I have a new enemy and its name is Cymphonix. I guess that we’ve had one of their Network Composer devices installed here at work for a week or two now. At first it didn’t cause too many problems for me, but I was told by other employees that their streaming music was no longer working. Luckily the streams that I use via my Sirius subscription are still working to this day (knock on wood).

I soon realized that I was no longer able to download mp3 files, which isn’t that big of a deal since I obviously have other ways of listening to music. Something strange started happening yesterday though. I was not able to get to oarsa.org:

Blocked Content Analysis: Gambling

I then browsed over here to edpaffjr.com:

Blocked Content Analysis: Alcohol and Tobacco

What the hell? It’s obvious to me that they either have a monkey doing their website categorization or they are using some sort of real-time filtering. Perhaps the device can read what’s on a page and then decide to block it or not. Obviously O.A.R.’s song “That Was A Crazy Game Of Poker” could lead to the gambling categorization, and that’s what first led me to this theory.

Regardless, I’m sure this product aims at increasing productivity. I’m not sure if the result is going to be reached though, especially after I just spent the last half hour of my lunch trying to research how the filtering is done. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to view these obviously “safe for work” sites in the future.