All Sourceforge.net Being Blocked by SmartFilter

An unnamed reader writes: "I just noticed that all sites. '*.sourceforge.net' are being blocked by all corporations using SmartFilter including mine. SmartFilter lists all of them as 'MP3' sites. Below is the error I get. How come they do not block Microsoft? I can download an MP3 player from there, too (Media Player does play MP3s)." Here's the error: "Access is restricted to the site (http://www.sourceforge.net/) you requested. Per the firm's Information Security & Privacy Policy, all Internet browsing is monitored and logged. Please contact the Information Security Center at ext 7114 for more information. SmartFilter Control List category MP3 Sites is restricted. " The aptly named SmartFilterWhere tool shows which sites are painted over by SmartFilter's broad brush; in this case, software development site (and Slashdot sister site) SourceForge is blocked by the latest SmartFilter versions -- 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.1 -- but not version 2. You might also be interested in The Censorware Project's analysis of the efficacy of SmartFilter as applied to Utah schools and libraries, or Peacefire's explanation of how and how well SmartFilter works.

Comments

Filtering solutions generally stink

[qurob]

I know, what else can corporations do, other than hire baby sitters for all the employees with net access.

But, in most cases, they are much more trouble than they are worth. Nothing lowers morale like big brother controlling where you go.

Sometimes the most useful sites are blocked. I remember working at a school district, I got NOTHING but complaints/questions about N2H2, the filtering solution we were using.

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[mindstrm]

Babysitters? Why?

1) Make sure people are doing their jobs. You can tell this by looking at whether or not they produce what is required in the time they have to produce it.
2) You can make sure restrictions on computers are such that they can't install software and/or do what you don't want them to.
3) You can look over logs once in a while to find problem people.

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[i_am_pi]

I agree. BESS is so intrusive. At least we don't have the version that advertises itself and some other scum company at the bottom of every page any more!

Also that's why I've set up a CGI-proxy
Pi

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[Grax]

I say we use the filters to throw alerts but not block anything. Log the alerts and check them out. If someone seems to have a problem then deal with them personally.

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[Squareball]

I like these filtering products.. they are GREAT for telling you WHERE all of the good stuff is.. I love looking through the sites that they block.. they are always the best sites.. FREE pr0n ;) WaReZ, they got it all!

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[visualight]

Score +5 Insightful you should be.

Great idea. Alert the user that he/she will be logged as having accessed site "x", and that he/she may be asked to explain or justifie visiting that site.

But don't block any sites.

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[1010011010]

Really. If an employee isn't performing, fire him. If he is, then net access and use doesn't matter so much, does it?

If there was no net, he'd jsut be on the phone or something anyway -- there were distractions in the workplace before the internet, after all.

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[Nonesuch]

visualight writes in response to Grax:

Great idea. Alert the user that he/she will be logged as having accessed site "x", and that he/she may be asked to explain or justifie visiting that site.

But don't block any sites.

I agree. It is a great idea...

SmartFilter has had exactly that feature (They call it "coached" or "coaching") since at least 1997.

That one feature is the only reason I am even considering recommending the SmartFilter product at all. I've been testing it for the past week or so, and (aside from panic'ing the Solaris server I installed the software on!) it works pretty well :-)

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[SCHecklerX]

The solution, if someone feels filtering is necessary at the workplace, is to do something similar to what spamassasin does.

If an employee goes to a 'questionable' site, have a click-through warning first, and then log the site if the use clicks through.

Then the power is on the user whether or not the site is actually legitimate, and management is happy b/c they have filtering software in place. Everyone wins.

Re:Filtering solutions generally stink

[hymie3]

I haven't yet worked at a place that cared (*truly* cared) if I surfed the net during work.
They have *all* cared about people surfing porn. If the employer allows an environment that fosters porn to exist, they open themselves up o all sorts of sexual discrimination and harrassment lawsuits. This is really about CYA and not about "don't surf at work".
Like you said, the people who are surfing the net 40 hours a week are the people who aren't going to be productive--who are the best candidates in next round's layoffs.

of course they are

[RealisticWeb.com]

Haven't we all learned by now that free software is violation of intelectual proparty rights of proprietary companies? SF.net produces free software that will (if left un-checked) undermine the american economy, raise consumer prices for software and eliminate thousands of jobs. Not to mention helping the spread of terrorisim and threteing national security. They should be shut down and censored at all costs.

Re:of course they are

[T3kno]

I think we need a new mod. (-1 Spelling/Grammar Whore)

Re:of course they are

[BlueUnderwear]

That's OK, I would never work for an Anonymous Coward anyway

Back in the day, Anderson Consulting was a very renowned employer...

Re:of course they are

[Tony Hoyle]

They still are... they're renowned for not being able to make balance sheets add up (unless you slip them a wad of dollar bills in a brown envelope).

Response by horny teens

[Dark Paladin]

Dude, check it out! I just heard that this place called Sourceforge is like, totally blocked by our school's filters!

Man, we got to check this out. It must have some sweet porn or soemthing on it.

Yeah, we got to get there. All right, bypassing filtering software...oh, yeah. Here it is! Dude, we're in! Sweet porn, here we come!

Click that one - Jboss! Must be a dominatrix or something.

WTF - there's no porn here! It...it's just geek code stuff.

The filter tricked us. Dude, those filter guys are so sneaky.

Next thing you know, they'll be trying to get us to study or something.

Re:Response by horny teens

[Yottabyte84]

I've actualy wasted hours at school browsing freshmeat. One thing though, it's always sounded a little like a porn site.

Re:Wow this is crazy

[Marx_Mrvelous]

No, not at all. IT's a private company, and they aren't accusing them of anything illegal. I could make software and block every site with the word "the" in the URL. Or block all sites and give the reason as "This site has content which I want to block."

I recommend not jumping to sue every chance you get, there are too many lawsuits anyways.

The real solution is, of course, for companies to drop their contracts and un-installing the software.

Kind way of asking them to be unblocked...

[sporty]

Hit their search page,

http://www.securecomputing.com/cgi-bin/filter_wh er eV301.cgi

and search for sourceforge.net. In the results, you can suggest a recomended they be removed from the list.

Re:Kind way of asking them to be unblocked...

[gmhowell]

Or just click here. Thanks for the link. Just submitted my sourceforge.net project page.

Hmm... Why should sourceforge sue? They have maligned me via brewnix.sourceforge.net. I may have a case.

Re:Kind way of asking them to be unblocked...

[vrmlguy]

Looks like securecomputing.com is getting ./ed, since response times are deteriorating even as I type.

Anyway, I checked it out and you're right. They have miscategorized Brewnix as an MP3 site. I've submitted a request that it be reclassified as a Drug site, along with Budweiser, Miller, and Samuel Adams.

Re:Kind way of asking them to be unblocked...

[tijsvd]

Better even: they don't check POST/GET, so:

use this link to request sourceforge removal directly

and

use this to list microsoft.com as hate speech site

Re:Kind way of asking them to be unblocked...

[gmhowell]

Always glad to find helpful souls on slashdot.

Re:Wow this is crazy

[Jondor]

Maybe, but wasn't sourceforge making money by selling the advanced version to companies?
Rather bad when your customer can't reach the demo..;)

2600.com

[Copperhead]

SmartFilter used to list 2600 as "criminal skills". Now, they list is as a political/religious site.

Go here and enter the sourceforge URL. On the right, "Suggest a Change" and tell them that it should not be on their list. Make your voice heard!

Re:2600.com

[ivan_13013]

Geez, only one person needs to submit the link to ensure that it will be reviewed again. 1000 people doing so isn't going to do much except flood the submission system with duplicates (which will probably be dequeued before they are seen by the reviewers, anyhow).

Listing SourceForge.net in the "MP3" category was almost certainly an accident. Secure Computing/Smartfilter has been very quick to resolve such issues in the past, typically providing automatic updates within a week or less.

Finally, if you want 100 percent accurate filtering software, you might as well give up right now. The nice thing about SmartFilter, if there is anything nice about any of these products, is that the links are reviewed and categorized by humans -- who are good, and trained, but not completely infallible. While processing thousands of sites, someone might hit the wrong button now and then. It's not a conspiracy, folks.

System admins who are frustrated by requests to un-block the site should simply add it to their local exemption file, at least until they recieve the next update to the control list.

-=Ivan

(disclosure: I used to work there a long time ago. There's no confidential information in this post. This message doesn't represent their official views or policies or anything. All facts stated in this message are potentially subtly incorrect.)

