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SmartFilter: Way Too Extreme
His discussion of the legal risks of decrypting these blacklists is fascinating too, and (as he likes to say) "a topic in itself." He would like to open up the source to his SmartFilter-decryption tool but feels the legal risk is too high. How sad is that?
Here's Secure Computing's definition of the "extreme" category, and the examples they give ("Pixman's Vault of Porn Pix", "Bizarre & Maximum Perversion").
You can confirm Seth's findings using Secure Computing's own SmartFilterWhere. It asks for your name and phone number; you have my permission to make some up. As of December 7, at 9:45 PM EST, that CGI operates with a Control List updated on December 5 and confirms all of Seth's results that I tried. By the time you read this, they may have quickly fixed all the errors he published, loaded in an up-to-the-minute Control List, and proudly announced that their software is now perfect.
Until the next report.
I think it's a little disturbing that Chumbawumba's site was banned, and not because it has anything to do with music, which it likely doesn't. More likely, it's due to the fact that Chumbawumba has extremely leftist views, something a lot of conservatives are obviously not comfortable with.
While I might not agree with all their politics, this is tantamount to banning Nader's site, or Buchanan's for that matter.
I honestly don't see any other reason for them to be lumped in with more 'shock' oriented artists like Marilyn Manson and ICP; they share little musically, or lyrically, or even in their videos. The one 'shocking' thing about Chumbawumba is the politics.
If this is the reason they're blocked, then someone please save me from the Information Retrieval Agency, because I'm a wee bit scared.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
The disgusting thing is that these companies inflict their own political and religious agendas on their own customers and nobody is the wiser.
The problem is that these companies say "Hey, we'll regulate ourselves -- no need for government involvement!" But they are not just regulating themselves, they are regulating the public.
At least when I go to see a movie, I know that the R rating isn't unfairly applied because the lead actor is a prolific democrat or republic or even a $cientologist. The only way to force these companies to behave ethically in their generation of lists and filters is to take every oppertunity to confront them in the most public means necessary and possibly to undermind, reverse engineer and defeat each package as quickly as they put them on the market.
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seumas.com
Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's website.
No, I think their music critic skills are spot on perfect.
--Shoeboy
Oddly enough, N2H2's "Bess" censoring system allows users to submit sites for "approval", at which point they're immediatly blacklisted. (Any site that ONE user finds offense must be offensive to EVERYBODY, right?)
Imagine my suprise when a friend of mine submitted the N2H2 site for approval, and the web site that allows people to purchase the censoring service suddenly become rated "Obscene" for about 24 hours. :p
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I work on a military installation that uses SmartFilter to prevent access to sites on it's blacklist. Imagine my surprise Monday morning when trying to get my daily dose of Slashdot to find out that this site is listed as being unaccessable because it is a "chat" site.
I'm sure someone will remark that Slashdot could not possibly be considered as a work related site, therefore the military is justified in blocking it. That maybe true, but as a systems administrator there are several sites that I normally frequent to find out what crackers are up to. I cannot access these sites at work (since SmartFilter blocks them) and must do so at home to keep abreast of news on the computer security front.
"Smart"Filter and all the other packages that pretend to "protect" people from the "evils" of the internet only end up restricting access to many of the sites admins/programmers/techies access to do their jobs. When will the companies that produce these pieces of crap realize that they are selling parents and companies pipe dreams that they can block out the undesirable aspects of the net? It is far more effective for parents to spend time with their kids surfing the net and helping them avoid areas they want to be off limits. Most companies have clear policies about what is considered acceptable usage; employees who violate those rules should be dealt with as the company sees fit.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Oh well, that's alright then. As long as it's only political censorship.
Type in as:
http://www.insaneclownposse.com
http://www.gcsextreme.com
http://www.extreme-offroad.com
If you don't type that EXACTLY (http and www,
not case-sensitive), you will get a misleading result
No. Smartfilter is priced in the thousands per year range. It gets installed by institutions and corporations in a proxy, then the entire company is forced through the proxy. I know -- I installed it in a previous job. Of course, if I knew what was in this report, I'd have been more hesitant.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
How long a list would you like? What's bad about this is:
I'm not interested in denying people the right to make a choice about whether to install censorware or not. Individuals can make whatever choice they want about whatever level of brokenness they're willing to live with. But in order to make that choice intelligently, they need to be truthfully informed of what this stuff really does. So far, that's not happening to the degree it needs to.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IAAL, and to me, this is the more important part of the piece. He's written a tool which arguably is legal because of the LOC exemption for censorware research to the DMCA anti-circumvention provision, but (understandably) he's reluctant to distribute it, allowing for a more full analysis of SmartFilter's flaws, because there is no similar exemption for distribution of anti-circumvention tools.
We here on Slashdot have seen tons of stories on the flaws of censorware, but the message is one still not gotten by much of the media or the general public. A truly exhaustive analysis of SmartFilter or other censorware products would help, but LOC's "half a loaf" exemption prevents that from happening without some reasonable fear of legal risk.
as to why they block things like sci.archaeology, is it? Remember that almost all censorware out there has a Christian Fundie slant, and it's easy to see that if junior discovers archaeology then dinosaurs, biology and evolution are next, and then from there you'd might as well write him off as another anti-creationism devil worshiping Darwinist!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"