Stupidest thing blocked by your company's porn filter?

Justy · November 30, 2007, 05:37:44 PM

My experience was today. I was on break surfing on Youtube. Yeah I've stumbled on things before that I didn't think would bring it up the "ATTENTION! IS SERVICES: PERVERT!" screen. However, in retrospect I can understand why it may have been triggered. Yet, yet, today I clicked on a video of a chess game... a chess game! Who flags a freaking chess game? Oi, vey.

Any other head scratchers out there?

Torgo · November 30, 2007, 05:41:07 PM

For a very brief time, I couldn't get on this site at my work place.

Mr_Vindictive · November 30, 2007, 05:48:49 PM

The company I work for put in a porn filter about 4 years ago or so. Only those of us in technical support / network admins were affected by it. It wasn't put in place for anyone in the sales or business departments. Naturally that p**sed us off to a high degree. It got to the point that management was blocking everything except our own intranet. I'm not sure how many people have worked support in the past but google and various other search engines are key in finding answers to difficult problems.

We kept screwing around with the Websense server as it was not very secure. We continued to compromise the machine and management continued to pay Websense to fix the problems. Finally it got to the point that they were losing too much money on fixing the equipment and gave up on it.

Mr. DS · December 01, 2007, 08:18:13 AM

Funny thing, I was once actually given a talking to in a job regarding visiting "porn" sites. I had to say, "um no" because the stuff they were blocking were all humor sites that have no porn on them. All was well after that.

asimpson2006 · December 01, 2007, 05:47:58 PM

Once we had to change someones name in the system b/c their last name was Porn and we sent the email to someone else and none of us got any replies back from it, eventually we found out that the people that we were sending it their email filter blocked it because of the word Porn.

Trevor · December 03, 2007, 01:25:49 AM

I was denied access to www.news24.com/Beeld/home which is an Afrikaans language newspaper. Because the word 'beeld' means image or picture, they automatically thought I was checking out naughty images.

I have also been denied access to this site and to the IMDB as well.

But they let me go to www.nakedandninety.com?

Khaz · December 03, 2007, 09:10:12 AM

Our work websensed our own company web page for about a week. Seeing as we had to log into the company page to access Oracle, that was an entire week of just sitting here twiddiling out thumbs. Good times!

Jason · December 05, 2007, 08:02:06 AM

Websense is the root of all IT evil. Well, that and Microsoft Excel.

One day, it randomly decided to block the entire 'web-based email' category, leaving everyone unable to check their emails for about a week. That was fixed, and now it's decided to block about half of google functions, including gmail's login. Grrrrrgh.

CheezeFlixz · December 05, 2007, 08:18:11 AM

Quote from: Trevor on December 03, 2007, 01:25:49 AM
I was denied access to www.news24.com/Beeld/home which is an Afrikaans language newspaper. Because the word 'beeld' means image or picture, they automatically thought I was checking out naughty images.

I have also been denied access to this site and to the IMDB as well.

But they let me go to www.nakedandninety.com?

Have you used http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html or is it blocked too?

raj · December 05, 2007, 01:47:11 PM

There were all those cunning stunts that got blocked. . .

I'm fortunate in working for state "owned" (for lack of a better term) academia, I never had to deal with pr0n filters.