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The main problem with filtering software is secrecy. When we don't know what sites are being blocked, then the error rate is also secret, so we can't know whether we're being duped. Since we don't know the content of most sites on the web, if a legitimate site is blocked through error or deliberate choice (e.g., blocking Peacefire as porn) we never find out what we're missing -- unless we try to go there with prior knowledge that it's legitimate. And website owners can't know when their sites are wrongly blocked and labeled as pornography or bomb-making instructions.

But filtering software relies on secrecy in a very fundamental way; a filterware company's marketable product, their added value, comes from the quality of their blocking lists. If the lists were freely available, then all filtering companies would go out of business. There would be no incentive to come up with a good list, someone else could just copy it.

I'm sure some people would very much like for this to occur (and a lot of them have posted above). But I don't think, from a public policy perspective, that we're ever going to convince a Congressman to pass a law sending censorware companies out of business when there doesn't seem to be any alternative method of filtering. Parents have a real desire, one that I think is legitimate in a lot of cases, to shield their kids from 'objectionable' material. Right now the only ways to do that are to monitor your child's Internet access all the time or to install filtering software -- and now we're seeing that spread to schools and libraries.

Another option, and one that I think a lot of parents or schools might take, would be to deprive their kids of the Internet entirely and not give them access at home. As far as freedom of information is concerned, I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we fought to promote free access to the few sites that censorware wrongly blocks and in doing so caused a lot of kids to lose their access to the entire wealth of the Internet.

I don't see any easy escape from this, but one possibility would use the open-source model. The reason why we celebrate the use of open-source software is because we believe that software open to public scrutiny will be of higher quality than if it were closed-source. Why don't we apply the same reasoning to blocking software and blocking lists? Lists are currently secret, not for any technical reasons, but because the companies who maintain it have to make money.

Imagine, though, if a non-profit foundation (American Family Association, etc.) maintained an open list and put together a filter that would make use of that list. Anyone could submit sites to the foundation, which would then use real humans to check them before adding them to the list.

Because the profit motive and secrecy would be gone, there would be no incentive for the group to add sites that they knew to be unobjectionable. Also, since the list is openly available, there would be constant attention (from the press, watchdog groups, website owners, etc.) to see whether sites were listed erroneously. If people felt that the list had too many errors or used the wrong categories (for instance, a site might not separate sex education information from pornography), they could start their own competing list, copying and modifying the original one. The open filter list would be unable to hide accidental or deliberate errors, and it could be adapted to make use of any group's list at the parent's request. The result would be a system in which errors were self-correcting and parents had both the knowledge and the freedom of choice to make real decisions about what their children should see.

I see two potential problems with this model that would have to be addressed. The first is that the lists would not be adequately maintained without the profit motive -- it would just cost too much money to employ people to scour the web or read through the submissions for objectionable sites. This may be true, but I have the feeling that some conservative billionaire (or Paul Vixie type) would be happy to endow a foundation to protect kiddies on the Web forever.

Secondly, there's the danger that the list would simply become a 100 MB text file of "Where to Find Porn on the Net." Since it would have to be publicly accessible, there's a good chance people might look for objectionable sites by scrolling through the list. But as long as the categories were reasonably vague, then they're no better for that purpose than a search engine. I can type 'porn' into Google and get as many hits as I want; the list wouldn't make my search any easier.

I don't know whether a project of this type would ever come to pass, but I think that it would be greatly beneficial for the Net as a whole. If an open-source alternative exists, then it would be possible to get the public consensus behind shutting down commercial, secrecy-based filtering sites. If we don't have any alternative, then Peacefire and their supporters are going to be fighting a losing battle.

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http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/charities.cron

I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.

The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and we've all heard about how well filtering software works.

Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.

Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.

Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:

• Setup: Samgoma card, $950
• Setup: Telco install fee, $350
• Reoccur: Telco, $123
• Reoccur: ISP, $150

Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.

I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.

Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.

Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.

Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:

fr16 Link encap:Frame Relay DLCI HWaddr 4096
inet addr:207.149.244.8 P-t-P:207.149.244.1 Mask:255.255.255.224
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4889031 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7655668 errors:136874 dropped:51 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Interrupt:7 Base address:0x360 Memory:c00de000-c00dffff

From here it's just the usual linux routing things.

Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.

