Thousands of Sites Wrongly Blocked

Ben Edelman writes: "In the context of the ACLU's pending challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act (PDF), I recently prepared a list of some 6000+ web sites that, by and large, fail to meet the category definitions of popular Internet filtering programs yet are blocked by at least one such program. This topic may be old hat, but my work is new: I have prepared an unusually large list of sites (including police departments, libraries, home-schooling sites, candidates for political office, and on and on), and I have retested these sites over a period of several months."

Comments

Experiment - censorware collateral damage verify

[Seth Finkelstein]

Well, maybe it's safe for me to post this to Slashdot ...

[Originally sent to a mailing-list]

In honor of the censorware material just released by ACLU, I thought I'd try a little experiment in distributed verification.

I took one example from Edelman's report:

16. Southern Alberta Fly Fishing Outfitters #6809
http://www.albertaflyfish.com
Blocked by: N2H2 (Pornography - Sep 11, Oct 7), Websense (Sex - Jul 5,
Aug 18, Sep 11)
Yahoo: /Regional/Countries/Canada/Business and Economy/Shopping and
Services/Outdoors/Fishing/Fly Fishing/Lodges/
Google: /Regional/North America/Canada/Alberta/Recreation and
Sports/Fishing
Fly fishing in Alberta Canada on the world famous Bow River.

Now, what does censorware have against this site? Maybe it doesn't like too many 'Fly' references in one place? No, it turns out that this site has the misfortune to be virtually hosted and share an internet address with:

http://clubexoticx.com - Club Exoticx

There's a bunch of other completely innocuous sites suffering the same collective guilt of the censorware blacklist. I'd like people to go to N2H2's lookup, at http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl and *verify* this for themselves by testing the following sites:

http://albertaflyfish.com - Southern Alberta Fly Fishing Outfitters
http://alistairbrown.com - Alistair Brown Folksinger
http://eclothing.com - 'The Game Is On Sportswear Company Ltd.'
http://effectivemanagementsolutions.com - Effective Solutions
http://eligh.com - Springboard Consulting
http://eyepowered.com - E Y E P O W E R E D - 360 Degree Panoramas
http://friendlyfacesonline.com - Create personalized family cartoon
http://gear4pickups.com - Gear4Trucks: HitchHoist Portable Truck Crane,
http://informationonhold.com - Information On-Hold
http://letsmakewine.com - Let's Make Wine
http://planetregister.com - Planet Registe
http://ppt-slides.com - 35mm Slides from your computer file
http://proteach.net - Pro Teach Main Page - Baseball instruction
http://rosiedonovan.com - Rosie Donovan Photography
http://springboardtoinnovation.com - Springboard Consulting

Here, I'll make this easy. Just click these URLs:

http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://albertaflyfish.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://alistairbrown.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://eclothing.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://effectivemanagementsolutions.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://eligh.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://eyepowered.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://friendlyfacesonline.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://gear4pickups.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://informationonhold.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://letsmakewine.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://planetregister.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://ppt-slides.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://proteach.net
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://rosiedonovan.com
http://database.n2h2.com/cgi-perl/catrpt.pl?req_UR L=http://springboardtoinnovation.com

You should get

The Site: [all sites above]
is categorized by N2H2 as:
Pornography

If there's some error-message text in a red font, that means the N2H2 program itself wasn't working, try again.

Now, since I've publicized this, I expect it'll be changed very rapidly for this one item. I have a saying: "Alacrity varies directly with publicity". But this is just one example in a HUGE blacklist. What else is lurking in there?

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)