Re:2600.com

[The Creator]

The article: http://censorware.net/reports/utah/

http://mailer.fsu.edu/~wwager/index_public.html

classified as gambling, see it? A computer made that mistake!(wager is the guys name, no _human_ whould miss that!)

>Now that your mind is hopefully on -- how well do you think an automated system (an AI) is going to classify millions of websites into 30 categories? That's 30^2 combinations.

How well? Really badly of cource. And just because there are (ahumn...) _2^30_ combinations, does'nt mean you have to search 2^30 space to find the answer. If we say that searching a page for a list of keywords is one operation. Then it is only 30 operations(having one list per category). Not 2^30 operations.

>Turns out I actually know a couple of the humans that do this categorizing, so I'm pretty sure I didn't just dream it up.

Maby you could have a friend post and admit they made the error the article gave as an example? :)

"This document last updated on Thursday September 07 2000."
Yes the article IS old. But that is no reason to go make math errors all over the place.

Re:2600.com

[ConceptJunkie]

Listing SourceForge.net in the "MP3" category was almost certainly an accident.

Unless SmartFilter is on the take from Microsoft. After all, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to convince a company like that that anything related Open Source is Communist.

"Better Dead than Red(Hat)" I suppose.

They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[User 956]

Seth Finkelstein has written some software to decrypt the software's blacklist of forbidden sites, and has analyzed what he found. The list of blocked newsgroups is fascinating: sci.archaeology as occult, and comp.org.eff.talk as criminal, for example. He's found "extreme or obscene" sites like hotrails.com ("extreme sports" rollerblading on "naked metal"), gcsextreme.com (custom-built computers for the "extreme gamer," unfortunately at a domain name with both "sex" and "extreme" in it) and extreme-offroad.com (same deal). Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's Web site. Every one of these and many more are blocked as "Extreme," which puts them in the same category as photos of mutilated dead bodies, bizarre hard-core pornography and child pornography.

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.

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Sounds like the crappy filtering service/software they used at my high school. We couldn't even go visit college sites at some points because they asked for your sex (male/female) on a form somewhere on their domain.

Sometimes I wonder if they block sites for any stupid reason they can think up, or if they do a massive search for "sex" or something in a page or domain name and don't police their own results.

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[Silverhammer]

sci.archaeology as occult

Have you actually read sci.archaeology lately? That's really a pretty fair description.

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[Renraku]

Illegal? You're using their software, you have a right to see what the software blocks, otherwise, lets all start learning Chinese and firewalling outside access.

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[Bingo Foo]

Um, yes, we can define what is good or bad. I'm pretty sure that if you:

1. took everyone at my place of employment,
2. showed them a random sampling of 500 websites,
3. and asked them to categorize them as appropriate or inappropriate for filtering at work,

you would find that everyone agrees on the apropriateness of about 490 of those sites. The problem is doing that with 5 billion pages, which may not even be the same tomorrow. There is also the fact that what is appropriate here is different from what is appropriate at an elementary school, so you can't use the same list everywhere. (the same experiment at an elementary school would also yield similar agreement, though on a different set of pages)

However, there sure are a lot of things that obviously should be blocked. You whine and complain that there is a small fraction of sites that reside near the critical cusp (and truly it is a small fraction when you consider the amounts of easily categorized commerce, puff, drivel, and unfettered debauchery on the web). What is the alternative? No filters? I would argue that easily half of the web should properly be blocked from schools, up to and including high schools.

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[marxmarv]

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?

Blocked site lists for filtering software are one of the two classes of copyrighted works explicitly exempt from the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Presumably this also means one can redistribute tools to generate such compilations. IANAL, TINLA.

-jhp

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[HiThere]

I have seen more evidence that they ignore accuracy than that they work for it. OTOH, I haven't been surveying that software, so I probably only hear about the abusive ratings. But I hear about the abusive ratings frequently compared to the number of favorable reviews I hear.

And censors that keep the block lists secret don't deserve to be cut any slack at all.

Re:They've always blocked stuff unfairly...

[mpe]

Sometimes I wonder if they block sites for any stupid reason they can think up, or if they do a massive search for "sex" or something in a page or domain name and don't police their own results.

These products are mostly compiled using programs which search for "offensive material". Since these are dumb programs they find "bad stuff" where no human would think of looking. Then things are augmented by human additions and exceptions. Both due to complains and to reflect the political views of those selling the product.
Whilst they will claim that everything added is vetted by humans this is self evidently impossible.

Not Blocked Here

[yelligsc]

Maybe my company is just slow to get updates... But we have smartfilter here at work and for now I have no problem hitting sourceforge.

Anyone know why this might be?

Scott.

Re:Not Blocked Here

[orkysoft]

Maybe your sysadmin hasn't blocked sites listed under "MP3", because he likes MP3s himself, or something like that?

Re:Not Blocked Here

[silversurf]

Almost all of these filters work off of a rule base, just like a firewall, where rule 1 is executed first on down. Plus most filters have catagories which group URL's by, well, catagory. When you set up the rule base you choose which catagories to block, who is going to get blocked (all, certain workstations (ip's) or users (if you have user monitoring that tracks who's logged in where).

So you're company may or may not block MP3 sites, or as you say, the db could be out of date. These filters are pretty flexible rule-wise, and so depending on how it's configured, it could be really stringent or not. Maybe they are just logging activity rather than blocking (??), that's possible too.

-s

Re:Wow this is crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

SmartFilter is accusing Sourceforge of doing something (trading MP3s) that Sourceforge is not doing. It doesn't matter whether trading MP3s is legal or not. SmartFilter is publishing false statements about Sourceforge in such a way as to damage Sourceforge's business interests. That is libel. Case closed.

How dare you, michael!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am calling for a boycott of Michael Sims, America's number one enemy in the fight against anti-anti-censorware, until he gives me an apology for his rampant goatse'ing and usurping of the Censorware Project, my pride and joy.

Frankly, I'm shocked that I am not revered by all of Slashdot. My contributions to the world of anti-censorware research are comparable to the contributions of Jesus Christ to the field of religion. I won more awards from that project than Michael won in his whole damned life.
Do not underestimate me. I will be heard.

Now's the time....

[Lumpy]

Start blasting this smartfilter as crapware that hinder's productivity and only costs the company money in lost productivity and overspending on worthless software (squid is a better solution than ANY commercial filter/proxy on the planet. oh and it happens to be FREE!)

blast it.... blast it mercilessly people...

take every step to blast ANY non-open-source filtering system....

OH, if anyone tries to tell me that squid is too hard to configure... Please let me smack you.. I never touched squid before in my life... last friday I was mandated to install a filtering system for our intranet (spawned by a user's need to view kiddie porn on company computers) I downloaded and installed squid today... it's working perfect and the porn filters that are freely available work just fine.. if they want to add other "naughty" sites, it takes exactly 30 seconds to add it to a flat-text file... even a MSCE coud do it.

paying for any type of filtering system is pure stupidity and would only be reccomended by incompetent sysadmins/netadmins.

Re:Now's the time....

[ImaLamer]

Seriously not trying to be a troll, but I hope someone turned the guy (or girl, you didn't say) in.

That is a _real_ crime, there is a real victim, and who wants to work with someone like that?

Re:Now's the time....

[Jester998]

[root@myhost /]# su MCSE
Access denied. Stupidity not allowed on UNIX boxen.

"add it to a flat-text file... even a MSCE coud do it."
No they couldn't. An MCSE would be asking "What do I click on to open this 'flat-text file'???"

"pure stupidity and would only be reccomended by incompetent sysadmins/netadmins"
See above.

- Jester

Re:Now's the time....

[smnolde]

to borrow your friend's high speed internet connection and tunnel your surfing through OpenSSH to a proxy on the high-speed connection.

This works *so* well that you can bypass pretty much any web proxy by going through open tcp ports.

Actually, with OpenSSH access on a server somewhere you can set up an encrypted SOCKS proxy with:
ssh -p ${openport} -C -D ${proxyport} -N ${ssh_server}

The point your browser's proxy setting to localhost:${proxyport} and away you go.

Gasp!

[Dalcius]

1) Make sure people are doing their jobs. You can tell this by looking at whether or not they produce what is required in the time they have to produce it.

Unfortunately, it *seems* all too common to *me* that supervisors don't know jack about the people working under them. The novel idea of making a programmer a manager of the programming department seems to escape some people.

*sigh*

Note my sig...

