Online Rights And Real World Censorship?

Denubis asks: "I'm a firm believer in the freedom of expression, free speech, anti-censorchip, et al, and recently I've found myself walking a very fine line. I've been asked to create a list of 'blocked' keywords (and/or URLs) for a proxy server for a community 'Internet' automatic laundry. However, as an avid reader on Slashdot, I've been indoctrinated about free speech, anti-censorware, and all those wonderful topics that I quite firmly believe in. However, my ideals now get to meet the real world, and they're finding a rude awakening. As a semi-public service, we cannot allow ourselves to display porn, since a junior high school is across the street. How do I make a list of keywords that will satisfy that requirement yet allow someone to look up breast cancer research, or the recipe to chicken Parmesan? My question to Slashdot is "What happens when our ideals hit the real world?"

"How do we deal with the censorship issue ourselves, so that we can offer constructive solutions instead of ranting, raving, and otherwise having fun? On a side note, this automatic laundry (using smart-cards) is located in South Central LA, and is in a very poor area where people haven't been exposed to the Net. How do we go about quelling their fears about the Net?"

Comments

Sometimes they bend, sometimes not

[marcus]

When our ideals meet the real world, they flex. If we are strong enough, committed enough, "ideal" enough, then being human, we modify the world to suit us and our ideals.

That is what humans do. Unlike other living things, when we meet something that doesn't suit us, we can change it. What happens depends on you, your ideals, your convictions, your strength and the "resistiveness" of the real world. Sometimes the real world wins and you are modified. Each and every day someone faces a part of the real world that doesn't match up with their idea of that it should be. It is up to each one to change the world to fit them, or to change themselves to fit reality.

Re:Sometimes they bend, sometimes not

[Eccles]

When our ideals meet the real world, they flex. If we are strong enough, committed enough, "ideal" enough, then being human, we modify the world to suit us and our ideals.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Have you tried explaining why censorware fails?

[Goonie]

Leaving out the ideological arguments, it has been quite adequately demonstrated that censorware can't and won't work. Have you tried explaining this to the decision-makers involved, and going from there to discuss the alternatives already canvassed here (Lynx, login and tracking, placing the computers where access is supervised, etc)?

Re:Yes, it is about prudiskness, and censorship...

[Arandir]

"And that is the very definition of censorship."

Censorship is not prudishness.

And yes, you're obviously prudish; you lump bondage and "barely legal" in the same category as bestiality and coprophilia.

Oh gee, I don't like bondage so I'm a prude!? Get real. I lumped these items together because they are things that a lot of parents would have severe objections to their children witnessing. Bondage may be consensual, and for the most part is play-acting, but real dominance in a relationship, particularly when it is usually associated with sadism, is not normal. "Barely legal" caters to the borderline pedophile, and is the pederast's methadone.

"You pro censorship types are such blame-shifting imbeciles."

I am not pro-censorship. If you have read any of my other posts, you will know that. I am a radical libertarian, and as such I have absolutely no interest in telling you what you can or cannot do.

But as a libertarian, I greatly object that you wish to ban a class of software for use in private. Censorware may be morally objectionable to you, but for some people it isn't. It is one thing to keep censorware out of publically funded libraries, but it is quite another to keep it out of a private laundermat. There is a universe of difference between government censorship and the outright banning of pornography and parents restricting what their minor children can view.

This whole slashdot topic was about using or not using censorware in a private business. Your morality simply does not enter into it. Your comment about the ineffectuality of filtering by words was right on topic and informative. Your accusal of Americans as prudes was very off topic.

"If your kids are raised properly, you don't need to protect them from the Big Bad Internet, they'll know which sites are good and healthy and which sites are negative and unhealthy."

It would be great if all children were raised properly. But they're not. But it's completely irrelevant. It's absolutely stupid to say to a parent "you did a bad job raising your kids so you forfeit all rights to keep pornography away from them".

"If parents aren't willing to do that, they shouldn't be parents, and you have no responsibility to filter through software what parents should be filtering by education."

