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Censorware Flaws Shown To COPA Commission
The reports themselves make for the most interesting reading; I'll just summarize them here:
FamilyClickThe following sites were blocked on the "18 or older" setting, in other words, the software thinks they were too violent, pornographic, hateful, etc. to be seen even by adults:
- AIDS Day 1997: China Responds to AIDS;
- Diccionario del VIH/SIDA (a dictionary of AIDS-related terms, in Spanish);
- Camp Sussex (a summer camp for low-income children);
- Triangles and Tribulations, an essay on the persecution of gay men and woman in Nazi Germany;
- "Homosexuality: Fact and Fiction", from the Christian Research Journal;
- genealogy of Alice Ficken (her last name means "fuck" in German).
and sodomy laws, pro-family protests of pornography, a defense of Wicca, etc.
Cyber SentinelThe software's PR blurb says: "At the core of the technology is an advanced recognition engine developed by Security Software Systems engineers (patent pending). This proprietary engine is very fast, very low overhead, and is very accurate."
Blocked sites include:
- CNN.com homepage (because of the story headline "Naples museum exposes public to ancient erotica");
- searches for the term "COPA" on CNet, Wired, Time, and USAToday (because each results page had at least one filthy headline, such as "Back to court for Net porn law");
- The American Family Association (the right-wing group pushing for censorware in libraries and schools, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
- biographies of COPA Commission members Stephen Balkam and Donna Rice Hughes - because they both graduated "magna cum laude" (think about it);
- and, my favorite, the list of papers presented at the COPA Commission!
This was a more interesting test; Peacefire took a sampling of 1,000 domains from the beginning of the .com zone file, and tested which ones that SurfWatch blocked. (Yours truly wrote the one-liner perl script to find sites that respond to ping; for that, Bennett almost named me co-author before I talked him down from his caffeine high.)
SurfWatch claims that it "adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find."
Of the 147 domains blocked, most (96) were clearly "under construction" and were ignored for the test. Of the remaining 51 blocked domains, 42 of them, or 82%, were erroneous blocks.
The 42 supposedly pornographic sites include:
- A-1 Dog Grooming and Kennels;
- American Builders;
- Waterbeds Online;
- A-1 Diamond Limousine;
- Poxy Coat;
- A-Antiques.com.
SurfWatch, for the record, is the software that the American Family Association (see above) and Family Research Council tried to force the Geek Compound's local library to install, earlier this year.
While I applaud Peacefire's (and Slashdot's) efforts to defeat censorware on a practical front, I'd like to (again) point out:
1) Even if the software could implement one person's definition of "obscene" 100% accurately, it couldn't do so for more than one person simultaneously.
2) Even if we all agreed that something was obscene, keeping someone (who is old enough) from looking at it is STILL WRONG.
We don't want to move the censorware battle to a place where they keep getting more accurate and we keep pointing out the remaining flaws. We want to start discussing where it is appropriate to target censorware, if anywhere. For instance, I am totally against any kind of filtering in a library or on all ISPs (that is, I don't mind of ChristSoft wants to implement a filter for their members, but I don't want ALL ISPs to start doing it).
Just imagine 5 years from now. FamilyClick is 100% accurate in filtering out those items they think are obscene. They come to Slashdot and say "happy now?" We say, "well, it's accurate---but we don't like it." Too late.
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Personally, I like the way the library in my town handles it. If you are below the age of 18 and you have a library card, on the back it specifies whether you are allowed to use the computers or not. Under that, it has two boxes that you can check off. One for censorware, and one for unrestricted access. This way, it is your parent's choice, and NOT Big Brother's choice whether you see the internet in its full glory. IIRC, most of the children have it enabled, so this shows you that most parents want it on anyway, for fear of their precious children seeing something naughty, like BREAST cancer.
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Can we not implement a freenet type decentralized, community based voting mechanism for web sites. This way the majority of the net users would vote on how a site is classified rather than a corporation... C.
Porn sites that use normally innocent and innocuous words to describe their business, and therefore get all sites with those now naughty words banned...
