VFR blocked at some businesses and libraries

Steven H. writes:

You are my favorite read of the day. Until I get another personal computer in a few months I am forced to use the laptop provided to me by my employer. Unfortunately, your website along with a few of my other favorites have been blocked.

I’ve tried but I can’t get around the block. Do you have any suggestions? Is email a possibility?

I’m going through withdrawal. Help!

LA replies:

I’ve never heard of VFR being blocked before. How many and what type of sites are blocked? I don’t know what to do about this, but I’ll post this and maybe other people will have ideas.

David B. writes:

Your site is blocked at the Lawrence County Public Library, my home county in Southern Middle Tennessee. I have found you forbidden in other public libraries. Your site is categorized as a “white supremacist, hate speech site.” Steve Sailer is blocked at many libraries for the same reason. Also, amren.com. You were unavailable on computers at the major corporation I worked for. Again, the reason was “hate speech.”

LA replies:

That’s disturbing. I did not know that. I have accessed VFR at public libraries around the country. I suddenly feel the cold chill of creeping Europeanism.

David B.:

Yes, you are blocked at my local library, but not at some nearby counties. I found you to be available in Maury County, but not in Nashville. The library in Decatur, Alabama was open to your site. Sailer is blocked at many places. Most libraries will have your site, but not all. It was surprising to me that my local library did not. I was NOT surprised that computers at the major corporation I worked at blocked out amnation.com

Chris L. writes:

Based on the way web filtering software operates, this may not be an explicit policy to block your site by the entities in question. The customer purchasing web filtering software usually purchases a subscription to a web filtering service. Typically, the service groups web sites into categories like hate sites, pornography, sports, etc and maintains that information on a regular basis. All that is required of the user then is to check which categories to block and allow. So, most likely it’s not the customer saying you are a hate site, but the service to which they subscribe. I recommend that the people being blocked at their local library talk with the staff and ask that an exception be put into the filtering software.

LA replies:

Good idea. I also had suggested to Steven H. that if this was a laptop his employer gave him, maybe it’s the case that the blockages work only in relation to a particular ISP. So perhaps he could temporarily set up another ISP account for the same computer.

Ingemar P. writes:

I am mystified about VFR being blocked at the libraries other readers mentioned. I regularly read your site at my very liberal university in California and have never experienced any problems.

James S. writes:

Lawrence, I think maybe a proxy service is what your readers need. For example, proxify.com, which I just found through an internet search for “web proxy”. How it works: the proxy site takes a URL and renders the requested page within their own page so that it looks like the information is coming from their, hopefully unblocked, domain. I’m sure libraries and associated filter services are smart enough to have blocked some of the proxy sites, but perhaps not all. I have no way of testing this—I’ve never found sites to be blocked at work—but in theory it should work. Caveat: don’t put any passwords or personal information through the proxy site, I’m not quite sure whether they can be considered trustworthy in that regard.

Mark P. writes:

I work in IT security so I would like to provide a word of warning to those who access on-line material from work defined as controversial.

Don’t.

A typical corporate system is one that is heavily locked down, one with all of the functionality confined to IT departments that have “Administrator” access, while Users are relegated to far more limited useability. Part of that “Adminstrator” access not only allows a company to install passive filtering software surreptitiously, it allows the active monitoring and collection of all of your on-line activity. Much of this activity could very well be grounds for dismissal since there is no right to privacy on a corporate network and corporations have every right to snoop. In fact, there is computer forensic software that is so refined, it can recover deleted information and passwords from a hard-drive that could give access to e-mail, ebay, amazon.com and other accounts. To give you a taste, see this and this.

You are not in control of a system. Be very careful what you do on it.

As far as corporate laptops are concerned, the issue is a little bit different. The laptop usually gives you more control, especially if you have adminstrator access rights. Any filtering software can just be removed. Be warned, however, because companies can treat this as damage to their property. Furthermore, average people are not technically proficient enough to track down all of the remnant data and record-keeping that a computer does even if they have adminstrator access.

If you are driven by the need to go on-line during work hours, or on a laptop, or to use public computers, the safest course of action is to run an operating system that stores on a CD or DVD and runs exclusively in Windows RAM (this is the volatile memory that usually comes in 256mb, 512 mb or 1gb chunks). By running an operating system exclusively in RAM, all of the data and information that activities produce are erased after the computer shuts down. Therfore, no evidence. Plus, it bypasses any filtering software installed on the system. All you need to do is make sure the computer boots off the CD-ROM or DVD first. Examples include PClinuxOS, Knoppix, or Damn Small Linux. They are all free downloads.

If you own a corporate laptop and you have stuff you don’t want seen when that laptop is returned, then you you should wipe the entire drive with a program called Darik’s Nuke Disk.

Jonathan L. writes:

Another means for your audience to circumvent filtering software is to use a 3rd party RSS feed reader such as the MyYahoo! portal or Google Reader as their proxy. Because the connection will be to Yahoo! or Google instead of directly to amnation.com, the filtering software will not block the request. The only drawback is that your RSS feed currently contains only the beginning of a post, and so a connection to amnation.com is required to read the remainder. You can of course rectify this by making your feeds more complete (much in the way of Jihadwatch’s, which contain the entire article text in the feed).

LA replies:

Yes, someone else mentioned that possibility to me as well.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2007 08:12 AM | Send