Flagged
for humor.
Yesterday I got an e-mail from my mother. This is not an uncommon event, but the e-mail was uncommon. She indicated that when she attempted to click the link my my blog-update email, that the computer told her that the web page was not accessible because it contained humor.
Humor?
I was blocked by a server for being funny. I don’t really think that I am funny, but I am on someone’s radar, I guess. I wonder if there is a list published every month with the URL’s of websites that may or may not contain humor. Either that or a great deal of people are reading this blog at that particular place—no names, protect the innocent—and the sysadmin caught it.
I get it, really. No one wants employees surfing the internet during work. Sure. I just cringe at the idea that we block we content because it contains something funny. I think that I might lose my mind if I couldn’t read humor online in between other tasks. We might see an increase in postal-employee-psychosis-style freakouts.
My advice: read this blog at home. Don’t get fired on my account.
Mom, et al: wear Kevlar to work, and have humorless attack drills regularly so that everyone knows what to do if someone loses it because they couldn’t read Dilbert that morning.
And me, well, I probably get flagged for stuff all the time. We live in a world of paranoia and flagging of “sensitive” data, risks, shady people, people who aren’t shady but might be in a place that is known to have other shady people in it: these are all very common. I know my passport has been flagged before, but never for being funny.
1
People invent these potentially useful, apparently benign tools, like flagging, and then someone appropriates the tool for malign purposes. The series of tubes that is the internets has been a boon for teaching history, to call up illustrations (the Lascaux shaman, Will Hayes, Levittown) that would have taken hours before–
And then the busies discovered blocking software.
I was putting together pictures of Boss Tweed and found one entertaining picture– a “Boss Tweed” brand of cigars– but the kids couldn’t see the picture because it involved the word “tobacco”. Just one of a hundred examples. I could have asked the “tech guy” who controls the blocking software for the teachers’ password but I will be goddamned if I ask or explain anything to that supercilious mealymouth. So I hum a tune and point in the opposite direction while some trusted student hacks it for me, or I access the forbidden image at home and email it to work. Are we sure we “won” the cold war? Because this kind of blocking– turning thought and curiosity over to a machine!– is more and more reminiscent of accounts I’ve read of life in eastern Europe.
2
Yah it really does feel like we are being locked down. I’m sure you read my recent post about DHS confiscating laptops at security. This shit is getting out of hand. In order to make sure that no one is doing anything illegal, we will be sure to engage in all possible activity that is in no way moral.
And to hell with the tech guy who services that network. I know that he is just doing his job, but you used to be able to count on techies to be subversive and have all sort of little backdoors and things that you could be used to get around. Now they are just slaves, or more appropriately, mouth-breathing, sycophantic, attention-seeking wankers who want nothing more than to please the boss so that they can get a pat on the head, the likes of which pat they nary saw as children or pimply, overweight teenagers. Bastards.
There is no solution, though. I am afraid that we are fucked. Done. Over and out. Once you go down this path, you don’t go back. The only solution is to wait until the system collapses (i.e. – the States legal system eats itself alive and there is a massive civil war in which the “bad” guys win). Until then, we’re likely to see more and more of this shit as we enforce the status quo (read: backslide into paranoid conservatism cum religious dogma).
Buckle up!