Slashdot Mirror

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the site www.peacefire.org It covers many web censorship issues throughout the world(think NetNanny and The great Firewall of China).

Interestingly enough, one of the first things seen on the site, is a method to circumvent all these filter programs, and firewalls. This attempt to block sites by BT, is pointless. If pedophiles want to look at kiddie porn, they can just set up a proxy in a different country. These people already goto great lengths to look at the sites, and this isn't going to stop them.

As others have pointed out, it's only a matter of time before people start advocating that other sites be banned, and eventually, these other sites will be. Unfortunately, the choice of what shoudl be blocked and what shouldn't be is ultimately subjective. I have no issues with BT blocking kiddie porn because it's pretty disgusting. But what's the point? So everyone can feel better about themselves, cause we're stopping children from being exploited? That's laughable. This is a short-sighted, and fairly ineffective solution to a serious problem. The kids will still have been exploited; just that we won't see it. See no evil, Speak no evil.

Meanwhile, it may also lead to other sites being blocked that certain people find offensive. In America there are alot of sites I could see being blocked, just cause people don't agree with them. Besides breast-cancer sites(which have already been blocked), gun sites have been blocked. I don't like guns, but I do like free speech. What if ISP's started blocking marijuana cultivation sites, or sites that gave tutorials for hacking your tivo or xbox? All these actions are technically illegal to perform, but the info is still covered under free speech. It's a subjective choice, that I don't trust anyone to make.

- fozz

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

The way that censorware works is that it blocks IP's, not domains. As a result, other sites hosted on the same IP as a site with undesirable content as defined by some censorware's black list are also blocked. This obviously has many serious problems -- the best writeup on the myriad issues with censorware is at Peacefire.

--Paul

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

Well, I find that being able to outsmart one's parents definitely provides a measure of privacy. Here's a few steps you can follow at home, kids (don't forget NOT to ask Mom and Dad's permission):

1. If you have your own computer, install Linux. If your parents have ties to the NSA, better make that OpenBSD instead. The fact is that, unless one of your parents has a beer gut, wears t-shirts with slacks, and hasn't groomed their beard in a couple of decades, they don't know how to use UNIX. You could leave it logged in as root all the time, and they probably wouldn't know what the hell was going on (not that I'm suggesting you do that. Use strong passwords!).

2. Encrypt your data. You can do this on your own machine or the family one, doesn't matter. GPG is available for Windows, Mac, and loads of Unices. It's also a simple, unobtrusive command-line tool that you can use to pretty well scramble anything.

3. Hide your files. On UNIX machines where you have root, chown them to root, then put them in a directory that only root can read (su to retrieve them). If you don't have root on a UNIX box, at least give them the standard '.' prefix. In windows, I recommend tacking on a ".sys" extension and hiding them somewhere in the C:\WINDOWS tree. As far as Macs go, just use the ol' unix '.' trick, and Finder will be none the wiser (I think, I don't have a Mac to test this on).

4. Browse anonymously. Back when anonymizer was free, it was a great solution. Nowadays, you'll probably need a friend to set up a server in a safe, uncensored environment. I recommend school buddies with apathetic/permissive/hippie/workaholic parents, as this lessens the likelyhood that you'll run into trouble. A dedicated *nix server with a simple redirector CGI would be nice, but for all the legions of windows users out there, this would appear to be an excellent option.

5. Cover your tracks. Clear browser history. On Windows, clear the list of recently accessed documents. If you have root on a UNIX box, flush the logs.

6. Encrypt transfers. Enigmail for mozilla and the encryption plugin for gaim are your friends.

7. Make your data look innocuous. Chatting with some friends on IM? Why not chat in Arabic (if you're on an unecrypted connection, be aware that this method reduces the possibility for parental-snooping, but increases the likelyhood of unconstitutional racial profiling. You've been warned). If you don't have the time or inclination to learn a foreign language, at least learn ROT-13. ROT-13 is so simple that, after a few weeks of practice, the overhead for conversing in it online gets to be pretty low. Keep in mind that it's by no means secure, but it prevents parents from catching naughty words with their peripheral vision. If your friends aren't as "safety-conscious" as you, you can probably write a quick script to do ROT-13 on the fly to incoming messages. Learning to do RSA in your head would be truly impressive (I can do it with small keys with pen and paper, but nothing's stopping you short of the computational limit of the human brain)

The moral of this story is that clever children can cheat their way out of a lot of parental and societal rules. When I was living at home, I used some of the methods above to keep certain data safe (e.g. IMs with my girlfriend), but curiously, I didn't use it to browse porn and the like. The reason? My parents didn't constantly snoop to make sure I wasn't breaking the rules, they just raised me with the conviction that sexual intimacy is a beautiful thing between two people, and that commercial exploitation cheapens that, and they trusted me to make the right choices when they weren't around. If you never give your kids a chance to make bad decisions, they'll never learn how to make good ones.

