UPDATE:
—– Forwarded Message —–
From: Websense Labs
To: 1389 Blog
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2013 3:37 PM
Subject: RE: 1389 Blog miscategorized by Websense as a “racism/hate” blog – Websense Security Labs Case: 0110 [ ref:_00D207dP._50020SIduM:ref ]
Hello,
The site you submitted has been reviewed. At this time, it is appropriately filtered under the following category:
http://1389blog.com/ – Advocacy Groups
Researcher Notes: The above filtering has been verified via the latest database versions (v7x: #04258; v6x and below: #94240). Please ensure your database version is up-to-date. If the filtering discrepancy persists, please let us know.
Thank you for your inquiry,
Dipti
Websense Labs
What’s Websense?
Websense is a software company that offers, among other things, content-filtering firewalls that stop people from viewing certain categories of websites and blogs from school, library, corporate, or other public networks.
Leftists don’t want you to view information that contradicts their party line, so they often complain about conservative or counterjihad sites so as to get them blocked from as many venues as possible. This is a form of stealth censorship.
1389 Blog is a legitimate news site.
Websense expects those who has been blocked from accessing a site to get their IT administrator to unblock it. Now that’s ridiculous. If a site has been wrongfully categorized, the proper action is to get Websense to remove it from their blacklist.
Please send an email like this one:
From: Blog admin 1389
To: suggest@websense.com
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2013 2:34 PM
Subject: 1389 Blog wrongly categorized by Websense as a “racism/hate” blog
To whom it may concern:
It has come to my attention that http://1389blog.com has been miscategorized as a “racism/hate” blog.
It is not a hate site and we don’t even discuss issues of race on the blog.
We have very recently put up some pro-Second-Amendment articles that have incurred the enmity of some malicious individuals on the left. We believe that the blog has been flagged in order to make it much more difficult for people to access the blog. What we have on the blog is protected political speech and hard news, mostly pertaining to jihadi activities, the US Constitution, and the economy.
Please remove this categorization without further delay.
Blog admin 1389
Is YOUR site blacklisted by a content-filtering service?
Sometimes a sudden drop in website access statistics suggest that you’ve been blocked – but it won’t be easy to locate the choke point that is keeping your readers away.
If your site has been blocked, you won’t find out unless your would-be readers tell you. And they are unlikely to be able to notify you of that if they can’t get to your site from their network.
Some service providers have URL lookup pages that let you find out how your site has been categorized. Other content-filtering services do not reveal their blacklists except to paid subscribers. Bloggers obviously cannot afford to subscribe to all of these expensive services just to find out whether or not their site has been blacklisted somewhere.
I found out that 1389 Blog was wrongly categorized because I happened to see a message on another site that mentioned a message from Websense denying access to an article on our blog. And yes, I did notice a sudden drop in blog access activity after the time that message was logged.
How you can help
If you cannot access a legitimate website because it has been blocked by filtering software, please try again to access that site from a different network, such as your smartphone. Get contact information for the site owner and let them know who is blacklisting them so that they can do something about it. Look up the content filtering company, send them an email, and pass that information along to the site owner also.