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October 06, 2006
Blocking blogs
Here at the Federal University of Roraima, in far-northern Brazil, where I am currently visiting professor of anthropology and a Fulbright scholar, the University deals with spam, viruses, and general Internet anxiety by blocking access to various sites. I discovered last week, when I tried to log into Anthroblogs, that this site has made the list somehow. My queries to the computer support department have met with contradictory responses of the type "oh, no, we don't censor anything but we do block blogs because, you know, not all students use them for good things." Because I "justified" my need for access, Anthroblogs was liberated for my IP.
In Brazil, Orkut is the target of the hysteria that in the US goes to myspace.com, and Orkut is blocked totally at the University. I was able to connect to my personal blog, hosted at this same IP and with identical software, and I know that no spam or viruses are coming from Anthroblog blogs, so I can only assume that someone scanned the access logs on the University's proxy and singled out anything with "blog" in the URL. So far, I can still get to most of the blogs that I regularly read. I'm hoping to engage someone from University adminstration about their use policies. I wrote to complain that my anthropology studensts here are being blocked from access to all of these blogs by anthropologists by a policy that is random and undoubtedly wholly ineffective.
Does anyone else know of Universities that block some or all "blogs" for security purposes?
Posted by johnn at October 6, 2006 07:19 AM
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