Maybe they just mean "sexually oriented"...

that is extremely weird. anything that block the it gets better project is a terrible, terrible idea. try searching for straight porn. did they only block gay content?

The take away message from this is that internet filters don't work for shit.

Ah, but Slog is blocked at the Albuquerque airport. Or was the last time I was there.

Seems for the price, he got alot for his money.

All it probably means is they bought a firewall with default settings that they don't know how to check or turn off. There's probably nobody who even knows how to log into the fucking thing, and the consultant to installed it a year ago is now living in Baton Rouge.

They probably whitelisted you so you wouldn't complain when you were blocked.

To be fair, the chief problem nowadays is anyone setting up a VPN can get around that carp.

Censorship, right here in Seattle!

6> Because if there's one thing we don't have enough of in Seattle, it's IT Professionals

Yeah, in my experience with this kind of thing, as @Fnarf said, it's probably somebody who just clicked "block everything" without seeing what it included. They will be embarrassed, somebody will find the manual for the firewall and mess with it, and it'll stop blocking gay-oriented sites. Then eventually somebody will try to look at, say, transexual support sites, find them blocked and complain, and the same guy will find the manual again and make another change and then those will work, and so on and so forth until finally somebody asks for straight-up porn and they say no since that was the actual point of the content filter in the first place.

A more interesting question is why the Norton DNS content filter even _has_ a sexual orientation-based filter.

8: Not really, it's their building, their ISP, they pay the bill, they select the options. A silly filter, of course, but it's a private business.

@7, no, that is mostly certainly NOT "the chief problem nowadays". It's not a problem at all. VPNs are not set up by "anyone", aside from people with admin access to the firewalls, and they are not used to get around firewall restrictions from inside. You don't know what you are talking about. AS ALWAYS. Not even close.

Maybe you meant "proxy sites". More likely, though, you just meant what you always mean, "I will jumble together some tech words even though I don't understand them so people will think I'm savvy". Which has never, ever worked.

Slog Tipper? Like he's some kind of secret source. Please. Typical Stranger self-generated drama.

You've been found out by dean.fuller @13. It was a nice scam you had going for a while there, Slog.

"A more interesting question is why the Norton DNS content filter even _has_ a sexual orientation-based filter."

Maybe because some people who purchase that product want to block such content?

I've been giggling maniacally every few minutes at the mental image of UW IT drone "Will in Seattle" trying to dodge that carp.

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18uh6iq0…

@13: What the fuck are you talking about?

Hit 'em up on twitter at @TheCACGroup

Southcenter Mall does the same thing. All gay sites are blocked.

@fnarf hmmm.... no, there are many portable VPN solutions. These install clients on your device - either cell phone or PC - that create a VPN connection to an external server. The traffic between your device and that remote server is then encrypted through a VPN tunnel. Granted, the local firewall could be configured to prevent that, but I'm willing to bet most aren't. Look at commercial services like SecureVPN for example. A different solution - not VPN - is something like TOR. For someone who wants to get around filtering, there are plenty of ways to do it.

I forgot to mention that Southcenter Mall blocks even The Slog. The only one I tried that it didn't block was Andrew Sullivan (before he went independent).

As the general manager of Columbia Center, I would like to thank you for bringing this to our attention. It is not and was never our intent to block "sexual orientation" websites. We have reviewed our public setting and determined that a default filter setting was causing the issue. We have corrected the default filter on the WiFi settings. We have also contacted the contenting filtering service provider to ask them to review their choice of words. For now we have made a manual adjustment to the security filter and have tested it to make sure it no longer filters out this content. We are also evaluating a change in our content filtering server. Lynda Collie, General Manager, Columbia Center

If Lyndac13 is legit, good for you. As a general rule in IT though, leaving anything with default settings is usually bad, be it severs, firewalls, access points, appliances, etc. Make sure your filter's admin password isn't also set to 'password'. :)

@16 Thank you for catching that, and for posting a link that only intensified my infantile giggling.

This is Norton ConnectSafe DNS filtering. You can filter Pornography and other. When you choose other it claims to filter this stuff. "Other includes sites that feature: mature content, abortion, alcohol, crime, cult, drugs, gambling, hate, sexual orientation, suicide, tobacco or violence." I was looking at DNS filters and was appalled that they would filter sexual orientation.