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

I remember reading that an old version of cybersitter did allow filtering content and removing offensive words. If I remember correctly, cybersitter removed this feature in newer releases and just started blocking the page outright because they ran into problems about removing words from quotes.

I think www.peacefire.org may have more info on that feature

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

A while ago, I wrote down some thoughts about Bayesian web filtering. The main point that I had was this: with web filtering, the people on both sides of the HTTP connection are on the same side, rather than having a greedy asshat spamming millions of decidedly unappreciative victims. You can make, say, porn sites that are indistinguishable from a discussion of the W3C recommendation process. How is a bayesian filter to know the difference? With email, the HTML tags are very suspicious; the IMG tag gets a very high spam probability. But with web pages, what can you do?

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I w

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

Who is good enough to decide what's good taste and what's bad taste for everyone?
Who is good enough to decide what's appropriate and what's inappropriate for everyone?

Fine companies with products such as these:

* BESS
* Cyber Patrol
* WebSENSE
* Net Nanny
* SmartFilter
* X-Stop
* I-Gear
* CYBERsitter

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to del

How would you feel if your webmaster maliciously took your web-site offline, then, when you demanded its return, put up a site attacking your company at your old URL? It happened to a group I was involved in, the Censorware Project, currently at http://www.censorware.net/. The purpose of this essay is to put the behavior on record, and to give you some impressions and inferences about it.

The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time -- around two years as I recall -- we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other censorware products.

Even though two of us were attorneys -- Jim and myself -- we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along. Mike also served as webmaster of the censorware.org site and did substantial work for the group, including writing contributions to several of the reports and lead authorship of at least one. Seth was the source of our decrypted censorware blacklists and managed many technical tasks, but later felt he had to leave the group because of the increasing prospects of a lawsuit, particularly under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued.

Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer of 2000, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight from Jim Tyre was to take the site down for a week. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is now closed." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.

After Seth created a partial, text, mirror, Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.

I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had

Why aren't they fighting to stock Hustler? Not because they don't think they'd win, but because they actually aren't succubi/inccubi.

Libraries are a bastion of "I'm okay, you're okay", but this doesn't include wanting guys jerking to porn in the middle of a large public room. If there were a device that magically read a user's mind, and blocked them from getting what, to them, would be pornography, then I'm pretty sure the library would love it.

But let's not forget that one man's porn is another man's reading material: Take Maxim for example... it's not allowed to be sold in Wal-Mart anymore, because they call it porno. If you've never seen it, Maxim is basically random stereotypical things men enjoy, one of which is scantily-clad women. All the 'naughty' bits are covered, and you're more likely to see something scandelous on MTV than in its pages.

Right now your tax dollars are going to seedy organizations with no government oversight, who can block anything they damn well please, knowing that it at least makes it less likely for people to read it. Check out Peacefire and find out some of the things your tax dollars have been doing for you.

One problem is the vast number of sites which, for various reasons, don't label appropriately - usually either because they don't label at all or intentionally try to keep ahead of the censorware.

Another problem is that any set of rules will result in miscategorization, while whitelist/blacklists are neither scalable nor do they satisfy the desire for local control of categories.

I'm the concerned parent of a 5 year-old (who uses "google" as a verb), a trained teen sexuality educator, and I'm extremely anti-censorship. As you may guess, I'm occasionally conflicted on this topic. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that for my family, what I'm looking for is a tool that lets me filter out the bulk of the egregious crap (porn, hate, violence, ads) for casual use.

I'd even be satisfied with a warning rather than a hard filter in non-blacklisted cases: "Warning: the requested page will probably make your little head explode - follow this link if you really want to got there or click here if you want someone else to check it out for you".