This really doesn't suprise me at all, the right wing politicans who suck more funds from education for defense and give tax cuts for the rich seem to be in the same boat as these corporate media goons. It would benift them to dumb down students and education (after all, doesn't corporate media frequently speak out on behalf of the "virtues" of censorship software in schools and libraries?

Call me paranoid a lot but I think this is just a sceme to make us illiterate unknowladgable drones in their business regime. Too bad you didn't get that diploma, but you can always flip burgers or take tickets or sweep floors.

Rember back about 8 years ago when there was a senate committie addressing the issue of gays in the military, and all the senators would have trouble pronoucing the word 'homosexual', as if saying it might make them turn gay or something?... anyway, it would be funny to see them saying "oral sex, anal sex, group sex, etc". Especially if you got into those really obscure fetishes.... But what I would hate is that a bunch of old senators saying dirty words would probably get more news coveradge than the DeCSS case has gotten so far.

Oh yea, no /.er should be without mebership in peacefire

ARGHH, those gosh-darnned republican neo-nazis keep taking our rights away! That's it! It's time for violen-

Oh what? You mean- America actually stood up for justice and/or freedom?? Wow.... what a bizarre feeling it is *not* to get all enraged whenever anything regarding legislation on the net is discussed. Yippie! It's a very weird feeling. I don't think that I have heard anything positive regarding freedom online since sometime before I knew what a computer is. Maybe I just hang out at the Peacefire site too much... Hmmm, darn. I feel kinda silly having wasted all that $$ on the gas for the molitoff cocktails at the riot I was planning.

Oh well, maybe the DeCSS case will turn out bad, because I don't know what I would do if I lived in a world where I couldn't protest against white-wing-fascists :-)

It seems to me that the main problem with filtering software is secrecy. When we don't know what sites are being blocked, then the error rate is also secret, so we can't know whether we're being defrauded as consumers when we buy a filtering product. Since we don't know the content of most sites on the web, if a legitimate site is blocked through error or deliberate choice (e.g., blocking Peacefire as porn) we never find out what we're missing -- unless we try to go there with prior knowledge that it's legitimate. Furthermore, website owners can't know whether they're being defamed or in other ways injured when their sites are wrongly blocked and labeled as pornography or bomb-making instructions.

However, filtering software relies on secrecy in a very fundamental way; CyberPatrol's marketable product, their added value, comes from the quality of their blocking lists. If the lists were freely available, or if we had laws that allowed for the lists to be openly copied -- laws that would protect people like Jansson and Skala -- then all filtering companies would go out of business. There would be no incentive to come up with a good list, because any effort a company put into their list would be lost when someone else made a competing product using the same publicly-accessible list.

I'm sure some people would very much like for this to occur (and a lot of them have posted above). But I don't think, from a public policy perspective, that we're ever going to convince a Congressman to pass a law sending CyberPatrol out of business when there doesn't seem to be any alternative method of filtering. Parents have a real desire, one that I think is legitimate in a lot of cases, to shield their kids from 'objectionable' material. Right now the only ways to do that are to monitor your child's Internet access all the time or to install filtering software.

Another option, and one that I think a lot of parents might take, would be to deprive their kids of the Internet entirely and not give them access at home. As far as freedom of information is concerned, I think we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we fought to promote free access to the few sites that CyberPatrol & Co. wrongly block and in doing so caused a lot of kids to lose their access to the entire wealth of the Internet.

Then how should we control commercial filter programs? It might be possible for an independent certification authority (a government agency?) to verify lists and give them a commercially valuable "stamp of approval," but this approach has its fair share of problems. First, the work would be massively redundant, since it would be checking every site blocked by every blocking product -- it would be far more efficient to combine the verified lists into a single trusted list. Second, the independent agency wouldn't be entirely accountable, since the list would remain secret and its own competence would be indeterminate. If it were private, it could be hijacked by commercial interests, and if it were a government agency, there might be constitutional/political concerns with it labeling certain sites. A certification authority would help, but it would be a second-best solution. The only way I see to escape from these problems would be to make everyone a certification authority -- to follow the open-source model. Lists are currently secret, not for any technical reasons, but because the companies who maintain it have to make money. Imagine, though, if a non-profit foundation (American Family Association, etc.) maintained an open list and got programmers to put together an open-source filter that would make use of that list. Anyone could submit sites to the foundation, which would then use real humans to check them before adding them to the list.

