Candidates' Websites Blocked by CyberPatrol, N2H2

Yet another topical censorware report by Bennett Haselton and myself. Is this getting repetitive? It turns out that politicians' websites are being blocked in schools and libraries as inappropriate for viewing by children (and, in many cases, adults). The report, "Blind Ballots", takes a look at two dozen candidates whose campaigns have been censored in our public schools and libraries. One of the products blocks pretty equally across the political spectrum; the other takes a big chunk out of Republicans, Libertarians and conservative third parties. One Republican candidate (so far) has changed his position on filters because of this report.

Comments

Re:What's the point of this?

[JatTDB]

When both sides of an issue like this are very dedicated to their stances, you have to try to find ways that don't necessarily outright discredit the other view. If you just walk up to a pro-censorware person and shout, "Censorship is wrong!", they'll just say back "We have to protect our children's eyes!" And you'll have many merry hours of saying basically the same things to each other for as long as the both of you can put up with each other.

But, if you can give a censorware advocate firm examples of the failures of such products, you run a slight chance of putting a crack in their defenses on the subject. With enough examples, you may even be able to convince them that there is no current censorware solution that doesn't have these problems. Then you can work on convincing them that automated censorware that actually has a 100% success rate is probably never going to happen. Then you can get them to realize that the only blocking software you really need is heavy parental involvement in children's lives.

What's the point of this?

[AlphaHelix]

Out of curiosity, what is the point of all these (admittedly redundant) articles about how bad censorware is at telling the difference between porn and non-porn? If one believes that censorship is a Bad Thing(tm), then attacking the efficacy of censorware is essentially a non-sequitor. By attacking the technical feasibility of censorware, you're implicitly saying that, if it worked properly, you'd be fine with it. Is that really the case? Or is this just a roundabout way of attacking censorship?
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *

note why conservative sites blocked

[Cermain]

Please note that the censorware which was blocking a bunch of conservative sites was doing so as a side effect of those sites being run off of free hosting services, which it blocked automatically. The writeup here on /. didn't make this clear - I recognize /. writeups need to be fairly short, but the impression I had (and which it appears other readers might have) is that this piece of censorware had gone out of its way to be prejudiced against conservatives.