Content filtering is popular with the ruling powers in places like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other geographies where the current regime has a reason to fear and subdue its adult citizens. Content filtering in the workplace is popular with employers who have actual, economic concerns about their workers' abilities to simultaneously idle on MySpace, bid on Ebay, chat on AIM, play Warcraft, and still work at a productive pace. Content filtering in K-12 schools is popular with parents and administrators because it protects minors from sexually explicit material of a pornographic or obscene nature.
Content filtering at public, CA community colleges ain't so popular, much less defensible, when the filtered content turns out to be neither obscene, pornographic, inflammatory with an intent to incite unlawful action, or libelous, but merely critical of a filtering institution's policies, programs, curriculum, and publicly-employed personnel.
We'd like you to test from libraries, computer labs, Wi-Fi spots if they exist, and any other networked computer on the Los Angeles Pierce College campus from which you have access to the Internet. Other LACCD campus locations and CSUers can test, too, because the wider you cast the net and the narrower the set of results … well, that says a whole lot about a little.
What you are looking for:
Instances of domain/subdomain failure or redirection:
Examples: You get redirected from www.piercefarmwatch.org to a page you did not request.
You can read other Blogspot or Wordpress blogs, but not ours.
You can reach Eurekster, but our swicki is not available.
You can reach Flickr, but our photo sets are unavailable.
You can watch YouTube videos, but our playlists are unavailable.
Social networking sites (del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and shadows) are available, but our bookmarks are not.
Example: You found us via a search engine, clicked on the Cached link for page results, but were redirected.
Legitimate URL redirection services fail:
Example: tinyurl
Example: You are redirected to somewhere other than results you request through Google Mobile Search.
RSS-formatted requests fail:
Example: You can reach Feedburner, but clicking on our feed URL from Feedburner fails.
Example: You know how to do the en-to-en thing to get Google Translate to serve as a proxy, but that fails.
That’s about it for the testbeds, other than the many mega-lists of anon proxies out there which you can find and play with for yourselves. Happy animal-safe-and-sane hunting!
