Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to this web page at this time.
Reason: The Websense category "Sex" is filtered.
URL: http://www.scholar.google.com/
Friday, May 23, 2008
Your tax dollars at work
The Large Nameless Agency definitely got its money's worth in the filtering software it's using. Check out the web site it won't let me vist:
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I'm puzzled by this post so I don't really know what to say. Blogger has never censored me, and I talk about sex with a child in my novel "Maggy," so what does this mean?
ReplyDeleteMainly I came by to tell you how much I appreciate you smart and interesting comments to my post. I'm a pretty sloppy writer on Utah Savage. i let my commenters do the heaving lifting of linking pertinent stuff, do all the research, and point out my typos. So, glad to have. If you want to talk about sex lets do it at my place.
I work for a government agency and was actually doing a work-related search on a government computer trying to use Scholar Google, which is a beta search engine Google is developing for people wanting to do scholarly research (e.g., find articles published in places like The Journal of American History) so the idea the agency's filter would keep people from getting at actual science or history while still allowing folks to do things like read Savage Love or do the New York Times crossword puzzles struck me as ironic. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what gets blocked -- it always reminds me of the cheap filters parents can buy for home computers -- I seem to recall something called Net Nanny that blocked any site that included the word "breast," which of course would make it impossible for a person to find any information on either breast cancer or how to cook chicken breasts.
ReplyDeleteI occasionally do short posts from work on my coffee or lunch breaks -- agency policy lets a person do personal stuff on the computer as long as it's "limited" use and doesn't claim to speak for the agency -- which is why I always refer to my current employer as Large Nameless Agency. I'm kind of looking forward to retirement when I'll get to name names and really vent about bureaucratic ineptitude.
Check it now, Nan. You can access it.
ReplyDeleteI'm on annual leave so this week so it'll have to wait a few days.
ReplyDeleteThe weird thing about getting blocked the other day was I'd been accessing Scholar Google for months -- it's even recommended by the Large Nameless Agency's library -- and suddenly it wasn't there. That type of inconsistency is one of the things that has me stifling curses in the cubicle.