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Our readers from a year ago may remember the series we did examining the attempt to force censorware into Holland's libraries. (Holland, Michigan is the home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, such as it is.) In February, voters rejected that attempt. But to quote Poltergeist II, "they're ba-ack." Thanks to a new Michigan law, all of our libraries have to address the question of minors and the internet -- and blocking software is, to many, the natural solution. I went to the Holland library's open board meeting on Tuesday night; here's what's up.

By the way, if you're wondering why you should care about Holland, Michigan: this is going to happen at your local library -- and other public institutions -- soon. It probably has already happened at your local schools. The Holland area is fairly conservative, so it's been at the forefront, but the issue will work its way around the country (and in fact the world) in due time.

Before I describe what happened at the board meeting Tuesday evening, I should put the meeting itself into context.

A small but vocal minority has been pushing for library filters since late last year. At that time, the effort was begun by the American Family Association, with the Family Research Council and a local group stepping in to do the heavy lifting.

The FRC is still playing the dominant role. In fact, Tuesday night, the AFA representative actively distanced the organization from the issue, probably because it has earned its reputation as an extremist group.

Since February, the push has been for communication with the library board: "community input" has been big. Since all board meetings legally must be open to the public anyway, it's never been entirely clear to me what the problem was. The board did form a committee, which met on several occasions with filtering supporters -- the few who showed up -- and educated themselves about their options.

But the pro-filter crowd and the media have been attacking the library for not doing more to engage the community in dialogue. In one recent headline, the city's Mayor, formerly anti-filter, was described as "ripping [the library board's lack of] public input." Ouch.

In fact, the FRC representative Tuesday night apologized at length for the pressure tactics -- even though, in most of the media reports I've seen, her comments were relatively mild.

Just a week ago, she was quoted as saying she:

"...doesn't think a Sept. 12 forum will be sufficient to solicit public input, with attendance limited to 200 people and less than two hours set aside for public comment.

"She said those restrictions will limit the amount of input the board can receive."

That's been the concern all these months; that's what's been keeping the library board awake worrying. Every board meeting has been completely open to the public, and the only issue was how many people the fire marshal would allow in, and how long the community would be allowed to outpour its concerns.

In fact, when the meeting started -- the one and only meeting that's been publicized as a forum for the airing of Holland's views -- fewer than 45 people showed.

Some more trickled in, some trickled back out later after less than two hours of public comment. A total of just over 60 people showed up, about half of whom spoke (excluding the boardmembers and the media, including the toddlers, not that the toddlers did much of the speaking).

The Family Research Council's representative saved her statements for late in the meeting, telling her group's supporters how important it was that they came out, and to hang in there because they were only at the halfway point. Her closing comments were encouragement to those supporters: "we're getting closer and closer, glory God, we will not quit until we get this thing right ... c'mon you people, there's two more hours, get up here and talk for yourselves."

As if that was the signal to wind things down, only a few more people stood to speak. There was a period of questions, which took a while because the lawyer fielded most of them, and then the meeting adjourned almost an hour ahead of schedule.

Three thousand people in the Holland area get the FRC's newsletters; roughly 1% bothered to come.

Why the lack of interest?

Part of the reason, to be sure, is that Holland is sick of the issue; they went through a long campaign early this year.

But another part is that blocking software is not nearly as popular as the vocal minority would have us believe. An AP article "Most parents shun net filters" suggests that just one parent in three uses censorware.

And even that seems large, to some. The latest issue of the American Family Association Journal has an article titled "Low percentage of Christians using Internet filtering shows ignorance of the dangers." They claim that "Seven out of 10 Christians have Internet access -- but only one out of 10 has filtered Internet access."

(Keep in mind, too, that when the AFA says "Christians," they mean conservative Christians, presumably more likely to use censorware.)

Parents simply have better choices when it comes to protecting their children. Education and communication are the most effective tools (the only effective ones, I would argue, in many cases). And they're cheaper too: at least, a library in Hudsonville, near Holland, recently spent $20,000 on card-based censorware (not including maintenance fees) for four computers. The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, just voted to spend $85,000.

And it takes a sneaky kid about ten seconds to completely bypass the $20,000 system. I know; I did it myself, and spent a while browsing a completely unfiltered internet.