Re:Gasp!

[carlos_benj]

Unfortunately, it *seems* all too common to *me* that supervisors don't know jack about the people working under them.

You mean like neither of ours know we're cruising around on /. right now?

Re:Gasp!

[Moonshadow]

Where I work, our programming dept. is actually managed by our senior programmer/sysadmin, which is wonderful because he understands our need to read slashdot. He's one of us :)

Re:Gasp!

[mindstrm]

Sorry.. that doesn't add up. It doens't matter *WHAT* the department is....

You hire employees for some particular reason. Either you are getting what you expect out of them, or you aren't. Blocking or not blocking internet access to them will have no effect on that in most cases.

Re:Gasp!

[Prior Restraint]

Unfortunately, it *seems* all too common to *me* that supervisors don't know jack about the people working under them.

Tell me about it. I was hired under manager A, working for tech lead B. Manager A was discovered to have 30 people reporting to him, when the corp. average for his level is < 10. To correct this, tech lead B is promoted to manager, and I (among others) am transferred so as to report to him.

However, office politics being what they are, I am told to finish working on manager A's project (can't miss that deadline, can we?). Once that's done, I'm then told to work on manager A's next project, because it's essentially an upgrade to the last project, and I already know the system. Lather; rinse; repeat.

Fast-forward one year, and I don't even know what manager B works on anymore. I only talk to him when I need to ask for vacation time, which I do moreso out of politeness than anything else. My performance evaluation was almost comical; he basically told me what manager A had said about me (and quite frankly, manager A doesn't know anything about me except that I seem to meet deadlines more often than not).

REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[Jucius Maximus]

Go to the smartfilterwhere filter checker site and request that they remove it through the automated form:

1. Go to the URL and enter "http://www.sourceforge.net" into the 'URL 1' field. Hit 'check URL'

2. The next page should say "http://www.sourceforge.net MP3" if it is still listed.

3. On the dropbox on the right, select 'remove from list' and hit 'send request'

Re:REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[leastsquares]

Doh! Crappy server...

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webadmin@securecomputing.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Re:REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[_ph1ux_]

/.....'D

they'll prolly think that we are launching some sort of attack on them - and blacklist /. as well. after all we are the sister site of that bad bad bad (tm) mp3 siter sourceforge.

Re:REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[Pedrito]

Request additions:

www.cnn.com

www.nytimes.com

www.washingtonpost.com

www.wsj.com

www.google.com

www.yahoo.com

www.datek.com

www.travelocity.com

www.orbitz.com

www.microsoft.com

That should just about put an end to them.

Re:REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[Hieronymus Howard]

How about www.godhatesamerica.com, since they haven't (so far) listed that one. I've just submitted it, btw.

HH

Re:REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[John Hasler]

"Remember, they're going to have to take a look at this page to decide whether or not to unblock it..."

You're assuming that they ever look at any sites.

Re:REQUEST REMOVAL!!

[Jeremy Erwin]

All subdomains of sourceforge.net are also being filtered, so fink, expat, etc... are all listed as "MP3".

So, a perl script might be needed to change all of these.

Why are you helping them?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

Why are so many people suggesting that we help smartfilter by voting to remove sourceforge? This won't help discourage companies from using it.

Instead, vote to make NYTIMES.COM and CNN.COM a "Criminal Skills" site. When the bosses start finding that smartfilter is effecting THEIR browsing, maybe they'll think twice before interfering in YOUR browsing.

Re:Why are you helping them?

[cliveholloway]

Nice idea - I just popped over and added http://www.microsoft.com under criminal skills.

well? what are you waiting for? :)

cLive ;-)

Re:Why are you helping them?

[zangdesign]

I just did the same to /. ;)

Web filters are problematic

[silversurf]

My company uses SurfControl's web filter product. In my experience of trying to administer the thing, is that it *usually* gets the catagory right. Supposedly these filter makers are verifying their databases, of which you pay through the nose to subscribe to. I've found about a 3-5% error rate, meaning they've miscatagorized that many of the total catagorized sites and this usually draws some level of corrective action to change the blockage.

My hunch is that these guys (filter makers) wrote a search engine to do the catagorization and are just doing a dictionary score to wieght a page and make a decision on the results. So SourceForge probably scored high on the words "Download" and "MP3", or something like that, and since they both probably occur alot seeing as how there are alot of MP3 tools on that site for download it got catagorized as such. This doesn't make it right, but I'm willing to bet that no human said "hey let's block SourceForge because we don't like it and that'll piss everyone off".

Most likely, the admins using the big-brother-ware in question can override the catagory and/or create an exception rule to allow people through to mis-blocked sites. But that depends on corporate policy. My company adopted a "if it's something you use for work, we'll unblock it right away" policy that works pretty well and they've followed through on it too. However, there is a possibility that someone would place implicit trust in the filter and not want to change anything they block. This would be bad (IMHO) because, just like a search engine or anything else, it's not perfect and these things are subject to human error in the end. I can tell you it's cut down the amount of pr0n bandwidth being used on my network, which is really nice because my downloads take way less time now.

-s

suggestion

[cr@ckwhore]

did you try it through an http tunneling tool such as anonymizer.com??

Re:suggestion

[Lysander Luddite]

SmartFilter Control List Restriction
SmartFilter denied access to the URL http://util.anonymizer.com/cgi-bin/freeaction.cgi? go=go&url=http://www.metafilter.com.

It matches the category Sexual content.

Metafilter is a news/events blog.

Finally, a reason to use Linux!

[The Turd Report]

We need to stop people from having sex.

I hear that if you run Linux, you never have sex. :)

Re:Finally, a reason to use Linux!

[CoolVibe]

Well, I'm running BSD and Solaris (yep, no linux here), so you mean there's hope for me?

That's the best news I've heard all day!

;)

Unpleasant at best

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Here is where you can plug a URL in to see if it gets filtered or not. And indeed, sourceforge turns out to be a wicked MP3-peddler. Oddly enough, freshmeat is not in there yet.

They also have another interesting and potentially more controversial filtering category: "Anonymizer". Try plugging http://www.anonymizer.com into that box on the link above. Thin legal ice, if you ask me.

Depends on the work...

[JaredOfEuropa]

Just this morning I downloaded some CVS stuff there, for free, as we needed some version control software in a hurry (do not ask why). The work others have done saved my employer money and loads of my time.

Some IT security officers / Internet admins do have a clue. Then again, we generally do not need a diversion, like working on an OOS project in company hours, as our work is mostly fun.

gnu.org?

[cpeterso]

Does SmartFilter gnu.org as a religious web site?

Re:bullshit

[gmhowell]

Perhaps your company's block list hasn't been updated. Or your firm doesn't block sites listed under 'mp3'. In any event, go to the search page on their site, and enter sourceforge. You will see that it is categorized as a 'bad' domain. Not only that, but it seems that all domains ending in .sourceforge.net are listed. For example, brewnix.sourceforge.net is listed, (for real. Used the search ~4:35 EDT) and there are no mp3 files or tools available.

It's less bogus than several /. stories of the past.

Re:bullshit

[FreeLinux]

It is certainly on the list. The fact that your company doesn't choose to restrict that category or uses an older version of the software doesn't mean that it isn't on the list.

As an after thought, your company may have that category set to log. In which case you will likely get a visit from management wanting to discuss your mp3 habits during work hours.

libel

[www.sorehands.com]

To be libel you must:

• Make false statements of fact (or opinions that imply false statements of fact).
• Make those statements with negligence, recklessness, or with malice as to the truthfulness of the statements. Negligence does not apply to public figures.
• The statements must be published to a 3rd party.
• There must be damages. Damages are implied if criminal acts are stated.

I have detailed the requirements for libel (under Mass. law) in a motion for summary judgment.

Re:libel

[Rakarra]

See? That's libel, good example.

I just listed Slashdot!

[toupsie]

I figured it should be listed under "Cult/Occult".

Them bosses need all the help they can get

[tiltowait]

Help a commercial consorware company do business? I think not.

Slashdot is in there

[Andy Dodd]

But it's properly listed as "Entertainment, General News" - So it's been fairly categorized.

It would suck to work at a place that actually turned on that category.

Re:No OSS at work

[alienmole]

Except that many companies use open source software in their internal development.

Apologies from us here at SmartFilter Corp.

[wackybrit]

We're sorry to hear that you are upset at a new feature built into our latest version of SmartFilter. We do, however, appreciate all feedback, and this has certainly been useful in locating a bug within our software.

