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Domain: censorware.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to censorware.org.

Comments · 115

  1. Buuuuuut...... by elfbabe · · Score: 1 · on Interview: Anti-Censorware Activists Answer
    ...Acme Internet Filtering's software may be blocking arbitrary sites with which it has qualms; say, for instance, the owner of Acme hates feminism, so all feminist sites are blocked. If the parent's agree with this, that's their prerogative. If not, though, they're free to switch to another company's filtering product that blocks sites that they feel should be blocked or allows more custimization and control over what gets blocked.

    Unfortunately for parents who like feminism but are against sadomasochistic pr0n, censorware companies DON'T release their lists of blocked sites. And, as has been proved by the studies posted at Censorware.org, unblocking certain categories won't help either because sites are frequently miscategorized.

    Marissa

  2. Index of Prohibited Web Pages by Seth+Finkelstein · · Score: 2 · on Congress, Vatican Moving Toward Censorware
    Often when people ask me to describe my position on censorware, I compare it specifically to the Catholic Church's Prohibited Index. I even wrote an essay Comstock in the '90, or the Index of Prohibited Web Books .

    Another good article along these lines is the humor (so far) piece Esther Dyson announces ratings partnership with Vatican (collected as part of a page I had of Freedom of Expression Satire and Humor)

    Oh well, I started talking about this stuff in 1995 , and much of what I said is coming true. Nowadays I just console myself about the cocktail-party way of doing things.

    - The Boston Lunatic

  3. Don't support W3C by jellicle · · Score: 1 · on Weaving The Web

    Fair enough. Supporting the Web Consortium is a worthy idea; it's hard to believe all but a handful of those reading this review on Slashdot would disagree.

    I hope a lot of people will disagree. The World Wide Web Consortium, despite its grandiose name, is nothing but an industry group of the largest, most powerful internet companies, which does its utmost to make all decisions and collaboration completely opaque to the internet community. If there is anyone in the whole world who least needs "support", it is IBM, AT&T, MCI/Worldcom, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, etc. etc.

    Berners-Lee's primary fear is "Balkanization"; his primary solution to that is PICS, which promises to censor the internet to such an extent that no one will be offended by any part of it (and thus it can all stay together in one big interconnected lump). This is, of course, total crap: network effects make being connected to the primary Internet so much more useful than only having a slice of it that people with proprietary networks (AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, lots and lots of others) have fallen over themselves rushing to connect - and now they are essentially all connected, in one fashion or another, and I predict that it will never split - it's simply too valuable to be interoperable with the other 99% of the Internet to split off. Berners-Lee's "fear" is nothing but a red herring.

    Berners-Lee's other work primarily includes those protocols which are deemed to be most profitable to the aforementioned internet giants. The P3P protocol, for example, is a standard for forcing all web visitors to disclose their name, SSN and checking account number to every website they visit - imagine the profits! W3C has long passed out of the time when it was useful to web development. Today, it's a closed group of industry execs who meet to find ways to make the WWW more profitable, not more useful or more informative or better. They're responsible for the most dangerous threat to free speech, PICS, and the most dangerous threat to privacy, P3P. Why in the world would anyone want to support them?

