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Sunday, August 13

"McAfee" = "McCarthyism"

by Mike on Sun 13 Aug 2006 11:28 PM EDT

Note: This article was published prior to McAfee’s fix of their site rating for marxists.org. As of late August 2006, the rating for marxists.org has been adjusted appropriately.

It looks like McAfee, one of the leaders in Internet security, has decided to take the idea of “security” to the next level. Their SiteAdvisor feature (available as a plug-in for web browsers) clearly warns users against visiting and using the Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org/marx.org) despite giving MIA a completely clean bill of health on all automated web safety testing results. (view their complete "Web Saftety Ratings" for marxists.org here) By and through McAfee’s own testing regimen, McAfee acknowledges the MIA site is completely free of automated e-mail spamming, adware, spyware, harmful links to other sites, and the like. And yet, they formally and unequivocally recommend that MIA is not to be used. Is it this a mistake or is it intentional? Is it "red flagging" or "blacklisting"? Whatever the case, it’s censorship, plain and simple. And the implications of this are both sinister in their nature and disturbing in their scope.

So how can the online community fight such skullduggery? It appears as though McAfee only permits registered users or verified site owners users to post comments in protest of their site ratings. Further, it is a bit tricky to connect with actually McAfee/Site Advisor staff to formally register a complaint regarding their ratings.

As a public service to the online community, we at greeklish.org have opted to open our own “Site Advisor” service in hopes that web users might benefit from our keen powers of observation and our sincere insight.

Note: This article was published prior to McAfee’s fix of their site rating for marxists.org. As of late August 2006, the rating for marxists.org has been adjusted appropriately.