It appears our QA department inadvertently made an error in the data files for SmartFilter. SourceForge is not, technically, banned as being an MP3 site, but is in a new category we added called 'Sites for Geeky Losers'. The pointer for this category has remained pointed at 'MP3 Sites' in our symbol table. We will be fixing this in our next release.

Regards,
Chuck "Jesus" Smythe
SmartFilter Corp. -- Banning the sites that we don't like.

Filtering software isnt the answer.

[pogle]

I'm a practicing Baptist, and have some strong issues on some things. However, when my church was passing around a petition in support of mandating censorware on school computers, I spoke out against it. People looked at me like I had suddenly turned into a gorilla.

Honestly, when public schools are underfunded, and hardworking teachers are underpaid and under-rewarded, should schools really be spending money on software that has been proven time and again to be ineffective? I haven't got this program to test, but how much of google's cache do they block, I wonder? And the Usenet archives? Between those, I imagine you could get anything you wanted anyways. My experience with the censorware at work has been it even blocks Slashdot on some days, but never anything else. It blocks a few online game sites, like Sony's Station, but not much else. I don't sit at work and browse porn, but I've loaded pages before that had plenty of it (people really need to identify whats in the links they email me) and the censorware didnt stop it at all.

So I ask you: Censorware that arguably does as much harm as good? Or raises for teachers and administrative staff who could better nuture teens' growth away from questionable sites as it is? It doesn't take much for someone to walk thru a computer lab now and then, and anyone turning their monitor off quickly is rather obvious. Censorware is a leech-like entity, and rates only slightly above spam mailers in my opinion (only because they once had, deep down inside, an urge to do something good--or so I like to believe).

But taking an active role in childrens education about such things, and occassionally checking in on them while they're surfing are far better alternatives than spending money thats going to limit so much of the good with only a little of the bad.

Re:Filtering software isnt the answer.

[extrasolar]

How about a spam-assasin-like system?

Where if enough people use it, it gets better -- but never perfect mind you.

Instead of some kind of automatic keyword system, schools and people go through the internet and start black-listing web sites. Of course all USENET and chat should be blocked for all but the oldest kids.

And then when an inappropriate web site is found by anyone using the system, it gets black listed. Of course, black-listed sites should go into a queue to be verified.

But thats basically it.

Re:Filtering software isnt the answer.

[MoneyT]

Censorware is also rather pathetic in the things it doesn't filter. While out school's new firewall/censorware has the wonderful ability to block all free web mail sites (except submail.net) and sites like peacefire, cexx.org AIM.com etc. For some reason, these people completely skipped over sites such as cyberarmy.com, and defcon.org. But the icing on the cake was when they missed thehun.com, kittykats.com and of course whitehouse.com Let's hear it for good web filters.

Re:Filtering software isnt the answer.

[DunbarTheInept]

It would be far better for people to simply be given a means to categorize sites, without giving them a moral judgement of any kind, and then sites could configure filter software to respond to these categories. One place might block any site related to "sex" without specifying whether that's evil porn or sexual medical information - just all sex sites of any kind. A very strict site might choose to block all stuff NOT listed as "education", and so on. The massive array of humans doing group voting on these sites would then NOT be making judgement calls based on whether they find a site offensive or not. They would be simply categorizing type of subject, and it's up to people to decide what sites fit under what subjects, regardless of whether they are "good" or "bad" sites.

Granted, not having any censorware in place at all would be a far better thing, but if it is going to be there, I think it's vital from an conflict-of-interest standpoint to have the categorizing list be made by someone other than the people producing the software. The list should be something that gets generated entirely by the public.

Re:Filtering software isnt the answer.

[pogle]

LOL, yeah, that would be pretty bad. Unless its SNL:

"I'll take the Rapists for 20!"

We broke it. :)

[Andy Dodd]

The script is giving an Internal Server Error now. :)

"violation of intelectual proparty rights" ?!?

[javacowboy]

Haven't we all learned by now that free software is violation of intelectual proparty rights of proprietary companies?

I understand that you're being sarcastic, but what I don't understand is how they can make this argument. How does Free Software violate existing proprietary intellectual property rights.

Just because I make something that performs the same functions and has the same features as a proprietary application (ex XMMS vs Winamp), how am I violating intellectual property?

Re:"violation of intelectual proparty rights" ?!?

[BlueUnderwear]

How does Free Software violate existing proprietary intellectual property rights.

The evil monopolistic corporations claim that the GPL undermines intellectual property by its "viral" nature, that would "infect" all proprietary code that would be shipped together with GPL'ed software, and would force it to fall under the GPL as well.

This is of course utter nonsense (GPL only spreads to code derived from GPL'ed code, but not to code that is merely shipped on the same CD as GPL'ed code), but those evil monopolistic empires want you to believe otherwise in order to protect their own selfish interests. Indeed, the only way GPL'ed code really threatens proprietary code is by being superior in quality, and more consumer friendly ;-)

Just because I make something that performs the same functions and has the same features as a proprietary application (ex XMMS vs Winamp), how am I violating intellectual property?

You would not violate copyright by doing so, but depending on your jurisdiction, you might violate patents (see Fraunhofer vs. free mp3 players), trademarks (see the Adobe vs Killustrator case), or trade secrets (DeCSS). Of course, all 3 examples are pretty dodgy, and heavily depend not only on jurisdiction, but also on who interprets the law...

Looks Like SmartFilter has a new category

[Anonymous Coward]

they block InsaneClownPosse.com [insaneclownposse.com], Tupac.com [tupac.com], Marilyn Manson [marilynmanson.com], and even Chumbawamba's Web site [chumba.com].

So, they have the new "Suckass" category up now?

classification of sites: Maybe...

[einhverfr]

They should list riaa.org as an MP3 site-- has more to do with MP3s than Sourceforge.net ;)

Re:classification of sites: Maybe...

[herbierobinson]

No No! "Criminal Skills"

Re:bullshit

[alienmole]

The headline and story is pure sensationalism. SmartFilter isn't blocking sourceforge, the individual company is.

The headline "All Sourceforge.net Being Blocked by SmartFilter" applies perfectly to your statement: if an individual company chooses to use SmartFilter to block certain categories, all of sourceforge.net will be blocked, thus "all Sourceforge.net is being blocked by SmartFilter".

Personally, I think it's an interesting story that's worth posting. Many companies use open source software for their own development - I work for one. We're using at least one Sourceforge project, in fact. OTOH, many other companies might really wish to restrict access to Sourceforge, for the usual perverse legalistic and fascistic reasons. If it's true that Sourceforge was added to the Smartfilter list for those kinds of reasons, I think that's worth discussing.

The Truth About Filtering Software

[Laplace]

Your manager installs filtering software. You may think that he is an evil asshole who want to make a feeble attempt to censor and spy on you. Well, chances are you're wrong.

Companies have all sorts of liability that they have to worry about. Management installs filtering software to cover their asses in sexual harassment situations, or in this case, intellectual property rights.

That way when the RIAA comes banging on the doors of your company because the employees are downloading mp3s, they can innocently point to the filtering software then bring down the hammer of god on the people who circumvented the filtering software.

Really, it's nothing personal and has very little to do with you.

Re:The Truth About Filtering Software

[DunbarTheInept]

Cold, uncaring censorship just to cover one's ass is worse than that done for misguided moral reasons.

Re:The Truth About Filtering Software

[HiThere]

I don't really have any problem with companies filtering their employees. I have *LOTS* of problems with blocking software vendors who won't make public the rules they actually use to determine blocked sites. With reasonable proof that those actually are the rules that they use.

As an alternative, if they use a list based system, they need to make the lists public.

Here public means available to customers and prospective customers. Don't wait until the money has been forked over to reveal that you block the breast cancer research site! Worse yet, don't just pretend that you don't, when you actually do. That should be legally actionable with a company killing fine riding on it.

Jeez, people. Calm down.

[John Fulmer]

We use SmartFilter at work. In fact, I'm the primary babysitter and representive of the Spanish Inquisition where it is concerned.

Traditionally, I've been against filtering software, under the "if you treat people like children, they won't dissapoint you" philosophy. Unfortunately, in examining logs BEFORE we turned on the filtering, people were doing a great job of acting like children beforehand. Reporting on a days worth of logs on the 'sex' category generated a 150 page (small print) report, covering about 50 employees. These were NOT banner adds and spam mail. After the filter went on, it went to about 20 pages. After a well placed firing for an extreme example, it went down to about 3.