What arrogance! What possibly right do you have to pick and choose who is fit to be a parent? You, sir, have absolutely no moral, legal or ethical right to tell someone else how they should raise their own children. How dare you! Before you start accusing us of reducing the net to our own "narrow ideology and belief and morality", take a good look at youself. We certainly do not want to impose our morality on the net. But you, on the other hand, want to impose your morality on people's lives and children.

there is no way to effectively censor

[brokeninside]

How do we deal with the censorship issue ourselves, so that we can offer constructive solutions instead of ranting, raving, and otherwise having fun?

You can't. At present there is no meaningful way to censor the internet without losing valuable content. The very notion of 'censoring' is predicate on a fixed idea of what is and what is not appropriate. There is no computational method for finding isAppropriate(viewer, content).

On a side note, this automatic laundry (using smart-cards) is located in South Central LA, and is in a very poor area where people haven't been exposed to the Net. How do we go about quelling their fears about the Net?

1. You train them. Show them how to find recipes online.
2. When you set up the system, think like Larry Wall, make it easy to do the 'right' thing, but do not attempt to make it impossible to do the 'wrong' thing.
3. Put into place a monitoring sytem. Only give your smart cards to people over 18 years of age and put in a mechanism that allows any person to look at what sites the smart card has been charged to look at. Don't enforce limits, but make it possible for parents to enforce their own limits. Sure, a parent can give their kid a smart card to go do the wash or browse the internet, but the parent will have the option of reviewing just what their child had been looking at.

i tend to think this is futile

[ebbv]

as i said in another post, putting net connections in libraries and schools is like running a freeway through the playground.

if you don't want kids and sheltered adults from finding porn 'on accident' *cough* then the simple solution is don't give them net access.

there is no form of blocking, automatic nor manual that is foolproof. if you go with automatic, either you end up blocking things you'd rather have available, or you miss some of the porn.

for manual, you just simply can't keep up with all the porn sites.

the only 'possible' solution, which is /very/ inconvenient, but is implimented in some libraries/schools is to have a librarian or other staff member assist all internet access, or do it themselves, and then print out the relevant info. this is really a silly way of doing it, though.

i really don't see another way.
...dave

Re:i tend to think this is futile

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont censor and make it so that if someone pulls up some lewd stuff, it will just crank the speakers up to high volume, flash the screen brightly and have a wav saying "PORN ALERT!!!"

Re:i tend to think this is futile

[Tassach]

I am all for sticking to your ideals, even if it means walking away from an otherwise good job (which I have done, btw)

Please remember that this is a PRIVATE business, not a PUBLIC library. While you may object to censorware on general principles, installing it in a private business is an entirely different proposition than having the government mandate it's use in a public institution. If a private company (or individual) wants to install censorware their own computer, THAT IS THEIR RIGHT. You may not agree with the decision, but it is none of your fscking business. A private laundremat or cybercafe is NOT a public library; it is NOT government censorship, and your tax dollars are NOT funding it.

In this situation, I see nothing wrong with installing censorware. A laundremat isn't a place someone would go to do serious research; so over-blocking isn't going to be a big issue. The idea here is to let people kill time by surfing while their clothes are washing, not give them unfettered net access.

I wouldn't buy any commercial censorware, however, because they are all snake oil and the companies that sell them are beneath contempt. I would suggest using Squid and one of the numerous open-source blocking lists.

"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Re:i tend to think this is futile

[Chiasmus_]

there is no form of blocking, automatic nor manual that is foolproof. if you go with automatic, either you end up blocking things you'd rather have available, or you miss some of the porn.

That's why you don't block.

If you want to give junior high kids "internet access", you know they'll go through trying every single porn site until they hit one that beats your filters :)

Instead of selective denial, the best you can do is selective allowance. Give them access to msn.com, aol.com, disney.com, dictionary.com, a few encyclopedias, etc. I mean, in a school library, they don't start by buying every book in existence and then beginning the horrific task of throwing out the porn and racist manifestos. They add things, one at a time. That's the same way school 'net connections should work, too.

Re:i tend to think this is futile

[Golias]

Rational people are able to make a distinction between ideals that you can compromise on ("I don't like censorware"), and ideals you should fight about ("redneck bigots are treating people unfairly").

Browsing the Internet while washing your jeans is not as big of an issue as racism. It's just not.

If you are unable to discern the difference, you will end up a mad hermit like Harrison Ford in "The Mosquito Coast", putting yourself and your loved ones through hell because of your unwillingness to participate in a society that forces you to make small compromises.

