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. "

Comments

Censorware MUST ban privacy, anonymity sites

[Seth Finkelstein]

Let's see if it's safe for me to go back to Slashdot ...

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/greate 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

Re:Its called supervision

[BrianH]

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.