It annoys me to no end when companies turn to 3rd party providers to filter access to websites on the internet. Yes, I can see why going to a site of German fetish porn1 while at the office is a bad thing. I also realize the internet moves way too quickly for a company to keep on top of the latest, greatest threat to the company’s technology security.
But when they turn to a company like Websense, it angers me. Why? Well, a lot of the domains we host (this one excluded) are through Dreamhost. Every time we’ve added a new domain to our account on Dreamhost, Websense is blocking it as malicious from the get-go.
How can you be blocking a website when THERE’S NOTHING ON THERE YET, YOU ASSHOLES!?
So, for the one millionth time2, I have to submit a request through their retarded contact form to get them to remove the goddamn block from their system. Tim or I have had to do this with just about every domain we have on Dreamhost at one time or another.
What it seems to me is that Websense is just looking at where the hosting is being done and saying “Right. This domain is with Dreamhost…it must be full of suck so we’re going to block it right now and not even check out what’s going on with this site before we do so! What were we doing? I like cheese…ooo shiny3!”
This happened to my favorite news aggregator site, Netvibes, about a month ago – they were being blocked as being malicious. It’s a news feed aggregator…huh? Lucky the awesome team at Netvibes is on Twitter and a message to them got them on the ball and had it resolved with Websense quickly.
Granted, I’m not an expert nor am I an insider to how the determination is made whether to add a site to the malicious (and therefore blocked) website list…but in my experience, they’re just profiling against certain domain hosts and not doing any due diligence or investigation into the domains they’re blocking. The vast majority of the blocks I’ve had to deal with on my own personal domains are on sites that have NO CONTENT on them yet because we just bought the domain and are in the process of developing the website.
Seriously, Websense…eat a bag of dicks for being so lazy. You get PAID to do this and only this…how can you screw it up so damn often?
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Get to work on a Habitat for Humanity house tomorrow with Tim (it helps to know people) and I’m so excited! Hope we have a good weather day!
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1. Good lord, my Google search numbers just shot WAY up on that score!
2. Just a small exaggeration…but you get my drift.
3. Ok…perhaps they’re not that AD/HD..but still, they don’t do dick to figure out what gets blocked and what does not.