There are a few things you have to consider when dealing with filtering software.

1. The people categorizing URL's and sites are not much better than trained monkeys. Just because a site gets blocked isn't part of a conspiracy. Just a TMIF (trained monkey input failure) event. Usually they correct it within a week.

(Side note: My favorite mis-categorization was when a dog breeding site was classified as a pornography site)

2. Filters are unfortunately a necessary evil in this day and age, since companies (mostly larger ones) MUST show that they are activly preventing the development of a 'hostile environment' toward protected groups, such as women and minorities. Filters are an easy way of doing that.

3. Filters by themselves are useless. Its amazing the number of things that they don't catch, and methods of by-passing them are out there. You have to keep the logs, and actually look at them. Filters are only alerts, not real preventitive measures.

4. Also, you have to take care that someone in your company won't use them for 'evil', like some middle manager on a witch hunt. You have to have good, fair policies in place covering Internet usage and trusted individuals with good ethics to see those policies are being followed.

In the last 18 months, my company has gone from having many gross violations of our Internet usage policies to very few violations. Most people can get to most the things they want to, and most, if not all of the 10K full time employees are pretty happy with the arrangement, or at least I haven't heard any complaints. For better or worse, the content filter and daily review of log reports is primarily responsible for that.

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[slimme]

1. The people categorizing URL's and sites are not much better than trained monkeys. Just because a site gets blocked isn't part of a conspiracy. Just a TMIF (trained monkey input failure) event. Usually they correct it within a week.

I work for a company that delivers web based training & knowledge development. If one of our customers experiences an outage of a week because of some TIMF, the damage can not be repaired because of lost momentum. It could easily kill our company in a week.

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[gosand]

I hate to agree, but I do. Especially when I am browsing for legitimate news, and the site is blocked by my company's filters. It irks me - but I can live with it. I know people who dick off all day on the net - they will always find something to waste their time doing. Filters just make sure it is not porn, for the most part. (one particular person propagated the AnnaK virus like 10 times because he just kept opening that attachment over and over)

At the previous company I worked, a small one that eventually bit the dust, the IT guy told me on the first day "we don't monitor your net traffic. As long as you get your job done, nobody cares. And if you find any really good porn, let me know."

But in big companies, there is too much deadwood. I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. Just because you can give people freedom doesn't mean it is always the best thing to do.

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[(H)elix1]

Reporting on a days worth of logs on the 'sex' category generated a 150 page (small print) report, covering about 50 employees.

Make sure you filter out your IP address before you run the reports next time (grin)

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[Saeger]

I've got a question for you:

What's your (official/unofficial) policy when it comes to the 'smart' employees who securely tunnel through their home computers for reasons other than just bypassing your filters? You don't actually require that all employees communicate in the clear at all times do you?

--

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[alizard]

Presumably, your omission of your company name isn't an accident.

If filterware is intended to make the workplace more friendly to women and minorities, why is it that is use in a workplace is never featured in HR recruiting ads?

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[John Fulmer]

Official policy is that tunneling through the proxy is a violation of HR policy, which expressly forbids avoiding the content filter, or avoiding the security infrastructure, eg.. the firewalls, and is handled as a disciplinary action. That's an HR policy, not mine (security).

Unofficial policy is that if I find you tunneling (there are ways) I will give you and your manager a heads-up warning and not take it to HR. If I find it a second time, I call HR and let them deal with it.

Tunneling through, even for 'smart' employees (who usually aren't), is a huge security concern for me, and if you can just tunnel though, how can HR have any assurance that you are complying with the AUP? Some of the 'smart' ones are the worst offenders. (2 hours of surfing this anyone? NOTE: do not click the link. DO NOT CLICK THE LINK!!!!!)

Anyway, that's the policy that ends with '...up to and including termination', and our HR staff does not fool around.

So much for the hard nosed stuff. The reality is that you can pretty much do anything you want as far as surfing and 'regular' protocols go (FTP, AIM, MS messenger, HTTP, HTTPS, etc..), but not telnet and ssh. As long as it isn't porn or racial hate sites. That's the trade off. Follow the fairly liberal rules, and no one complains. Break the rules and our (female) ex-military/lawyer HR person comes down upon you like a ton of bricks.

It works out well, in general, and we have very few issues in our organization. All we ask is that people act in a somewhat mature fashion in their Internet usage and we have no problems with what they do otherwise. That's up to their manager.

Re:Jeez, people. Calm down.

[mpe]

The people categorizing URL's and sites are not much better than trained monkeys.

Most likely they are programs rather than people anyway.

Just because a site gets blocked isn't part of a conspiracy.

You can hide quite a bit of conspiracy within such a pool of incompetance.

I called the extension

[Torgo's Pizza]

When I dialed extension 7114, I promptly got a person to talk about this. He stopped me at first saying he was 'just a guy in accounting'. He 'pretended' not to know what I was talking about. I let him have it with both barrels and told him that this policy was unacceptable. He still feigned ignorance claiming that I had the wrong extension and didn't know what I was talking about. Another lie.

I then pointed out that this number was on the web page that had the explaination to why the site was being blocked and that it was posted on Slashdot. This corporate lackey kept up his charade and asked what Slashdot was. Seriously, what kind of fool does this person think I am? I said I wasn't going to put up with this type of corporate behavior and someone was going to set things right. He finally took my name and number down and said he'd get back to me. I hope that my actions will correct this situation.

Hmmm... some security personnel has just shown up at my cubicle wanting to talk to me. They no doubt want to congratulate me on my pro-active response to the situation.

Just ask . .

[techstar25]

Once the software my company uses wouldn't allow access to my homepage hosted by adaptive.net. I emailed the dept and told them what the site was, and they emailed me back saying that it was blocked because the host hosts a lot of porn sites. He was able to change the settings so it allowed me access. No problem. Dont' forget, the admins are geeks just like us, and if they knew about it blocking sourceforge they would probably change it if they could.

Re:Question?

[PMadavi]

Well, I work in IT, so I know first hand how damn frustrating it can be when you're trying help somebody with their PC, and they've got so much crap on there you can barely turn the thing on. Realplayer, AOL messenger, MSn and Yahoo Messengers (which don't go through defined ports anymore, they seek out any open port and use it), RealOne, blah, on and on with their Bonzai Buddies and all kinds of shit. It's just not good for the computers. At least most people have nwerwer PC's with w2k (thank god). But you'll run into the occasional 98 box with all that crap. Ech. My point being as follows: People who put crap on their PC's at work definitely eat up time and resources. All those programs tend to do a number on the fluidity of a windows machine, and cost the company. Technically, people shouldn't be downloading music and IMing during office hours, but c'mon, everybody goofs off at work. It's the American Way. HOWEVER, I do not believe that blocking these nuisance sites is the answer. I'd rather see IT departments show a little soul, and try to explain to people (install the notions into their heads) that putting crap on your work PC is bad, bad for you, bad for the company, and just a waste of everyone's time: "Important documents can crash and go bye-bye forever because of Bonzai Buddy. Take the knife that is your mouse pointer and plunge it into that awful little monkey's heart." Or some-such. Either that or they can send me around like the Gestapo to everyone's PC. I'd rather not do that. The point is: We can be responsible workers, and non of the B.S. would be necessary.

Filtering isn't easy.....

[jsimon12]

I was asked to put in a filtering solution for a local company to stop porn usage (which was rampaging through this small local firm). So I put in a IPF/OpenBSD/Squid with transparent http filtering. Itis cheap and effective, but not fullproof, it required a lot of monitoring in the begining and making sure sites were what they were, adding and removing sites from the list I was able to get to start with.

My advice, if you have a legitimate buissness reason for accessing SourceForge (which a lot of us do) then go to you IT department and get it removed, or added for you. Who knows maybe they had some problems with something on it, or more then likely they don't even know.

ext. 7114?

[psycht]

doesn't work.

Confirmation

[sohp]

Just a confirmation that sourceforge.net is blocked by SmartFilter. I'm seeing the rejection message sitting here at work. How silly of them.

Entire site down.

[muon1183]

Well, the /.ing is complete. We have knocked their entire site offline (not just the cgi server handling removal requests). I hope their software isn't dependent on being able to contact their site, otherwise they're going to have quite a problem. Hooray for the /. effect, it ought to get their attention.

.sig, what's that?

Or to be even more 1337

[Salsaman]

Try this:

http://033042125704/

Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems...

