Gallery blocked by www.securecomputing.com as 'Nudity'

[andreas_thaler]

Hi folks,

 

don't know if this is a very recent thing or not, but I could not access my

gallery any more from my office PC today because www.securecomputing.com

decided to block access to thumbs.photo.net and gallery.photo.net by putting

them in the categories 'Art/Culture/Heritage, Nudity'.

 

Basically this means that there are a lot of people out there that are not able

to see your images any longer, regardless whether they do contain nudity or not.

 

While I certainly assume that there are many photographs here that have nudity

as content, I think that categorizing the site as such is more justified for

places like www.onemodelplace.com or similar.

 

What do you think?

 

Best regards,

Andy

 

PS: You can request them to change the rating using the link

http://www.securecomputing.com/sfwhere/

[davidmccracken]

Complain to your bosses who installed the filter at your work place!

[seanb]

<I>While I certainly assume that there are many photographs here that have nudity as content, I think that categorizing the site as such is more justified for places like www.onemodelplace.com or similar.</I>

<P>

But then what happens when someone at a site using securecomputing stumbles across a nude? They complain to securecomputing and get the site added back, I would imagine.

[hatley]

Come on David, hundreds of corporations use the ratings at that site. Which makes more sense? Emailing the admins of his corporation and bringing attention to himself negatively, or letting all of us know so something can be done positively?

 

The fact you knee jerk a response and call it "complaining" tells me you are defensive about it, understandable considering your collection.

 

But I don't see how we fix the fact that badly done nudes come off like snapshot porn and are embarassing to the rest of us without stifling the learning process and bringing the exceptional photographers to light. Perhaps make the nude category a "members only" category which forces folks to log in? That might not help the situation either. Such a tough situation.

[keith turrill]

I worked for one of the largest companies in the world. We had all sorts of policies on computer usage including non-business, audio/video streaming, nudity, and sexual content.

 

The people who run offices really don't have the time to debate artistic freedom. In some cases, content such as audio and video streaming in a large office may put a severe load on bandwidth. Regardless of those issues, the office equipment belongs to the employer and right or wrong, they can decide what it gets used for.

[bobatkins]

I don't see how you can complain.

 

There is nudity in the gallery on photo.net, fairly explicit nudity, more explicit than most of the "modeling" websites. It is definitely NOT a "work safe" site and it seems reasonable for businesses to block it.

 

If I had a business, I'd block it myself.

 

The saving grace is that they were at least sensible in blocking only the gallery section rather than the whole photo.net domain. They also put it in the Art nudity class, not porn. I really don't see how you can argue with them over that.

[hatley]

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think a great number of paying members of this site will be displeased if photo.net becomes inaccessible to businesses. It seems like it would be a negligible thing to discuss this among the administrators and develop a plan moving forward to mitigate it as much as possible. I'm not sure why any other approach would be considered or represented.

 

Maybe itﾒs just me, but the culture of the forums seem to have become very, very defensive when criticism is offered. Again in this thread there seems to be a sense of that.

[joeb]

I don't see the problem. If you are a business that needs to access Photo.net's galleries you could override the block. If you are working for the 99.99% of businesses that don't, the computer is your bosses not yours. Surf the galleries from a computer you own.

[hatley]

What if you would like to show someone at a large corporation your portfolio? Sure, you could keep a private site to show off (I'm sure many of us do), but when there are clearly solutions available to mitigate the issue - why not do so? It could be approached programatically in the urls, and cordon off nudes into a specific sub domain or sub directory - then one admin could make the rounds on the larger policing sites once a week or so and ensure that everything else on the site gets as liberal a rating as possible.

 

Thats one solution, I'm sure smarter folks than I could come up with others in a short ammount of time. But ignore the issue? Don't know why we would with alternatives to photo.net existing and new ones cropping up all the time.

 

Cheers,

Michael

[bennyboy]

Of course, nobody will be looking from their work PC, because they'll be hard at work right?

[peter_apostol]

Most fellow photo.net members have approached the issue in a technical manner 'how to get around the issue or not'. I feel there is a greater situation at stake here: that photo.net is here to promote the art of photography. Many will say that not everyone here has such an ideal in mind and that is true. Nevertheless, the website's purpose is -or should be- that. Keeping this in mind, I find it a form of censorship to block a whole site because it contains nudes. What's so bad about the human body anyway? We all have one. Modern conventiality one might say. Anyhow being at a work-place definetely is a just excuse for using the software to block porn but blocking communities like photo.net is an exagerration...One may slack around in many ways other than surfing on photo.net.....

