First Amendment

The United States Air Force joins the “Great China Firewall” effort and begins a harebrained attempt to block blogs, for Air Force personnel’s non-reading pleasure¹—no doubt in the name of national security or military readiness.

This falls into the category of “adults” trying to prevent adolescents from looking at “dirty” pictures—it will meet with the same or less success, too!

This blog wants to be perfectly clear ... fuck you (a standard military term) United Stated Air Force and your censorship, strong post to follow!

Who would have thought that the tools developed to circumvent China’s authoritarian regime (and others) would be required usage at home (download Tor & Privoxy & Vidalia)!

Web: Wired, Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs

-----notes-----

1. The article states that the Air Force is using a product developed by Blue Coat Systems, Inc., founded in 1996, to filter the word blog from the URL.

So the hypothetical URLs =http://blog.airforce.mil or =http://www.airforce.mil/blog/ would be censored, but =http://glob.airforce.mil or =http://www.airforce.mil/glob/ would not.

These class of content-based censorship tools are great if your being paid by the word to maintain the dictionary of censor words. Blue Coat uses AI in an attempt to reduce maintainance cost, but the actual cost savings are more marketing hype than bottom line.

They're not so great when the word globalization is censored, because the AI algorithm decides reversing strings is a common human practice for avoiding authoritarian regime censors.

But, the fun (and the limits of content based filtering) really begin when the guys and gals over at the Air Force globalization command center call demanding access restoration to the URL http://www.globalsecurity.org so they can review those specs on that new Chinese silkworm missile variant.

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