Re:Do what needs to be done

[iElucidate]

The place is open to the public, and it is entirely within their rights to do what they want with their resources. Denying them any control over their own resources would seem to me to be a real breach of rights.

I think that filtering in general is a slippery slope to censorship and loss of liberties. that is why I am against a filtering system. Certainly, I agree, as I've stated in other posts, that this is not a big deal - It's a laundromat, for godsakes - however precedents are often set and followed by starting with something innocent and then taking it to the extreme. That is what worries me - how far will we go? Will everything be censored? Will all business access to the internet be filtered? Will we only be able to see what "they" want us to see? Will everything be product placements and advertising and other forms of highest-bidder speech?

That is what I worry about, not the fact that a laundromat is blocking internet access.

Whom ever pays the bill sets the rules

[technos]

Yes. They are providing a free service to the community that their own expense, and the specifications of that service are theirs to dictate. They are free to dictate terms of use to anyone willing to utilize their service.s

In the other case, I am doing the server/filesharing at my own expense. No one can dictate to me the terms upon which I may or may not share my own files, save perhaps the ISP.

Censorwaring JPEGs and maybe GIFs but not words.

[billstewart]

Another way to solve most of the problem without doing major censorship is to build your proxy system to retrieve any regular files and only run requests for JPEG files through the censorware filter. That still makes it possible for people to read dirty words, but that's usually not what really annoys people who get annoyed about Internet porn, because you have to actually *read* it rather than having it blatantly visible to anybody nearby. This is much more equivalent to people in laundromats reading trashy best-sellers and bodice-ripper romance novels with Fabio on the cover.

Somebody commented in the past that p0rn pictures are almost always JPEGs rather than GIFs, because of better picture quality and because it's what digital cameras generate, so you can do a surprisingly effective crude first cut by killing JPEGs and letting GIFs through. That does block web sites with pictures of people's kids and cats, and doesn't block animated GIFs or advertising banners for p0rn sites, but it's usually close enough for government work and better than blocking pictures entirely.

no problem

[TerryG]

I agree with the posts that you'll have a tough job filtering content based on text...you'll probably need to use filter software which could be bucks. I don't know. Here's a quick link: www.safekids.com

Concerning the moral dilemma...there isn't one. You are not the U.S. government. You are not shutting down these servers with objectionable content, you are not prohibiting anybodies free speech. True, surf n' wash is limiting the content available to it's customers. That's not censorship. It's a business policy. Newspapers don't print expletives found in letters to the editor (at least mine doesn't). Government censors, businesses do not.

Now, businesses and corporations are gaining power in the ability to dictate government policy (maybe they have already gained?). At some point it may be necessary to worry about businesses controlling online content...I don't think we are there yet.

What does AOL do?
Maybe allow for the filter to be switched off with proper identifcation....but would you want to do your laundry at a place where teenage boys are surfing porn?

TGL

Yes, it is about prudiskness, and censorship...

[Sir_Winston]

> It's not about being prudish, it's about blocking off what you don't want to see

And that is the very definition of censorship. When you filter based on what you, personally, don't wish to see, and have that choice be applicable to everyone, that's censorship. And in this case it's censorship for the purposes of being prudish. If you don't like something, don't look at it. If someone leaves a terminal pointed to a site you don't like, close the window. It's that simple.

And yes, you're obviously prudish; you lump bondage and "barely legal" in the same category as bestiality and coprophilia. The latter two are considered very unusual perversions, while bondage is a consensual lifestyle choice much like homosexuality or heterosexuality, and "barely legal" is a term usually used to refer either to the Hustler magazine/website of the same name, or to girls 18-22 who look young and girlish--in other words, the type of women most men are naturally sexually attracted to.

> My biggest objection however is the insistance that I can't keep my children away
> from anything that isn't immediately fatal.

