The Web Filter That Made A Porn Site Newsworthy
from the sorry-about-that dept
bt garner writes in with a story that shows why having corporate web filtering technology might not always make sense. In this case, a UK news organization broadcast a report about kids playing on railway lines and posted a website address along with the story. It turns out that the website address (broadcast mid-day) sent people to a hardcore porn site. It's not entirely clear why the station felt the need to include the URL, but they're not getting in trouble for it. In reviewing the case, Ofcom is letting them off the hook because the news organization says they tried to check the website before including it in the broadcast, but were blocked by their own corporate web filter. So, without being able to see it, they figured it must be fine to list the website (which probably should have set off alarms in the first place). You would think that, of all places, a news organization would realize that having a web filter in place is, at some point, going to interfere with actual news gathering.
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Dangers of Web Filters to Business
Policies should be established on what is appropriate and what is not, with clear consequences for violation of the policy. Granted there are always exceptions, as would be in this case. Any sort of monitoring or logging would have flagged the editor had he actually been allowed to view the site. Once this activity was noted, the editor should have been able to adequately defended his actions as it was the prudent measure. Unless of course he spent the next two hours browsing the site...
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filtered at the newspaper
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what an opportunity
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