Entries Tagged 'Wi-Fi' ↓

Sonic Wall Threatens 1389 Blog

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Like today’s memorial of 9-11? Apparently, Sonic Wall does not.

It looks like Sonic Wall has reconsidered its earlier decision to keep the 1389 Blog’s rating benign.

(See Breaking News: Sonic Wall’s Censors Attack the 1389 Blog!)

Email from Sonic Wall:

Dear Customer:

You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate 1389blog.com as “25.Political/Advocacy Groups” at 2007-09-10 08:25:00.500

The request has been reviewed and rated as:
“1.Violence/Hate/Racism” at 2007-09-11 04:33:02.453

You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.

Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support

We will keep you updated.

Meanwhile, please read the comments here.

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You’ll be surprised to hear why Panera Bread and SonicWALL blacklisted Foehammer’s Anvil!

For rolling updates on this topic:
Stop Blog Censorship!

As I explained earlier this week, SonicWALL is a company that provides content-filtering or “censorware” for the WiFi system at Panera Bread. They’ve been blocking access to the antijihadist site Foehammer’s Anvil, with no explanation given, so I blogged the contact information for both companies, and emailed them to complain about this inexcusable censorship.

I got a response back from Panera Bread telling me to use this form to ask SonicWALL to reevaluate any sites that were wrongly blocked. So I went over there and entered the URL for the Anvil…

Here’s what I saw!

Yep, that’s right - SonicWALL has been censoring the Anvil as pornography. Of course, if anybody at SonicWALL had actually bothered to check the Anvil for raunchy videos or ribald humor, they would’ve been awfully disappointed.

Smiley with "liar" sign Smiley blabbing on an old telephone Evidently, if some anonymous liar tells SonicWALL that a blog is pornographic, that’s all it takes to get it blocked from a whole lot of places. No inspection, no notification, no appeals process. Several months later, when the blogger is losing traffic and figures that somebody may be interfering with access to the blog, then maybe the truth will come to light. But by that time, the blog owner will already have lost readership and money.

If you’re a blogger, the same thing could happen to your blog. Even if you are not a blogger yourself, and even if you never heard of Foehammer’s Anvil before, the same thing could happen to other blogs that are full of valuable information that you have every right to read.

So go ahead and use this form to tell Sonic Wall to reclassify Foehammer’s Anvil. Obviously, the more people contact them, the better!

But even if they do, the matter doesn’t end there. Clearly, SonicWALL is not the only “censorware” company that has been blocking antijihadist sites.

“What else can I do?”

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Tell Panera Bread and SonicWALL to Stop Censoring Foehammer’s Anvil!

For rolling updates on this topic:
Stop Blog Censorship!

What do you mean, I can’t read Foehammer’s Anvil at Panera Bread?

Furious Smiley To our amazement and disgust, some of us have recently discovered that access to legitimate news and political sites - especially antijihadist sites, including Foehammer’s Anvil and Jihad Watch - is being blocked at many WiFi sites, workplaces, schools, government buildings, and other locations. This blacklisting is done automatically by content-control software, also known as “censorware.”

In Jenn Sierra’s article, Are Anti-Jihadist Sites Blocked where you Work, Study, or use Wi-Fi?, she mentioned that she was forbidden to access Foehammer’s Anvil from the supposedly “unlimited” WiFi at Panera Bread.

How do they set up this “censorware”?

Generally, an outside company is in charge of setting up the “censorware”. Depending on how it is set up, the censorware will block everything that falls into certain broad categories - not just blatant pornography, but anything having to do with sexuality, drugs, tobacco, alcohol, weapons, and violence. All too often, it also excludes anything “politically incorrect” that someone might conceivably classify as “bigotry” or “hate speech.” In other words, it locks out a huge range of sites offering news and views that are vital to effective participation in American society.

Unless someone knows how, and is willing, to loosen those restrictions, adult voters and taxpayers will find themselves treated like small children who cannot be trusted to make up their own minds. Forget about enjoying a broader range of political news and opinion than what the mainstream media conglomerates deign to provide. If you’re traveling, or if you are located where you have no other way to get to the Internet, you’re out of luck.

Political speech - especially “unpopular” political speech, or speech that makes some people uneasy - is exactly the type of speech that our Founders most wanted to protect. It’s also the type of speech that is most often shut down by the current wave of “political correctness”.

The coffeehouse has a venerable tradition as a place for reading and sharing newspapers, for socializing, and for exchanging news and ideas. Attempts to suppress this freedom of expression took the form of closing the coffeehouses or of prohibiting coffee itself, which proved largely futile. Nowadays, we rely on the Internet café to meet the same needs in a slightly different way. Too bad that the technology itself, which potentially lets us share information, exercise our freedoms, and express our creativity, is being misused to narrow the range of ideas that we are allowed to debate.

Where is this censorship going to end? There’s already a scarcity of printed news that addresses the issues of jihadism or the dangers to our freedom and our way of life posed by the growing Islamization of the U.S. And neither television news, nor our elective officials, even acknowledge that there might be a problem.

Food for thought: If we did have a newspaper that covered those topics, do you suppose someone would complain if we were to take it into a Panera Bread store to read while we’re eating? What would our response be if someone did raise a fuss? Just askin’…

If you’ve visited this blog before, or if you’ve already met 1389 elsewhere on the Web, you’ll know that I’ve never been afraid to “stir the pot” whenever it needs to be stirred. Nobody has attempted to shut down 1389 Blog, probably because it hasn’t built up a big enough audience yet. Even so, this issue affects all of us, bloggers and readers alike. Keep in mind that the blogs you like to read won’t be able to survive if it becomes too easy to stop their readers from seeing the blogs!

So here’s what to do:

Contact Panera Bread at: Panera Bread Logo

Ronald M. Shaich, Chairman and CEO
Panera Bread
6710 Clayton Road
Richmond Heights, MO 63117
Tel: (314) 633-7100
Fax: (314) 633-7200

Email contact form

Investor Relations:
800-301-5566, ext. 6500
investor@panerabread.com

Contact SonicWALL, Inc. at:

Matt Medeiros, President and CEO
SonicWALL, Inc.
1143 Borregas Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1306
USA

P +1 888.557.6642
P +1 408.745.9600
F +1 408.745.9300

Email contact form

“What else can I do?”

More Information:

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Are Anti-Jihadist Sites Blocked where you Work, Study, or use Wi-Fi?

For rolling updates on this topic:
Stop Blog Censorship!

warning.png A few weeks ago, I wrote about Foehammer’s Anvil being blocked from Digg, and about corporate diversity policies being used to censor anti-jihadist sites like Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.

Since then, Foehammer and 1389 have been doing some research, and believe the Anvil (and probably other anti-jihadist sites) have been placed onto “blacklists” at various American and international companies.

Foehammer is requesting readers to advise if they have experienced this same problem, and to let him know, in this comment section. (For more information about so-called “hate-speech” filtering, see here.)

I was using free Wi-Fi service at Panera Bread last weekend, and found that Foehammer’s Anvil was blocked from there - no reason was given. Other bloggers have written about censorship at Panera Bread here, and here…particularly the use of SonicWall Filtering.

Meanwhile, what can we do about Panera Bread and SonicWall?

Also see:

(This article was also posted by Jenn Sierra at FHK.)

Get your own resist21.PNG Resist! button here.

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Shared hotspots are on the way

I saw this story at breitbart.com:

Time Warner customers get shared Wi-Fi hotspots

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