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Only a Pawn in Their Game

Posted By Matt On 11th August 2005 @ 15:16 In Blogs, Internet, Technology, Censorship | 16 Comments

After getting a tip from a reader who had trouble accessing her website from a Panera Bread restaurant, Media Girl discovered that her website was being blocked by SonicWALL, a “content filtering service.”

Media Girl found that her own site had been rated, strangely, in “Category 1 - Violence/Hate/Racism.” She writes:

I wonder, what does it take to get that rating? Not much, apparently — especially since this site advocates no violence, and only speaks of it in terms of violent crime and violent wars, really has not addressed anything about racism, except for its pernicious persistence in our society, and has expressed hate only for hate.

But, as Media Girl soon found, there seems to be little correlation between SonicWALL’s ratings and that pesky thing called “reality.”

She found, for instance, that SonicWALL classifies The Tattered Coat as

Category 22 - Games

Now, I love a good game as much as anyone, but this site hardly seems to fit SonicWALL’s description of a gaming site:

Sites that provide information and support game playing or downloading, video games, computer games, electronic games, tips, and advice on games or how to obtain cheat codes. Also includes sites dedicated to selling board games as well as journals and magazines dedicated to game playing. Includes sites that support or host online sweepstakes and giveaways.

While I am hosting The First Annual Katherine Harris Colorized Photo Contest (submissions still being accepted, by the way), that contest seems too recent to have been responsible for the rating.

Idyllopus did some analysis of the ratings, and noticed a few patterns, mostly having to do with the kind of blogging software being used to produce the blogs in question. But the ratings do seem pretty arbitrary.

Here are some ratings from my Philly/National blogroll:

All-Spin Zone
Category 22 - Games

Attytood
Category 1 - Violence/Hate/Racism

Blinq
Category 33 - News and Media

Corrente
Category 36 - Reference

Eschaton
Category 31 - Web Communications

Fables of the Reconstruction
Category 6 - Adult/Mature Content
Category 25 - Political/Advocacy Groups
Category 35 - Usenet News Groups
Category 41 - Society and Lifestyle

iFlipFlop
Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment

MyDD
Category 25 - Political/Advocacy Groups

Rittenhouse Review
Category 33 - News and Media
Category 36 - Reference

Slacktivist
Category 27 - Information Technology/Computers

Suburban Guerrilla
Category 22 - Games

The Booman Tribune
Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment
Category 54 - Advertisement

Upyernoz
Category 31 - Web Communications

Whiskey Bar
Category 33 - News and Media

(not a picture of the author)

It’s pretty hit-and-miss. At least I’m in good company in the Games category, sharing that rating with All-Spin Zone and Suburban Guerrilla.

You can check out your own blog’s rating on this page. Let us know, in the comments, how your blog was rated.

As for me, well, I’m off to play some more games.


16 Comments To "Only a Pawn in Their Game"

#1 Comment By Tiffany On 11th August 2005 @ 15:22

Here’s my rating, which confuses the hell out of me, considering my site isn’t related to any of these. Then again, guess that’s just par for the course.

Category 27 - Information Technology/Computers
Category 29 - Search Engines and Portals
Category 55 - Web Hosting
Category 0 - Unrated

#2 Comment By albert On 11th August 2005 @ 15:38

dragonballyee.blogs.com
Category 14 - Arts/Entertainment
Category 41 - Society and Lifestyle

#3 Comment By Matt from the Rant On 11th August 2005 @ 17:06

Category 22–Games.

I’m bummed. I was hoping for cult/occult.

#4 Comment By Chris On 11th August 2005 @ 17:16

Category 22–Games. That’s cool, I was thinking of quiting my job and my site to play Madden 06 any damn way.

#5 Comment By Josh On 11th August 2005 @ 17:18

skaroff.com/blog
Category 22 - Games
Running WordPress

#6 Comment By Mark On 11th August 2005 @ 17:31

I’m on MSN Spaces (stop laughing … seriously … I’m poor and it’s free … aww, go to hell).

Anyway, I’m a Category 64 - Unrated.

Not sure if that means I’m so obscene as to not deserve a rating, or if I just haven’t shown up on their radar.

Probably a little of both.

#7 Comment By JLo On 11th August 2005 @ 18:07

I feel your pain, Mark: Category 64 - Unrated.

Not even worth a damn rating. Pricks.

#8 Comment By Mikhail On 11th August 2005 @ 18:44

Category 64 — unrated. I say keep your filthy ratings off my website!!

#9 Comment By blue girl On 11th August 2005 @ 22:49

I’m: Category 15: Business & Economy

!!! Yeah right !!!

#10 Comment By Suzy Shedd On 11th August 2005 @ 23:25

Matt, as a matter of curiosity, did you find out which method Sonic Wall uses? If they’re using a bot/webcrawler for classification, that might explain the weirdness. If it’s a method where humans do the rating, I seem to remember that the usual human rater seldom has more than a hs education and spends approximately seven seconds on each site. If there are anyactual people at the company, why not interview someone who’s supposed to know what’s going on? THAT should be fun!

#11 Comment By albert On 12th August 2005 @ 00:31

oooh, madden ‘06 - with the new move we’ll be oh so close. when does it come out?!

#12 Comment By Mark On 12th August 2005 @ 05:14

The URL
http://frymax.typepad.com/longcut/
is currently rated as:
Category 15 - Business and Economy

Boooooo! I wanted games too!

I’m trying to think if I’ve ever had a post about “business and economy.”

#13 Comment By Chris On 12th August 2005 @ 09:21

Albert, it’s out.

#14 Comment By Frank On 12th August 2005 @ 09:47

Hey, I achieved my goal on iFlipFlop with all those Tom Cruise and The Runaway Bride stories…I’m all about the Arts & Entertainment. LOL. What kind of bozo firm can be this far off and still sell a product?

#15 Comment By G. D. Frogsdong On 12th August 2005 @ 10:56

I’m a category 31-Web Communications. When I read their description of the category, all I could htink is that my allowing comments via Haloscan put me their. Well, that’s about a couple of million blogs in that category.

These filtering systems are absolutely awful. I worked at Avaya last year and they had a filtering system. Whenever I went to dictionary.com to look up a spelling, I got a warning window. Dictionary.com. What’s the problem? The dirty word definitions?

#16 Comment By Idyllopus On 13th August 2005 @ 11:02

(I’m making my rounds on some of the blogs that have posted on this and leaving the following that contains some interesting information that was left at my site. Apologies if you’ve already gotten this information and I’ve not noticed it.)

I had posted about this and my findings were that there were some patterns with people one typepad tending to come up as business and economy and people on blogger tending to come up as web communications. Later a Seth Finkelstein came by my site and posted a link to his page on censorware which is very interesting. And he briefly noted in my comments area that “The system is simple. Roughly, all blogs on a service (IP address) will have a default blacklisting. Then individual blogs may have entries which override that default.”

So what he said confirms what I was finding, though, as he noted, there are exceptions.

Anyway, I suggest reading his page. He gave testimony before congress on DMCA Censorware in April 2003 and also was profiled in the NY Times in 2001 in “Cracking the code of online censorship”.


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