Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites
Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites – The Markup
Not diminishing how shitty this is
But where does it say NASA is blocked?
...why is "education" a category for blocks? We were afraid you might use the computers at school to learn something?
You're not supposed to be educating yourself, you're supposed to stick to the curriculum. You might learn the wrong things!
We had to take my daughter out of public school and put her in online school due to severe bullying and now I act as a "learning coach," which means I basically sit with her and make sure she stays on track. But it also gives me examples to do things to tell her when the school is lying to her. Overall it's pretty decent (social studies is remarkably even-handed for an American social studies class), but her health class is abysmal. Yesterday, they were talking about the benefits of AA and I had to explain to her that, while AA helps some people, it is not backed by science, was founded from a prayer group, and the founder thought that the actual way to stop drinking was to do AA and take LSD, so it's not even doing what "Bill W." wanted.
It also said nothing about courts mandating AA, which is interesting, since it made it very clear that you can only quit an addiction if you want to.
That's far from the only time I've had to tell her that what her health class is telling her is bullshit. Even the quitting smoking section had some nonsense and didn't even mention smoking cessation medication (I have no idea why).
Somebody mixed up the whitelist and blacklist.
Oh gods, I hope not
Other notorious sites blocked under Education:
New question, why is duckduckgo in the education category? Are all search engines?
That's a great question and I wish I knew the answer to. Apparently, only DDG got blocked as Education/Science, Startpage was blocked as security.proxy, Bing for no specific reason and several Google variations (.ca, .nl, fr, etc) blocked as "App Defender".
The more I look into it, the more I'm left wondering who the fuck created the blocklists. The Social Media category has several instances of sites that are anything but any form of social media or social network
I suppose it's most likely some parents heard a kid was "slacking off looking at pretty pictures" and complained...
"The moon landing was a hoax" , "we shouldn't be funding people to stare out into space", "What has NASA ever done for us", and other favorite GOP tunes.
Aside from the "moon landing was a hoax", I've seen democrats express similar sentiments about NASA. At least until I point out that a lot of our modern technology is based on stuff either developed directly by NASA or for NASA by a government contractor. That and the fact that NASA is one of the most, if not the most, profitable US agencies. Like, iirc NASA provides a 6x return for every dollar spent on them. As such, I find it really strange that the US is determined to keep NASA's funding at a minimum when we could be using them to generate a lot of money for the economy.
I work in K12 IT, and the reason is that all manner of categories are defined for both blacklisting and whitelisting when creating content filter rules. So while “education” would not be used for blocking, it would be useful for rules to apply to specific defined groups or devices which can only access specific categories (such as education). Just FYI.
All sites are categorized. Which categories are blocked is up to the administrator.
Sure. The question was more "why would education be a category chosen for blocking by a school administrator?"
Categories such as “education” are useful for limiting access for specific groups of devices. For example, if one class has a particularly mischievous group who keep going off task from their devices, rules can be created to whitelist certain categories, and only pass traffic that are in these more straightforward categories. Just FYI.
Thank you
