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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.
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!"