You pro censorship types are such blame-shifting imbeciles. Sir, you can keep your kids away from anything you want to. You can keep them from going to public access Internet terminals--hell, you can lock them into AOL-only sites on your home computer, if that's what you want. You can keep them out of standard junior high/high school sex ed classes, if you want to. You can keep your kids away from whatever you choose to keep them away from. My sole point is that ultimately it's a parent's responsibility to teach his or her children well enough so that they don't need useless and inaccurate key-word filtering on public terminals to keep them from looking at inappropriate things. If your kids are raised properly, you don't need to protect them from the Big Bad Internet, they'll know which sites are good and healthy and which sites are negative and unhealthy. But I guess Americans just don't want to take responsibility for raising their kids and teaching them well any more, I guess they want to censor the world in the hopes that their kids won't be exposed to sexuality of any kind, ever. That's why we have insanely high teenage pregnancy rates and sex crime rates compared to France, England, and most of the rest of Europe, where kids are taught about sexuality and taught the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality.

It's very telling that someone modded down my first comment in this thread, which simply pointed out that filtering by words contained on the page is ineffectual, and that ultimately it's a parent's responsibility to raise children who know what they should and should not be looking at on a public access Internet terminal. It's very telling indeed, about the outright Puritanism which is still rearing its ugly head in this nation, holding us back even after centuries.

I repeat, and pay attention this time: "Yes, there's lots of unhealthy sexuality on the net that I wouldn't want my kids exposed to at an early age. But do you know the best way to keep them from looking at that stuff? It's by having honest discussions with them about adolescence, life, sex, and the difference between sex with love and sex without it, and the difference between healthy sexuality and destructive sexuality. If parents aren't willing to do that, they shouldn't be parents, and you have no responsibility to filter through software what parents should be filtering by education. Censorship "for the good of the children" is no better than cesorship for any other reason. Nazis and NetNannys are two sides of the same coin; it's the parent's responsibility to supervise the child, to raise the child, to teach the child the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality, not to try half-assedly to reduce the Net to their own narrow ideology and belief and morality."

I worked at a community college...

[misleb]

I worked for a community college that had several large, public computer labs and censorship was never an issue. Most people just don't want to get caught looking at porn in a public place. Not to mention the "being turned on in a public place" factor... Of course there were a few people that would look at porn in the labs. It was kinda funny actually. The offenders would have a 2 inch high space to browse in and they woudl get real close to the screen so they could scroll through the image. You always knew who they were and they had a reputation. You can simply ask them to leave. It should be your right to ask someone to leave if they are doing something that is "inappropriate." Just have a written policy that states "No Porn! Violators will be asked to leave." On the other hand, it should go without saying that porn is inappropriate for a public computer lab. Just like running around yelling or talking loud is inappropriate for a public library. It really shouldn't have to come down to legality or written policies or censorship.

Really, the only "censorship" we found necessary was blocking web based chat sites. And that was just to keep people from hogging machines in busy labs. I swear, some of those people are friekin' chat JUNKIES!

Point is that you are wasting your time trying to censor content. Personally, I really don't think there is anything worth censoring. Most information, and lets keep it this way, is still legal. There is nothing illegal or unethical about researching illicit drugs or reading racist manifestos. What people DO with the information is another story. I think you should be strong and insist that if it isn't illegal and it isn't blatantly inappropriate, it should be permitted.

-matthew

sigh...young/old, what's the difference?

[efuseekay]

It's is strange that we strived to block smut from "young" people, while trusting that "adults" can watch them without being "corrupted".

The truth is that people who are interested in smut will always be interested in smut whether or not they are exposed to smut as young kids in the first place.

Smut is just an interest. If somebody has nothing better to do in his/her life, and like smut then he/she will want it. If somebody likes smut, but then found something else more interesting to do (like writing obfuscated Perl code), then he/she will just lose interest in smut and channel his/her interest somewhere else.

Block smut in Junior/Senior/Blah blah anywhere is NOT going to make a more "moral" world. What's the difference? 12 year old kids will eventually grow up to be 18 anyway.

I personally think watching smut is not amoral. I just think it's boring after a while : there are just so much more interesting things I can do.

Re:You may not want to hear this, but.....

[NaughtyEddie]

That's easy to say. What we see here is a young man with ideals, meeting the real world. Slashdot is full of young men with ideals who have yet to do this. It's good that the issue has been brought up ... it may lead to greater maturity among the Slashdot readership.

