CWP | X-Stop Files: Deja Voodoo

X-Stop blocks all of Xoom member pages, except only those which have been specifically unblocked. According to Xoom's counter, they have about 4.5 million members.

Four and a half million.

Not all have put up member pages, of course, but we think that the number who have is ever so slightly more than the hundred or so member pages which have been unblocked as of early November, 1998. The main reason for becoming a Xoom member is to get the 11Mb of free web space, after all.

Censorware apologists would call the block on http://members.xoom.com a block of a single site, but they would be wrong. Xoom member pages are structured like this:

http://members.xoom.com/mysite
http://members.xoom.com/yoursite
http://members.xoom.com/hersite
http://members.xoom.com/hissite

mysite, yoursite, hersite and hissite are four completely different sites, having nothing in common except the use of Xoom's free service. X-Stop's ban on http://members.xoom.com doesn't just ban the company of Xoom, but every site, and every page within a site, which begins with the URL "http://members.xoom.com/". How much damage is caused by that single block? 100,000 separate sites? One Million? More? We don't know, and neither does X-Stop.

Next > >

This document last updated on Thursday September 07 2000.