Slashdot Mirror
Internet Filter Plan Hits Snag
Censorware in public institutions? Congress is pushing for it, but the current bill has a surprising opponent: at least one of the censorware makers. A major-brand corporate V.P. is quoted in a
recent AP story
as saying: "Things that mandate specific technologies probably aren't the best solution here. Let the free market decide...." But the interesting technical story here is
yet another statistical analysis
by Peacefire. They looked at five popular packages and showed that for every ten appropriately-blocked domain name, there were anywhere from four to forty domain names just randomly censored. Ouch.
Yes, boys and girls, there is an easy way to filter out the worst filth on the internet, a way to rid yourself of all the "steve case ate my balls" homepages and 99% of all the sick, gay, goat and kiddie porn out there.
Are you ready for it?
Ban everything under geocities. Duh. Any stupid troll could have figured that one out.
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
I doubt there are any sites that "randomly censored". Maybe inexplicably censored, or unintentionally censored, or inadvertantly censored, or even extraneouslyy or gratuitiutously censored.
Censoring sites randomly would be pretty hard to code given the number of potential URLs. I guess of course you could do it by IP number, but what would be the point.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Wouldn't it make sense to also consider the percentage of unblocked pornographic sites?
I asked Bennett Haselton (of Peacefire) the same question. He replied by mail (8/5/2000):
Bennett Haselton wrote:
The information is not intended to persuade people who support censorship because by that age people generally don't change their mind anyway. The information is to help people such as librarians who are embattled in their local community because they don't censor Internet access on their computers.
If we focus on the fact that blocking software doesn't block enough pornography, then we're betraying our cause because part of the point of what we're doing is that pornography is not harmful. Now, how do you persuade people to believe *that*, if they already have formed the belief that porn is harmful? I don't think you can, which is why we have the censorware-disabling instructions on our site; you can't reason with parents not to use the software, so we can at least give people a means to get around it...
-Bennett
In fact, judges typically decide court cases because of what is wrongfully blocked, rather than because not enough material was censored.
(PS: Sorry for posting private email, but I think that Bennett would approve)
Problems: too US-centric, and too difficult to police. If J Random 1337 w4r3z d00d (a resident of, say, the UK) puts up his '1337 warez site complete with the standard porn banners, but puts meta tags up saying it's rated the same as the Teletubbies site, who can stop him? Do you then go the route of Australia and tell all the ISPs in the US to block certain websites? I suppose it would be a solution to this problem.
Even when they're in the US, you're still going to have to track them down, etc; if their pages are hosted outside the US, tough bikkies.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Filtering/blocking based on Domain names is fatally flawed.
/. admin... sorry for blocking your ads :P)
That's why there are software like Internet Junkbuster, or Guidescope.
No matter what the domain name is, it's still blocks ads. (Oh, hello
So, the same thing can be used to block porn sites. (Ok, at least Junkbuster will try to block every domain's ads. Don't know about Guidescope...)
---
Sadly they block even many GNU projects. This is not fun and games anymore.... luckily I found a GOOD solid way to bypass bess. I fear documenting it, since it may lead to a fix. So I just won't.... but there are ways around bess's filtering mechanisms.
Ever need an online dictionary?
One important omission that Peacefire has historically made time and again is to ignore the differences between Web servers dedicated to a single Web site and those that serve up multiple Web sites for multiple domains from a single host (so-called "virtual hosts," as Apache refers to them). It is possible for a Web server to have, say, both a pr0n site and a neighborhood church site on the same server--different domain names, but same IP address. It is not uncommon for Web filters to make the error of blocking both sites in such a case, because of the difficulty in determining whether or not a single Web server handles multiple "virtual" sites. The ability, or inability, to resolve this kind of problem is an important distinguishing performance factor for evaluating Web filters, but Peacefire and its cheerleaders seem to prefer glossing over such complications because it makes it easier for them to draw colorful, simplistic, haha-aren't-those-big-bad-censors-stupid conclusions. (Yes, I know, it's not in Peacefire's best interests to be fair about such analyses anyway.)
The problem is that little Jimmy is more likely to understand the technology than said parent, and be able to either bypass it, or steer his parent's ISP-choosing towards one which doesn't do this.
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
... is that it's never a mistake to censor anything that doesn't deserve it.
Those who fight for censorship ultimately claim that it's for the good of society to prevent certain information from seeing the light of day. The main fallacy behind that line of thinking is the idea that information can harm people, directly or indirectly - when in truth, information is just the composition of ideas and thoughts, while it's MOTIVATION and FEELINGS that actually cause harm and discomfort.
Anyway, you could reason that censorship advocates hold no value for the information that they want to be censored. This means that there IS a set of information that they consider to have value, because they at the very least have to have thoughts and ideas that motivate them to feel that other thoughts and ideas are bad.
One ugly result of this logic is that censorship advocates are motivated to tell you what you can't have available, but are equally motivated to have control over information and communication systems so that what you ONLY see is the information that they consider valuable. Not all censorship advocates directly feel this way, but if they thought this deep about it, they'd come to this conclusion. Luckily, the Internet is under no such threat of control overall...
My main point: With this logic, if non-offensive information is censored unfairly, that's okay. Why? Censorship advocates discriminately consider a certain set of information valuable. By definition, it has to be in the set of information that they know and have learned already. So the set of information that they consider as value-less includes the entire set of information that they are unfamiliar with. Therefore anything they don't know about is worthy of censorship. If a website that they do not know about happens to be censored, there is absolutely no problem in that; strangely, if information that they value happens to be censored, they're enraged when they find out - but until they find out, or if they don't find out, then it's not possible for it to be a problem, because what they don't know has no value to them.
