Comsift Paradigm Shift
You may have received email from Comsift, and we wanted to make you aware of the implications. If you have a Comsift Internet content filter and if you subscribe to the update service for it, Comsift has decided to make an important change which may affect you.
Until now, they have blocked many Websites where individual users publish unmoderated content – especially images and videos. For example, on Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace, anyone can use language or publish imagery or videos that would be inappropriate for some audiences to view.
Your ComSifter is very good at identifying inappropriate words or phrases in textual content, but is unable to determine the appropriateness of graphic or video images published on such sites, so historically, Comsift’s policy has been to completely block many such Websites.
On March 11, 2012, it is their intention to “update” your appliance to unblock Facebook.com, YouTube.com, and MySpace.com. With certain exceptions, textual content on those pages should still be filtered, so whatever categories of words and phrases you intended to block should still be blocked. However, inappropriate published images or videos or even user profile photos may be displayed.
What does this mean to you?
- If you had previously blocked those sites but want to unblock them now, you don’t have to do anything.
- If you had previously blocked those sites and want them to remain blocked, we can create manual blacklist entries for them to override Comsift’s default handling.
- If you had previously whitelisted those sites and want them to remain whitelisted (which means that even inappropriate textual content would be permitted), you don’t have to do anything.
- If you had previously whitelisted those sites but want textual content to be filtered, we can remove those manual whitelist entries to restore Comsift’s default handling.
If you have questions or need us to make any adjustments to your configuration, please just call or email. If your network is configured for remote access, we may be able to make changes remotely, without incurring our minimum 1-hour service charge … or if you can wait, we can just do it on our next visit.
