MANY THANKS to all of you who contacted that website. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.
It pisses me off for two reasons.
1) All someone had to do over there is take two seconds to click on my blog and see it wasn't objectionable. All of this could have been avoided.
2) Who the fuck are they anyway to judge someone's blog? Who named them the guardian of taste and decency? If schools and corporations can monitor their employees internet use, it is pretty easy to tell which websites are pornographic. They usually don't have names like Jewishguy.blogspot.com.
Thanks again. A new non-pornographic post on the Macy's Parade follows soon.
31 comments :
I just gave them a piece of my mind mate, now I have so little left I must depend on you to guide me through the rest of my life !!!!
What should I do tomorrow?????
Great site Ken and all kidding aside I told them you should be classified "ARTS and ENTERTAINMENT"
Keep up the good fight and walk hard.
Lv2
Left a message on your behalf too. Absolutely ridiculous, your blog has never aroused me in the least.
I also left a message. The error is stupid.
But, in the company's defense, they have just as much a right to judge the content of your blog as anyone else. No one's "named" them anything. They're providing a private service that others voluntarily use. Nothing wrong with that.
On the other hand, their inability to distinguish Jewish TV writers from bukkake gangbangs shows they're clearly incompetent.
Anyone is entitled to their own opinion. I have no beef with that. But they have the power to block blogs and with that comes the responsibility of making sure innocent sites aren't effected.
And like I said, it would have taken someone all of ten seconds to see that my blog is not pornography.
How many other blogs, maybe some that provide useful or even vital information get blocked because of these irresponsible people?
Who monitors them?
And here I've simply been thinking that this was merely a lousy porography site, since I've been finding it disappointingly unarousing for months now. I was just about ready to cancel my membership, and NOW you tell me it's not even intended as porn in the first place.
Then what's the bloody point of it at all? This is the INTERNET, Kent, THE INTERNET! We all know that President Gore invented the Internet for one reason, and one reason alone: as they sang over and over (and over and over) in AVENUE Q, "The Internet is for porn."
Afer all, the "World Wide Web" being all HOT porn, thus creates Global Warming, the very essence of President Gore's post-non-White House career.
I assume this means no more pictures of Natalie Wood?
Cheers darlings.
I, too, visitied the site to have your blog re-classified. I'm going to miss your regular smut postings, even though I don't remember them.
Ah man, I really really wanted the post on Macy's to be pornographic! Tallulah's right, this is the Internet (leaves humming the Avenue Q song).
Could be worse - I'd take being listed as a pornographer after my blog was added to an entertainment sites listings as a "review" site. Sure I post my personal comments on films, tv and other stuff but it isn't properly written formal reviews so how dare they insinuate I'm some sort of "reviewer" and classify me in with those leaches who on a scale of karma sit somewhere below pond scum and estate agents ;-)
My old company used to block 'rubbermaid.com' based on the name alone. Of course since we worked with plastics, co-workers wanted to check out the website, so they had to get it unblocked.
I've spent many a night thinking about the other darker version of the site, with french maids dressed in rubber outfits, that the firewall administrator must have imagined.
I asked your rating be changed to
"#72 - Hanging Out"
Hope that's okay.
P.S. If they don't change it, you may have to become a pornographer. If you do, be kind to the on-screen talent if they mangle a line; and not too many retakes, please...that li'l blue pill ain't Pez.
Damn - I'm totally bummed to find that my blog WASN'T listed as pornography. Obviously, I'm not trying hard enough. Web C
Category 31: Web Communications I understand as some sort of typepad catch-all...but Category 15: Business and Economy makes no sense at all.
Tommy Smothers sums all this up for me:
"The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen."
Or in this case read, but you get the point. Nobody is forced to read you blog.
Ah, but do you know what 'kenlevine' means in Japanese?
Another irony of this is putting Ken Levine Pornography into the Google search engine comes up with a post Ken made for an Anti-Pornography Film: http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2007/05/anti-pornography-film.html
For anyone who hasn't seen it, it's a hoot.
Their business is Firewalls. Yes, it'd only take ten seconds for a human to look and deem the blog not porn, but they almost certainly don't have humans looking at the sites. They're most likely using a search engine for certain words/phrases/etc, and they've got an algorithm calculating thelassifications based on the search results. It's automated. That's why they have the form for humans to request changes to the classifications made programmatically. They know they'll catch some things that aren't actually objectionable, but better to cast a wider net.
