Telus Blocked 766 Other Sites, Too
To follow up on Telus’s ill-advised censorship during the recent labour action, I recently read on Boing Boing that the company blocked 766 other sites along with the offending one.
Tests undertaken by the ONI on July 27, 2005 showed that Telus’s blocking extended to far more than the single targeted site. Telus’s filtering also blocked 766 additional, unrelated sites with domain names hosted on the same server as the blocked site. These sites included http://www.airgasengineering.com/, an engineering company; http://www.boogieforbreastcancer.org/, a breast cancer fundraising site; http://www.medicinemodernlife.com/, an alternative medicine site based in Australia; and http://www.mountainrecyclers.com/, a Colorado based electronic recycling company.
It’s always the first problem that arises with censorship–innocent material inevitably gets censored. In this case, Telus threw out 766 babies with the bathwater.