On the other hand, if you don't selectively discriminate among groupings of ideas and thoughts, then all information possibly holds some value - and none of it should be censored. This is what we like to call freedom...
This you should not forget, however: You can't control or affect other people's motivation and feelings without altering their frame of reference - their entire collection of knowledge and information. And you can't control or affect other people's actions without imprisoning them or altering their motivations and feelings. If you do not pay attention to the spread of information, you leave everything to chaos theory. Sanity issues aside, people in general will not infringe on the basic civil rights of others if they are correctly guided through our collection of human knowledge. In the end, we do need to make sure that information is presented properly for all human beings to maintain order on this planet... otherwise you WILL have suicide bombings and 4-year olds getting upset at pictures of naked women. It's just that discriminately preventing information from being presented to certain people is not fair to those people, not the proper way to share information, and certainly not a foolproof way to prevent anyone from having misguided ideas, thoughts, motivations, feelings, and actions. (Columbine HS being the most tragic and convincing argument of this)
Well, at least stuffing the site in the category 'Hacking' makes some sense (After all, one of the things that Peacefire does is post instructions on how to circumvent these filters.) It's certainly better than the blanket all-categories filter that most of the programs seem to do to peacefire. (Of course, I suppose that this program may do the same thing if the admin lifts the restriction on the hacking category. Does anyone know?)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Ethics and moral are good. If you have enough money to technically afford them. Lots of them... Democracy is much more economical. This may be too picky but... how are you comparing ethics and morals to democrarcy? Ethics and morals are concepts of how we should act and democracy is a form of government. Seems to me the three can coexist quite nicely. Now I just have to figure out why you need money to have ethics and morals.
This solution might work if:
(a) the 3 filtering packages were all 'nearly correct'.
(b) they had completely independent heuristics.
As an (extreme) example, if 3 filter programs each blocked a ramdom 20% (1/5) of sites (I'm not saying that they do), this approeach would block an effectively random 10% (13/125) of sites.
My guess is that with this approach (based on what I've heard about the current filters) is you'd hardly get anything blocked except for anti-censorware sites like Peacefire, or where they have common heuristics (like anything with the word 'breast'). Still worse than useless.
You won't even have to go to a library anymore! You would be able to access ALL the books without paying, from anywhere in the world!! woohoo capitalism! way to go government! talk about some spending cuts!!!
While I'm not comfortable with the idea of censorship, I wonder if segregating all the porn sites into one Top Level Domain (.sex, .xxx, .eros, whatever) would be enough so that those who want to can "filter" out all sex. domains.
This concept would be the cyberspace equivalent to a red light district in meatspace.
The hard part would be policing the conversion of www.mysexsite.com to www.mysexsite.sex. And who pays for this conversion...
I'm just wondering if there are any effective content filtering solutions out there that would really work at keeping out the porn but allowing "socially approved" versions of sexually related content (e.g. sexual dysfunction support groups, sexual health, etc.)
Bah. Since when can the U.S. gov't mandate legal policy in foreign countries? Even if (and its a HUGE if- it were *possible* to enforce this technically, (which it isn't), do you really think all those fortune 500 companies that make up all the special interests groups would be delighted to spend $$$$$$$ to refurbish all their web properties? Never happen.
Most browers keep a history. Why don't the parents just check the history every few days to see what the kids have been looking at? Sure the kid could delete the history but make that part of the computer use rules. Delete the history, no more computer use for little Johnny. My biggest concern with the censorship issue is that the government is trying to do the parents job. Parents have an obligation to control what their kids are exposed too. Lazy parents want the government to do it for them.
Now this doesn't deal with filtering software in schools and libraries. So, why doesn't each institution decide on their own what solution is best for them. Ideally hire someone to monitor the lab. They don't even have to be that attentive. It's gonna take a lot of balls to look up porn when the lab monitor could stroll by to see what youre doing at any minute
If I ran a censorware company, I wouldn't want government meddling in this area either. Before long, they'd be mandating standards, examining results, holding hearings, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It's not too much of a stretch to see some agency deciding that it's their duty to the people to regulate the censorware makers to assure that they're doing an adequate job, and to punish those who don't measure up.
What about making the porn sites get rated here: RSAC?
Would that work better than word based filters?
--
That's odd that you say the above, since when I just checked celebrity.com, there was definitely substantial nudity there, from the first banner ad onwards. If you don't believe me, follow any of the links from this page on their site.
Server1: syn port 1433, Hi, you awake?
Server2: syn ack, Yep.
Server1: ack, Oh good.
Server2: Won't you login?
Server1: Don't mind if I do!
Server2: Got a user name?
Server1: sa
Server2: Password?
Server1: blank
Server2: Okey-dokey
Server1: Your admin is an mcse, isn't he?
Server2: Why yes, how did you guess?
The CIA won't be pissed that you just took down their sql server, will they? After all, it invited you!
>How many libraries ever carried issues of Hustler in their magazine rack anyway?
;)
the library I always went to as a kid used to carry some porn.. a dutch library (ofcourse...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Actually, that site is a-celebrity.com, I know this because I went to celebrity.com and it was clearly porn. Not bad I might add. But I was in search of some backgrounds. So I found the page you were talking about and the correct address is a-celebrity.com and there were some nice backgrounds there, found a new one for xdm. thanks
a-celebrity.com would be blocked under the Lingerie setting, as an earlier poster said. A couple of clicks gave me this: Alyssa-Milano - certainly a nice piccy, and definitely not pr0n, but it falls inside the list of subjects that were requested to be blocked...
