How About an Intelligent Open Source Filter?

GlitchZ28 asks: "It seems to me that the problem with Internet filters is their blanket approach searching for words in pages, URLs and of course the ole blacklist. It's the same as WWII blanket bombing. Drop 500 bombs at one target and chances are you'll get it (along with a lot of things that weren't targets). Has anyone considered starting a little project to create a simple, very easily modified open source Internet filtering program? Allowing library officals to decide what tactics would fit their needs such as a blacklist of the the obvious porno sites. I really wouldn't mind a filtering system IN public libraries if it could be scrutinized BY the public and then changed."

If we must censor content on the Internet, I would feel better about it (but not much) knowing that the censorship was done by the people rather than some bureaucrat in Congress.

Comment by michael : Many anti-censorship folks have been pushing this line for a long time; that the blacklists used in public institutions should, at the minimum, be open for public inspection. This would, no doubt help cure some of the more egregious errors. But the above poster is making an error in his reasoning. Computers do the searching because there is no other way to do it - you simply cannot categorize hundreds of millions of pages by hand, period, end of sentence. And an algorithmic approach can never fully characterize the range of human expression present on the Web - even assuming, for the moment, that you could get people to agree on what should or should not be censored, there's no way to make rules which will pick out those pages with 100% accuracy, or even anything close to that. Doing so would require the development of true artificial intelligence, which isn't even on the horizon. Calling something "open source" or not doesn't make it magically able to achieve a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. When you add in the fact that with three people in a room you have four different opinions on what should and should not be censored, it should become clear that throwing an open source label at something is not going to result in an easy solution.