Who decides what our honest and trustworthy friends at Secure Computing will allow their clients (or rather, their clients’ subjects and employees) to read? Turns it’s a bloke called Tomo Foote-Lennox. No, that is not a typo.
Mr. Foote-Lennox, it seems, is the one who ruled that BoingBoing was “porn” on the basis of that cat breastfeeding picture from Japanese TV. Now, that’s certainly weird, and probably unwise (sharp cat teeth?), but is it any more weird, disturbing or unpleasant than dressing up as a giant baby in order to get your rocks off? Note – the first, second and fourth links may be considered objectionable by corporate censorware. In fact, even Secure Computing’s own SmartFilter product will block them and presumably mark your file accordingly – I checked. You can check a URL here. To my disappointment, this blog is considered kosher.
No giggling at the back. Yet. Yes, he is entirely within his rights to do this with consenting adults, in the privacy of his own home etc. But it’s the hypocrisy, stupid. Frankly, I can’t care less about his Pampers problem-whoops-alternative lifestyle. The alternative lifestyle that he espouses that I’m pissed off about is the other one: censorship.
Another point about censorship, which this perhaps illustrates, is that it does the censor no good. Maybe it was reviewing all those 307,000 pages of porn in the .st domain that dunnit? Because of course they really, really did!
Right, with the serious point out of the way, let’s start with the belly laughs. This is so much an Internet culture archetype it’s absurd. How many jokes have you heard about On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog? In Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs, there’s a character (Michael, the master programmer and near-autistic mega-nerd) who falls in love with another participant in an online roleplaying game. Another character warns him that “she might be a 58 year old fat man in spaghetti straps and a diaper” (I may be misquoting).