BoingBoing gets 'nude' moniker

It may be irreverent. It may have lots of wise-ass comments. It may even touch on sexual themes.

But to hear the editors of the popular tech culture blog BoingBoing tell it, the site doesn't traffic in nudity.

And thus, its designation by the filtering software SmartFilter as a "nudity" site seems perhaps a little bit questionable.

After all, BoingBoing argues, less than 1 percent of its posts generally have any nudity in them, and even then, the skin is in the form of photos of Abu Ghraib prison abuse victims.

Granted, the site promotes--in the form of Web ads--sites like "Suicide Girls" that do offer nude images--but that's not what the SmartFilter software is getting at.

The software filters out any sites it has tagged for nudity when someone, say a parent, engages the filter.

Meanwhile, in protest, BoingBoing is encouraging its readers to slap an image on their own sites of the pubic region of Michaelangelo's David. The idea, they hope, is that the software will begin to filter out so many sites as to become useless.

Here's hoping for a little sanity in filtering.