Friday, January 23, 2009

The Strangest Thing Happened Last Night

Last night when I pulled my blog up on the laptop that I work on downstairs, the format didn't look quite the way it usually does. There was a darkish banner at the top and the words "ob-scene content" appeared. I was mystified. This is my blog: to say the content is innocuous is probably an understatement. Everything seemed slightly off and when I clicked on the list of "Blogs I Follow," the blogs were brought up in feed form, not as the regular blogs. I thought perhaps some sort of mischief must have been involved, so I switched to another browser. Everything seemed to be OK there, and the blog appeared as normal on my main computer in my home office.

The event bothered me all day at work, and I started to think: What was different; what could possibly be construed as obscene? For one thing, I realized that I had not used the laptop since the weekend and I had posted my last article (the one below, "Visiting with Grandma Brinlee") using my regular computer on Monday. I also remembered that the laptop is an old family computer and that the last two "owners" were my two daughters - and we had probably put some sort of screening program on the browser.

The only difference was the article. I am not sure if my conclusion is correct, but I think it is this: I had used a word which can mean "chewing tobacco" but can also mean a terrible type of movie, one which is not appropriate for anyone of any age, let alone children. I changed the wording of the article and am having no problems on either computer. But I am totally paranoid now, and I can empathize with Randy Seaver, who could not access his own blog at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City as described here.

2 comments:

  1. How weird. I've never heard of that happening.

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  2. I know - I don't think this would happen on most computers (and it didn't happen when I pulled the site up on 2 other computers or on the other browser on this machine), but I suspect we had some kind of content blocking on the one browser, which was the older of the 2 that I have on this machine and probably the one that would have initially been used by my girls when this computer was "theirs."

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