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

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

FamilyClick

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

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

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

Cyber Sentinel

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

Blocked sites include:

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

SurfWatch

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

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

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

The 42 supposedly pornographic sites include:

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

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