or at least confused to death.

BoingBoing, a techie/culture blog, has been put on a blacklist as featuring “nudity.” While it does, from time to time, link to some art including nudes, it’s not exactly your typical nudie site, mostly sticking to actually rather boring DRM reporting, book updates, “see what my friends are working on” (thank god they have talented friends and their books are good), and the odd … well, oddity. Like the Cthulhu mythos as interpreted in Lego: Clthulego; that was a classic.

BoingBoing has decided not to take its blacklisting lying down, nor kneeling in front thereof (ie change their editorial policy so they obey the blacklister’s commands). They have, instead, and vastly to their credit, decided to culture jam the censors, thusly.

Quote:
BoingBoing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere. Our response to net-censors: Get bent!

We’ve decided not to rejig our editorial process to make it easier for a censorware company to block us for their customers. Instead, we’re creating a clearinghouse of information on how to defeat censorware.

Stick Michelangelo’s “David” on your blog to protest censorware

BoingBoing reader Kurt von Finck says,
 Read with a mixture of dismay and pleasure today’s BB article regarding blocking by SmartFilter. Dismay that a product with “Smart” in its moniker is so stupid, and pleasure that you’ve decided to stand up to it. Let me suggest an additional strategy.

What happens when the blogosphere uses so much tasteful nudity that the web is unusable for SmartFilter users? What happens when SmartFilter blocks so much content that the web is crippled for its users? 

So, I have created the attached button (standard 120×90 size) that BB readers can put on their sites. It features the pubic region of Michelangelo’s David sculpture, uses fairly neutral colors, and is taken from public domain stock photography. I release this work into the public domain, relinquish any claims over its use, and encourage BB readers to put it on their sites.

Maybe if enough of us do so, SmartFilter will just collapse under the weight of its own odious censoring.

Yo, here come da context:

I think I’ve been waiting to write an entry like this since I was in Grade Four. When you’re in Grade Four, you’re still allowed to be your own illustrator, so there I was, writing and illustrating away. God knows, Andy Warhol had no reason to be looking over his shoulder, but a kid should be allowed to draw, even if the adults get all toe-curlingly squeamish about it. Honestly, I cannot remember the story I wrote, although my mother no doubt kept it pressed between the leaves of Collier’s Encyclopedia, $19.99 a volume at the grocery store, with detergent proof of purchase. For all I know, it resides there to this day, confusing the descendants of the original garage sale buyers.

No, I can’t remember the story at all, but I do remember the illustration I made to go with it. It was in pencil, at the bottom of the blue-lined notebook pages, because there was a bit of a margin there and you could almost pretend there weren’t any lines except just across the tops of their heads, and even then you could pretend, or try to make them into tiaras or something; I think I did, a blue tiara, but after all these years I could be mistaken. But it’s something I’d do: when life hands me a blue-lined notebook, I make blue tiaras out of it.

The illustration. Right. It was based on Botticelli’s Venus, as I recall, a daring choice for a nine-year-old.

Particularly as the teacher told me point-blank that if I didn’t cover her up, I’d be thrown out of school. I argued, I raged, I pulled out every library book that this and other nude pictures inhabited; our school, it turned out, was absolutely crawling with nekkids. It made no difference; they said they’d suspend me, so in the end I caved and covered her in enough hideous fur to hide a family of Bigfoots. And, of course, I’ve never forgiven myself. I learned too late, during many empty, echoing midnights. that it was better to be a martyr than a success.