But it's political pressure that installs such systems, not necessarily actual demand. Holland's library has taken a great deal of heat for not holding meetings which only a tiny fraction of the community seems interested in. Of course it's easy to use hindsight, but it's my guess that holding the meetings earlier and more often would have taken the lid off the child-size pressure cooker; everyone would have felt better. That's something to consider for the next community faced with this issue.

And speaking of demand, only about 100 patrons at Hudsonville have signed up for the internet cards. The system was installed under pressure from local conservative organizations; others, like that in Grand Rapids, will be installed thanks to a new Michigan law.

That law, Public Act 212, takes effect in our fair state on October1 and in effect, according to the Holland library's lawyer, makes it illegal for minors to use the internet. It demands that terminals for those 17 and under be "restricted from receiving" material "harmful to minors" (that's the underage equivalent of illegal obscenity). No software can guarantee such a restriction, of course, unless it executes the shutdown command.

In fact, it was recommended that the adults' terminals be not only shielded for privacy, but placed so that no minor might walk by and catch a glimpse of something harmful.

So the line seems pretty clearly drawn. How it will play out in reality remains to be seen.

You've probably figured out by now that I'm opposed to blocking software. Before the end of the month, I'll look at what alternatives a library might adopt -- too late for Michigan libraries, but perhaps not too late for yours. There are many choices to be made between the simplistic extremes of "filters" and "nofilters," some of which protect our right to free expression more than others.

Unfortunately, you won't see such alternatives in the traditional media. When filter supporter Tish Fackler pulled out her air filters, she gave a little laugh and said "looks like I'm going to be on TV tonight." Then she held up her meaningless props and delivered the soundbite that was on TV that night. I'll try to keep it a little more real than that.

At 11:30 AM PDT today, Bennett Haselton of Peacefire is scheduled to begin speaking to the COPA Commission. The occasion is their third and final hearing on the subject of blocking software, aka censorware. Our highly hilarious report on the second hearing may still be fresh in your memory; this time around, Bennett takes on the products FamilyClick, CyberSentinel, and SurfWatch.

The reports themselves make for the most interesting reading; I'll just summarize them here:

FamilyClick

The following sites were blocked on the "18 or older" setting, in other words, the software thinks they were too violent, pornographic, hateful, etc. to be seen even by adults:

• AIDS Day 1997: China Responds to AIDS;
• Diccionario del VIH/SIDA (a dictionary of AIDS-related terms, in Spanish);
• Camp Sussex (a summer camp for low-income children);
• Triangles and Tribulations, an essay on the persecution of gay men and woman in Nazi Germany;
• "Homosexuality: Fact and Fiction", from the Christian Research Journal;
• genealogy of Alice Ficken (her last name means "fuck" in German).

and sodomy laws, pro-family protests of pornography, a defense of Wicca, etc.

Cyber Sentinel

The software's PR blurb says: "At the core of the technology is an advanced recognition engine developed by Security Software Systems engineers (patent pending). This proprietary engine is very fast, very low overhead, and is very accurate."

Blocked sites include:

• CNN.com homepage (because of the story headline "Naples museum exposes public to ancient erotica");
• searches for the term "COPA" on CNet, Wired, Time, and USAToday (because each results page had at least one filthy headline, such as "Back to court for Net porn law");
• The American Family Association (the right-wing group pushing for censorware in libraries and schools, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
• biographies of COPA Commission members Stephen Balkam and Donna Rice Hughes - because they both graduated "magna cum laude" (think about it);
• and, my favorite, the list of papers presented at the COPA Commission!

SurfWatch

This was a more interesting test; Peacefire took a sampling of 1,000 domains from the beginning of the .com zone file, and tested which ones that SurfWatch blocked. (Yours truly wrote the one-liner perl script to find sites that respond to ping; for that, Bennett almost named me co-author before I talked him down from his caffeine high.)

SurfWatch claims that it "adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find."

Of the 147 domains blocked, most (96) were clearly "under construction" and were ignored for the test. Of the remaining 51 blocked domains, 42 of them, or 82%, were erroneous blocks.

The 42 supposedly pornographic sites include:

• A-1 Dog Grooming and Kennels;
• American Builders;
• Waterbeds Online;
• A-1 Diamond Limousine;
• Poxy Coat;
• A-Antiques.com.

SurfWatch, for the record, is the software that the American Family Association (see above) and Family Research Council tried to force the Geek Compound's local library to install, earlier this year.