[kelly_flanigan1]

Probably the reason you have been not doing your TPS reports is you are wasting time on Photo.net instead of working.

[davidmccracken]

<i>"What if you would like to show someone at a large corporation your portfolio?"</i><br><br>Try posting it to them. Get real here.

[hatley]

I'm not sure how they would view it if gallery.photo.net was banned, as all the images are linked to there.

 

Could print them, or use a different website - but I mean, this is photo.net we are discussing =) Seems like it would be doable to seperate the different sections into nature.gallery.photo.net and finearts.gallery.photo.net, etc etc that way it would be doable to ask groups like the one mentioned in this thread to localize their filter to the pertinent subject matter.

[bobatkins]

Any company seen to be allowing its employees to view pictures of Naked Women (or men) in the workplace is laying themselves wide open for a sexual harassment suit.

 

It's like hanging a Playboy calendar up in the office. You just don't do it and if you do you're likely to get sued for creating a hostile work environment.

 

Would you allow employees to visit the Playboy website from the office as long as they promised they were only reading the articles?

[neild]

I thought the Playboy website only had articles, just like the magazines!

[yann_r.]

the height of irony would be that Andreas is working for Playboy :D

[andreas_thaler]

Hi everybody,

 

thanks for the active participation and interesting replies.

Just some more thoughts on my initial thoughts for posting the question here:<br>

<br>

Bob Atkins wrote:<br>

<i>There is nudity in the gallery on photo.net, fairly explicit nudity, more explicit than most of the "modeling" websites. It is definitely NOT a "work safe" site and it seems reasonable for businesses to block it. </i><br>

<br>

I absolutely agree that there are parts of photo.net that contain nudity and are not 'work safe'. However ... I would very much assume that this also applies to pbase.com, flickr, photocommunity.de, photocamel.com, imageshack, fredmiranda, and so on ... however, these sites are not listed in the 'nudity' section, while other sites like onemodelplace.com are (to which I agree).<br>

<br>

Mind you, I am not advocating to block all these sites, but I would rather understand if they put up a category like 'hobby:photography' and allow companies who take a harder stance on whether 'hobby' sites are permissible content or not to block all those sites.<br>

<br>

The question here is ... is it sufficient that there is one picture containing nudity to categorize the site as such into 'nudity'? Maybe some philosopic question.<br>

<br>

I also don't really believe that a company <b>has</b> to block access to websites containing nudity, or they will get sued. <br>That sounds a bit over the top for me ... even by US standards (which I don't know, admittedly). Is it already that far?<br><br>

However, it might become some business relevant question for photo.net, because if they had been blocked at the time when I decided to pay my subscription to photo.net and not to pbase or one of the others. <br>

<br>

Best regards,<br>

Andy<br>

<br>

PS: And no, I do not work for 'Playboy' (Assume I wouldn't have to worry about such filters, then)

[andreas_thaler]

<i>However, it might become some business relevant question for photo.net, because if they had been blocked at the time when I decided to pay my subscription to photo.net and not to pbase or one of the others.</i> <br>

(dang, hit the 'confirm' button too early, should have finished the sentence first)<br><br>... then my choice might have been different.

 

Best regards,

Andy

[constance_cook]

Andy:

 

It is "that far" by law in the US. It might get past once, twice, etc. and then when someone blew the whistle those instances constitute a 'pattern of behavior' which could also be combined with other types of sexual harassment to make quite a good case.

 

Nudity doesn't belong at work. The calendar girls are gone.

 

Conni

[hatley]

Well - I've worked in and around large corporations most of my career, and in the US. In my experience (working in IT as a manager and dealing with this from a personnel side), its not that its illegal to display nudity. Witness the sculptures and paintings present in many public and corporate offices. Rather, its that sexual harassment cases are rapant and as the last poster said, the "culture of harsassment" card can and is played here and there. Sometimes, its founded - more often its a manifestation of general dissatisfaction. But large corporations react to it the same way they do to RSS, with a big hammer so as to mitigate HR and law costs. Most larger corporations I know now have some form of program running which every 15 minutes or so locks up the user's desktop and takes the user through a series of stretches (some of which are quite comical). This has mitigated the *flood* of lawsuits that are a dime a dozen about injured arms and wrists, and cost companies silly money on the margin.

 

But US corporate culture aside, this could all be fixed if the administrators attend to my advice and seperate the sections out programatically. As others have mentioned, there are alternatives to photo.net now and gravity will set in if it isn't dealt with. I won't renew my subscription if it isn't, sadly.

 

Cheers.