--
-=DaveHowe=-
I'll agree that a-celebrity.com is in the lingerie category and that this is an error from Peacefire; however, I think sniping on Slashdot after checking one data point just isn't good enough. I won't even talk about the voteups...
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Very true. For example, I can't get to the Peacefire statistical analysis -- it's blocked by our corporate Cyber Patrol filter :-(
The interesting thing is, that after looking at Cyber Patrol's
12 categories
under which a site may be blocked, I can't see that Peacefire falls into any of them...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
SurfWatch 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.
Compare this to the tag line above Google's search box:
Search 1,247,340,000 web pages
For argument's sake, let's say that a scant 1% of the internet is home to "objectionable" material worth adding to a filtering database. Though the real figure is undoubtedly higher than this, it'll be a good starting point for the purposes of this excercise.
Now, assuming both groups are telling the truth in the above blurbs, in order for SurfWatch to have 100% of the objectionable web content checked and indexed, it would have taken them 31,183 days, or approximately 85 years, to cover 100% of objectionable web sites at their current rate of roughly 400 new sites per day.
This strikes me as a somewhat problematic figure, as at this early stage in the history of computing (circa 1915,) the Internet was pretty much restricted to an elite group of individuals and organizations who owned or had access to one of the zero computers in existence.
Now, I guess, the only question is whether Google or SurfWatch is lying...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
True, but the problems reported by the Peacefire study are far worse than that. For example: Cyber Patrol was tested using their "Partial Nudity," "Full Nudity," and "Sexual Acts/Text" filters turned on (and no other filters). Among the sites blocked: an attorney's site (http://www.a-attorney-virginia.com), and a home inspection company (http://www.a-actionhomeinspection.com).
If this is the type of gaffe we can expect for selecting sites which contain nudity or sexual content, what can we expect for other categories which are more nebulous, like "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling?"
By the way: Peacefire does link to Cyber Patrol's category definitions in their analysis of that product. I picked them because they had a high error rate which was pretty illustrative of the problem, but there were several other products reviewed with similar error rates.
Good enough for what?
Good enough to declare the entire thing a sham? no, of course not.
Good enough to be concerned about peacefires actions? When they are calling other people liars and claiming that there were no "borderline" cases in those they declared "falsely blocked", yeah it is.
Good enough to make a comment on /. encouraging a more skeptical view of Peacefires "studies" than had currently been given? You bet your ass.
I made it perfectly clear that I was commenting only on the one page, but that it was the only page I had checked. I also made it clear that I did not have time to sit around cutting and pasting all the sites (why didn't they include links, anyway?) but that I wanted t give a heads up to anyone who wanted to investigate the investigators.
I would note that in many cases, a single example out of many investigated has been enough to discredit any filterware arround here. I find nothing inapropriate about people finding a single example that only seeks to call peacefire into question interesting.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
You are not permitted to access the URL http://www.peacefire.org/error-rates/ due to the policies established by !@#@!#.
The following list defines content that is deemed inappropriate use of !#@##@!;'s internet connection:
Nudity
Gross Depictions
Militant/Extremist
Questionable/Illegal/Gambling
Racism/Ethnic Impropriety
Satanic/Cult
Sexual Acts
Violence/Profanity
If this is an error, and visiting this site is neccessary to perform your job, then you should contact the IT Department Manager.
(And we take back calling you naughty, too.)the ^##$##$ is where i blocked out the company's name. made me bust out laughing at my cube though.
What about sites on Tantric Hinduism?
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
Maybe these companies should be thinking twice about basing a business on trying to create software to do a task that, as you've just pointed out, is pretty hopeless (all issues of whether it's a good idea or not aside).
And they should definitely be thinking twice before making claims about personally checking each URL which can easily be demonstrated to be false.
[TMB]
The review they did is pretty easy. The only had to review the 5-50 sites that were actually blocked.
False negatives obviously occur, because SurfWatch accurately blocked 9 sites while CyberPatrol only accurately blocked 4 sites from the same list.
So yes, statistics can be used to show anything they want, and in this case they wanted to show the number of false positives in 1000 domains, and they did just that.
I notice that in the Peacefire comparison, the only number they consider is (# of non-pornographic sites blocked)/(total # of sites blocked), i.e. the number of false positives
They use this statistic because it is the only one which is possible to obtain. To get the number of sites which should be blocked but aren't would require knowing where every single pr0n site on the internet is, which is completely unfeasible.
------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
So if the concern is that for any given access control package a certain number of sites may be blocked which should not be, why not use a proxy which has say, 3 of these packages loaded up on it. Certainly each package probably has mistakes in its resolution routine, but the odds of an perfectly innocent site being mistakenly blocked in 3 different packages seems rare. 2 out of 3 say OK and you are in....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I mean ... short of hiring a full-time staff that exclusively surfs through the entire web
Many of these companies claim that the blocked sites are individually reviewed by human staff. One of the points of the Peacefire analysis was that these claims are false (and as you imply, they're pretty ludicrous claims to make in the first place).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Me too! aren't they the best?
If you are concerned about censorware sneaking through Congress because the general population is uninformed about the hazards, you should go visit the linked story (or a similar story running now on CNN.com). AP and CNN are businesses, if a story gets a lot of traffic, they will print more like it. Nothing better than co-opting really mass-market media to spread your message.
Not really. Hmm, yes and no. One of Peacefire's arguments against filters is that it is technologically unfeasible to implement an accurate and effective filter. Given the size of the Internet and the state of AI used to apply filters this is true.