[extrasolar]

Why do you think we have filtering software? To give slashdotters a reason to rant and rave and ultimately do nothing?

There are legitamate uses of filtering software. And in some places (elementary schools, unsupervised children) where its a choice between filtered internet or no internet.

Just like 12-year old Kenny can't go into Wal-Mart by himself and by the latest Eminem CD.

And guess what? My internet isn't filtered and neither is yours (you are reading a slashdot forum after all), and I don't think anyone is interested in filtering you net usage anyways.

So please, keep the desk-chair militias at bay.

SmartFilter blocks Peacefire

[n8ur]

I just tried to go to the Peacefire link shown in the story, and my company's SmartFilter told me it was blocked as "non-business related" (our block page doesn't show the category).

So, SmartFilter is at least smart enough to block its critics...

Audit mode and monitoring a good alternative

[Anthony]

I evaluated bunch of filter products a few years ago for a customer. Smartfilter nudged out SquidGuard because of the lower admin overhead.

They run it in audit mode on a small amount of categories considered inappropriate. The user has a choice to continue to the site after receiving a warning, and must explain their choice if they appear in our weekly reports.

Porn surfing at work went from about 1% of traffic to about 1,000 hits a week (counting ads as well).

They have been catching big downloaders for about two years before that. It certainly keeps those MP3 and warez doodz at bay. I can't undestand the economics of downloading. To download a CD in Australia costs A$90 or more for most sites. If you can get away with someone else paying for it, then it is "free"

Smartfilter is a pain in the rear

[ryanwright]

I administered a server running Smartfilter at my last job.

The software is garbage. Really, it's a pain in the rear. Worse, huge numbers of sites are misclassified. Every time I updated the control list, half a dozen employees would call because some legit business site had been incorrectly classified as pr0n and they could no longer access it. A great deal at only ~$4k per year (blech).

I tried to get them to use an open-source solution with no luck. If it didn't run under Windows and cost a fortune, they weren't interested. Pity.

pr0n at work

[White Shade]

I'm not entirely sure, but I can't seem to think of any reason why someone would want to be looking at porn while they're at work ...

What can be worse than sitting at your desk in your cubicle/office, with a boner and one of those "urges" to pull the "manual override", and not being able to do anything about it (without risking charges of indecency, at least)

And what would happen if your coworker (or boss?!) came in while you were viewing porn, and asked you to get up and walk to a meeting or something, while you were still 'in the mood' ..

I know most of us guys have good control over our erectile functions, but... come on, it's gotta be a *bit* uncomfortable to be in that state and to try and talk business or something..

Maybe it's only me, but I just don't see the allure of viewing pr0n at work.

anyway.. tiz just my little rant ..

Offtopic perhaps, but...

[mwillems]

...but I do think this person absolutely has a point.

As the CTO of in international company, I see a lot of people around me who cannot spell. Some are VERY clever people, but indeed, some of them will probably never grow to become managers (let alone CEOs), simple becuase they cannot write (and that includes spelling).

Now this may not bother you - in which case, that is fine. But if you ever want to become the pointy-haired guy who earns US$150k instead of being the tech who "knows more" but earns $50k, things like spelling, as well as knowledge of geography, politics and current affairs are exactly the things that make a difference.

Being the pointy-haired guy means being able to put together a good presentation, being able to sit next to another CEO on the aiplane and talk intelligently about the state of the industry, and being able to address 100 people confidently.

The good news is: this stuff is learnable. If you can learn C++ or Java, you can certainly learn "English". Advice: this "English" language is as important as those other languages if you want a good resume.

Again, no value expressed here: it is perfectly OK to want to be the guy who makes less but works fewer hours and says what he thinks. :-)

Mike

Re:Offtopic perhaps, but...

[mwillems]

AC,

What makes you think that all CEOs on planes speak English?

Well, as it happens, I've actually met quite a few on planes, flying to Holland, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Tokyo, you name it, and I am happy to report that in fact most of them DO speak English. English of course is the world's business language. Take me as a typical example if you like: I'm Dutch, but speak pretty good English. It's just one of those business requirements (like spelling).

:)
MW

Re:Offtopic perhaps, but...

[John_Booty]

actually, it's "speak Enlgish pretty well", not "speak pretty good English"

don't worry; 90% of native English speakers make this make this mistake as well, including myself. also, your English is much better than my Dutch, so I'm only teasing :)

Re:Offtopic perhaps, but...

[Skapare]

If you're only going to pay $50k for techs, then you're going to get the ones who can't spell. You get what you pay for. If you don't need to have techs writing reports, then the $50k techs will probably do just fine for you. If you want a tech that can also do things like write proper reports to management, and document the systems and programs they put together, then I suggest you start paying more so you get a better pool of applicants and can choose the ones that fit your needs. Don't whine about the porr quality of techs if all you're offering to hire them is a lousy salary level.

Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't pick and choose its readers and posters, so of course you get all kinds here. But there are many out there who can spell, and who can write documentation (some who can just don't like to, though).

How *I* use SmartFilter with their 'coach' mode.

[Nonesuch]

There is one very interesting feature of SmartFilter that I find redeems many of the flaws in this particular "censorware".

SmartFilter offers four possible results for each category when a user attempts to visit a site on the filter list:

1. Permit. Access is allowed, but logged by user-IP, URL, and category (if any)
2. Deny. Block access, return a HTML page explaining what was blocked, and why. Same logging.
3. Delay.. Access is permitted, but page returns after a delay (default 30 seconds). Same logging.
   

   Here is the interesting one:
   

4. Coach.. Access is blocked, but permit the user to 'click through' to the actual page. Either way, log access.

With the 'Coach' option, nobody is actually blocked from accessing any web site. However, for each new access to any 'questionable' site (based on categories from the SmartFilter database), the user is presented with warning page, and the opportunity to choose to continue, with the knowledge that their actions are logged and may be reviewed.

The default HTML pages that SmartFilter ships with are rather boring. I've made a few changes to the 'Coach' page HTML to make it very clear what is going on -- bright icons and background, big WARNING banner at the top, and the text of our official "Internet Access Policy" (just in case the user somehow missed it when they signed their employment paperwork).

I'm hoping that 'coaching' will cut down on web access abuse and wasted time, while still allowing people to get to sites that they really need to access for their job, without getting people fired.

And best of all, the warning page breaks the never-ending cycle launched by those damn porn-site popup ads!

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> And in some places (elementary schools, unsupervised children) where its a choice between filtered internet or no internet.

I have two more choices. You could *gasp*, supervise the children. Or, far better than ineffective black-list filters that let porn through while blocking Dick Armey's web site, you could provide a white-list filter that only allows pre-screened URLs through.

Of course, when I was a kid, we could buy albums by the Dead Kennedys without our parents holding our hands.

Getting pr0n was a lot tougher back then, but you can trust that I was able to find it despite the fact that I couldn't go into a store and buy it.

> My internet isn't filtered and neither is yours

Not yet at least...

Oh and...

[mwillems]

....and there IS a difference between typos and spelling. Typos (like writing "simple" for "simply", and typing "becuase", when you are in a hurry) are allowed even for CTOs. They are easily differentiated from actually not knowing the spelling.

Honest. :-))

Michael

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[samantha]

There is no excuse for such filtering software in a corporate environment. It should be opposed there as a criminal restraint. Companies and sites that are excluded by this ridiculous piece of software should sue. Just having the users "vote" says that it is a debatable issue in the first place whether site X should be blocked and worse, it legitimizes such blockage in such environments in the first place.

Keep asinine comments about "militia" to yourself when people are simply attempting to get some action out of the apathy that surronds us.

Marilyn's extremity

[commodoresloat]

If I was a parent I'd be thanking Zeus that they blocked that freak's site.

Marilyn is no more extreme than Alice Cooper or Lou Reed or freakin' David Bowie. Sure, he looks pretty crazy, but no crazier than the dude that works in the local video store (and he's spent a lot more on his wardrobe). I'm no fan of his music, but reading interviews with him he is hardly "freakish" or "extreme"; he votes Republican; his views are not that far out of the mainstream, and after his music was blamed for Columbine he wrote one of the most intelligent responses to the tragedy that I came across in the media that spring (including on slashdot; my apologies JonKatz). The only reason he's so controversial is that he's intentionally giving the finger to the religious right, which is most likely his family background. So he takes a lot of his symbolism from Christianity and performs in a manner that is provocative and mocking. Of course it pisses those people off, it's meant to, but it's hardly a threat to your children unless you want to keep them closed-minded. (It's definitely not a threat to your children if you believe in Zeus, as the parent post implies!)

