Security Gone Silly

Here's an interesting one. Yesterday, I went to check out Effinfunny and could not view some of the videos. After checking with a friend, it turned out that he (Sam) could run them just fine. However, Sam was outside my office. He said to check Revver.com and then MySpace. I got this error:

This site is blocked by the SonicWall Content Filter Service.

URL: http://www.myspace.com/

Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Adult/Mature Content"

Turns out that the guys at SonicWALL way overdid their firewall software. It's one thing if I was checking some bondage site - "research" in the Internet Marketing business - but c'mon. This is way over the top.

It's one thing to get searched three times while walking between terminals at Frankfurt or Heathrow and having to discombobulate yourself for all sorts of random fears. But this restricts hurts legimate businesses. Someone creates a site about Internet Marketing, posts videos in Revver and uses them as they video player, but finds out that many of his target audience can't see the video. Now people can always complain to IT, they aren't necessarily going to call their network admins and tell them to enable MySpace traffic.

So we've sent this to the SonicWALL folks. Hope they fix this. Hope other firms don't go security-silly.