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Comment by joosters

All well and good, but are these kind of 'middleboxes' unequivocally unethical? For example, some ISPs might want to block highly illegal content - let's use the typical examples, e.g. child porn sites, malware domains, and so on. It's not inherently unethical (or, at least, there are plenty of reasonable people who would say it is ethical) to install a middlebox that will make it more difficult for users to access these sites.

So now your company has got a content blocker installed. What exactly are your network engineers meant to do now? Demand personal refusal over any additions to the sites that these boxes will block? That seems highly unlikely to happen, and how could that even work in practice? Are all the engineers meant to vote on blocks, and only those unopposed sites get added to the list?

Can ethical network engineers usefully oppose content blocking?

parent joosters 6 years ago

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