"mom, why can't I get to www.disney.com?"
'Well hon, I guess its all the 'Mickey Mousing' going on there'
-={(Astynax)}=-
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"Darkness beyond Twilight"
My mental image of the whole thing is a library with controlled and uncontrolled (or minimally-controlled) terminals, where uncontrolled terminals were only available to adults and controlled terminals were available to children. Uncontrolled terminals could access pretty much anything; controlled terminals could access sites already in the database with a ranking (within an category) above a level set by the local staff. Unlisted sites being accessed from the controlled terminals would be bounced to someone else for approval (I'm imaginging this going to someone supervising the children's area of the library). Alternatively, children's terminals could be in one of two modes: private but limited to approved sites or monitored but allowed pretty much uncontrolled access. That way if little Johnny is looking at porn/bomb howtos/drug recipes/whatever, someone shadowing the terminal can see it and either shut down access to the site or go have a talk with Johnny.
On the moderation side, scoring would be a bit more complex than /.'s - moderators could be ranked, and moderators with higher ranks would have more influence on the scoring. Similarly, moderators with low ranks or moderators who abused the system could be given less influence and eventually dropped. By doing this, you could hopefully prevent "poisoning" of the system by people with agendas. Ranking could be handled by something similar to /.'s meta-moderation, but probably more automated. If librarian A puts a site in a category and librarians B, C, and D all disagree with that assesment, A's ranking (overall or within that category) goes down. There could even be a way for the general public to "nominate" sites for moderation with suggestions as to categories.
The biggest headache with the whole thing, I think, would be who does the moderating, particularly early on - it's not like most libraries have people sitting around doing nothing who could just take it on as an additional duty. Unfortunately, it's not like there's a good base list out there that could be used as a seed.
One interesting thing is that if such a system was developed it could have commercial potential as well - perhaps a version of it that did not include the ability to moderate, but which did allow the use of frequently-updated copies of the score files from libraries. By providing it to libraries for free, a company would both help libraries avoid community pushes for censorware with an agenda and gain access to a pool of site raters.
Overall, there are all sorts of potential approaches to the problem of protecting people from disagreeable information, the problems are that there are so many different ideas of what's considered disagreeable and there are so many different ideas of who needs to be protected. On one end, you have people who believe that what's appropriate is no restrictions at all; on the other you have people who believe that all access should be tightly controlled; in between you have the bulk of the populace. In the US the general tendency is probably toward less control, but the tight-control people are noisy. Assuming that somewhere in the middle (limited control) is where things are going to end up, the problem becomes one of ensuring that the controls that go into place are not too restrictive, and that's where I think approaches like this could come in.
Finally, before people jump all over this as advocating censorware, I lean toward the less-control end personally, but I think that there are some things that need to be discussed with children before they're exposed to them unsupervised. Children who think and parents who teach them to do so are the way to go, but in our current society I'm not sure how much we can depend on that.
fencepost
just a little off
Shouldn't filtering be set up by kids so that their parents don't suffer the trauma of stumbling across naughty bits on the net?
It's only parents that have trouble with alleged pornography. Under-age kids either don't understand what they're seeing, or they react with "Yuk!" or else they think it's hilarious (and you've got to admit, rubbing squishy bits together has to be the funniest thing on the planet), and older kids positively love it.
And since kids understand the technology far better than their parents anyway and can easily bypass any block they like, it's really they that ought to be doing the censoring to protect their parents.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What bureaucrat(s) get to decide which companies are "porn" and which companies merely have "erotic" or "adult-themed" content? And if you find your site branded with the scarlet "S" and subsequently blocked, to whom may you appeal?
Will sites dealing with homosexual lifestyles, erotic fiction, transcripts of Supreme Court nominee hearings, or pro-life/pro-choice advocacy be labelled with ".sex" because of their "adult" content? Does an online gallery of the collected works of Robert Mapplethorpe or David Hamilton warrant the imposition of a .sex domain?