This argument consists of 2 sections:
This little piece of analysis addresses the second point. It's just easier. To prove the first you need to find all the porn sites then see which ones aren't blocked. If dozens of filter companies with millions of dollars of resources can't do it, Peacefire ceratinly can't. And of course you can't estimate the size of porn Internet in relation to the entire Internet (the size of which is more or less known or can be estimated reliably). It's like proving a negative, it has to be exhaustive.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Politicians trying to get the vote of the moral majority. Conservative parents want their children protected from the "evils" of the internet, no matter what the cost. People tend to forget that children are not the only ones using the internet at libraries. What about college students? What happens when someone without access to the internet in their home needs to do research on breast cancer? the Holocaust? religious cults?
Politicians have to cater to those people that vote. And since the "moral majority" and the like always turn out in huge numbers to vote, they're important. The less the people that disagree with them vote, the more important they become.
If young people voted in higher numbers than old conservative types, young people would be more likely to be catered to.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Uhm, no, the quote was supposed to show that even great men like Mohammed are humble. It reads 'if the mountain does not come to mohammed, then mohammed will come to the mountain'.
As to how this is supposed to be the internet is totally beyond me...
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
For the record, I would apply for that job. Surfing for porn, sounds like my life already.
oops. I accidentally moderated this down. I'll reply to cancel.
-Dave
http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.peacefire.o rg/c efire.org/
http://a123.g.akamaitech.net/7/123/21/000/www.pea
Libraries have always been "censored" - there has never been a library that has carried every single book & periodical in existence, so I don't see any moral mandate for a library to allow for unlimited internet access.
Every time a librarian chooses to purchase or not purchase a book, they're engaging in "censorship". How many libraries ever carried issues of Hustler in their magazine rack anyway?
What is the matter with this proposal: Blocking software is installed in a library, perhaps even one with a high degree of false positives. If a site happens to be blocked, a patron would come up to the librarian and request that the site be enabled. The librarian would check the site from their desk workstation, and if it was deemed appropriate, the block would be lifted. This is essentially the role librarians have always had: organizers & diseminators of information.
The only condition would be that blocking software operates by allowing selective enabling rules to override the built-in rules. I assume most have this feature; not being a user of the software I don't know the details.
I think this is a lousy idea. What if the person is looking for information on HIV, human sexuality, non-Christian religions or something else that might subject them to public ridicule or ostracism?
Why not just publish a monthly list of all books checked out from the public library, including the identity of the borrowers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If you checked sources then you may find a curious fact that both proverbs exist and for quite long. "the mountain will come to Mohamed" is somehow a way to say that even if one does not wish to achieve a fate then the fate will forcefully achieve you. As you may know the Prophet did not want to accept the role that was given to him. However, in time, he understood that he had to do it. No matter the hardships and barriers in front of him. It is still a question to consider if he did go to mountain Arafat or montain Arafat reached him...
[...], filtering based on domain names is incredibly simple to bypass. [...] Just open up a dos box, ping the host, and it will give you the IP address. Put the IP address in the address bar in your browser, and you're there.
Look for censorware to block these IP addresses as well, as soon as someone at one of these censorware companies walks into a wall hard enough that he accidentally and temporarily has some sense knocked into him.
Before anyone starts frantically grabbing his pornography onto floppy at the local public library before even this loophole is closed, consider that even this slightly clueful measure is easily enough defeated by the use by site operators, of dynamic IP addresses connected with domain names via CNAME DNS records (in this context, aliases to such temporary subdomain names as are available at DHS). The practice therefore by censorware of blocking whole IP address ranges will accelerate the use of massive, dynamically switched IP address range pools (by overseas operators, probably), so that ultimately even IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses are no longer of much use as a guide to exactly from where data is arriving.
A world-wide information infrastructure based largely on immaterial information itself has by its very nature an almost infinite capacity for sneaky, slippery deception that makes a total mockery of any attempt to clamp down on it. One can easily envision for instance, an explosion of anonymous resurfers which themselves as needed use the techniques mentioned above.
The more the censorware tries to block off the sea, the more the sea will leak around every barrier placed in its path. In the end, as always, the sea will win.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Ethics and moral are beyond Democracy. Democracy accepts even the expression of those values that are against Democracy itself. Democracy is not just a form of government but also a form of civil action on society. Do not miss American Democracy with Democracy as a philosophical concept. A concept of decision taking, expression and communication that gives freedom to express his own ideas and take decisions on the base of election. American Democracy has got a too mechanical stamp on ruling terms for the last times and has lost many of its civil values expressed by its creators.
The enforcing of ethics or any form of moral concepts is a blow against Democracy as they violate the principles of free thought and expression. Besides they are expensive. There should be organisms to control this enforcing. In Internet this means more people, more hardware, more programs. Now you know that all this costs money and also that Internet grows exponentially on most fields. To keep such filters working, to hold up the growing amount of information you need more money, more hardware, more programs. And it is impossible today to achieve this. Or you blow up your connection or you are forced to admit that Democracy is not only a better value but also more feasable in terms of economy of resources. Sincerly I believe that Democracy wins in this world, mostly because it costs less to hold it up...
>And if you are in a public place using a public access terminal, you really have no reasonable right to assume that the teacher or librarian would not do so. Unless, of course, you ask any librarian who agrees with the American Library Association's Bill of Rights at http://www.ala.org/work/freedom/lbr.html. Librarians are not going to take the role of parents. How can you expect a librarian to parent a child when each parent has a different set of beliefs as to the raising of their child? This is why librarians are against censorship. The parent's role is to raise their child, and if the parent cares about what a child sees, then the parent needs to watch the child. The library's role is to provide equal access to information. The parent's/patron's job is to select the material they want to view. If parents are concerned with what their childer are exposed to, then they need to be involved in making those choices with/for their children.
