Websense goes for FeedBurner

Websense, our corporate web filter, is at it again. Now it has targeted all FeedBurner powered feeds and is blocking them, categorising them as “Sex.” TechCrunch, Ajaxian, ReadWriteWeb and many, many other blogs are affected. The FeedBurner site itself isn’t blocked, just any feed powered by FeedBurner e.g. the TechCrunch feed. Even my own feed is now blocked.

And I work on an RSS/Atom project. Nice one Websense, really appreciate you blocking a large percentage of my daily job.

This also highlights another negative facet of using FeedBurner for your feeds. Any firewall/web-filter set to block one FeedBurner link can easily end up blocking all FeedBurner links.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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jufemaiz 1 year ago 1 point
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I'm really not surprised with this sort of net nannying. We have it much *much* worse at our work :\

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1 /people/jufemaiz/ /people/jufemaiz/following/ http://euphemize.net 218300388 in/joelcourtney jufemaiz jufemaiz 'ju:femaiz jufemaiz

Rick Klau 1 year ago 1 point
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I just got off the phone with WebSense, and they claim that FeedBurner is classified as "information technology", not "sex". (That there couldn't be any one classification is a separate issue.) They suggest that either (a) your URL database is corrupt, or (b) out of date. The recommended resolution (per Websense) is to contact them and ensure your database of URLs is up to date.

Hope that helps,

Rick Klau
Google (former VP/publisher services, FeedBurner)

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http://www.rklau.com/tins/

John Butler 1 year ago 1 point
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So that explains why all my live bookmarks won't load. God damn you websense! So are we stuck with that ridiculous filter for good now?

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http://blog.johnnypez.com

Paul Watson 1 year ago 1 point
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No, I've got IT to look into it John. They will contact WIT and sort it out. Our project depends on it, these feeds aren't just our personal dalliances.

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http://www.paulmwatson.com/

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