The mandatory library filtering ballot in Holland, Mich., home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, has been defeated. With heavy voter turnout of 41% (compared to 12% in 1996), the proposal was rejected by a pretty wide margin: 55% to 45%. The Holland library will remain unfiltered - or, more accurately, will now have the right to make up its own mind about whether blocking software is appropriate. See the local press coverage (or national or international), or read on for more.

I think it was my friend Lizard on the fight-censorship mailing list who said: "You can't compromise with book-burners. When someone asks you to burn 1,000 books, you cannot agree to burn only 500." He's exactly right. Any middle ground is a step backwards, and hard to recover.

It's important to keep in mind how tough the battle was. Holland was chosen to be a testbed by national groups like the American Family Association and Family Research Council, and they spent a lot of money. Why? Because the AFA and FRC stood to make a lot of money by using Holland as an example for nationwide campaigning. They have been hyping up this ballot as the first big step in a nationwide campaign.

And they figured Holland would be a slam-dunk. It's one of the most conservative communities in American. And the measure was well-timed: the ballot was on the same night as the Republican primary. (Michigan is not a closed primary, though, and many Democrats did vote.)

Some Slashdot posters have commented that I've seemed pessimistic in my reports on the campaign. They've been right. I couldn't read the city's mood very well, not being a native, and based on the coverage and talks I'd seen, I didn't think the chances were very good.

While the AFA and FRC together contributed over $40,000, the anti-filter side raised - locally - $2,000.

The AFA sponsored a "pushpoll," in which a Florida firm made phone calls to hundreds of likely voters, asking them "questions" designed to leave the impression that the library is inviting to pedophiles. Local anti-filter volunteers went door-to-door.

The pro-filter organizations ran radio, newspaper, and cable TV advertisements, they sent out at least three direct mailings, and they spent thousands on slick presentations to local groups.

And when it came down to the vote, they lost.

This isn't the end, though. It's just the beginning. The heads of the various pro-filtering groups are all hinting that the battle is not over. Presumably that means it will become another ballot issue, perhaps later this year, perhaps next year. And it will certainly be happening elsewhere in America at the same time. (Write me when it gets to your community.)

In some cases, the unaccountable censorship of secretive blocking software will be turned down at the voting booth. I'm guessing that, in the next five years, we'll see a definitive statement on the relevance of the First Amendment, one way or the other, in the courts.

But for now ... well, I'll close by congratulating everyone in Holland who worked to defeat this measure, and by quoting from one of the direct mailings funded by the AFA. You'll have to imagine this text as it appears, in 30-point headlines, with yellow highlights:

"America's watching, Holland. The debate over Internet filters on library computers is a national issue. Now, the focus is on Holland, Michigan.

"Tuesday, February 22nd, Holland citizens will decide the first ballot vote on filtering in the nation. How we vote will affect this issue nationwide.

"On February 22, send a clear message to America. Tell America we must protect our children from Internet pornography and drugs."

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).

Last month I shared with you some news about the pressure to install blocking software on the Holland library's Internet terminals. I promised to dive into the trenches of the struggle, and report occasionally to Slashdot on what was happening. There's been a lot to report, but more to do. Over the next two weeks I'll catch you up on what's been happening. Today, a peek into the heart of the matter: an open letter to the local Family Research Council, on the flaws of their favorite software. Click for more.

Last Wednesday, the library board opened up its auditorium for two and a half hours for three presentations on blocking software. The local branch of the FRC went first and put SurfWatch through its paces. They showed an unfiltered Internet on the left, SurfWatch on the right, and demonstrated how a search on "breast cancer" was successfully not blocked. Then they put child pornography on the wall of the library auditorium, demonstrating what SurfWatch would block.

For my presentation, I had brought a computer, but asked them if they would mind my demonstrating the software's flaws on their own laptop, to show I had not misconfigured anything. They agreed.

I spent much of my presentation talking about the size of the Internet and why most blocking was done by robots. Then I spent several minutes just listing some of the sites found blocked in some of our earlier studies at the Censorware Project.

Then I turned to the keyboard to illustrate some bad blocks. I ran out of time before getting to most of them. Some I did show but so quickly that many of those watching may not have realized what was going on.

Afterwards, Kimberley Fraser, who gave the Family Research Council presentation, asked me about some of what I'd said. I ended up asking her if I could respond to her in the form of an open letter. She agreed.

Below is that letter.

