My Internet Content Filter At Work

shortly after i started working at my new job a new server was installed. along with the server came an outside company that filters what types of content can be viewed through our ip address. a few times now the filter has wrongfully blocked my view of particular web pages for all the wrong reasons. one time i was blocked from looking at an ovation acoustic guitar because the filter thought it contained pornography! the name that ovation gave that line of guitars was celebrity and the guitar i was trying to checkout was black. so i was blocked for trying to access a site that had the words black celebrity in it. this has happened on a couple of other sites too. they had nothing to do with porn, but because of a couple of key words i get blocked. another time i wanted to send a semi-long text message to a friend and decided to do it through sprints website, but the filter blocked me. evidently it won't let me use any chat services or sms text services. so i ended up wasting more company time because i had to type it out on my phone, and i'm not the best at it to say the least.

i just remembered another one. i hardly play the lotto, but i played it once back in may and i tried to look up the winning numbers online. turns out that the texas lotto site was blocked because it had to do with gambling. really, i could understand if it was a poker site or something, but the texas lotto? so i spent about 15 minutes finding a site that would show me the numbers without being blocked. finally, i, like millions of others in the united states, use myspace. i like to check for new messages a couple of times a day. usually when i first get to work and then again in the afternoon. i've been doing this at work since april, but today i was blocked from accessing myspace because it was related to dating & relationships. several times i've been blocked from reading news articles on yahoo because they had do to with relationships. sometimes the stuff that gets blocked by the filter baffles me. the irony to the whole thing is that a couple of weeks ago i did an image search for pictures of car wash signs and ended up with multiple results of women washing cars topless. so the filter lets me open pictures of topless women, but not an acoustic guitar.