Sticking to your ideals isn't imperative by any means. What most people think are "ideals" are just preconceptions about the way things are and the way things "should" be. Whenever you examine your preconceptions under a bright light, you find them to be not quite so black and white as you first thought.

I'd go even further, in fact. It is imperative that you not stick to your ideals. Your response should be appropriate to the circumstances, not just a knee-jerk reaction because of your preconceptions. It is quite immature, and logically falacious, to say that one preconception overrides all other concerns.

Witness the pro-life groups. Would you say they are right to kill doctors for their ideals? It's a tricky issue, and you can't answer complex questions like these by using your dogma and preconceptions.

You use the term "something you feel strongly about". If only more people would think about the world, rather than try and feel their way through it. Emotions are unreliable indicators.

The fact that the original poster admitted that Slashdot has "indoctrinated" him into these ideals is also quite telling...

Re:The Real World - which one are you living in?

[bluetea]

These kids are at an age where they can be responsible for their own actions and where seeing pr0n probably won't scar them for life.

No, they're not. This is a junior high school. We're talking about children as young as 12 or 13. You may think they're responsible enough to have access to pornography, but I have a feeling most people (including their parents) would disagree.

It's a public facility and there's no more obligation to censor/filter material for minors than a magazine store that happens to sell copies of Playboy and Penthouse.

Whoa there. First of all, we're not talking about the likes of Playboy and Penthouse. Those are publications that are entirely legal pretty much everywhere. There's a huge difference between the kind of nudity featured in newsstand magazines and the kind of hardcore porn you can find on the web. If a 5 year old sees the cover of Playboy at Barnes and Noble, who cares. If he walks into a laundromat and sees a photograph of a woman having sex with a dog (or an autopsy photograph, or whatever) that some punk-ass teenager pulled up and left on the screen as a joke, there are going to be problems. The laundromat may not have a legal responsibility to filter that kind of stuff out, but you can be sure they're going to take a lot more heat than they want if they don't take some kind of action to prevent things like that from happening.

Here's another illustration. My summer job is providing support for public web terminals at a mall. We have filtering software for one simple reason - if we didn't and someone complained about their kid looking at porn, we'd be kicked out of the mall in about 5 seconds flat. It would happen - no question about it. It doesn't matter if it's fair or not. That's the way things work in the "real world."

I don't like filtering any more than anyone else, but the reality is that it really is necessary sometimes. If you're offering public web access, you're taking a huge risk if you don't at least make some effort to restrict content. No, filtering is not perfect and never will be. My point is that there are situations where it's the only answer.

Censorware or predefined sites

[Lawmeister]

There has been a lot of controversy about filtering for certain 'naughty words' and blocking sites that some company has deemed 'inappropriate' (NetNanny et al). Many sites that had useful non-pr0n information (cancer, historical sites ie. WWII and the Nazi's etc) were unfairly being swept into this banned category.

I read an article in the Vancouver Sun about new product which has a rather large database of educational and 'safe' sites and they have a panel adding more sites weekly. It is SafeXplorer.com.

What does the /. community think of this option?

don't do it.

[swngnmonk]

You're asking for the impossible - a context-sensitive proxy. Why not compile a list of 50-100 sites (LA Times, CNN, ESPN, etc..) that would be useful to people, and proxy based on those domains? It's not a perfect solution, but it will save you the trouble of having an imperfect text filter showing some 11-year old porn.

community censorship

[lemurific]

why not have *no* blocking software, and only a simple request not to look at pr0n? Depending on the community, this should be deterrent enough.

Dammit

[clifyt]

Dammit, why the fuck is this even a question for /.??? First of all, it is not censorship for a biz to say "I don't want certain things on my computers'. As an employee, I wouldn't want my boss telling me this, but then again I've had to put the smack down on people in my office that were looking at porn where customers and other employees could see it. I thought about installing censorware, but decided that it would be much easier to fire the employee after his second warning (the first was when a new employee 18 year old girl came in crying because he was showing other employees 'BigAssBitches').

As a biz owner, you can do what ever you want. If your customers don't want to see it, then thats the audience you have to please. If your customers want porn, close the door to minors and have at it too (though the biz license would probably be harder to come by).

Now if it were the Gov't censoring shit, like the gov't saying ya can't have violent games played on public property like here in Indianapolis (though this still doesn't effect private property 'cause Jillian's still had my favorite sniper game as of last week), I'd say it was a /. story.