The site you refer to has those glamor shots as you say, but only if you go several pages deep into the site. Therefore, the main page should not be blocked. Additionally, if you check out any of the other sites that were wrongfully blocked, they're even more obvious mistakes. Most of them are just 'under construction' pages.
server1: SMTP server ready.
server1:-bugs/gripes to postmaster@...
server1:-unsolicited commerical e-mail is NOT authorized to access this service
server2: hey, want some spam?
server1: you're in MAPS, your access is illegal, go fuck yourself
Remember that most anti-hacking laws are stated in terms of "unauthorized access to a computer". That *should* include connecting to the SMTP port to send spam, when it is explicitly stated that such usage is unauthorized.
Are we talking Libraries and schools only? OR do they want to mandate bars, resturaunts, and trainstations ect? Censorship sucks. They Gov't seems to think all net users are horny porn seeking chesters. I think I'm offended. :p
"Game over man! Game over!!"
Also, I recall that the most complete search engine has only cataloged about 10-15% of the internet. I think its safe to say that the censorware companies haven't even come close to searching this much of the net, and therefore the vast majority of porn is NOT going to be blocked.
using Censorware is like wrapping saran wrap around your monitor to protect your kids. It just doesn't work, and more importantly it CAN'T work from a technical point of view.
Once Again, donkeyhumper.com is banned again.
go figure
Well, that's what's being debated... Is accessing information unfiltered one of your rights? Tell your representatives in Congress whether it is or not!
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
http://www.ala.org/washoff/fltrguide.htm l
The most amazing aspect of this proposal, among many, is the fact that if your computer or Internet access is paid for by e-rate subsidies, the definition of a minor is under 17 but if the computer in the same school or library is paid for by either Title III or LSTA, the definition of a minor is under 18. So schools and libraries would have to apply different rules to 17 year olds, depending on what computer they were using!.
I also love the fact that in an era of increased demand for privacy protection, particularly for children, this law would also require schools to monitor everything kids do using school Internet access. Sounds common sense, but what if the school allows dial-up access from home? Then the only way to comply is to install monitoring software. Who gets access to those records? How long are they kept? Do you really want to create a complete record of every site a kid has looked at K-12?
Liza
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
Something about ...double check those URLs and HTML tags I think...
--
Infuriate left and right
The original link was to the general AP site, so as soon as I submit that rebuke, it gets fixed. Well me mudder and me fadder.....
--
Infuriate left and right
What do they really expect out of these software packages though? I mean ... short of hiring a full-time staff that exclusively surfs through the entire web (remember, google alone has indexed some 1.3 *BILLION* pages) how are you going to maintain that "breast" is sincerely in reference to something as innocent as "baked-chicken-breast" or "breast cancer" as opposed to "hot naked breasts!"? ... I don't mean that the current options shouldn't be held accountable for the level of accountability that the rest of us are, but a little bit of leniance, and perhaps a peer-review system of blocked pages (and a configureable filter) are all called for ...
just a poor corporate boys thoughts...
bemis
wtf does LI- mean again?
We will fight them on UseNet, we will fight them via email, we will fight them with mirrored web sites. We will never surrender, unless they buy out our IPOs and offer us mega-billions in stock options.
Hey, gotta make a living, right?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
We tested a Bess proxy server with the following categories enabled: "Adults Only", "Hate/Discrimination", "Illegal", "Porn Site", "Sex", "Violence", "Alcohol", "Chat", "Drugs", "Free Pages", "Gambling", "Tasteless / Gross", "Profanity", "Lingerie", "Nudity", "Personal Information", "School Cheating Info", "Suicide / Murder", "Tobacco", "Weapons", and "Personals".
So I loaded in the first "falsly blocked" site on their list (celebrity.com) and checked it out. It has a bunch of pictures of different celebrities, in a somewhat porn-site like format, but no actual nudity. Then I went back and really looked at the list of what they had enabled. "Lingerie". In other words, they had choosen a setting to test it on that pretty much says "This blocks that hide-the-nipples, victoria's secret type supersoft porn, not just nudity." And many of the pictures on this website fell exactly into that catagory - cameron diaz's upper toso wearing nothing but her hands holding her breasts, the same with a "fan dance" fan over the relevant areas, another celebrities wearing tiny black bras and panties, or panies and an open shirt just barely covering the nipples....
Now this is just one site from one of their tests, but then its the only one I checked, and they are lying about it not fitting one of the catagories they chose to block for their test. Is it still blocked if they tested the filter for porn only? I don't know. But that (very) little investigation gives me some serious doubts about the honesty and objectivity with which these "tests" of filterware are being conducted.
If I had time this afternoon I'll check a larger sample of their results, but I shouldn't even be making this post, so don't wait up. Anyone else who wants to do skeptical spot checks on them (read the "checked" items carefully) please follow up.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
When a company enters the business of making a filter program, one of their assumptions is that there are no rules out there. Thus they must rely on what have been shown time after time to be flawed heuristics to detect "objectionable" material. However, if the US government gets into the act, they may try to fashion legislation forcing web pages to include some meta tag indicating their content, with penalties for content that doesn't match the tag. Then they would lump untagged content with "objectionable" material, requiring it to be blocked, leaving the burden on webmasters to update their sites.
It's sad to see what this country is coming too. Want to know why a bill like this is going to be passed? Politicians trying to get the vote of the moral majority. Conservative parents want their children protected from the "evils" of the internet, no matter what the cost. People tend to forget that children are not the only ones using the internet at libraries. What about college students? What happens when someone without access to the internet in their home needs to do research on breast cancer? the Holocaust? religious cults?