Peacefire.org has some great info about what sites are blocked by the various filters.

Support Bennett Haselton / Peacefire.org and their efforts in this area.

Reading through the ~13 posts or so currently attached, sounds pretty split between the libertarian views and totalitarian trolls of child-rearing (though my money is on the libertarian-majority for the anonymous readers).

For what it's worth, I agree with you. I'm young enough so that when these things come up in meetings, I'm speaking for the kids, rather than the parents. I've even pointed a few folks to peacefire.org for a perspective in how evil censorship-in-the-name-of "protecting the children" can be. I don't believe the lack of censorship efforts on my parents' part has warped me (in any undesirable ways). I wonder if the pro-censorship crowd remembers their own parents' attempts, whether their mothers were successful in preventing them from seeing Playboys, what positive effects they attribute in their own lives to this control.

Unfortunately it's a feature that makes money. It might not surprise you to learn that living in this country with you and me are millions upon millions of people living in fear of every corner and shadow, believing every stranger ready to snatch, pervert, or otherwise corrupt their child. It takes an incredible amount of doubt and will to believe that the world is not just a swirling cess pool of depravity, based on what you hear from Culture. Christ folks, if you want to protect your kids, don't let them watch the news.

So, you're a Software Corporation, you've got a demand from your customer base to help them enact what you may feel to be misguided efforts to control their kids access and behavior in the world around them. If there was a way to make money selling Responsible Parenting, I'd like to think we'd do it. The alternative is to lose the revenue to a third-party offering the same thing.

And I realize that in general that's a shitty justification for anything. Profit. In our defense I offer two salient points: (1) that's all the reason any corporation needs to do anything, and (2) it's never been a popular opinion to tell parents how to raise their children. Having the controls, with the knowledge that parents who don't want them won't use them, is easier than telling customers and parents why they shouldn't want them.

--
My two cents. It should go without saying that my views are my own, but I thought I'd just make it clear.

Well, they could first stop here. That was a favorite of mine for breaking web filters. I also had an app that would record keystrokes, and then just make up some excuse for them having to use the master account. Once I had their password, I could adjust the levels. Now, I didn't do this to find porn, I did it because the filters prevented you from using the net connection for anything but its pre-approved list, which excluded mozilla, and my secret collection of uber-violent games, but that's a different story.

and apparently your childhood isn't the only thing that's broken, but codehappy.net is too.

We have a new blocking software disabling program on the Peacefire site. This one not only works against home programs like Cyber Patrol and CYBERsitter, it also works against programs like Bess, SmartFilter, and WebSENSE. By following these instructions, you can turn your home computer into a miniature Web site, so that when one of your friends wants to get around the blocking software installed on some *other* computer, they simply visit the URL that points to the Web server on your machine. Once they are visiting your "site", they see a form where they can type the URL of the page they want to visit, and the contents of the page will be fetched for them. The concept of a "circumventor" like this has been around for a long time, but until now, setting one up has only been an option for people with lots of computer experience who really know what they're doing. What we've done is reduced it to three simple steps which can be completed in a few minutes. Here they are: http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circu mventor-instructions.html These instructions are officially in the beta testing stage, so they may not work perfectly. (If you encounter any problems, the setup program creates a log file, which you can email to me so I can try and figure out what went wrong.) But prior to this announcement, several people have reported using the instructions with no problem, so if you follow the steps, you could soon have a circumventor up and running on your computer. This same technology can also be used to help defeat Internet censorship in places like China and the Middle East, so once it's out of the beta testing stage, we hope to spread the word as far as possible so that people living in those countries can ask their friends overseas to set up circumventors to help them get around the local censorship. (Ironically, the greatest publicity that the circumventor instructions will get, will probably be from pro-censorship advocates thundering against "these damn kids" hacking around their blocking software -- but if it helps raise people's awareness of an effective way to combat international censorship, so much the better.) Anyway, try it out and let us know how it goes. We're always collecting more examples of blocked sites, so if the tool helps you access a site that you needed in order to do research, or simply helps to access a site that was apparently blocked out of sheer stupidity, you can send us an email about that, too. (With your permission, we could also post it on the Peacefire site, although we will of course remove your name if you want.)

