Web Censorship on the University Campus?

Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"

Does your university censor /. too?

[mcmonkey]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Blocking porn?

[Skevin]

> subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking.

My last job used to censor Lightspeed University too. I can't possibly imagine why

Censor back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Print some labels with "censored" in a big courier font and walk around campus sticking them over random information (signs, notice boards, fire instructions). Then do the same to any legacy (dead tree) copy in the library.

Web content filters don't care about context and neither should you. If anybody attempts to reprimand you, tell them it's common policy, protects students and reduces the liability of the university. If they ask for examples of this, then the more ludicrous the better.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[RDW]

Perhaps University should be the place where any intelligent net user should learn how to circumvent this sort of thing (an increasingly important academic skill!). Actually, it's pretty simple. All you need to do is [Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to the rest of this comment at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Proxy Avoidance" is filtered]

Art Class

[Dekortage]

As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights [ibiblio.org], you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.

Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus [artchive.com], which... what the hell?"

I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.

Re:Sounds Like...

[Morphine007]

Yes, like Royal Military College in Canada: 137.94.0.0 to 137.94.255.255 -- go nuts

By the way, a military institution, beholden to the vast majority of the most fucked up government rules imaginable, blocks absolutely nothing. Monitor, yes; block, no. I could surf for the naked pictures of Taco's mom to my heart's content and not get blocked once. Though the admins might have something to say about what I was looking at.

To the OP, tell your CIO they're just as much of a joke as the school IS is becoming...

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY

[shawb]

What... you don't see the humor in downmodding the comment such that it in great probability is reduced below the viewing threshold for the majority of Slashdot readers, in some essence censoring a post which is making a (debatably) humorous reference to an error message which has implications that can be viewed as being related to censorship, all of this being posted to a discussion on censorship in an organization supposedly modeled on free sharing of information, the discussion being held in a community of people who are supposedly great supporters of freedom of information?

To double the humor, the mod of offtopic was in itself an offtopic mod, as the post was in an of itself on topic. Redundant would have been a far more appropriate mod, as we see a "nothing to see here, move along" post on just about every Slashdot story that is related to censorship, but then again that mod would have brought up complaints of being unfair as many Slashdotters can't seem to realize that a post can be redundant even if it is the first post on that particular discussion if the post shows up on every single discussion of similar nature.

Re:Does your university censor /. too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach at a private university ok, PRIVATE is the key word. You don't like it go work for a public university, I do. I may have more freedom then you, but I am sure I get paid less then you. oh, and if I have any mis speld works is because I went to public schoul.

Re:Sounds Like...

[Deviant Q]

Are MIT and CalTech [sic] known for football? Nope.

What are you talking about!?! Our football team is undefeated since 1993 [caltech.edu]! :-P