NASA IT Declares A Symphony To Be "Meaningless Content"
This is what happens if you try to visit the website of the San Francisco Symphony @sfsymphony website at https://t.co/rGmkFF73AP from inside the @NASAAmes firewall i.e. it has been blocked by @NASA because it has been declared to be "Meaningless Content" by #NASA net nannies. pic.twitter.com/owNBuYxLkW
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) February 9, 2018
I worked for a company like that. I’d walk over to the IT guy and see him streaming Netflix or playing games and tell him to turn on a site. He never questioned my requests.
Of course it’s not NASA (Ames) that decided this site was “meaningless content” but the vendor to which NASA has handed the keys. But also NASA (Ames) has decided what categories (including “meaningless content”) of sites to block, which is problematic at a research institution (what is “meaningless”?)
IT folks were gracious and expeditious in getting this fixed (already addressed.)
It’s funny to see articles that lack intelligence and present inaccurate information as fact, but I guess that is the new norm now. I’m sure NASA, just like any other company or organization relies on the vendor to accurately label sites. They certainly do not identify the millions of sites that exist on the Internet and individually label them on their own. More than likely, the vendor uses algortihms to identify and label sites and this is not a perfect process. Seems that they provide a method to request the site to be unblocked. Problem solved.
I ran into this problem with a legitimate site that had a scientific paper I needed. As noted by others, NASA has a vendor that is paid to block sites with “inappropriate” content, but naturally they just use an algorithm that isn’t very accurate.
Is it not (much) more likely that this is a simple mistake?
How’s the wireless reception at Ames? If it’s any good, I doubt anyone under 35 uses the wired or WiFi network for anything much other than official business.