Talk about arrogance

In one my previous posts, I had pointed out that blue coat is blocking legitimate websites like Orkut and classified it as Adult/Mature content. Well yes, mostly the members of the website are adult. But that does not mean the website should be classified as Adult/Mature content. Jokes apart, as I had noted earlier also that there are certain categories / communities which are adult / mature in nature, but then again Orkut has specifically mentioned in its acceptable use policies that there should be no profanity, nudity and otherwise offensive or inappropriate content. I believe a policy statement by the website owners should be a good way to determine the nature of the website.

Having said that, if Orkut has to be classified as adult / mature content, then I am sure most of the websites like Yahoo!, Google would have to be classified likewise as they contain explicit adult content groups with nudity, erotic, dirty language and is explicitly mentioned as that it contains adult content and the visitor has to be over the age of 18 to visit. If that is not adult / mature content, then I am not sure I understand fully what it means. And the irony of it all is, I can visit those pages, groups very easily with the same Blue Coat web filtering service.

I had contacted Blue Coat support with this issue and I got a reply back essentially acknowledging that their service is blocking the website and implied meaning (which I understood) was that it was incorrect. The actual content is below:

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Hi Mukul,

I have tested site in question (www.orkut.com) and does seem to be blocked as ‘Adult/Mature Content; Newsgroups’

ProxySG42#(config content-filter)test-url www.orkut.com

Testing URL 'www.orkut.com/'

categories: Adult/Mature Content; Newsgroups

Please visit our site review site to submit re-categroization for URL / URLs

http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp

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I had submitted multiple site review requests to Blue Coat to no avail and now when I tried to do it again, the website informs me that it has been submitted multiple times and they feel that it is correct. Essentially meaning that they won't change it. The actual message is:

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The page you want reviewed is http://www.orkut.com/   (Check another site)
This page is currently categorized as Adult/Mature Content, and Social Networking

This web page has already been submitted many times, and has been verified as rated correctly.

NOTE: Blue Coat manages the web site ratings system used by many different software and hardware vendors. Blue Coat does not control whether a web page is "Blocked" or "Allowed" — your Internet Use Policy controls this. For more information on how to change your Internet Use Policy, click here

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I was very disappointing to get a response like this from Blue Coat. Such episodes make me a little nervous about the company and I don't think I would recommend Blue Coat to any of my clients if this persists.