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Rob Smith, director of operations at Hustler Video Group says he hopes that market penetration of 3D TVs in the home is high enough that 'by the fourth quarter of this year it will be at the point where we can justify doing a 3D product.

WTF kind of retard is Rob Smith?! Even your average Slashdot user knows that penetration is measured in terms of depth, not height. The irony of it is that Rob Smith has probably had more pussy than the entire Slashdot userbase put together. *sigh*

Fuck, let's slashdot Hustler!

• Dragon Magazine
• Linux Magazine Freedom
• Ché
• PC Gameplay
• Hustler

the magazines i read regulary in austria (schwarzenegger) are c't, iX and the online-mag telepolis. on telepolis there're english articles too and an interessting column named WTC Conspiracy, with the first article about 9/11 posted on 9/13! other good literature is: linux magazine, freeX and of course SPIEGEL. on the web good places are golem, ORF, n-tv. unfortunately are the english magazines quite expensive (wired or hustler, both over EUR 10|-!). grtngs

Disclosure: I am an employee of Secure Computing Corporation, the makers of SmartFilter. The opinions in this letter may not represent the views of my employer, but I'm not lying either.


You are right when you say that filtering is done broadly. For instance, even though the content on the hundreds of pages at hustler.com changes all the time, the entire site is blocked in the sex category without reviewing its content regularly. However, we do frequently review sites that are already listed, usually based on customer feedback. Mormon.com was recently blocked.. because it used to be a sex site, until the Mormon church purchased it and called us up to have the listing changed (not deleted though, it's now in our politics and religion category -- something which employers may decide not to allow during business hours).

But you are incorrect when you state that the censoring is done by computer. We have a staff of humans who review most of the sites that are blocked, placing them in 27 different categories including sex -- no computer program we know of is capable of doing this. We also have an AI which catches only the most obvious porno sites, acting in an extremely conservative manner (basically, knowing how dumb it is and leaving tough decisions up to humans). Such an AI would not cause this comments page to be listed (even though you said fuck, huh huhuh...) because it doesn't "look like" a sex site (that shouldn't violate my NDA :) ) We tested it for months and as soon as it makes just ONE bad call, we'll take it offline and make it more conservative. So far all the miscategorizations have been by humans, but nobody's perfect.

Slashdot -- because of its computer and Internet related content and up to the minute industry news -- is exempt from being blocked by SmartFilter according to our guidelines, unless the local sysadmins add it themselves. So are almost all ISP's (though sections of the sites may be blocked).

Some of our competitors use other methods to list sites, including word searches and links to naughty sites. We may use methods like these to get lists of URLs, but we don't enter those into our product without checking them extensively.

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

I really don't understand why this is such a Bad Thing. The bill isn't saying that you can't look at porn; it just says that I don't have to pay for you to look at porn.

Libraries already don't carry Hustler. Does any other than the most close-minded ACLU types really feel that that's censorship? No. Everyone of legal age is still welcome to go down to the corner Quickie Mart and buy a copy, albeit without the assistance of a subsidy from my taxes.

In think it's too over-reactive to think that SlashDot would be censored. I don't recall any nudie pics or violent content (if you're willing to overlook Linux vs. BSD, that is).

Censoring films is one thing, I don't agree with it, but its feasible. There's a finite number of movies produced that need to be examined and a whole industry that can just be disallowed based on the genre (the hardcore porn genre, or maybe even soft core, I have no idea what the Australian censorship board views as offensive)

Censoring web sites is pretty close to impossible. There are the obvious ones, I would expect that Hustler and any page attached to that domain would be blocked for instance. What about individual pages though? I can set up a page on a free web server such as Tripod or GeoCities with objectionable content. GeoCities would eventually yank it, but Tripod seems to not care. Personal web pages with material they would find offensive probably numbers in the millions. For an ISP to selectively block these pages isn't feasible, so their only choice would be to block sites that have one or more user pages with objectionable material. I.e. block GeoCities, Tripod, AOL and a large number of other providers. Great, except for the small fraction of objectionable pages on these servers there is a large number of non-objectional pages. A few of these even have useful material.

Basically the end result would be that a site such as slashdot could be censored from all Australian internet users if it ever were to fail Australia's movie screening process. Oh yeah, there's a small box on slashdot which contains the latest image from JenniCam as well as links to Rotten.com and so on.