Nude filtering software

[Mike McCarty]

Recently, while surfing my fav artful websites, I was denied access to some because of the use of the word "Nude."

I was using a computer that was hosted by Sarasota county government and noticed that while I was able to get to these sites they would not show any of the images. All the images, regardless of content, were x'd. When I clicked on the x'd out image it would kick me off the site and state that policy prohibited access to this site.

I was able to get to my own site, which does not have any reference to nudes. I can only assume that because it cannot know what the images are it can only be searching for key words.

What this means is that if you have these types of words anywhere on your site you could be locked out of many viewers that may have such filtering software installed on their computer. This could be many ordinary families that have small children and have chosen to filter their content.

There may be more to this than just seaching for a few key words, but this is all I can figure out at this time. If it were me I would eliminate any such words or phrases from my site, or, give it some thought depending on your content.

The following msg. was displayed after trying to reach a fairly prominent artist's web site:

"This organization's Internet use policy restricts access to this web page at this time. Your request was denied because of its content categorization: "Pornography" "

[Michele Rushworth]

Hmmm....good to know. I guess an artist should label that section of their work "figuratives" or have the words created as a graphic rather than searchable text.