    --
    Michael Sims

  4. IT IS HACKED!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Passing Porn, Banning the Bible

    See it at http://www.censorware.org/press /press_07-28-99.html! The full text is here (in case that they fix it): PASSING PORN, BANNING THE BIBLE: N2H2'S BESS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS The Censorware Project Issues A Report on a Dangerous Product Popular in Schools FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Jamie McCarthy Phone: 616-381-4893 Email: cwp@censorware.org New York, New York, July 28, 1999. The Censorware Project , an activist group which opposes the use of blocking software in schools and libraries, today released its new report, "Passing Porn, Banning the Bible: N2H2's Bess in Public Schools", a study of the Bess Internet blocking software from N2H2 Inc., a company planning to go public later this week. Bess, a network-based product, is used in approximately 8,000 schools, affecting more than 7.3 million students, according to documents filed by N2H2 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We were not surprised to determine that the product lets through substantial amounts of hard core pornography," said Jamie McCarthy, a software developer who is a founding member of the group. "Our report contains links to porn sites, most of which have obvious, sex-related names and URL's, which were not blocked by Bess." "The Net is essentially unfilterable," McCarthy added. "Recent statistics indicate that there are about eight hundred million pages on the Web, a number which grows by leaps and bounds every week. N2H2 claims that Bess blocks eight million of them, a small fraction. Anyone who claims that censorware is a substitute for parental supervision is selling you a bill of goods. But N2H2, which stands to benefit greatly if Congress passes Senator McCain's S.97 e-rate legislation, is the first company to seek a public offering based on these kinds of claims." The group also found a substantial number of innocuous sites blocked by the software. James Tyre, a Pasadena, California attorney who is also a founding member of the group, said, "These included a version of the Bible compiled by Thomas Jefferson, a site on Darwin and evolution, an issue of Redbook Magazine, and sites dealing with issues as diverse as Serbia, baseball, psychiatry and celibacy." One of the blocked sites identified by the group is Friends of Lulu, , which promotes involvement of girls and women in the comic book industry. "Friends of Lulu is a national nonprofit organization devoted to getting more women and girls involved in reading and producing comic books and graphic novels...Our organization promotes the use of comics as an educational medium (especially for literacy) and as a literary and an entertainment medium. Why anyone would want to block access to our site is baffling to me," said Jackie Estrada, President of the Friends of Lulu, which maintains the site. The report also examines N2H2's Searchopolis search engine, which it promotes as a safe tool for use in schools. "The search simply ignores words it doesn't like," McCarthy said. "For example, a search on 'cancer' returns 692,742 hits. But a search on 'testicle cancer' returns...exactly the same 692,742 hits! N2H2 ignores any body parts they think are naughty. How educational is that?" The group, founded in 1997, has previously issued reports on the CyberPatrol, Smartfilter, X-Stop and Websense products. Its website is located at http://censorware.org.

  5. Re:of note by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 2 · on Passing Porn, Banning the Bible
    "I wonder if they get paid for product placement."

    You joke, but some censors have seriously accused us of shilling for the porn industry. We've got a really sarcastic and informative response to that, which you could read in our Admin section if it weren't totally slashdotted at the moment. Oh well.

    Jamie McCarthy

  6. CyberPatrol "issues" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Ask Slashdot: Cyber Patrol Censorship?
    Some stuff I thought that people should know about CyberPatrol and censor-ware in general:

    CyberPatrol is bad. Not only because it is fascist-ware, but also because it is not done right. They could block just a certain part of a web site, but they don't want to. It is easier for them to just block a whole domain, and that way, it's more likely that they'll be able to manipulate ISPs and such into kicking off users who express their rights.

    Secondly, CyberPatrol is funded by (a) Christian group(s).

    Want to know how fucking effective it is? On a CyberPatrol-ed computer, I could go to go to godhatesfags.com, but not safersex.org. Hmm... (Oh wait, it is effective, if you're a white Christian male American conservative...)

    I understand that this isn't really directly related or shtuff to the guys posting... Check out censorware.org, which is a little outdated/sparse, but still useful. And the EFF, of course. The ACLU has a thing on censorware in public libraries and stuff, too.

    "Censorship causes blindness: READ"

  7. Censorware.Org by gwachob · · Score: 1 · on Ask Slashdot: Cyber Patrol Censorship?

    Please see www.censorware.org

    There are some legal and political challenges being mounted to the proliferation of 'censorware'.

    Ironically, this site is blocked by some censorware itself, so you may want to try:

    208.249.126.162

    -or-

    3506011810

  8. Re:How to access block sites?? peacefire.org by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 1 · on Return of The Onion
    Your employer's censorware probably also blocks the Anonymizer (which someone else suggested).

    To really get around it, you'll want to find out which product you're up against, and then visit PeaceFire. They have instructions to get around a variety of different products, possibly including yours.

    Jamie McCarthy

  9. Re:Slashdot WILL be censored by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 1 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    As filtering software becomes more mainstream (the kind of thing that happens when more libraries are required to use it) it won't be controlled by a right-wing fringe. The classic abuses people are forever using to illustrate the flaws in the filtering software will fade away.