Enough of my complaining about a nonissue.

clif

Re:Obscene language is the key

[iElucidate]

Great job, you used the words "cunt" and "cumshot" in a sentence. Now he has to block Slashdot...

Re:You may not want to hear this, but.....

[jheinen]

On the gripping hand, quitting your job and publicaly stating your reasons can often do far more to change attitudes than simply quietly working within the system. By quietly working to reduce the amount of censorship, you are still censoring. You are not making a stand against it, nor are you doing anything that will likely bring attention to the issue. All the while the crusders for the moral right will advance their agendas further and further. Social change usually doesn't happen by people quietly sriving against the system. It works by publically and willingly getting your butt kicked in the name of the cause. It ain't easy, and it ain't fun. But you have to ask yourself which is more important; you're comfy life, or the betterment of your Fellow Man? In some instances it may be teh former, but sometimes it will be the latter. The final decision is up to the individual. We already know which side of the fence the corporate oligopoly has decided upon.

-Vercingetorix

Re:Just keywords or the whole blocking system?

[evanbd]

A simple modification: Multiply the score (if negative) by the number of JPEGs over 50k. Or something similar. Banners and other "Business Graphics" are usually GIFs or small. Porn, however, is much more often large JPEGs. So a site that only uses a little bad language would get a much higher rating if there were lots of large photos.

---

Re:You may not want to hear this, but.....

[Phroggy]

What you do is stick to your ideals. It may be inconvenient. It may result in losing a job. But if it is something you feel strongly about, you must not surrender your conscience.

On the other hand, if you truly believe in your cause, then you'll do what you can to make sure there's a little censorship as possible going on at this laundromat. If you fail to meet the requirements of the management, they will find someone else to replace you, and that other person may simply install CyberPatrol. It may be best to compromise your ideals in order to maintain your influencial position.

Isn't politics great?

--

Intelligent filtering

[Jason Earl]

There is no substitute yet for a human when it comes to intelligent filtering. Squid, Perl, and ipchains goes a long way, but there really isn't a substitute for scanning the log files.

I set up something similar for public use for my troop of Boy Scouts. After explaining to them how their privileges would go away (and their parents would be notified) if they disobeyed the rules, and showing them how easy it was for me to monitor what they were surfing (a quick example involving a simple Perl script and the squid access log) they were off and running.

The system has been surprisingly automatic, and it has had the added consequence of getting several of the boys interested in tools like Perl, Squid, and Linux.

However, it wouldn't work at all if there wasn't an intelligent person manning the switches. Much of the tedium can be removed from the job, but your computer is not going to make value judgements for you. No matter how fancy your porn detection algorithms are there will be a way around them, or worse yet, there will be web sites that generate false positives. But if you put an actual human in the mix, then you can make the type of useful system that the poster above mentions.

This is how I've seen it done.

[DarkMan]

This is the approach that was take for a University hall of residence.

Firstly, squid was used to do some IP address filtering. The suspect domains were obtained by greping the .com, .uk, .nl [0] and possable a few other zone files against a list of 'bad' words, that imply pornographic content. The IP addresses were then redirected to a local page that said the page possably had illegal content. Any question, email the admin for a review.

The next thing was to put posters up, explaining what was done, stressing the blocked sites were selected by an automatic method, and that porn (and others - warez etc) was banned.

The next step was to ensure that all the monitors could be seen anyone (ie no terms tucked in a corner).

After that, anyone caught, the site was baned, and so were they [1].

The bandwidth each user utilised was also examined (automatically). If it was found that a person downloaded more than a limit [2] of data from one site, in one day, the site was flagged for checking to the admin. This was desiged to catch warez sites, and similar. IIRC, the only think it caught was uk.kernel.org :).

This approach yeilded one complaint about an incorrectly blocked site (It was along the lines of fuckedcompany, although I forget the exact one, and one person caught for looking at porn.

The reason for the porn ban is that porn is just about the only clearly recognisable objectionable item, at a distance (ie for someone at the next term). There were other banned catagories, but they were unlikely to cause problems. Porn is also a bandwith killer.

Today, we'd probably be looking at throttling Napster, or possably blocking it [3].