You my friend need Peacefire

Three things, in combination, really bother me about this. The first one if that the spesifics of the blocking are kept secret for stupid reasons ("disseminating pornography", indeed. I'll disseminate pornography!). The second reason is that the secret blocked sites are being chosen by the state government, which I wouldn't trust at all, especially if you think of all the underhanded things people have done to get elected. Finally, I'm just against censoring the internet for anybody other than yourself.

"Some good parenting = trust ! facist paranoia."

I never had this problem with my parents. They always trusted me, I'm pleased to say, however, I'm not here to discuss me. There are a million ways to get around this, such as ... leaving your phone at home, or turning your phone off. Now perhaps people will say that since they are kids, and most kids are irresponsible, this is a good thing to do. However:

"Rules are meant to be broken"
-Some wise soul

I take for example spy software that my best friend's mother put on his computer. He wasn't computer savvy enough to bypass it, however, if I had had such software on my computer:

1. I would hate my parents, and feel resentful towards them.
2. I would do my best to bypass this with things that are available here.

Don't people realize that spying on your kids will only make them want to break the rules? If I knew that my parents were the type that would spy on me while I'm at school, then I would refuse to have a cell phone.

This seems to me to be something for overly paranoid and protective parents that think they can't trust their kids, and need to know at what second of the day their kids are doing anything.
-Dae

If you're a pervert who wants child porn, go to freenet. It can't be easily blocked without blocking all of freenet, and the courts don't widely know about it (yet). If the ISP blocks that, just try an arms race of circumvention measures like the fine folks at Peacefire are doing (for non-porn related reasons).

Like it or not, the internet is rapidly replacing (has replaced?) older forms of disseminating information. The protections of freedom we enjoy in the use of such media must be extended to the internet or we risk allowing a social agenda forced on us by the peddlers of these filters.

A good place to begin familiarising yourself with the limitations of these filters is The Blocked Site of the Day. I suspect that reproductive health is actually targetted for blocking rather than an accidental victim of imprecise technology, but the net effect is the same.

This is a MAJOR assumption, and one that's shown to be wrong on many occasions.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to give up *porn/indecent* material on public resources... but the reality is that a) there is a "moving line in the sand" of what people consider porn, and b) censorware repeatedly oversteps its bounds and blocks non-porn sites that have protected speech.

Ultimately, I'd be happy with a censorware solution that was a) open sourced b) open-access (you can see the sites that are blocked as well as the reasons they were blocked, and could contest censoring openly).
Sadly, I doubt that this will ever happpen.

Recently in Slashdot (motto: "CmdrTaco always posts duplicates"), residents reported an outbreak of trolls. Perhaps you think there are no trolls in Slashdot. Perhaps you are an idiot.

As the French say, au contraire (literally: "In Soviet Russia, other people insult YOU!!"). I have here in my hands a copy of an Associated Press article sent in by alert reader Anonymous Coward., whose name can be rearranged to spell "ADNROANWYOMCO US", although that is not my main point. "Anonymous Coward", by the way, only has the letters "Naked and Petrified" in in common with "Alyssa Milano", so there is no other reason to mention Alyssa Milano in this column.

According to a quote which I am not making up, from Slashdot Mayor CowboyNeal (formally "Mayor CowboyNeal" and informally "G-Dog"), trolls ranks as a major crisis just behind fear, anger and hate (insert your "dark side" joke here), as evidenced by the following conversation between Slashdot government employees:

FIRST SLASHDOT POSTER: "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!"

SECOND SLASHDOT POSTER: "Mod parent +5 (Insightful)."

THIRD SLASHDOT POSTER: "Mod parent down."

Fortunately I have a suggestion for Mayor G-Dog, and that is: take away George Steinbrenner's computer.

No, seriously, my suggestion does not involve George Steinbrenner's computer, although it might involve laughing at Tobacco Institute scientists. My suggestion is more along the lines of a coup de grace, from the French coup, meaning "solving", and de grace, meaning "problems". The procedure (you may want to write this down):

1. 1. Sell free software to rich kids for $1/byte.

1. 2. ...

1. 3. Profit!

But instead the Slashdot city council (motto: "We'll help people when you pry the TPS report out of our cold, dead fingers") thinks that they (the trolls) will always post off topic soon, sending this message to the public, and to the world: "First Post!".

