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.
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)
... 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)
What about making the porn sites get rated here: RSAC?
Would that work better than word based filters?
--
>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=-
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.
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.
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
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.)
Ugh, let me answer this troll. You don't need the data to know that the filters are bad. As someone who knows a fair amount about AI (Artificial Intelligence) it's obvious to me that censorware claims promise more than the best AI currently available, but use the stupidest algorithms (keyword match, flesh-tone counting, etc.). The only decent tactic is a human-picked access control list, but a few people simply can't censor the entire net. Even then, human-picked lists have their own problems because they tend to be politically motivated and impractical (which is possible since the blocking strategies are secret).
Therefore, it should be obvious that Peacefire doesn't need to make up any data. They should have an ample supply of true facts to work with. Contrast this to the exhorbitant claims of the censorware vendors (CyberSitter: "Guaranteed to block over 97% of all objectionable content!")
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."
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
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...
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/
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
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.
Especially if they try to claim that they do have a staff member verify all blocked pages, as is mentioned in the linked story.
I wouldn't try to start a perpetual motion engine manufacturing corporation unless I was a master scam artist.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
http://dai lyn ews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20001023/tc/internet_filters_ 3.html
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
The other danger is that labels can lead to censorship. There are many theaters that are unable to show a NC-17 movie, regardless of social or artistic value, due to lease restrictions.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Stock one-size-fits-all solution.
.xxx? What about borderline sites? Who decides what *MUST* be in .xxx?
Here's the stock one-size-fits-all answer.
How do you enforce that all "pornographic" content goes into
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
While the laws still exist, they have been *totally* ignored - the one exception being porn sites are no longer hosted in Australia. The regulatory body responsible, and the government itself, have absolutely no interest in the matter.
This probably has to do with the fact that the vote of the bible-bashing independent senator the government was chasing at the time is no longer crucial.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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
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
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)
Did you know what the English Church/Government tried to shutdown Shakespear in his day? It's no different today. Books like The Red Badge of Courage and This Side of Paradise were called "violent" and "pornographic" in their day. Reading both of those greatly benefitted me as a child, and probably millions of others too.
We need to end censorship, for children and adults. Having access to reality doesn't hurt children. I'd rather have a child learn about the anatomy of the opposite gender than grow up in a world that condemns realism.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
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]
[
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 ethical problem here, as I see it, is the difference between choosing not to spend limited resources on obtaining something ... and choosing to spend limited resources on deliberately blocking access to something.
Big difference, when acting as disseminators of information. NO library in existence currently could possibly hold every last bit of information out there. Some libraries specialize in certain sorts of collections, and many libraries spend a considerable amount of resources referring patrons to places that have what they don't.
Installing blocking software would be more like throwing out books that someone donated.
IMHO at least.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
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.
It also is pretty hopeless to make a decent translation program. I view things like babblefish and the like as being pretty crude, but they are free, and if it doesn't know for sure what something is, it leaves it. I think it might be a good idea if the censorware programmers took the same approach. It might be a good idea to leave in words like "breast" and "Dick" since they can be talking about anatomy class, or someone's name. However, I can't think of a non-vulgar or non-pornographic instance of "cum guzzler" or "suck my dick" which would be fine to block in my opinion.
The real fallacy here is not how unreliable censorware is, but of the expectations these ignorant politicians, christian groups, family groups, etc. are about the usefulness of the software. There is no substitute for parental guidance. We should have learned that from the generations that have grown up watching TV already. If these people really cared about what was good for the children, they would take care of them properly and not try to rely on broken software to do their jobs for them. If people can't take the responsibility to raise their children, they shouldn't be having them in the first place.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
> It might be a good idea to leave in words like
> "breast" and "Dick" since they can be talking
> about anatomy class, or someone's name.
> However, I can't think of a non-vulgar or
> non-pornographic instance of "cum guzzler" or
> "suck my dick" which would be fine to block in
> my opinion.
I can.
"I can't think of a non-pornographic instance of 'cum guzzler' or 'suck my dick'"
Well isn't that a non-pornographic instance RIGHT THERE!?! (Well, it certainly didn't give ME wood to read it...maybe it did for someone else?)
> The real fallacy here is not how unreliable
> censorware is
No the real fallacy is that FUD is the major driving force behind policy. There is NO evidence whatsoever that this is harmfull to children.
I dunno about YOU, but as a child I was exposed to porn. Completely by accident I was getting into things that "I shouldn't have" and I saw porn. The same has happened to about every other person I know. Either they found some of their parents stash (my friend's fiance was telling me about the time her 5 year old came into the room exclaiming "hey mommy you have to see this" only to find he found oneof her porno tapes) - or their friends find it and expose them.
Everyone that I know, who was exposed to porn, grew up perfectly normal. Why? because it *IS* a normal occurance.
The simple fact is this...parents want to protect children. They fear every possible thing that could happen. They are paranoid. Companies that make censorware - and people in congress making laws - are nothing more than preditors. They fan the flames and scare parents. They prey on that fear and use it to make a buck.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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
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.