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Another report on SmartFilter by Seth Finkelstein (here was last month's). He's written some software to decrypt the software's blacklist of forbidden sites, and has analyzed what he found. The list of blocked newsgroups is fascinating: sci.archaeology as occult, and comp.org.eff.talk as criminal, for example. He's found "extreme or obscene" sites like hotrails.com ("extreme sports" rollerblading on "naked metal"), gcsextreme.com (custom-built computers for the "extreme gamer," unfortunately at a domain name with both "sex" and "extreme" in it) and extreme-offroad.com (same deal). Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's Web site. Every one of these and many more are blocked as "Extreme," which puts them in the same category as photos of mutilated dead bodies, bizarre hard-core pornography and child pornography.

His discussion of the legal risks of decrypting these blacklists is fascinating too, and (as he likes to say) "a topic in itself." He would like to open up the source to his SmartFilter-decryption tool but feels the legal risk is too high. How sad is that?

Here's Secure Computing's definition of the "extreme" category, and the examples they give ("Pixman's Vault of Porn Pix", "Bizarre & Maximum Perversion").

You can confirm Seth's findings using Secure Computing's own SmartFilterWhere. It asks for your name and phone number; you have my permission to make some up. As of December 7, at 9:45 PM EST, that CGI operates with a Control List updated on December 5 and confirms all of Seth's results that I tried. By the time you read this, they may have quickly fixed all the errors he published, loaded in an up-to-the-minute Control List, and proudly announced that their software is now perfect.

Until the next report.