small flightless bird

Monday, February 27, 2006

don't mess with boing boing

We here at SFB link to (or steal links from) Boing Boing often, and for good reason. It's probably the most well-read blog out there, and it tends to act as a pretty entertaining filter for all the ways to waste your time on the internet - an accomplishment I've tried in my own small way to mimic with this site. Its power is tremendous - if they post a link to something, that link will probably show up on a few thousand other blogs within hours. And getting Boing Boing to link to your site (an event significant enough to warrant the creation of term "boingboinged"), is often enough to crash servers.

But the contributors tend not to put their awesome powers to direct use - at most, they'll just direct your attention to whatever they think deserves it, or post an editorial on some subject or another. That's why the actions they're taking against an American company that provides internet content-filtering software to other countries might be fun to watch: all four contributors are ganging together with the stated goal of putting the company out of business.

The reason? Thanks to Secure Computing's SmartFilter software, internet users in various parts of the world (including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and some parts of Africa) can't access Boing Boing due to bogus "nudity" false-positives.

Whether or not you're a regular reader, this fight should be fun to watch. Link.