A friend asked me to transfer an old interview of his grandfather from a reel-to-reel audiotape to CD. I finished this task last night, creating a wonderful-sounding MP3 to email to him while I got the CDs ready.
I discovered this morning that the note I sent him with the MP3 information got filtered somehow by his “ISP”, Bellsouth.Net. Most of the message’s content made it through fine, but the link I sent him to his MP3 was completely removed! After two messages sent to him, I determined that Bellsouth must be altering the content of messages to its users.
I find this disturbing at the least and downright scandalous at the worst. I’ve never had much faith in Bellsouth as an ISP, having dealt with them before at a client site. I’ll agree that Bellsouth the phone company knows what they’re doing in hooking up Internet connections, but their Internet group has always seemed absolutely clueless when it came to being an ISP.
I should be fair and say I don’t know whether Alan is using mail-filtering software on his own PC and whether that might explain the filtered link. My “evil detector” – the gut instinct with which I place a lot of trust – points the finger at Bellsouth.
I hope I’m wrong about this, because if I’m right, it serves as a chilling indication of what the Internet can become – a filtered, censored wasteland controlled at the whim of corporate interests.
Update 25 Jul 1 PM: A test email sent through a different mailserver seemed to work. I’m not sure if its a problem with my home mailserver or what. Guess I need more testing to be sure, but at any rate, it looks less like a Bellsouth issue at this point.
