Halliburton Bounces Boing Boing

Content filters, the scourge of office Internet goof-offs everywhere, claimed a very high-profile victim by blocking people behind those filters from visiting the most-heavily trafficked blog on the Internet. Several posts on report on how Smart Filter made an impact on one Boing Boing reader's day when he tried to visit the site from Halliburton: "Access denied by SmartFilter content category," was the message a Halliburton engineer in Houston said he received last Wednesday when he tried to visit BoingBoing.net from his office computer. "The requested URL belongs to the following categories: Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies, Nudity." Yep. "When it happened I was pretty put off," said the employee, who did not want to be named because the topic involved company filtering policies, "as I enjoyed the little distractions it provided me during the workday." Nudity at Boing Boing? Mark Frauenfelder The unnamed Halliburton engineer may not receive much sympathy from the community at large, since he works for a major government contractor that pays salaries out of US taxpayer dollars. The greater problem for filtering companies is context. Blocking Google's page translation service because of its potential for avoiding the content filter also removes the usefulness of the utility for those who have legitimate needs for it. That does not benefit anyone. Tag: | document.write("Email Murdok here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.