Most of my posts this year have concerned the O2 and Symantec censorship scandal, some readers may becoming bored of the issue by now but I make no apologies for them in fact they'll keep coming until the censorship stops. To be honest, I've probably been rather two soft on these companies in the past and things are going to step up a gear from now onwards.

I keep learning more about the Rulespace filter by the day and I made a quite astonishing discovery recently. O2 and Symantec have two possible ways of blocking a site, it can either be classed as a "hate site" or be placed in the "hate" category, either way it gets censored and access is restricted.

Take a racist site such as Stormfront, O2's url checker shows us that it is in the "hate" category. The same goes for a site such as the National Coalition for Men, one of the oldest men's organisations in existence. However, in addition to it's place in the "hate" category, it also receives a "hate site" classification, something not found for Stormfront.org. So Stormfront is blocked once, yet a perfectly legitimate organisation such as NCFM.org is blocked twice over just for good measure, just to make sure it never gets seen.

A quick glance at Stormfront's forums soon reveals racistand derogatroy comments about Africans and Jews, whereas the top article on NCFM.org concerned the need to defend the concept of innocent until proven guilty. Despite this, O2 and Symantec are clearly saying a respected non profit organisation advocating for men's human rights and gender equality is worse than Stormfront, and more deserving of censorship and a "hate" classification. The Rulespace filter system is so misandrist or so flawed that it favours proud racists over men's human rights advocates.

The list of sites deemed worse than Stormfront by these companies even includes dvmen.org, a site for male victims of domesitc violence in Colerado run by the Equal Justice Foundation. Also apparantly worse than Stormfront is mensdefence.org, the site of author and pioneering men's equality advocate Richard F Doyle.



Please remember to cancel your O2 contract if you haven't done so already and uninstall your Symantec software, in both cases there are quite a few cheaper and better alternatives out there anyway. Also don' forget to give the reason for your cancellation.

by John Kimble