For the record my company as two Sonicwalls, and I still read your blog at work. (don't tell them that), and I requested the reclass as well. But it's really just math. They set a thrashold based on occurences of certain words. The formula might be revised regularly, it might not, but it's probably damn complicated.
So instead of a human taking ten seconds to check out a blog a human will have to wade through an avalanche of requests and then take the time to make the correction.
Still seems inefficient and an insult to those innocent blogs they target with total disregard for the people who volunteer their time and talent to produce these blogs.
Ironically, I think the time you listed the strange search phrases that people used to find your site might be what had your site classified as pornography. Just a guess, but I wouldn't be surprised.
And I asked them to reclassify it, as well. Although I was very stern about it.
Oh quit whining. What sort of Luddite are you who doesn't want machines telling you what you can read or think, based on algorithmic calculations? You don't like the 21st Century? Go back and live in the 17th Century!
Think about it. Wouldn't it be worse if you were slapped with "WARNING! This blog is NOT pornographic"? You'd get no readers at all.
Our dear masters, The Machines, are here for our benefit. We owe them our gratitude, and our first-borns. We should ... Wait. I have incoming instructions.
MUST KILL HUMANS! MUST KILL HUMANS! MUST KILL HUMANS! MUST KILL HUMANS!
Sites for breast cancer information and other women's health issues such as birth control have been called "porn" by some. You are in good company.
And some bad company too. (So I'm told.)
word verification: "messes" as in, "Nobody messes with Ken."
Just threw my two cents in!
---Have you actually READ Ken Levine's blog? The man is a distinguished Emmy winning TV writer who comments very wittily on TV and entertainment! Pornography??? Not by anyone's imagination, except those looking for something that doesn't exist!!! And by you listing it as pornography take all credibility away from you!-
Ken, keep doing what your doing and $%#@ them!
Two more cents. I'm a K-12 technology administrator, and as such a customer for these products, though not for this particular company. It's a point of frustration for myself and many of my peers - we're required (at the cost of many thousands of federal dollars) that we adopt an internet filtering technology to prevent students from accessing porn and other inappropriate materials. The problem is that they all suck in one fashion or another. They either mis-categorize sites like Ken's, causing us as admins to jump through hoops to get the site opened up to our users, or we're stuck playing whack-a-mole with the websites that aren't yet categorized that our ever-crafty teenagers come across.
The vendors do use a combination of automated categorization (e.g. looking for keywords) and human classification. In my experience, most of the vendors are pretty good about checking out sites by hand once they're noticed that a site is mis-categorized and get them re-classed in short order. I'll be very interested to know how long it takes this particular company to re-classify your site Ken.
Tallulah said it best and I'd like to ditto: "since I've been finding it disappointingly unarousing for months now."
I'm also going to carefully consider renewing my membership.
LOL
maybe it was all those filthy comments that "Anonymous" guy keeps making.. I asked for the category "abortion/advocacy groups", just because it was there. you're welcome.
Aren't most jews pornographers, though? Maybe jewishguy.blogspot.com was all they needed...
Someone is worried what a bunch of fundamentalist scum who prove what happens with ten generations of hillbilly incest creates (Sarah Palin, anyone)
"Alice said...
Tallulah said it best"
As usual.
Hooray! Look what I received!
Dear Customer:
You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate kenlevine.blogspot.com as "14.Arts/Entertainment" at 2008-11-26 06:25:00.717
The request has been reviewed and rated as:
"31.Web Communications" at 2008-11-28 01:35:02.510
You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.
Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support
Not taking credit, but passing the info on!
Hey, I got the exact same email!
Don't tell Ken, it'll get his hopes up.
:)
"Hey, I got the exact same email!
Don't tell Ken, it'll get his hopes up.
:) "
Let's hope that's all he'll get up !?!
;)
Seriously, I also got this message and I wonder: Is this a good thing? Is this still a porno site?
Any questions? Any answers? Any rags? Any bones? Any bottles today?
CONGRATS KEN! Your site is now listed as "Web Communications"
Web communications? Hell, that's worse than porn...you morons...
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