Speaking of which, "The Slashdot Trolls Outbreak" would be a great name for a rock band.

Sorry, a library is not a daycare that you can dump your kids at and ignore. It isn't a Disneyland created to keep your children safe at all costs. Libraries exist to help create a well educated public, to encourage the spread of information and to support the spread of new ideas necessary to keep democracy flourishing. To support these goals, information that you may object to your children seeing must be available to adults. Any restriction on this information for adults is unacceptable.

There's plenty I want to keep away from my kids while they are kids.

And somewhere there is someone who wants to keep your kids away from things you think are perfectly safe. When the paranoid religious group decides to bar links to Harry Potter fan sites as "Occult" or breast cancer information sites as "Sexual". It's not possible for a library to come up with a perfect filter for everyone. Unless you filter to the extreme, some parents will be horrified that their child has access to to information about halloween. Unless you have no filter, some parent will find some information filtered that they want their child to have access to. (And do you think a child that encounters a "Access Denied" is going to ask the librarian to unblock it? Heck, most adults would be too embarrassed to do so!)

No system will work for everyone. Heck, no system will work for most people. And any system will irritate many patrons doing legitimate research.

Ultimately responsibility for filtering what you child sees is your responsibility. If you're not confident that you child is mature enough to handle whatever he comes across, you are responsible for keeping your eye on him. Even before the internet, you could find novels with graphic descriptions of sex and violence and books encouraging racism and violence, yet you don't seem to worry about that.

Your child is your responsibility. Just because you're too lazy to keep an eye on your child is no reason that my library experience should be diminished.

...it's fun to see where they flubb because it is so rare. And these can only get better with time.

Censorware can't work. It simply can't. The internet is growing too fast to restrict. New pages with "bad" content are being added rightnow, and new pages with "good" content are being added. Censorware has no hope to keep up. Search engines with an easier job (find everything, and try to find everything) can't keep up. How can a censorware manufacturer accurately make all of those decisions? Deciding that a given page is "reasonable political commentary" or "hate speech" is extremely difficultt, even for humans. A computer has no hope. Check out Michael Sims' "Why Censorware Can't Work" article for more details. Furthermore, censorware must filter any web site that could possibly redisplay content from another web site. This means that all censorware must always restrict translation software web pages. There are a number of articles documenting this problem, here are just a few: "BabelFish blocked by censorware", "SmartFilter's Greatest Evils", and BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE (censoreware vs privacy & anonymity"

I bet the story about being blacklisted would be blacklisted.

That's usually the way filtering software works... they block sites like peacefire that publish banned-lists, so that you don't accidentally find out what you're not allowed to know.

But, guess what!

Error rate for domains: 34%

...we conclude that the overall accuracy rate is low, and that about one third of sites blocked by SafeServer do not meet their criteria.

Yeah, that's a quality algorithym there. Better then a dart board!

US Patent 6,266,664 can be read at the USPTO - to wit, their system does a ratio of bad words to good words.

So, in summary, it looks up words from a database, sums the hits, applies a function to the sum and divides by total words. Don't worry, they say "neural network!"

But wait! They make the list themselves. Of course, they do it by examining if the turn of phrase is used more on pornographic sites or breast cancer sites! That was clearly a deep line of thought well deserving of a patent there. Please, defend your company more for us, because defining a list of regular expressions and calling them "better, bad, worse" isn't exactly a-1-a computer science.

Oh, and in case you think I am wrong? Neural Network! Neural Network! Neural Network! Neural Network! Neural Network! There! I can't be wrong now!

The government.

If the AU citizens are stupid enough to trust their government enough to let a group of their bureaucrats make this decision for them, that is their right. If they're embarrassed in a few years when they describe themselves as living in a "free country", that's their problem.

If you're stupid enough to hope that the US government will someday make that decision for you, that's your right as well. Though if you really want this, there are various censorware products which will prevent you from seeing most of what offends you on the Internet. Go to Peacefire and select whichever one they like least. An adult doesn't need that kind of protection, of course.

However, if you advocate that the US government makes us taxpayers pay to have a kindly Federal government put the blankets over our heads to keep the evil spirits out, I'm going to call you a fool publically again. However, I'm sure that being called a fool, a retard, and far less complimentary things is hardly new to you.