Whilst this is possably slightly more than you want to block, it's justifyable on most fronts.

[0] In the UK, the netherlands is infamous (rightly or wrongly) as a source of, uh, XXX porn.

[1] This, of course requires user authentication, which I assume you are doing.

[2] Something insane, like 400 Mb (we were on the back of 155Mb/s ATM link).

[3] The Net was explicitly for 'academic purposes only'. One guy we found downloading porn claimed it was for his course :). We asked for a signed note from his proffessor, explaing why, and authorising that use. This, surprisingly, never appeared.

This will get on-topic eventually...

[_vapor]

...but why does it seem like most internet censorship debates, and all filtering software, is particularly concerned with porn? While I despise censorship, if people want to get all in a huff about porn, that's fine with me -- it's their opinion. But at the same time, why do we see so little resistance to other forms of traffic, such as violence on the web, or hate speech. Yes, I understand that there is a market for porn-filtering, and that's why all the filtering software is designed to block porn -- but why is there (apparently) no market for violence-filtering software (for example)? If a school doesn't want its students to see bare breasts, they'll get NetNanny or whatever, but that won't stop me from accessing some gruesome sites with photos of corpses, or cnn.com, for that matter, with its coverage of some foreign war.

The whole filtering debate is useless, as everything is shades of gray -- like the poster alluded to, showing a baby breast-feeding is not porn to most people. I'll bet it is to someone, though. Violent scenes could essentially be porn to someone; pornography is not about genitals and breasts and butts -- it's about lasciviousness, gluttony, and passivity (not necessarily bad things in themselves, IMHO). The reason you see governments, big business, the wealthy, the powerful, and elite having problems with porn is that they have a hard time using it to control you (well, that's not totally true, but mostly, I think). Violence in the news, on the other hand is a very effective tool for them to get their way (which is usually to fill their pocketbooks), by teaching the public their own filtered view of reality.

I'll try to make this on topic again by saying that you, the poster, as well as anyone else who cares about their freedom, have a duty to NOT participate in such filtering nonsense. Anyone who would be harmed by certain content on the internet should not be using it without parental guidance anyway; filtering software is NOT a suitable replacement for a human being. It is far worse, IMO, for benign content to be accidentally blocked that it is for a child/sensitive viewer to see something that might prod their value system a little bit (heaven forbid!).

In a word: abstain.

On Censorware In General

[iElucidate]

The debate always comes down to this: After we finish ranting and raving about the evils of censorware, we find an area where the censorware might actually be needed, if not for general happiness, then for legal reasons.

You have been given an impossible task. There is absolutely no chance in hell that you will be able to block even .001% of the pr0n/objectionable sites out there. Commercial software filters can cover a lot more sights, but not with much better accuracy. Instead, look at your target audience. You are serving people who have little if any experience with the net. Therefore, a nice portal site will lead them in the right direction without you worrying about "objectionable" material.

You definetally need to make your users sign agreements for internet use. You need to make sure your company isn't held liable for any problems they have or cause. Another clause must deal with objectionable material. Perhaps simply having an agreement that they will immediately close any material that the management deems inappropriate to the customer base. Maintain no liability, but keep the option open to kick people off the system if you get enough complaints. Train your staff to simply scan the monitors and make sure nothing explicit is available.

The problem with censorware has always been choosing what is objectionable to whom. I am a strong advocate of free speech, but when people are using a pay service in public, the proprietor of the service has a right to enforce certain rules. Allowing the on-site staff to survey online use to make sure nothing "inappropriate" to the customer base is probably the best solution - this way people on the scene can address whether content affects them and their neighbors, instead of relying on a person or company far removed.

Wrong approach

[MostlyHarmless]

You simply can't do it. You would either have to do it by hand (yuck) or install censorware (yuck). The latter would filter about .01% of the material, while the latter would filter maybe 50% of the material and be wrong 10% of the time.

A better option?

1. Put the computer near the counter or wherever your guys stand. People won't mess around when their screen can be seen by employees.
2. Post usage policies next to the computer in a _visible_ location.

It acts on the same principle that should hopefully keep our libraries uncensored: People wanting to avoid public embarrassment.

--

You may not want to hear this, but.....

