Digg is blocked at thousands of schools across the nation – Stop it!

2 thoughts on “Digg is blocked at thousands of schools across the nation – Stop it!”

1. Your statement that Secure Computing is blocking digg is inaccurate. Understandably, it’s frustrating when a site one commonly uses gets blocked by a URL filter. That being said, all that a URL filtering vendor does is attempt to assign every URL to a category that end-user administrators can then use to decide whether or not to allow access to.

   This being the case, a URL filtering manufacturer can’t BLOCK anything. It is the policy of the network owner that determines your access to categories of URLs.

   If you dig around a little bit, you’ll see that in this case SCUR has categorized Digg.com as belonging to the category “Technical/Business Forums”. The description for this category is as follows, from their website: “This category includes sites with a technical or business focus that provide online message posting or real-time chat such as technical support or interactive business communication.”

   Not sure if this is entirely accurate. You see descriptions of their entire category list at the following site https://web.archive.org/web/20070302010134/http://www.securecomputing.com/index.cfm?skey=86

   To check what category a URL is listed under, you can check the site at:
   https://web.archive.org/web/20070227002401/http://www.securecomputing.com/sfwhere/index.cfm

   Once you see the category they assign the URL to, you actually have the ability to suggest a recategorization.

   In my experience, filling out this sort of form will cause HUMAN review of the potential mis-categorization of the URL and would definitely be more productive than just sending an email to their customer service department.

   Just a suggestion if you actually feel like affecting this.

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