BYU continues to block YouTube

Jacob — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:30:08 +0000

Brigham Young University’s Internet filters continue to block the popular video sharing website, YouTube. BYU blocks the site completely “because it allows inappropriate sexual media throughout its URLs,” according to an article in the student newspaper. I appreciate that BYU wants to block inappropriate content, but YouTube contains so many videos that it is unreasonable to block all of YouTube content because there might be a few bad videos. Likewise you could argue, that BYU should block the whole Internet because there are a few bad sites.

By blocking YouTube, BYU is prohibiting students from accessing great video content. For example, recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring organization for BYU, has published public affairs videos on YouTube that show Church Leader Elder Ballard explaining church beliefs. Students trying to access this content from BYU campus Internet are blocked from the site.

Other educational materials are also on YouTube. Recently, UC Berkeley started posting full lecture videos online. So far, they’ve posted over 300 hours of video taped lectures online for free access to the public. These lectures could help BYU students supplement their own studies, except that BYU blocks the UC Berkeley’s YouTube site.

BYU’s efforts to block video content come in addition to Google’s own safe-search program anyway, which limits access to inappropriate “adult” material. Why does BYU feel they need to be extra restrictive about YouTube? When does blocking bad content at the consequence of blocking good content go too far?

Google buys YouTube It is interesting to note though that there is no...
DOPA limits free speech Recently there has been new legislation introduced in congress what...
BYU’s new website theme fosters identity theft On February 15th, BYU will launch a new look and...

MSN Blog Censorship

Jacob — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 05:26:14 +0000

I found this article about how MSN is censoring the blogs that it hosts. I’m actually not too upset about it, since most users are probably pretty aware of whats happening and they can move to another hoster like blogger.com, or even have their stuff hosted here on peargrove.com. But there is something else that really bugs me. Its in the end user license agreement of using MSN blogs:

Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to “use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat” their blog postings.

Wow, that is really horrible. What it is saying, is that if you use MSN Spaces, Microsoft owns your content. I don’t want Microsoft to own anything I create. I create it, and it is mine. Thats why my blog is hosted by me instead of by Microsoft, so I own my own content. I’m free.

My secret blog A few months ago there was a discussion on ProvoPulse.com...
Google Blog hacked? I was looking through my live bookmarks on Firefox, which...
First cross post There are a lot of great tools out there that...

Square Galaxy » censorship

BYU continues to block YouTube

MSN Blog Censorship