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Interesting topic. First, there is no loss of security in publicising blacklists. It is a bit silly (or nasty) to claim this is some security breach when it simply isnt.

The problem with web filtering is that there is a market for it. People want to buy it. People are making money on it. It is not going away.

Now, what aussie govt is doing is plain wrong. But, at least, they are not doing it in secret like in the UK... On balance, UK's filter is not mandated by the government, rather it is chosen by ISPs.

Either way, the technology simply isn't there yet.

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Google is your friend: 703,000 for novell software partner. (0.58 seconds)

So, the next time your manager is afraid of having a Linux server on the production network, use CoLinux instead?

So, the next time your manager is afraid of having a Linux server on the production network, use CoLinux instead?

Why are we sitting around debating this. Just ask SurfControl to change the categorisation.

Just go to their 'test-a-site' page", enter www.libertyforum.org, and yes, it does indeed come back as "Hate Site". Now, all you have to do is click on "Submit a site" and you can ask for the category to be changed. I set it to "Lifestyle & Culture" , but you might chose something else.

Matt

My company uses SurfControl's web filter product. In my experience of trying to administer the thing, is that it *usually* gets the catagory right. Supposedly these filter makers are verifying their databases, of which you pay through the nose to subscribe to. I've found about a 3-5% error rate, meaning they've miscatagorized that many of the total catagorized sites and this usually draws some level of corrective action to change the blockage.

My hunch is that these guys (filter makers) wrote a search engine to do the catagorization and are just doing a dictionary score to wieght a page and make a decision on the results. So SourceForge probably scored high on the words "Download" and "MP3", or something like that, and since they both probably occur alot seeing as how there are alot of MP3 tools on that site for download it got catagorized as such. This doesn't make it right, but I'm willing to bet that no human said "hey let's block SourceForge because we don't like it and that'll piss everyone off".

Most likely, the admins using the big-brother-ware in question can override the catagory and/or create an exception rule to allow people through to mis-blocked sites. But that depends on corporate policy. My company adopted a "if it's something you use for work, we'll unblock it right away" policy that works pretty well and they've followed through on it too. However, there is a possibility that someone would place implicit trust in the filter and not want to change anything they block. This would be bad (IMHO) because, just like a search engine or anything else, it's not perfect and these things are subject to human error in the end. I can tell you it's cut down the amount of pr0n bandwidth being used on my network, which is really nice because my downloads take way less time now.

-s

"Our database of holiday-related email messages and attachments has grown 650 percent since last Christmas,"

Go to http://categories.surfcontrol.com/test-a-site.asp and put "www.gayteenresources.org" into the text box. You'll get back this message:

http://www.gayteenresources.org/ is in our list and categorised as Adult/Sexually Explicit

Note that if you just type in "gayteenresources.org", which of course is the same flinking IP number, you will be informed that the site is not blocked. I assume this is because filtering software is written by idiots.

Go to http://categories.surfcontrol.com/test-a-site.asp and put "www.gayteenresources.org" into the text box. You'll get back this message:

http://www.gayteenresources.org/ is in our list and categorised as Adult/Sexually Explicit

Note that if you just type in "gayteenresources.org", which of course is the same flinking IP number, you will be informed that the site is not blocked. I assume this is because filtering software is written by idiots.

Seriously though, there are probably 100+ filters or filtered ISPs on the market. You can get a reasonable list from GetNetWise. But no one has a service that lets you test against multiple products. The COPA Commission recommended that a neutral independent testing authority be created to test these products; if such a thing is ever created, /.ers should let them know that URL testing is a feature we'd like to see.

It isn't too hard to check some of the big ones. SurfControl, which sells CyberPatrol and SurfWatch, and several corporate-oriented products, has links to two test-your-site pages from h ere .

NetNanny provides a list of filtered sites when you buy the program, that is human-readable, so you could buy it and look at it.

N2H2 has such a large share of the school, library & reseller market, and provides a free-download home product, that they are also worth a specific test, even though there isn't a URL test page available.

Liza

This is one of the problems with letting machines decide what should be filtered. The machine may filter out all "sex" sites -- including sites concerned with biology, like animal and plant reproduction.

True, but the problems reported by the Peacefire study are far worse than that. For example: Cyber Patrol was tested using their "Partial Nudity," "Full Nudity," and "Sexual Acts/Text" filters turned on (and no other filters). Among the sites blocked: an attorney's site (http://www.a-attorney-virginia.com), and a home inspection company (http://www.a-actionhomeinspection.com).

If this is the type of gaffe we can expect for selecting sites which contain nudity or sexual content, what can we expect for other categories which are more nebulous, like "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling?"

By the way: Peacefire does link to Cyber Patrol's category definitions in their analysis of that product. I picked them because they had a high error rate which was pretty illustrative of the problem, but there were several other products reviewed with similar error rates.

Very true. For example, I can't get to the Peacefire statistical analysis -- it's blocked by our corporate Cyber Patrol filter :-( The interesting thing is, that after looking at Cyber Patrol's 12 categories under which a site may be blocked, I can't see that Peacefire falls into any of them...

But they are! Haven't you heard. Try searching for "laws against pedophilia" at this site here. You will note the search successfully defends children (and anybody else) against all those harmful "laws against pedophilia"

The pluses were it was easy to install and administer, it gave pretty good reports, and it worked well from an HR perspective. Minuses included sometimes buggy software, reports that didn't always run, and price. It does run with Microsoft Proxy Server as well.

I think a solution like this can be helpful, because they maintain the URL database for you. I'm not saying that this is the greatest solution in the world (I realize that the number of registered domain names will constantly expand past anyone's ability to catagorize them.), but I think it could work. If you could combine a url database with a method for sending blocked url's to an administrator for review, I think it will get close to what you want. This way, you could disallow access to things that might be legitimate (like the breast cancer example), and then grant access when it comes up.