*sigh* Legalities and such...

I was just reading an interesting discussion on Atomic Think Tank (the message board for Green Ronin's Mutants and Masterminds, a very cool OGL d20-based superhero RPG), and it put me in mind of something.

Occasionally, I put in suggestions to WebSENSE about its blocking. The first one I did I posted off to the Seruma Censorware blog (which is on Serumamakkurori.net, aka Seruma, my personal website). I posted up pretty much the whole email (their response plus my original suggestion). I'm planning on doing the same thing on my latest, which is a request to unclassify peacefire.org. I don't think there's a chance in heck of them unblocking it, but I want to post their response if it's a negative, because I think that it would give a good look at how they think. Thing is, it's a semi-private email (a response to a web form), so it's kind of a grey area.

The fun thing about the peacefire request is that I have mixed feelings about their (Peacefire's) methods. I know that proxies are one of the few decent ways to get around the idiotic censorware blocking, but it's a certain way to piss off sysadmins (and my uncle's one, so I understand that POV). I'd rather people not deploy censorware than their victims having to use possibly dangerous proxies to be able to access the Internet freely.

Tidbit of (possible) interest

I seem to be spamming my FL this evening. Sorry about that.

Anyway, if you've been following the news about Sony BMG's rootkit fiasco, you know that the maker of said rootkit is First 4 Internet. Interestingly enough, while I was doing my usual search for useful anti-censorware articles/links, I found that said software company had, at least briefly, made a program that was supposed to censor out dirty pictures.

While that's not up anymore (in fact, I think most of First 4 Internet is down, for obvious reasons), here's the page I found, going into how successful that effort was.