a "Mail" in the URL was suddenly being blocked. Obviously, the blockage of "mail" was a bad idea, as anyone on the office network would not be able to access email addresses often used for daily business. Besides, mail is a fairly benign URL.

Our first reaction when the message "URLs or Pages Blocked" was to google news Gmail in to find out if the server was down. It is after all a Beta program, and we've grown accustomed to the occasional glitch. Of course, because google returns the search term in the URL, the search results were also blocked. We were a bit confused until we tried hotmail and yahoo mail. After those sites returned the same message, we realized in fact "mail" was being blocked on our end.

Perhaps not surprisingly, "Sex" was also blocked. Of course, the censorship was being done rather blindly. Websites with the word sex in the text were allowed to pass through, only those with sex in the URL were being blocked. For those of you suffering from Puritanical morals, keep in mind where "sex" appears. Middlesex, Essex, and Sussex are all counties in New Jersey. Inadvertantly, the official county webpages were suddenly blocked.

While all this was quickly remedied by removing the blocking software, the conundrum illustrates not only the difficulties of censoring the internet, but also the unintended consequences. Imagine instead the same software operating on a small business network, but rather installed on a large scale government network with many levels of bureaucracy. How long would government workers be barred from viewing the official Middlesex county webpage in a vain effort to thwart office pornography?