Slashdot Mirror
South Carolina's On-Again, Off-Again Filtering
fuzzbomb writes: "South Carolina libraries were forced to put filters on their computers or lose half of their funding. Now they're having to remove filters from some of their computers because the law says that every library system must offer unfiltered access on up to 10% or at least one of their computers. "
Readers may be interested in my anticensorware reports on the above topic, particularly
-
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php -
BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity)
-
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/great
e stevils.php -
SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - censorware & privacy/anonymity
Censorware MUST ban privacy, anonymity, even language-translation sites, because these represent a possible escape from the control of censorware.See also, by Peacefire, http://peacefire.org/babelfish/ - BabelFish blocked by censorware
I'm going to be releasing much more anticensorware work in the near future, but it's not clear if it'll be accepted for consideration on Slashdot. This is in part due to the still-active issue of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org), and the acrimony between myself and Slashdot editor Michael Sims. I'm trying to see if there is a way to work around that editorial abuse, but frankly I'm a programmer, not a diplomat.
-- Seth Finkelstein
Ah, they have an answer for THAT too. Adults are permitted to view pretty much any non-pornographic site on the Internet. If you want to view IHateFags.Com, then you are permitted to. What they have done is set up two computers at the end of the librarians counter that aren't visible to regular users. They ask that people who are viewing "objectionable" material use these (you must get librarian permission to use them), but make it clear that screen content is still visible to the staff. If you view something objectionable on one of the regular machines and someone complains, they may ask you to change to one of the private machines. And what about innocuous links and popups? That's why they review the request logs. It's pretty easy to tell a porn surfer from someone who may have accidentally brought up a single page (and promptly closed it)
See, all it takes is a little forethought and common sense.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
SC Laws don't necessarily make sense, but the intent of the law is to make sure that at least one computer in every library has free, unfiltered internet access, regardless of the stuff you can get to.
But there are other issues here as well. South Carolina has implemented a statewide network backbone that all of the K-12 public schools, libraries and distance education centers can connect to, free of charge, that's right, unmetered high-availability, high-speed access to the internet. Some of this is made possible by a federal program called E-rate (http://www.sl.universalservice.org) that pays a certain percentage of the cost of technology expenses for connections to the internet etc.
This FEDERAL program has guidelines and restrictions that require protection for children using the stuff the FEDGOV pays for, (http://www.sl.universalservice.org/reference/CIPA .asp), or you don't get your "financial assistance."
This may be the reason that this law was enacted.
Anyone ever see those commercials with that goofy Matthew Lesko and all the government money available that you don't know about? This is one of those plans.
High-availability? High-speed? You've never actually USED an Internet connection at an SC school, have you? In the school district of Aiken County (which is -- I shit you not -- about the size of Rhode Island), school Internet connections are well-nigh useless because of the massive number of people using them (in the district, there's about 30,000 students, faculty and staff) at any given time. ALL HTTP traffic from every school in the Consolidated School District of Aiken County is filtered through a single proxy server (yes, just one) on a T1 running Bess (N2H2 claims that their "high capacity, clustered appliances" [translation: Linux boxes running a hacked version of Squid]scale to "tens of thousands of users", but as far as I can tell from my experience, they're full of shit). And of course there are enough people browsing the web at any given time that the T1 is almost completely saturated.
So while there is a statewide backbone that all schools can hook up to, as long as they all have to filter their traffic like this, it's pretty useless.