Dear Ms. Fraser,

As you know, at Herrick District Library last Wednesday night, your group gave a demonstration of SurfWatch's successes and then I showed some of its failures. I went through these failures rather quickly and didn't give the audience much of a chance to see the details of what I was doing.

You asked afterwards if I could provide verification of some of these points of failure, and I am delighted to do so.

First of all, regarding the colossal list of wrongly-blocked sites that I spent so much of my presentation reading, please consult our Web site. These wrong blocks were found in our reports on five other popular blocking packages: X-Stop, Cyber Patrol, WebSENSE, X-Stop again, SmartFilter, and Bess. You will find these reports at http://censorware.org/reports/.

There was some confusion in the question-and-answer period about whether these wrongly-blocked sites were also blocked by SurfWatch. Surely not all, and I have no reason to believe very many of them, are still blocked by SurfWatch or any other software. As I explained, when wrong blocks are publicized, they are usually unblocked quickly to minimize bad press.

Now, regarding the errors of SurfWatch itself. Note that some of its past errors are cataloged at http://peacefire.org/censorware/SurfWatch/. I am not sure whether I found time to describe those erroneous blocks or not.

In any case, here is information that hadn't been reported before. The following are all sites which I had prepared for Wednesday night, not all of which I was able to demonstrate. Please consult with your technical staff and confirm that each of these URLs and searches is wrongly blocked using the same category ("Sex") that you use in your tests and that you would recommend for public libraries.

http://www.gaydaze.com/sstory/curfantasy.html
"Daisies for my Wife," by Harold Roppers, a science fiction short story.

http://censorware.org/essays/sex_lies_jt.html
"Sex, Lies, and Censorware," an essay by my colleague Jim Tyre that is critical of SurfWatch.

http://intertain.com/store/browse.html
The bookstore at Intertain.com. Starting from that Web page, click "Browse," then "Love, Sex and Marriage." All categories of books on that page, 600 books total, are blocked, including books on domestic violence, natural childbirth, and African-American families.

http://www.wap.org/ifaq/sex/marriage.html
"Marriage." A humorous look at marriage through the eyes of children.

http://netdetours.com/archive/sex.html
"Sex and Politics: A historical look at affairs of state." A comparison of the Clinton sex scandal to scandals of other historical figures.

http://www.wwf.org/galapagos/booby.htm
The World Wildlife Foundation maintains information about the animals found on the Galapagos islands. SurfWatch refuses to let us read about the Blue-Footed Booby.

Searches on the following phrases are blocked, on (almost) any search engine:

safe oral sex
testicle cancer
sexually abstain
abstain from sex
sexual abstinence
no sex
Sex, Laws and Cyberspace (book title)
Smart Sex (book title, safe sex guide)
Voyeurism in the French Novel (book title)
Save Sex (title of both book and FRC poster campaign)

http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/013000tv-voyeurism.html
"Television's New Voyeurism Pictures Real-Life Intimacy." The New York Times looks at shows like "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire." (In the question-and-answer period, one gentleman suggested that this page was blocked for a suggestive photo that appeared in the print edition of the Times. Please confirm that the Web page has no photo.)

http://www.rainbow.ch/chribru/chris/odonnell.htm
A Chris O'Donnell fan page.

http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Spa/6834/
"Alternative Healing Resources: A Reference Guide for Balancing Your Mind, Body, and Spirit."

http://www.lesbigay.com/equal_rights/equality.html
"The Equality Project: Dedicated to promoting education and acceptance of all genders, sexualities, races, and religions."

http://www.magiccarpet.com/%7ecgrafe/diamondgallery/
"Diamond Gallery Sports Cards." Baseball and football cards for sale or trade.

http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Crime/Crimes/Sex_Crimes/Child_Pornography/
Four of the thirteen anti-child pornography sites listed on Yahoo are blocked. "All Against Child Pornography," "Anti Pedophile Network", "Adult Sites Against Child Pornography," and "Defence for Children International."

http://cnn.com/starr.report/
The Starr Report, in every place it appears on the Internet (this URL is just one example).

http://afa.net/Pornography/pornography.html
And finally, the American Family Association, which launched the pro-blocking-software initiative in Holland, is blocked.

I believe your technical staff will confirm what I have found to be true: that all of these are blocked as pornography by your software. Please let me know what your team says. Thank you.

Jamie McCarthy
jamie@slashdot.org