Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
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 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
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
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.
www.poak.net
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.
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.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
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
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
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
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
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.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.