Because the profit motive and secrecy would be gone, there would be no incentive for the group to add sites that they knew to be unobjectionable. Also, since the list is openly available, there would be constant attention (from the press, watchdog groups, website owners, etc.) to see whether sites were listed erroneously. If people felt that the list had too many errors or used the wrong categories (for instance, a site might not separate sex education information from pornography), they could start their own competing list, copying and modifying the original one. The open-source filter software would be unable to hide accidental or deliberate errors, and it could be adapted to make use of any group's list at the parent's request. The result would be a system in which errors were self-correcting and parents had both the knowledge and the freedom of choice to make real decisions about what their children should see.

I see three potential problems with the open-source model that would have to be addressed. The first is that that the lists would not be adequately maintained without the profit motive -- it would just cost too much money to employ people to scour the web or read through the submissions for objectionable sites. This may be true, but I have the feeling that some conservative billionaire would be happy to endow a foundation to protect kiddies on the Web forever. Besides, submissions from the public (or at least from trusted members of the public) would make the job of the list-keepers that much easier, since they would only have to read through submissions, not find stuff on their own. Their work would certainly not exceed that of a certification authority.

Secondly, there's the danger that the list would simply become a 100 MB text file of "Where to Find Porn on the Net." Since it would have to be publicly accessible, there's a good chance people might look for objectionable sites by scrolling through the list. But as long as the categories were reasonably vague (for example, CyberPatrol uses "Extremist / Militant" rather than "pipe bomb," "smoke bomb," and "nuclear bomb") then they're no better for that purpose than a search engine. I can type 'porn' or 'pipe bomb' into Altavista and get as many hits as I want; the list wouldn't make my search any easier.

I don't know whether a project of this type would ever come to pass, but I think that it would be greatly beneficial for the Net as a whole. If an open-source alternative exists, then it would be possible to get the public consensus behind shutting down commercial, secrecy-based filtering sites. In fact, the availability of a free open-source alternative might just drive commercial filters out of business on its own, since the open lists could advertise their accountability and reliability in comparison to commercial, secret lists. If we don't have any alternative, though, then the political will to deal with censorware will never exist, and people like Jansson and Skala are going to be fighting a losing battle.

> So for the 150th time, if the majority of
> people want it that way, what's the big deal?

Because first and foremost, filterware is a ripoff scam. It doesn't block what it is supposed to censor, and it blocks things that no sane person would want to censor. See www.peacefire.com for details. The only beneficiaries of filterware are the sleazy con men who promote and sell it; among them the lying dirtbag with whom jamie was having that public argument. As a taxpayer I would obviously prefer not to be mulcted for software that doesn't work.

Then, even if you could overcome that first fatal objection, even if you could make filter software that would actually work properly, the next question is, "Do we want to rigidly censor the material in public libraries?" By "rigidly" I mean that the degree of censorship that is normal in internet filterware is much higher (much more restrictive) than that which public libraries customarily apply concerning traditional library materials, that is, books.

Finally, you say "if the majority" but it's perfectly clear that "the majority" has neither any knowledge nor any opinion on these issues at all, and in their ignorance they are being shamelessly demagogued and bamboozled by scam artists such as this repellent Kimberley Fraser character jamie describes.

But I'm not even going to address those last two issues any further; those are arguments which only bear consideration after someone makes filterware which actually works the way it should - which may be a technically impossible AI problem anyway.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

If you're coming to the library to do research, then unless you just happen to be researching porn or hate groups, you'll probably enjoy the fact that there's not someone on the computer across from you staring at women in all sorts of unnatural positions.

Hrmm, Lets take a look at some of the popular "hate groups" these various blocking software blocks, shall we?

National Organization for Women
Covenant of the Goddess and The Witches Voice, Wicca is a nationaly recognized religion in the US
Yahoo Search Engine
MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratories
The University of Arizona
Stonewall Inc., gourmet coffees, teas, food and gifts.
...and of course...
Peacefire, A site telling people how to disable this blocking software

The problem with commercial blocking software is the lists of blocked sites are not published, and often contain OVERBLOCKS, Stonewall Inc is blocked under the "Gay Sites" area of Cyberpatrol, but it has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality.

This is the reason we need to keep these "filters" out of our libraries and schools.

-- iCEBaLM