[jheinen]

What you do is stick to your ideals. It may be inconvenient. It may result in losing a job. But if it is something you feel strongly about, you must not surrender your conscience. It is especially hard if your ideals are significantly different than those of mainstream society. But where would we be if Martin Luther King had reached a "compromise" with Jim Crow legislation? What if Nelson Mandela decided to change his position in order to avoid the inconvenience of prison? The fact is, the actions you take are important, no matter how unimportant you may feel as an individual. It is only through many small individual acts that large-scale change will happen. As Camus wrote "it is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees."

-Vercingetorix

The Real World

[alleria]

These kids are at the age where they can be responsible for their own actions, and where seeing pr0n probably will not scar them for life. It's a public facility, and there's no more obligation to censor/filter material for minors than a magazine store that happens to sell copies of Playboy and Penthouse.

That said, IMHO there is no good technical solution in terms of blocking, whether by keyword or anything else. Witness the tens of commercial products that are rediculed by Peacefire on a frequent basis. For any blocking scheme, there will always be holes in the system, and also sites that are incorrectly blocked.

I would suggest that each person should have to log on with a unique ID to use the system, and that all accesses would be logged, and that they are told that their activities are logged, and analyzed.

That said, it would probably also help to put the terminals in a position where the contents of the screen are prominently visible to other patrons of said laundromat. Public embarassment can be a reasonably good deterrent.

My $0.02

Just keywords or the whole blocking system?

[_xeno_]

Are you just creating the keywords, or are you doing the blocking software yourself? If you're doing it yourself, you may want to consider a "point" system where certain words get certain positive/negative points, and for a page to view, it must have a certain number of points.

For example, say that the word "breast" is a -1 word, being rather mild and usable in ok ways ("There goes a robin red-breast!") while "worse" words such as "penis" are -5. Some phrases ("hot bitch") would be -10, and so on.

Some words would activate "positive" words, so that finding "breast" might allow "cancer" to be a +1, so "breast cancer" is a 0, not a -1.

Once the page has been scanned and a score has been figured, determine a score needed to allow viewing, adjusted for number of words (so that someone looking at "-1" on Slashdot doesn't find it blocked because some troll posted "Jon Katz is a cunt" 30 times in a row).

I dunno how well this would really work, but it's an idea. It still runs into some problems - the optimal solution would be to have someone watching people online. And of course, go over the proxy logs and see where people have gone - block sites that shouldn't have been allowed that way.

how often do you guys wash your clothes?

[table and chair]

In response to some of the standard comments in this thread:

1. The "Social shame will keep porn to a minumum" argument.

Laundromats are strange places. They attract strange people. And they seem to make ordinary people lose a lot of their inhibitions. I've seen people take off their pants and throw them into a washing machine, as if it were perfectly normal to get nekkid in public. That some dirty old man won't immediately begin to hunt for porn seems like wishful thinking, even if he's got an enormous audience.

2. The "Supervisory staffing will be a burden" caveat.

Laundromat employees are hardly burdened as it is. Maybe there's some secret work that they do that I've never noticed, but it seems like most of the time they sit around and watch TV or read or stare at people. Once in a while they'll clean a lint trap or yell at someone for using too much detergent. Asking them to keep an eye on the internet terminals, or even to man an administrative terminal to process un-blocking requests, seems like no big deal to me.

3. The "Stick to your ideals! Screw the Man!" exhortation.

We're talking about a laundromat. Nothing noble has ever happened in a laundromat. Stop quoting Camus and making wild comparisons to great moments of integrity throughout history.

Obscene language is the key

[nagora]

Breast might be the only "sexual" word on a porn site, but I doubt it. The meta tags will contain plenty of words which are very unlikely to appear on a non-porn site (cunt and cumshot spring to mind), so filtering on the "strong" words should drop the vast majority of sites you're worried about.

Remember that the sites want to be found by search engines, so think about what they are going to put into their text to get indexed and act accordingly.

Filtering based on "breast" is not going to lose any porn sites that filtering stronger language left behind.

TWW

Use Lynx

[Hairy_Potter]

That way you won't display any dirty pictures, and you can use Linux and 486's to do it real cheap. And the ascii erotica will help the junior high kids learn how to read.