I was surprised to find that http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/ was blocked from my work computer. After some research I found that my system admin installed a new product from esafe. This product uses a ridiculous dictionary with thousands of words you never even heard of. Any site containing one or more of the words get blocked immediately. After some more research I found that the word getting blocked on the MXNA is ‘bitch’ , obviously, it’s the bitchwhocodes blog. A fine and decent piece of internet ;). After some convincing I got my admin to remove the ‘bitch’ word from the list. So now I can access the MXNA but still not the bitchwhocodes site. How many more dirt and malicious stuff you got in there girl? ;). Anyhow this is a real pain in the a$$ (hope I won’t get blocked for that one) I’m currently thinking of a solution. Surfing through a proxy won’t help cause the d@mn thing sits on the winsock and analyze everything that enters the computer. A proxy that encrypts the data won’t help either cause any kind of encrypted data get blocked. I came with the idea of useing a proxy that has the same word dictonary and knows to change the words to a non offending kind. I “only” need to find one that do this or install one myself.
Anyhow, what kept me connected to the flash world is this fine tool by flashMattic. named: MXNA posts feeder. This tool uses the MXNA webservice and somehow only the offending posts got blocked as opposed to the browser that was blocked completely.
Check it out (requires latest flash player 8.5 / 9)
If anyone knows how to overcome the esafe problem, please let me know.