I think Simba works for SonicWall

Before anybody who has never been to Senegal, or any other developing country, jumps to any conclusions about the country's infrastructure, it wasn't that bad. Sure, none of the cars would pass at the DMV (I could see the road through my taxi floor once, and sometimes had to ask passing pedestrians to open the door for me from the outside), but there are places in the US where that is also the case. A good example is Matinicus Island (Don't know what that is? Buy this book. It's excellent and written by the Island's Electorial Bakerclerksmithmedic).

Anyway, because electricity was scarce, we had a hard time finding Internet, but when we did, it was still better than ALA's. It was also less censored. And I think that’s an important point to make; no disrespect to Senegal intended, but the Internet in rural Senegal is better than the Internet at ALA, which is in Johannesburg. I have been wanting to make this point for a while.

To give you a sense of just how bad ALA’s Internet is, a month after graduation, I am still delighted that I don’t have to imagine the second half of Youtube videos for myself. Fully loaded Youtube videos at ALA were as unattainable as freehand circles. In fact, I now often find myself wrong footed by the speed with which web pages load. A year at ALA accustomed me to doing practical things in between clicking on a link and actually reading it, for instance going to the bathroom, making my bed, or walking to dining hall for a sandwich. Now, the page just appears, and I’m annoyed that I can’t eat something.

But of course, it’s not the speed of the tortoise that counts, it’s the number of places he can visit, and ALA’s Internet certainly restricts the number of places one can visit; the firewall, or "SonicWall", couldn't block better if it were Iker Casillas defending a shoebox. “Jokes/Humor” is a forbidden category.

There are many other banned categories, but I am unconvinced that ALA's firewall and the rest of society are working under the same definitions.

I once had to write a paper on market opportunity in Senegal for bowling alleys (weird, I know), so I researched bowling implementation online. Astoundingly, I found what appeared to be aProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

tep-by-step business plan, only to have it blocked under the heading “Adult/Mature Content”. Just in case someone working for SonicWall is reading this, that label does not normally refer to the meaning of “mature” that is a euphemistic heading for people in their middle ages and above. “Adult/Mature Content” does not mean “webpages to do with old people”. There is therefore no reason to ban me from looking at their favorite activities. And if you are going to do that, there are other activities, such as bridge, hair growth drugs, and Gene Kelly, that are far more specifically mature than bowling.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty funny until I looked for lion drawings online in order to do research for this cartoon (I posted it a while back):

I found one with an enticing thumbnail and I clicked on it. This is a screenshot of what I got:

Whoever programmed these parameters must either be a human with weird tendencies, or a very very conservative lion.