Defining pornography is pretty tricky. D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Allen Ginsburg, Henry Miller, and other notable 20th century writers all faced accusations of obscenity. I realize that you probably have a very clear idea of the kind of sites that should be given a .sex TLD, and I probably wouldn't disagree with any of your choices; but, unfortunately, I don't think we can depend on the same rational objectivity on the part of any board of de facto censors.
As another poster has observed, it will be all-too-convenient to enforce a blanket ban on anything with a .sex TLD, and certain lobbying groups will doubtless see to it that such a ban is enforced on campuses and in libraries, or required of local ISPs in small and not-so-small towns across the nation. After all, what elected official wants to be on record with such an "anti-family" position as supporting access to those dirty .sex domains?
Remember the rationale behind the NC-17 rating? The X rating wasn't intended to merely represent pornographic films. The Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, for example, was rated X. Eventually, however, X came to signify hardcore, and porn merchants used XXX as another marketing tool. The MPAA eventually adopted the NC-17 rating, ostensibly to allow serious filmmakers to release adult-themed films without being saddled with the same rating as Debbie Does Dallas.
Unfortunately, NC-17 is the financial kiss of death. Why? "Family" newspapers mostly won't run advertisements for NC-17 movies. Most major theatre chains won't show them. Major studies routinely require R-rated films to be delivered (such as the case with Kubrick's last film).
The same thing has happened with "Parental Advisory" labels on rock and rap albums, to a degree, but I won't go into that here; I'm afraid I might have rambled on too long, as it is.
In a nutshell, requiring a new .sex domain opens an entirely familiar can of worms. Whether it's labeled Censorware, Parental Advisory labels, or the Hayes Commission, it's still the same can we've been opening since the Comstock Act.
If they ever made one that was perfect that would scare me more than these attempts at it. Especially since in everyone's mind different material is offensive. It also depends on the context as shown by many of these links. I was wasting time at my local library, where they said the didn't but I found they have Surfwatch happily installed. My roommate and myself got into an argument at work about some irelevant point with Hitler so I went to look up Hitler and try and find info. (I dont remember what I was looking for exactly) But the only sites I could get to were useless. Most of them just history about how the allies won the war. All the sites that mentioned his beliefs were blocked. I finally cliked on a neonazi page that was strict hatred and very insulting and it allowed that. I found it so amusing that I called the librarian over to show her and she took offence and asked me to leave if I was going to look at information like that. I told her my situation and she said I was looking wrong and she would find it. She quickly ran into the same problem, and gave me this solution. Well if it is important you should get it out of a book, the internet is usually wrong anyway. I left think of sour grapes. Just my ramblings.
I am 31337 or something.
We're talking about absolute control here. Right now, the Internet is not as important as TV, but it will be much more important in the near future, and if there's a single company (or an oligarchy of companies) that's in control of what children can see, without public scrutiny, they can do whatever they want. And they will probably get away with it.
That's why the censorware issue is so extremely important, and that's why Mattel went after the guys who cracked the Cyber Petrol filter list. It's not because of accidental overblocking, it's because of the power of intentional censorship by conservative organizations. In schools and libraries, imagine that!
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I'm very very strongly against government censorship. However, I do believe it's a parent's right to control what kind of material their children get access to (or at least try). This control doesn't extend to schools and libraries. Libraries and schools I do not think should be censored ever. Make parents sign agreements before letting their kids use public internet if liability is the problem.
This censorship software is clearly ridiculous, and seems like it has barely improved since the first versions were released. This only adds to the ridiculousness of the demands to censor public access.
On an somewhat sad sidenote, the network administrator of my high school system is also totally against censorship and tracking of websites, but when upgrading servers last year had software installed which COULD do both (but didn't). Apparently he felt that given the attitude in the school system, it was only a matter of time before mandatory censorship and tracking would be the status quo.
Scott
I wanted to research a Trip to Thailand but the damn library keeps blocking any info about it!!
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air and light and time and space
at the COPA, COPA will ban ya, the software's a lot like Net Nanna. Oh the COPA, COPA will ban ya, porno and nazis will always get block-ied at the COPA, COPA will ban ya.