I never said that the AU government didn't have the right to block IPs in a similar manner and for reasons similar to that which China and various Islamic countries do. If the AU government wants to order their citizens to rub themselves with blue mud, that is perfectly all right with me.

However, it's still a stupid thing to do.

But much more rational than the actions you support. And probably much more rational the actions you recommend in any statement about public policy you will ever make.

The only limits that one can really put on a government one doesn't live under is... no initiating attacks against other countries with weapons of mass destruction.

While their government appears to be run by idiots, this is the kind of idiocy one can hope that even they are incapable of. Of course, if they actually are planning anything like that, their citizens won't find out until the retribution hits their cities.

I've put as much time as conveniently can be spared today in whacking tards. However, this has been worthwhile, I like to take time once in a while to explore the depths of human arrogance, stupidity, and superstition. I suppose finding you was inevitable sooner or later.

I'll probably whack some Libertarian religious cultists tomorrow. Any chance you'll convert to Libertarianism before then?

People want web-filters to block "unsuitable" sites as well. Does that mean we should support web-blocking, since the blocking only happens by request of the end-user? Perhaps.

Sounds good to me. If you want to run a web filter on your machine for your own use that filters "unsuitable" sites, enjoy! It's your money. The problem with filters isn't that they exist, it's that 1) they refuse to tell us what they are specifically filtering and 2) they want to enforce these filters on other people (like adults at a library. Oops, I guess the page on breast cancer you were interested in is prohibited by the filter, too bad. Oops, no translation services so you can read the article in a foriegn language, too bad.)

Myself, I'll continue to enjoy the un-cut, pure internet.

What about a bookstore with "sanitized" versions of popular works?

Well, I'd never use such a store, and neither would any of my friends. But so long as I have access to other bookstores that will sell the full versions, I don't care. I think you'll find the market for "sanitized" media is pretty small. Americans may talk puritan values, but we like our filth.

Would you support that, even though it violates the writer's moral rights (after all, you have changed their work WITHOUT their permission.)

The United States have never formally recognized an author's moral rights. I think we're better for it. Moral rights would significantly restrict my ability to use things I've paid for. Right now the only thing I can't do with a book is make copies and redistribute them. I can redistribute the original. I can make copies for personal use. I can do anything else I want. Moral rights gives the author the right to restrict what I do with the book I paid for.

Furthermore, moral rights are harder to nail down. US copyright restricts copies for X years. At the end of the X years, we assume you've made "enough" money to justify your creation and it goes public domain. We made a trade off between our ability to copy things and incentive for authors to create originals. What about moral rights? How many years must go by before you've enjoyed your moral rights enough? Can you really say that after X years you no longer deserve them?

This service takes that control away, and puts it in the hands of a third party censor, who then effectively controls the vision of what is seen by this particular population.

This particular population specifically chose this option. It's their choice to make. And if they want, the uncut version is certainly available to them.

It's the kind of attitude, I want to consume all I want, but I don't want to deal with the consequences of my consumption.

I'll agree with you here. I don't understand this mindset of "I want to see such-and-such a movie, but I don't want to see certain parts of it." But would you force these people to see the full movies? It's their choice. Why take choices away from them?

12 year old Kenny can buy Marilyn Manson, etc. at WalMart or more likely, Best Buy.

Sure, so you feel messing up the voting system is a constructive action?

In this case, certainly. The only way a PHM/PHB who decided to buy the filterware is going to be persuaded that something is wrong with it is from experience, if he's even capable of learning from that. If his favorite news-related sites are inaccessible, that might actually make him wonder what the hell he's bought.

With respect to censorware, try Peacefire. It would work better if you had an open mind, but I'm not sure if you've got one to open.

I really don't care if you respect me or not. I can not respect you as a person, regardless of your technical expertise, if any.

Another fact you don't have straight. It isn't a decision between filterware access to the Net and no access in schools and libraries for children anymore, except in areas where the school board or library board of trustees are imbecilic fuckheads like you.

CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) was shot down in flames by a Federal Court. The three-judge panel didn't buy the horseshit you believe, either. Despite the best efforts of DOJ attorneys to present your flawed arguments in the best possible light.

Hmmm... dumbest people with an Internet connect... are you an elected public official or do you actually work for a censorware company? You obviously aren't bright enough for Microsoft.