The real moral question is not whether you want your horny teenager looking at porn in a public library, but what happens to the people who need legitimate information but are denied.
-Antipop
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
If the Government contracts to someone to do their Censorship for them, it's often much, much worse: the company can be much more secretive about what they censor ("Trade Secrets! Trade Secrets!"), and we can't hold them to the same strict first ammendment standards that the courts hold the government to.
-Dan Milstein
I have written a truly remarkable operating system which this sig is too small to contain.
I don't think that the spammers are storing things on your email system. There's a transaction that goes something like this:
Server 1: Hi, you awake?
Server 2: Yep, whaddya want?
Server 1: I have some mail for User1, will you accept it?
Server 2: Sure, I'll accept mail for User1. Send it over.
Server 1: Ok, Here it is.
Server 2: Ok, got it. Need anything else?
Server 1: Nope.
Server 2: Ok, see ya.
The recieving server always makes the decision to accept the gift of the email, or not too. Nothing is being dumped on the recieving machine without permission. As soon as it is accepted, it's the property of the second server, so it's not true that the property of someone else is on your system.
The packages in question do not block "appropriate" (what's that?) sites, while censoring random ones.
The packages block both types of sites. The action of preventing a URL or whatnot from being seen is "blocking", "stopping", etc. (If you want to claim that "censor" just means "block", then you should have said that the software "censors" both types of sites, good and bad alike.)
I get really fed up sometimes with people to whom "censor" apparently means, "block information I think is OK".
Censorship is about power, about using repression to prevent people other than oneself (or one's wards), from contacting texts. If I choose not to look at, or spend money on, the New York Times, I am not censoring it. Only if I prevent someone else from doing so, am I. Censorship has nothing to do with the information content of what is blocked; it is just as much censorship for the State to forbid the reading of Playboy as the New York Times.
Note, though, that the courts have supported such censorship in many areas of First Amendment jurisprudence, usually in order to prevent children from accessing information. The questions do not revolve around "censorship", then, but "compelling interests" and "least intrusive means", etc.
Blocking software installed on public computers is censorship. But it is the power relationship of the State to the individual that determines that, not the blocking per se. And furthermore, whether or not such software will be emplaced has nothing to do with whether it is "censorship". It has to do with the "compellingness" of the need for it, and what alternatives there are, and how the Supreme Court feels the day it comes before them.
- Find every single porn site on the internet.
- Take a range of these porn sites.
- Test each site within this range.
- Compare number of blocked (or non-blocked) against the total number, which you found in the first step.
Good luck with Step 1.*cough*
--
Of course the combination of false positive (i.e. blocked but shouldn't have been) and false negative (i.e. should have been blocked but wasn't) should be more powerful than either statistic alone. After all, you don't just want to prove that the filterware is damaging by preventing access to legitimate sites. Some people are likely to view that as acceptable so long as it keeps the kiddies from seeing pr0n. Similarly, some people are going to be willing to accept an inability to block everything so long as the obvious places are blocked. But the combination of the two- that it blocks legitimate sites and fails at its ostensable purpose of keeping the kids' eyes off pr0n- makes it truly worthless.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
True, and that's obviously why they did it. And they can certainly discover some interesting and useful facts by doing just that. Still, given that one of their main conclusions is "SurfWatch didn't go through each of these 1000 sites by hand", it'd be even more powerful if they could say "... but we did." :-)=
[TMB]
Nowadays some content filters such as Symantec I-Gear go much further. They will scan the HTML code with regular expressions (including foreign languages) to help detect if a site contains objectionable material.
Our company has been using I-Gear for a year now, and from the monitoring of our I-Gear logfiles we have found that employees have been blocked from 99% of objectionable sites with I-Gears new methodology.
The downside is that every now and then with all categories 'blocked', our users will come across a legitimate site that is unintentionally blocked by I-Gear. (But these can be quickly excluded from the filtering.)
I believe that the technology you're looking for is available today in a reasonable working state. Its just too bad that public places such as libraries, schools, etc, don't investigate the availability of such software thoroughly.
http://dai lyn ews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20001023/tc/internet_filters_ 3.html
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I would have *killed* for the internet in grade school. I was so bloody *bored*. I think there is a very real missed opportunity with the head/sand guys here, especially with gifted(?) children who regular teachers can't relate to. A lot of these kids would simply learn all by themselves if left in a room with an internet link. Yes, some of the stuff they learn might be porn, but that will happen sooner or later anyway. We have no real trust in our children anymore. Part of the problems facing schools these days is the us vs. them attitude. The children aren't trusted and aren't included. They are managed, and this doesn't work really well. Imagine a school where a 162 IQ kid actually learns something other than how to hit the minimum required of him so people will leave him alone and he can just be bored instead of bored *and* annoyed.
Geez, these are supposed to be intelligent people teaching our kids yet they wish to restrict access to information for the very kids that would otherwise gain that information like a sponge. I would have.
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson
So how did they define what was/was not a pornographic site? Pretty subjective. The statistics are probably meaningless.
...so that when they finally get out from under our wings, they get run over by the big bad wolf and the boogyman and all...the problem is this, as we continue to add more and more rules and regulations and restrictions and conditions to our society's childrens developments, the farther from reality we push their lives. They wake up to a world that is nothing like the teletubbie world they are used to and it will take them longer to adjust...but don't get me wrong, there are areas where children live in very poor environments, where they get a huge dose of the real world from day one, and they too are dammaged from the bombardment of the cruelties of life, the thing we should aim for is a happy medium...and what is that medium? I'm not sure, but I do know one thing, while music, video games, movies, and now even television has maturity ratings, books don't, so that's the safest answer I can come up with, make kids read a lot. Make them read cookbooks...so when we're all old and hungry, they'll be able to cook some good food, preferably not too crunchy because we wont have our teeth to chew with...
