Friday, April 16, 2010

Hmm: Navy Cuts Off Access to Fox News Site

On the upside, if they want, ahem, some real news, they can still access CNN and MSNBC.
Members of the U.S. Navy were blocked Friday from gaining access to Fox News' Web site, a Navy spokesman confirmed to FoxNews.com.

Lt. Justin Cole, a spokesman for the Navy, said that he wasn't able to access that site along with other news sites, including NewYorkTimes.com. But Navy members could still go to MSNBC.com and CNN.com.

"There's got to be some type of issue with NMCI," Cole said, referring to the Navy Marine Corps Internet. Cole said he was looking into the cause.

When members tried to go to FoxNews.com, the following message appeared: "Access to this site has been denied in accordance with Navy policy to safeguard the security posture and/or to maintain the operational integrity of the NMCI."
I'm surprised they don't just reroute the Fox News links to Obama's Organizing for America website.

Update: It appears to have been a technical issue.
A military official who's an expert on these matters told retired Lt. Col. Oliver North, a Fox News contributor, that two issues with the Fox News site would have triggered the outage.

One is the bandwidth -- most of the other news sites don't consume as much bandwidth as Foxnews.com, which is pretty busy, the source told North.

The second, the source said, is the filtering system was triggered by a photo of celebrity Kim Kardashian that was posted to the site that contained the notation: NSFW, which stands for "not safe for work," combined with a slideshow titled "Sexiest Celeb Stepmothers."

The source said the Navy's system is built automatically to filter out and block any sites that are perceived to possibly contain porn.

"What has happened here, the computer saw the NSFW photo and saw the sexiest celeb stepmothers and automatically said it's a porn site and shut if off to the rest of the Navy in the world," North recalled what he was told.

"When people started to call in, they then manually looked at it and then overrode the computer program," he said.

FoxNews.com posts photos with the NSFW notation about three times a week and features a twice-weekly sex column with the words "sex" in the headline.

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