You got to admire how clever he is too (though admittedly he's picking on an easy target); in response to many of the criticisms of his treatment of Christianity he promised in this interview to "balance my songs with a wholesome Bible reading" so fans can "examine the virtues of wonderful 'Christian' stories of disease, murder, adultery, suicide, and child sacrifice. Now that seems like 'entertainment' to me."

Re:Marilyn's extremity

[Hektor_Troy]

"he votes Republican"

That alone should be enough to get him filtered!

Microsoft/Hotmail

[AntiNorm]

How come they do not block Microsoft

Given all the porn spam I get, why the hell is Hotmail not listed under the Sex category?

Cheesy porn

[Daetrin]

It would be interesting to try and write some erotica that couches everything in metaphot and allusions so as to totally bypass their filters.

It would almost definitely end up sounding really bad, like the ones in this article on bad porn awards but it would be worth it to make something that was unblockable by any type of systematic filter.

Think of this as a message from your boss

[alizard]

Your corporation doesn't consider you professional enough to be able to figure out for yourself which sites are appropriate for you to browse on company time.

So they've delegated that task to a retarded electronic babysitter.

Suck it up and be a good drone or update your resume and start looking for a better place to work.

A competent professional doesn't need to have his/her time and efficiency wasted by this kind of crap. Competent management doesn't hire people who need electronic babysitters.

Libel Lawsuits for fun and profit?

[billstewart]

If the Sourceforge folks are getting blocked by CensorshipInc., do they have grounds for a lawsuit for things like restraint of trade or libel? It's one thing to block them for "hacker tools", a category which some lameoid censorware products do, but blocking them for MP3s sounds blatantly negligent at best.

occult

[commodoresloat]

Why is it that "occult" is considered a category that merits censorship? Would people not be outraged if they had a category like "Episcopelean" or "Jewish" and censored stuff in that category? "Occult" is even less specific; why is it considered legitimate, in a nation that values free speech and liberty of thought (not to mention free choice of religion), to suppress ideas based on a label like "occult"? To my reading "occult" is a category of knowledge that encompasses a variety of mystical traditions, ancient and modern. Why do people feel we must protect children from the "occult," and why do we not frown upon people who feel that way the way we would frown upon those who felt we must protect our children from Jews, for example?

Re:occult

[Reality Master 101]

Simple, because the "occult" is not a religion, it's an obsession that many teenagers go through when they have severe problems. Studying religion is one thing, wearing black and pretending your some sort of "dark lord" is whole 'nother thing.

Or to put it another way, studying world war II history is one, obsessing over Nazi hate sites is another.

Re:occult

[jedidiah]

If a teenager wants to think he or she is a shaman, druid or witch that should be their perogative. They have reached the traditional age of majority under the old law and should not be interfered with.

Fear of competitors should be not used as a weak excuse to continue the suppression of various ancient and native religions.

The possibility of obsession is also no excuse to deny access to information. People can be obsessed with many things, including the currently dominant superstition.

Re:occult

[commodoresloat]

Simple, because the "occult" is not a religion, it's an obsession that many teenagers go through

Have you ever tried to talk to teenagers interested in the "occult"? Sure, there are some obsessive losers in the bunch, but many of them are both intelligent and articulate. And the last thing I would want to do is restrict their access to information about the ideas they care most about, even at the risk that a few of them will read something that will make them want to sleep in coffins and slash their wrists. It shocks my conscience that any American parent would think otherwise.

Studying religion is one thing, wearing black and pretending your some sort of "dark lord" is whole 'nother thing

Perhaps, but either is well within the domain of the First Amendment. While as a parent I would be concerned if I had a child doing such things, I would think the appropriate response in a society that values diversity of ideas would be to actually talk to your children rather than prevent them from downloading freakin' Marilyn Manson photos. And focus on conduct, not ideas. If your kid is sacrificing goats in the name of Cthulu, the solution should be a firm discussion about what you find unsavory about such behavior rather than trying to prevent it by making sure your child can't find any information about Cthulu anywhere....

Re:occult

[DunbarTheInept]

The only difference between a cult and a religion is that a cult is a religion with a small enough membership that it is still politically safe to give it the ridicule that all religions richly deserve.

Re:occult

[Reality Master 101]

And the last thing I would want to do is restrict their access to information about the ideas they care most about, even at the risk that a few of them will read something that will make them want to sleep in coffins and slash their wrists.

The point is not "restricting access", the point is controlling access. If my child is going down some unhealthy freaky path, then I need to know about it. It may be just a phase that they are going through, and that's fine.

Perhaps, but either is well within the domain of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is irrelevent to someone under legal adult age.

I would think the appropriate response in a society that values diversity of ideas would be to actually talk to your children rather than prevent them from downloading freakin' Marilyn Manson photos.

I agree. But it also depends on the age and mental development of the child. Marilyn Manson is a symptom, not a cause. My 8 year old daughter doesn't need to see the freaky photos on that site.

For whatever reason, too many people think that every child should be deluged with as much as much raw Internet sewage as possible at as early an age as possible. It never occurs to people that maybe it might have an unhealthy effect on a developing brain. "Just talk about it" is not a magic incantation. For example, I don't think it's particularly healthy for little girls to see constant images of animal sex porn.

Obviously, the older the child, the more they can be exposed to. But for someone to say that none of these things have any influence is just folly. Like I said, a lot of these things are symptoms, not causes. But that doesn't mean you have to feed unhealthy obsessions just because your kid "wants what he wants".

Re:occult

[Hieronymus Howard]

I've just typed both 'occult' and 'pagan' into google. The top sites for both categories are unknown by Smartfilter. Not very smart if you ask me.

HH

Re:occult

[commodoresloat]

If my child is going down some unhealthy freaky path, then I need to know about it.

How, by examining the logs of what sites she tried to go to that were blocked? jeez.

The First Amendment is irrelevent to someone under legal adult age.

You're wrong even in strict legal terms, but that's not the point. Of course parents have the right to censor their child's reading habits (though only a moron believes that they'll be truly effective). But in a free society I would think we'd err on the side of more speech rather than little, even for kids.

For whatever reason, too many people think that every child should be deluged with as much as much raw Internet sewage as possible at as early an age as possible.... I don't think it's particularly healthy for little girls to see constant images of animal sex porn.

Nor do I. But we're not talking about obscenity here (which is already illegal in the form you're talking about); we're talking about "occult" ideas. If your child wants to study Rosicrucianism, or the Gnostics, or the Kabbalah, or the ancient Greek magicians, you'd rather censor and stigmatize the subject matter?

Just curious, are you going to censor the Harry Potter series from your daughter?

Re:occult

[mangu]

If my child is going down some unhealthy freaky path, then I need to know about it.

If you need a web censoring software to know your child is doing that, then, well, you are so out of touch with your children that they would be better in an orphanage.

I don't think it's particularly healthy for little girls to see constant images of animal sex porn.

Maybe you don't know the internet very well, but I cannot imagine how a little girl would see constant images of that. BTW, how do you protect your little girl from seeing stray dogs mating in the street? It happened sometimes in the small town I grew up, and it was a great source of fun for the boys to chase dogs that couldn't disengage after copulating. Hmm, I guess those boys, including me, grew up to be serial killers, right?

Re:occult

[Reality Master 101]

though only a moron believes that they'll be truly effective

Where does this bullshit come from that "they're just going to do what they're going to do anyway, and there's no way to stop them, so you might as well let them do whatever they want".

But in a free society I would think we'd err on the side of more speech rather than little, even for kids.

See, this is what I find so bizarre. I'm talking about controlling what children see and hear and guiding them along the path to adulthood. And that includes sometimes shielding them from bad influences. You're characterizing this as some jack-booted campaign to censor everything around a child.

I have a feeling you would be the kind of parent watching your kid start to hang around with the druggie crowd, and then saying to yourself, "well, [wring hands] he has a right to pick his friends [wring hands] I shouldn't interfere, it'll just drive him to do it more [wring hands] I better just stand back and let him 'find himself'".

Just curious, are you going to censor the Harry Potter series from your daughter?

If you have to ask that question, then you have absolutely no idea what the discussion is about.

Re:occult

[Reality Master 101]

If you need a web censoring software to know your child is doing that,

Actually, I haven't said anything about web censoring software.

Maybe you don't know the internet very well, but I cannot imagine how a little girl would see constant images of that.

