Just some thoughts about technology as it relates to censorship, corporate America, and voting.  I apologize for s u c h   a   l o n g   p o s t.

As the article alludes to, this type of censorship, is getting more common.  For instance if you browse the web from China, you would not see a lot of sites because the Chinese government has decided that the citizens can't see them.  The Chinese have set up their routers and other internet devices to block access to these sites.  They could also easily trace when a citizen tried to access a site and later have a discussion with that citizen.  Cisco the maker of a lot of the routers used on the internet at one time was looking at adding some new "features" that made this sort of thing even easier.  This does not only happen in China to be sure.

Slashdot, the site the article was on is a tech site frequented by computer enthusiasts.  You will find a wide range of articles there.  The comments can get pretty juvenile, but you do see a lot of good stories out there.  They have been following the voting machine fiasco too.  Their main bitch being that the voting machines are not open source, meaning no one can see the code that makes up the program.  Which basically means that the machine could be programmed on election day to favor a particular candidate, but be fair and square the days before or after the election so any testing would look ok.  This is a touchy situation because even if the code is audited and deemed good by a big accounting firm or something, who is too say they weren't bought off?  This is one system where I think we will have to have the program freely available for anyone that wants to view it.  Maybe I am wrong, but I think computerized voting has a much larger chance of being manipulated than paper ballots because it is a much larger job to get people in place at all the polling places as opposed to writing the one software program that goes on all the machines.

My company has looked into internet access monitoring software.  The newest stuff is supposed to be more context sensitive.  For instance, better at blocking sites with the word "breast" if it as at bigjuggs.com for instance as opposed to a site about breast cancer research.  The last stuff we looked at had broad categories to block porn, violence, weapons, hate speech, etc.  We never purchased the software.  A lot of companies do because they 1. want to monitor their employees online to make sure they are being useful and 2. because they are afraid of a lawsuit if someone views inappropriate content on a work computer.  We do run a proxy server that shows the addresses people go to and someone reviews the logs periodically and will talk to an employee if their are inappropriate sites (basically porn, or if someone logs a couple of hours at ebay or something).  Generally my feeling is that if the person is getting their work done etc, don't bust them for going online and buying license tabs or taking car of other personal business because the dislike of the company you create in that person will far outweigh the 5 minutes of lost production.