Slashdot Mirror
Mattel/Cyber Patrol Censors Critics Again
This means, for example, that if you have Cyber Patrol set to block "Full Nudity", you might think you're blocking pictures of nude human beings, but you're actually banning criticism of Mattel and the homepages of people Mattel is suing even if the decryption utility and essay aren't hosted there, such as Matthew Skala's homepage. Feel free to download the demo version of Cyber Patrol, update the filter list to the newest one, and check this out -- or just type it into their search engine, though that won't tell you it's banned under every category. Does Skala's page contain full nudity? No? Then you're seeing an example of a company purposefully and deliberately lying about the content of a page in order to serve their own agenda.
Same thing if you chose Violence/Profanity, or Partial Nudity, or Sexual Acts, Gross Depictions, Intolerance, or Satanic/Cult, or Drugs/Drug Culture, Militant/Extremist, or Sex Education, or Gambling, or Alcohol and Tobacco -- guess what? "All categories" also include "or criticism of our company or product."
Welcome to America in the new millennium, where a corporation just made the decision to ban several documents from the World Wide Web. They did it unilaterally, without court review, without any notice to the public whatsoever, yet their decisions are now being carried out (the Cyber Patrol product automatically updates its list of banned sites on a daily or weekly basis) in public schools and libraries and companies across the country, for children and adults. (Cyber Patrol uses the same list for the "corporate firewall" versions of its products.)
A list of mirrors is still available. Get it while you can. Declan McCullagh, a journalist for Wired, has started an archive of case-related documents; -- he too has received the legal threats, despite never hosting the banned essay. (The .uni files are actually TIFF images of the documents.)
And just as I was finishing up this story, I've received an e-mail in my capacity as censorware.org webmaster. A woman wrote:
The link to the essay you mentioned on your page [our homepage] date 3/16/00 must not be correct. Could you e-mail me the essay? I am a high school librarian and am trying to find out more about what Cyber Patrol filters. Thank you.
I wrote back, among other things:
In fact the link was correct, but Mattel (the maker of Cyber Patrol) has filed suit against the authors of that essay and made legal threats to that ISP which caused them to delete the page. So, the page existed on Friday, but does not today.I certainly understand your desire to find out what Cyber Patrol blocks, but they are going to great lengths to stop you from finding out.
The following is a rant I wrote on Saturday, when I first found out about Mattel being awarded the injunction. Anybody may feel free to copy or reproduce parts of it.
My mirror does not include any of the program files, but only the published analysis, Mattel's complaint, and an English translation of the Swedish copyright law 1960:729. I have no relation to the defendants in this case, and am only an interested third party.
- David Michael Turover(Perpetual Newbie)
(begin rant)
I am not in a good mood right now.
I've just had to troubleshoot NT's braindead permissions scheme, I've taken a test where several of the "correct answers" are wrong, my right wrist is aching(not good for a CS student), and it's barely noon. On my lunch break I crack open Netscape to read the news, and find that a United States federal judge has ordered two cryptology researchers to remove an essay that they had published on a Swedish website.
The two researchers in question are Matthew Skala, a Canadian, and Eddy L. O. Jansson, a Swede. They have reverse-engineered a program called Cyber Patrol, and described in detail the cryptography and computer file formats used by the program.
Cyber Patrol is a product made by Microsystems Software, which is a subsidiary of Mattel. The purpose of the product is to prevent any user of a computer where it is installed from accessing any of a list of several Internet web sites, ostensibly to prevent children from viewing pornography. As part of their report, Skala and Jansson offered a Win32 binary named cphack.exe, a utility which decodes Cyber Patrol's list of blocked URLs(website addresses).
Mattel promptly sued the authors of the report, charging them with copyright violations and ordering them to remove their program, report, and all supporting and related documents and materiel, claiming that the report and software will cost them over $75,000 in lost sales. On Friday March 17th, two days after Mattel's complaint was registered, Judge Edward F. Harrington awarded Mattel a preliminary injunction against the two. Jansson's internet service provider, though in Sweden and not subject to U.S. law, has removed his account and deleted the documents.
Reverse-engineering is the process of examining a product to see how it works. In almost every industry it is not only expected to occur but considered an integral part of the free market. In the software industry, however, products are often sold with "shrinkwrap licenses" that restrict reverse-engineering. A shrinkwrap license is a contract describing terms of use for a product, in which these terms cannot be read until after the product has been purchased, can not be disputed, and must be agreed to for the consumer to use the product which they have already paid for and in most cases cannot return. In most Western countries these shrinkwrap contracts are unenforcable, and in the U.S. their legality is disputed, although the upcoming UCITA bill will make them law.
In most Western countries, including Sweden, reverse-engineering of software is a right explicitly allowed by law that cannot be taken away by a contract(1960:729 26 g). Legal protections against reverse engineering can be obtained; they are called "Patents". Furthermore, an action undertaken in Canada and Sweden should be out of the United States' jurisdiction; However, the U.S. court did not refuse to hear the case as it should have done, and instead granted the injunction by weighing the action under U.S. law.
To make the situation more repugnant, Cyber Patrol doesn't work. And not just Cyber Patrol. It is well known that all content-blocking programs such as Cyber Patrol have a high rate of failure, and a high rate of erroneously blocking acceptable content despite any claims by their marketing departments of being 100% accurate.
This is not the first time Microsystems/Mattel's lawyers have been aggressive. A Microsystems software engineer who was fired from his job for seeking medical attention for his sore wrists has since been sued by Mattel for documenting his experiences. Outrageous lawsuits such as this have been happening often lately, and what is frightening is that in the United States' court culture, they have a good chance of succcess.
Does listing sites criticizing the company as "nudity", "violence", or "profanity" constitute libel? It seems to me that Mattel has opened itself up to a monstrous class action suit here. They are deliberately misrepresenting the content of these sites to their customers.
/||\
I would *love* to see one of these filter critic cases end with a libel judgement against the filter software maker. That would maybe give the rest a reason to think before they act.
And i hope whatever employee had to add those things to the database got their orders in writing. And has polished up their resume.
__
(oO)
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.