"www.loyalty.org itself is the server for the web site of Californians for Academic Freedom, the group I founded to oppose the California loyalty oath, which is still a non-negotiable requirement for anyone who wants to work for the State of California -- including student employees of the University of California. "

http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/

That's the most controversial thing about the page. In my view it's not a big deal to have that stance but some people don't like others who rock the boat when it comes to the status quo.

My activism on this issue for the past decade and a half has basically consisted of corresponding for a few minutes each year with some new person who objects to signing the loyalty oath. I doubt that the site blocking has anything to do with this.

I was curious about the contents and contentions points of the oath so went looking and one of the files you link to is a 404:

http://www.loyalty.org/oath.txt

Catch-22 should be required reading cf. "The great loyalty oath crusade"

I don't know why my web site was categorized that way by your employer's firewall.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

Could you tell me the brand? I would like to test few sites that I believe are much worse than loyality.

I'm guessing it's a false positive from using an IP similar to a sketchy site. It looks like the IP points to Linode.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the puzzle when I completed it three years ago. A practical exercise cracking the RSA keys followed by a small classic code breaking puzzle.

I really doubt that shoen's page is any issue. Perhaps you can get to it in the way back machine.

My experience with these firewalls/blacklists is that they have quite a few random false positives. Requests for fixing them one-by-one seems to be a recurring theme on our company chat.

I would leave a company that used an internet blocker. They constantly get in the way of real work and benefit no one. The only valid use case I see is attempting to stop idiots downloading malware and installing it on company computers

In more "traditional" companies that have software dev departments, they are extremely common in my experience, so switching companies wouldn't help much if you're in such a field.

If 90% of the company employees only use IE and MS Word and are actually likely to install malware, and the last 10% are software engineers/data analysts/numerical simulation people, the latter are gonna have to work within/around these types of constraints.

Part of the reason I dont work at such places. Wouldn't want to be somewhere where I am treated like an idiot.

I guess we all find different optima. To me it's not really being treated like an idiot, it's "we need to have a policy that takes into account that most of the people are idiots, you smart guys work around it if necessary".

I don't know where you work, but off-hand I would postulate that working at "such places" also has advantages over where you work (e.g. better work-life balance, living in an area where property prices are not insane, etc.). As I said, we find different optima in these tradeoffs.

On a personal device it's reasonable to use a VPN.

On a personal device, it's reasonable to use LTE.

Not always feasible. Not everyone has a cash to spend on data and lives in an area with good wireless coverage.

It might be the case that some people employ VPN, or SOCKS proxies over ssh to their home computer, or similar schemes. I wouldn't know.

Maybe a particularly simplistic auto-categoriser mistook the few eighty-eights (88s) on the root page[0] for their use as Nazi symbolism[1]?

[0] http://www.loyalty.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=88_(number)&oldid...

For context, Seth Schoen is not only very tolerant, one of the least racist USAns I know, but also Jewish.

mine too interesting. which firewall do your employer use ? here it is sonicwall.

It appears to be a personal website; I believe it is miscategorised.