    The majority of the flaws we've found at censorware.org are errors related to how poorly computers parse natural language. The standard example is that "breast cancer" and "chicken breast" considered smut until a special case is made for them.

    Right-wing biases show up also, it is true, but the main source of the problem is that the miraculous breakthrough in A.I. just hasn't happened yet.

    Jamie McCarthy

  10. Slashdot WILL be censored by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 3 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    [I] think it's too over-reactive to think that SlashDot would be censored. I don't recall any nudie pics...

    You're joking, right?

    The censoring will be done by computer (because no humans can read the 1,000,000+ URLs added to the web every day). And it will be done broadly (because no human or computer can visit a site ten times a day to review what has changed).

    Cyber Patrol, the most popular censorware program and widely regarded as one of the best, decided to block over 50 ISPs in their entirety. The whole domains. Gone. Often because of a few naughty words - or because of links to naughty sites - or sometimes not even for any reason we could figure out.

    Slashdot does not have a naughty-words filter, so I can post the word "fuck" as much as I want. And it allows links to naughty sites, such as your link to Hustler. So slashdot.org will surely be blocked, in its entirety, by any censorware program that discovers it.

    Jamie McCarthy

  11. Re:How can they do this? by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 1 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    I'm only half-remembering, but wasn't there litigation in Viriginia that basically forbid a Library from using filtering software?

    You're thinking of Loudoun Country, Virginia, and your memory is correct. The most complete and readable history of the suit is at http://censorware.org/legal/loudoun/.

    "We were beaten like a rented mule in this lawsuit"
    - Loudoun Trustee Bob Twigg

    Jamie McCarthy

  12. May or may not be struck down by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 1 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    The standards for Constitutionality are much looser when the feds tie their restrictions to funding, rather than applying them outright. Since libraries will only have to install censorware if they take the money, this amendment to the bill may well be found Constitutional.

    If the decision in Loudoun County can be taken as an indication, then yes, library filtering is grossly unconstitutional. But don't get complacent. Loudoun was just the first battle; the war isn't over.

    More information on censorware is at censorware.org.

    Jamie McCarthy

  13. May or may not be struck down by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 1 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    The standards for Constitutionality are much looser when the feds tie their restrictions to funding, rather than applying them outright. Since libraries will only have to install censorware if they take the money, this amendment to the bill may well be found Constitutional.

    If the decision in Loudoun County can be taken as an indication, then yes, library filtering is grossly unconstitutional. But don't get complacent. Loudoun was just the first battle; the war isn't over.

    More information on censorware is at censorware.org.

    Jamie McCarthy

  14. Franks-Pickering amendment a terrible idea by jamiemccarthy · · Score: 1 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    The Franks-Pickering amendment that requires mandatory filtering for schools and libraries has already been passed and thus is now incorporated into the Juvenile Justice Bill.

    That bill will (almost certainly) be passed by the House within the week. It then gets shot back to the Senate, which has already passed a similar form; they too will have to vote on the modified bill.

    There are numerous other amendments that make this bill a bad idea. Children as young as 13 will be tried as adults. Judeo-Christianity's Ten Commandments will be posted in public schools (though apparently Buddhism's Four Noble Truths are still unwelcome).

    But the worst part of it will be the censorship of every federally-funded school and library across the nation. To be precise, we will be turning over responsibility for that censorship to unaccountable third-party software companies who use computers to scan for naughty keywords. (Information on this shoddy and biased software is available at censorware.org.) Third-party censorship is the worst threat that the net will face in coming years, because everyone thinks computers can magically determine what's porn.

    Don't get complacent and think it will be overturned. This bill may well be Constitutional because it is tied to federal funds. Find your representatives, find out how they've voted, and call them at (202) 225-3121.

    More info on the bill is at the ACLU.

    Jamie McCarthy

  15. Some recommended reading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on House Might Mandate Net filtering in Libraries
    Here are some links to check out:

    These sites present cases that the problem with censoring software isn't that they block porno sites, but that that they have a tendency to be overbroad and block lots of non-porno sites, for a variety of reasons.