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censorship by AOL

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by john_wills

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/11/14/national1452EST0630.DTL
When I sent the above URL to my friends by email AOL bounced it back. There was no trouble from the other ISPs (UCSB, hotmail,...). What do you suppose AOL doesn't like in this SF Chronicle article?

3 replies

by jardinier

Hi John: This is the message I recieved from the link, when sent from TechRepublic. I suspect a technical glitch rather than an insidious plot.

Item Not Found

The article or page you requested was not found. If this link was sent to you via e-mail or posted on another website, it was probably incorrectly formatted.
If the link that gave you the error appeared on one of The Gate's pages, please mail us and let us know at webmaster@sfgate.com.

You can also go to our search page at: www.sfgate.com/search

by john_wills

maybe an embedded blank. The sfgate.com search facility should be fed "Austin" and "abortion" to reach the article. I think it was the word "abortion" in the email subject which aroused AOL's censor, but I have not done thorough experimentation.

by jardinier

I find that people who have no familiarity with AOL don't have a clue how it works. For a start, it has it own inbuilt mail service. Secondly, while it uses Internet Express technology, it does not use the full, standard IE. Even when installing standard IE, there is "special artwork support for AOL."

Although 30 million people can probably be wrong, I use AOL out of choice because of its simple installation, much better laid out email system and, because it functions separately from either Internet Explorer or Outlook Express, is much less vulnerable to viruses.

I have never encountered any form of censorship with AOL, which is why I suggest the problem was perhaps morely likely caused by AOL's different setup to other ISPs.

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