Filter Thaw?

Quick Work Network Filter Update: Yeah, apparently that was a false alarm. Late yesterday afternoon I was able to get straight to Blogger without having to click any buttons acknowledging “quota time” or anything like that, and today that return to normalcy still prevails, so apparently it was a brief interlude of heavy-handedness. On the one hand, that’s a bit of a relief, especially once I realized that because Blogger uses a pop-up window for the uploading of pictures, which counts as a separate window and requires the use of ten more quota minutes to do one minute of work, I would be burning through a lot of this quota time for a once-a-day post. But then again, from the Blogger dashboard, which I use for following other blogs, I was able to launch new tabs viewing all of those blogs with no filter warnings whatsoever. So it wouldn’t have been that big a hardship (and please be aware I use that term as ironically as possible without completely obliterating its meaning) in any case. It does all beg the question, though, of what was going on yesterday. My two leading theories:

1 – It was an inadvertent dry-run. The Pentagon is eventually going to block access to Blogger et al, and they activated the filter before they intended to, and took it back down, but eventually will put it back in place when originally scheduled. That may sound a bit improbably inept, but trust me, it’s not that far-fetched.

2 – It was an intentional move which was immediately met with howling cries of protest from users who have legitimate, DoD-business reasons to stay abreast of various blogs for more than 50 minutes a day. Also not that far-fetched in theory, but this is my number two hypothesis because of what I said above: I was able to get to all the blogs linked off of my Blogger dashboard, just not the main Blogger site itself. So how much hutesium et clamor could there have been?

As always, I will keep you all posted of further developments, if any.