unFULRed

At work, websites are content filtered for various, often valid reasons, and at different levels. I am actually responsible for the local administration of a content filtering service at work, but today's lesson is about the FURL.

When you are blocked from accessing a site by the base, you receive a big nasty "Forbidden URL" message citing various regulations concerning internet use, etcetera etcetera, and we've come to non-lovingly call it being FURLed when you try to access a site that is blocked.

At times, they tweak with the keyword filters, for example blocking anything with the words game or webmail. I've generally not been impacted by their policies, as I don't hit too many off-limits kinds of sites, but all of that changed this last week. They've been phasing in a new keyword block, that not only resulted in a good FURLing when trying to access certain sites, but I had personally been FURLed.

You see, they started blocking the word "blog" from web addresses (the technical address of this blog was blogs.shawnwright.us/news), so any address containing that word would get FURLed, meaning I've not been able to read my own darn blog from work (even though the rest of the world could read it just fine). So... I've gone and added an alias address for the blog (the change is transparent to the whole world, but very visible to my base readers). Instead of "blog" being used in the address, I'm now using "slog", the idea being "Shawn Log" instead of "Web Log". I toyed with several options, but I needed something I could say and others could remember without too much trouble. All of the "blog" addresses for my sites will still work fine. But if you're in a location that is FURLing my blog, you now have a workaround.


It's good to be unFURLed.