-HobophobE
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
So what? What terrible thing is going to happen because of this?
I think the best bet for schools and libraries is to avoid filtering and simply SUPERVISE the children. A little shoulder surfing never killed anyone. And if you are in a public place using a public access terminal, you really have no reasonable right to assume that the teacher or librarian would not do so.
Which would do what? Thing is this would probably encourge me to look at porn. To see how they would respond if they respond at all.
Seems I am always in some jam.
I save the species,
From words like "feces" --
Then Peacefire calls my work a scam.
I search the Web of Wicked Pages.
I look for drugs, hate, guns, or sex.
And when I find it,
I mark it "unfit" --
Because the Rules I Have won't flex.
(more)
Email: slashdot3@FreeMars.org (Address will be abandoned when it gets spam.)
While I do not have the software that blocks banner ads automatically, I do the functional equivelent with my good old fashion brain. I did not look at the banner ads, but at the content of the page.
And what you are saying is that peacefire are the baldfaced liars, not me. They claimed that the site had been falsely listed as a pornography site. My point was that it did fit the non-porn filters that they had enabled, by the page content that I witnessed. You stating that there were also pornographic links is not an argument against me, it is a support of my conclusion that peacefire is cooking the books.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Especially in a library, of all places?
There's plenty of objectionable content among the books. And it's much harder to filter books than it is to filter net-sites.
OTOH, maybe the censorware is a good thing... make the kids look for their porn and bomb-making materials the old-fashioned way.
[Note to the sarcasm-impaired: the preceding paragraph was not meant to be taken seriously!]
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I guess free speech has at least some downsides .. but luckily everybody here realises that free speech is so incredibly important to maintaining freedom that we'll fight to keep it in spite of the one or two annoyances it may create .. right?
I mean, come on .. if you need to use the flipping free internet machine in the library, just ask the bum surfing porn to move for a while so you can use it .. get authorities to move him if it becomes a serious problem ..
It's ILLEGAL. We can argue till the cows come home about whether it should be, but if kids are breaking the law in plain view on (and with!)library property, the library staff can get in trouble for contributing to delinquency.
There will doubtless be an outcry at that point for censorware, if not for outright removal of internet access from libraries, once the situation is made public. And that screws everyone.
Sort of like how, even if you think drugs should be legalized, standing outside the library where the legal smokers go, smoking a joint, is probably not the wisest move...
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
"I may not be a father ... but I know I saw my fair share of bare skin when I was a kid. "
Just a "me too", but I would like to add the important point that this was quite a number of years before I'd even heard of the Internet. A lot of people seem to be going around talking about kids looking at porn on the internet like the internet is the first thing ever that allows kids to look at porn. Hell, there was tonnes of the stuff around (magazines, videos etc) when I was at school. I can remember getting access to porn at school as far back as probably about age 10 or 11. And strangely enough, even though a fair percentage of guys looked at the stuff even at that young age, IT WASN'T HARMFUL. If you think that you're going to stop your child from looking at porn just by buying some point-n-click censorware, you're deluding yourself. If you think your child isn't already getting porn *somewhere*, you're in denial. And if you think it's going to irreperably harm him to be seeing that porn, you're demented.
So? It's a good place to pick up bums, then. You know, give 'em a couple of bucks and they'll blow you.
Filtering/blocking based on Domain names is fatally flawed.
Domain names are basically really, really cheap and people can move from domain to domain with no real problem.
Kind of like whack-a-mole.
People who want porn will get porn. News letters will (spam for the rest of us) supply the latest domain name.
Censorware only really works on static sites, like political ones.... Free speech ones...
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
This is one of the problems with letting machines decide what should be filtered. The machine may filter out all "sex" sites -- including sites concerned with biology, like animal and plant reproduction.
For this to work in a way that does not filter out "non-offensive" sites, it would require HUMAN BEINGS to actually logon and check each site themselves to see what kind of content is on that site.
Another problem is that the institutions doing the filtering could very well find themselves liable for EVERTHING that DOES NOT GET FILTERED. This would be bad.
A few years ago I was in a public library and there were a couple of youths (under 15) downloading pornography to floppy disks. The library in question could have easily filtered this out -- by NOT FACING THE COMPUTERS TOWARD A WALL to allow the 'net users as much privacy as they had. (Of course, they could have popped over to the photographic arts section and found a book that was probably just as thrilling.)
I think the best bet for schools and libraries is to avoid filtering and simply SUPERVISE the children. A little shoulder surfing never killed anyone. And if you are in a public place using a public access terminal, you really have no reasonable right to assume that the teacher or librarian would not do so.
I guess the lesson here is: get your pr0n from home. Dad's bookmarks will probably have all the best sites listed already anyhow.
All that needs to happen is legislation that spammers have to pay per spam. Advertisers have to pay postage to put their stuff in my mailbox. If I take my wares to Uncle Bob's storage, he's gonna charge me monthly to keep my stuff. My stuff now exists on his property. It's a simple matter of economics.
If Joe Spammer wants to store his wares on my property, then a monthly fee is due. It's that simple.
I don't think that the same deal with telemarketers apply here. A telemarketer has to be told not to call after one time. However, he's not really storing anything on your property, just wasting some of your time. There are so many spammers out there (and the ability to forge so readily), that it'd be impossible to enforce the same kind of idea. Even if they were to implement something like this, the idea of tracking the forgers (which is what most people would start doing), would be a logistical nightmare.
