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.
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)
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
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.
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
[...], 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!
Once Again, donkeyhumper.com is banned again.
go figure
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.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
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.
http://dai lyn ews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20001023/tc/internet_filters_ 3.html
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
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.
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
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]
[
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 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.