The printed edition of the ‘Corriere della Sera‘ has an article today about the unintended side effects of the site filtering system that Vodafone put in place recently to supposedly protect minors from adult materials while browsing the web using the Vodafone Live! application suite.
As reported in Italian by Stefano, the author of Quinta’s Blog, among Italy’s most read, the censorware used by Vodafone is also impeding the access to the websites of several political parties. It is often, if not always, the case, that the dumb filters are unable to do their ill-defined jobs, and at the same time stop people using the internet in an unfettered manner to communicate.
The Italian Government has just fallen a few days ago, and the level of discussion, both among politicians, and with the voters, is intense. This is not the time to artificially restrict what people can say on a medium, like mobile phones, which in Italy is actually much more widespread than PCs!