No, but it's a good idea to allow it. I'd also argue that censoring public access to information (i.e. libraries) based on discriminatory standards (i.e. allowing religious sites but not atheist sites) is a violation of free speech rights.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
WEBSENSE
Access to the desired Web page is restricted at this time.
Reason: The Websense category "Hacking" is restricted.
You requested: http://www.peacefire.org/error-rates/
---
Vote Inanimate Carbon Rod in 2000
Does anyone know how accurate Peacefire's stats really are? Bess is configured by the individual site administrator to block different categories based on their local acceptable use policy. You also have the ability to block sites individually. Does Peacefire take all this into account or are they just spreading more FUD?
Back in 95 there was an attempt here to implement a censorware system. Reasons were various and did not included moral/ethical issues. One of them was porno. Porno was killing all channels and we had to do something with it. The few weeks this system lived have shown:
:))))))))
1: Some may know this phrase: "If Mohamed doesn't get to the mountain then the mountain comes to Mohamed." That is the first historical record of the existence of the Internet...
2: What is porno for you, for him/her? What is erotics? What is medicine? Besides how easy is to filter jpgs or gifs?
3: You first shut porno, then erotics, then the picture of every woman, then the word "woman", then the word "man", then every word, then the Internet...
4: This was the Soviet Union some years ago. So if you say censorship, people ask: censorship? Censorship? CENSORSHIP? @%@*%$* C-E-N-S-O-R-S-H-I-P????????!!!! Hold the doors! The crowd is coming to take the Lubianka!!!!
5: Ethics and moral are good. If you have enough money to technically afford them. Lots of them... Democracy is much more economical.
However the end of this was really simple and stupid. One very BIG GUY needed some information about the University of Sussex. Naturally the system didn't allow him to get into this little town. But the guy needed BADLY this small town. When he got the news why he couldn't reach it when he needed so BADLY, he made a BIG NOISE and THREATENED to send the whole University to court. It ocurred that, juridically, such filters are equivalent to "surveillance measures". If you don't have a badge and you don't carry a court order, you don't have the right to use them. The system was promptly removed. It was the first and last censorware experiment here. Right now, if a channel is stuffed with pictures of hot chilly chicks we don't have the right even to sniff it...
[stock rant on the subject]
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.
[end of stock rant on the subject]
[
If the filter software blocks http://www.earthlink.net/ because there is porn at http://www.earthlink.net/some/random/page/pornomat ic.html, I think most people would consider that to be a real error.
On the other hand, if they block http://www.randomsexsite.com/ when there's no actual porn on the home page, only on every single link from the home page, I think most people would say that's not an error.
But if you look at the Peacfire studies themselves, they make it clear that there are no gray cases... they were all clearly porn or not.
[TMB]
I think schools, libraries and the like are seeing the internet as a giant smut pool. The Internet has become synonymous with porn. It's sad because there are actually TONS of useful resources on the internet. Luckly some of my more open minded teachers let us use the internet on a daily basis. I have yet to hear of one single student going to an inapropriate site.
But, reguardless, my school would support this bill in a HEART BEAT. I believe many schools are like mine. If they could they would have a person watching over the shoulder of every student at any time.
Let kids know that this is not the place for inapropriate material and let them know the consiquences, but filtering software required on all computers is a bit hasty. The kids using these computers won't go to these sites at school, especially if they know the sites are being logged.
In conclusion, I feel that filters are freedom hindering devices that don't even work because they can't bloock every site and they block some that are genuinely good. Let the people police themselves.
It's not for everybody
The facts they are using are not biased. The point of the article is that the software is preventing people from seeing legitimate sites. For the purposes of this study, it doesn't matter how much porn gets through, just how many things are inappropriately censored. Given that they are very clear about their methods, data, and conclusions, your accusation of bias is quite unfair.
I work for one of the largest hosting house for adult content and we block pings at the routers to help protect aganst DoS, etc.
They should actualy check for a valid response from port 80 if they are checking port 80 content filters. Otherwise, they're testing a ping filter.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I'm sure that the "corporate V.P. type" would endorse the bill a lot more if it wasn't his competitor getting the deal...
[it's humor. laugh.]
-----
I notice that in the Peacefire comparison, the only number they consider is (# of non-pornographic sites blocked)/(total # of sites blocked), i.e. the number of false positives. Wouldn't it make sense to also consider the percentage of unblocked pornographic sites?
I guess this is just another example of using statistics to prove whatever you want. I'm opposed to filtering as much as Peacefire (well, maybe not quite that much), but they should still try to give unbiased facts.
-Chris
It seems to me that there is a possible error in this study, and here it is:
If the censorware system blocks all domains that have porn in them, the porn may not be at the top level of the domain, and so looking at the top level of the domain could make it apear as if it was not a porn site when it did have adult content on it. For example: I'm sure that there is some porn somewhere on Earthlink.net, so if a system blocked Earthlink.net, they could technically be blocking porn, even if you went to www.earthlink.net it would not appear to be a porn site.
That being said, down with censorware.
Peter Darley
As a parent, I wouldn't mind a filtering product in libraries and other places that blocked only hardcore porn. Unfortunately, no such thing exists. The software blocks lots of non-porn sites and lets through tons of porn sites. To me, that makes the product worse than useless. It creates a false sense of security in parents, who think this will keep their children from seeing porn at the library. It absolutely will not. And it raises free speech issues about what legimate sites are "inadvertantly" blocked.
It took me a while to come around on this issue, but until and unless the technology improves dramatically, filtering is a very bad idea.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.