Apparently YOU don't know the Internet very well. I'm not talking about images of two animals having sex, I'm talking about women having sex with animals.

Hmm, I guess those boys, including me, grew up to be serial killers, right?

Once again, you confuse symptom with cause. Jeffrey Dahmer used to go into the forest, catch animals, and torture them. But hey, he was just going through a phase, right? The parents were right in just letting him "get it out of his system", right?

Re:occult

[mangu]

I'm not talking about images of two animals having sex, I'm talking about women having sex with animals.

Yes, I realize that. But I cannot imagine how an 8 year old girl would get the exact sequence of links to reach such sites. And, even if she would, by some random clicking on links, reach an extreme freaky p0rn site, would that be so dangerous? Despite what pedophiles think, little children are NOT interested in sex. It's as boring to them as politics. She would probably think "gee, how stupid, now where are those fairy tale cartoons I was lookin for?".

The big problem I see in parents censoring what their children see is the same as in overusing antibiotics. Overprotection will not allow their natural antibodies to develop. Ten years from now, your girl will be eighteen, an age when hormones makes women more susceptible to sexual messages than at eight. What will happen when she, not being restrained by any parental control anymore, is be exposed to all the filth in the world? Or do you think you will control her forever?

Well, as her parent you know best, but my advice would be to explain to her that there are many freaks out there, and that she should avoid those freaks when she meets them. Encourage her to surf the web and show you anything that seems strange. Then you (and not any software censoring company) will be able to tell her "yes, honey, that's a disgusting site. Don't go to there again". If she truly respects you she will comply. If she doesn't respect you she will find a way to disobey you, anyhow.

Re:occult

[HiThere]

Why is it that "occult" is considered a category that merits censorship? Would people not be outraged if they had a category like "Episcopelean" or "Jewish" and censored stuff in that category? "

They seem to rate them by the amount of political power that the factions can mobilize (both for and against). There is no other justification that appears to match the criteria in a (reasonably) predictable way.

You can justify this on commercial grounds as well as on grounds of prejudice. What's really unfair is that you can't find out what the criteria are. I wouldn't really mind if the KKK put out some blocking software, but I'd sure want to know before I accidentally gave them some money. (Well, actually I'd want the purchasers to know, but that wouldn't include me. I'd rather choose for myself. [Might be worth buying as a source of sites to check out though, if you could read the filter files.])

Re:occult

[commodoresloat]

I have a feeling you would be the kind of parent watching your kid start to hang around with the druggie crowd, and then saying to yourself, "well, [wring hands] he has a right to pick his friends [wring hands] I shouldn't interfere, it'll just drive him to do it more [wring hands] I better just stand back and let him 'find himself'".

You have no idea what kind of parent I would be. Neither do I for that matter, but, of the two of us, there is only one qualified to comment on that. Were I a parent I would probably find the above insulting.

I suggest you read over the discussion; we're talking about censoring "occult" material from teenagers, not protecting your 8-year old from drugs or goatse.cx.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[lelitsch]

Actually, I think Dick Armey's web site does much more damage to children than a lot of the porn that's out there.

Commercial Censorware is the only game in town?

[Nonesuch]

A great deal at only ~$4k per year (blech).

They're only charging you $4K/year? I guess that is the 100 user license?

I tried to get them to use an open-source solution with no luck. If it didn't run under Windows and cost a fortune, they weren't interested.

I would love to use an "open source solution".

However, I have had no success finding such a beast.

Can you point me at a stable URL (not IP) blocking package which will run with (Solaris8|FreeBSD)+Squid, and for which we can purchase a subscription to a oft-updated list of "non-business use" sites, sorted by category?

Until then, Secure Computing will get their $$,$$$/year for SmartFilter.

Well done!

[First Person]

This is the rare post which is both informative and funny.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[ryanwright]

Just like 12-year old Kenny can't go into Wal-Mart by himself and by the latest Eminem CD

Actually, he can. Wal-Mart doesn't sell naughty music as-is. Instead, they censor it by muting out anything they deem unfriendly to "families" and sell it that way. That's why I will never buy any media (CD, DVD, etc) at Wal-Mart.

More errors...

[gerardrj]

The article linked to mentions how the sites must be banned by computers, not by humans as the company claims. Here's some evidence that a stupid human must be at least partly involved: www.theonion.org : General News www.theonion.com: Adult Humour They're the same exact site. The content is 100% exactly the same at both TLDs. If a computer where categorizing these things they'd both be the same. Only puny humans could mess up this badly.

Paying for filterware, or paying for a service?

[Nonesuch]

Lumpy Writes:

...(squid is a better solution than ANY commercial filter/proxy on the planet. oh and it happens to be FREE!)

You are claiming that PC+Linux+Squid is a better caching proxy than the Network Appliance "NetCache" for my multi-thousands of users corporate enterprise deployment?

As it happens, I am using Squid... with the SmartFilter plugin. This took a bit longer to install than Squid by itself, and is considerably more expensive ($4K/year for a 100 user license).

the porn filters that are freely available work just fine.. if they want to add other "naughty" sites, it takes exactly 30 seconds to add it to a flat-text file... even a MSCE coud do it.

Okay, where do I go for a list of porn sites?

Now then, where do I download equivalent lists to the couple of dozen additional categories that SmartFilter offers? Games? Drugs? Sports? Mp3? Chat? Investing? Dating? Webmail? Anonymizer? Politics/Religion? Cults/Occult? etc, etc.

paying for any type of filtering system is pure stupidity and would only be reccomended by incompetent sysadmins/netadmins.

Paying a subscription for updated filter information is not stupid if (and only if) you can trust the commercial entity that is maintaining the list to do a good job and not let any of their bias (religious, political, etc) show in how they rate sites.

I wish I could make it my job to surf for new Mp3 and porn serving web sites to add the URLs to a corporate filter list, but the reality is, paying $4K+ per year to subscribe to a list of sites/categories is cheaper and more effective than paying me to do the same job by hand (pun intended).

Bollocks

[ebcdic]

They sell a bogus product that makes it easy for corporate dickheads to enforce stupid policies. They're as blameless as heroin pushers.

You defend them, you're part of the problem.

Not surprising

[jesser]

They're in the business of filtering smart, after all.

Wall Street Journal

[swb]

The WSJ, Barrons, Finacial Times, et al should be listed as a "criminal skills" site, since I could probably guarantee you 100% readership of one or more of those publications among the executive classes of WorldCon, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Adelphia.

I mean, all those pubs just do is encourage criminal business practices, yes?

Bullshit, burn bitch, burn!

[Erris]

Unfortunately, in examining logs BEFORE we turned on the filtering, people were doing a great job of acting like children beforehand. Reporting on a days worth of logs on the 'sex' category generated a 150 page (small print) report, covering about 50 employees. These were NOT banner adds and spam mail. After the filter went on, it went to about 20 pages. After a well placed firing for an extreme example, it went down to about 3.

If the program catagorizing your logs was not full of it, your company had serious problems to begin with. Chances are that SmartFilter or some sister program told you just what you wanted to hear. Did you really sample those sites? Did you have another program to verify your employees were really going to those places? Scepticism helps here, because I find it hard to believe that anyplace with 50+ of how_many_hundred_? employees dicking around all day with porn can stay in business for 18 months. The other problem your comany has is you. Your statement, " Most people can get to most the things they want to.." reveals the fact that you don't care if a few can't get what they want or need to do their jobs.

You've got 10,000 employees like I've got half Bill Gates's shares of M$.

This one really cracks me up:

You have to have good, fair policies in place covering Internet usage and trusted individuals with good ethics to see those policies are being followed.

If you trusted them, you would never need a filter, would you? Obviously, you company is filled with people that can't be trusted. It's too bad you don't apply the same scepticism to makers of snake oil. For all that, you still end up combing the logs to improve the filters. Don't you have something better to do? Like provide information services?

Re:Bullshit, burn bitch, burn!

[John Fulmer]

I hate to respond to this one, but I have to:

>If the program catagorizing your logs was not
>full of it, your company had serious problems to
>begin with.

No arguments there.

>Chances are that SmartFilter or some
>sister program told you just what you wanted to
>hear. Did you really sample those sites? Did you
>have another program to verify your
>employees were really going to those places?

I wrote my own report engine, because I couldn't find anything that would give me the detail level I needed. And yes, I did sample those sites. In fact, if I'm investigating an AUP violation, I have to look at most of them. I don't depend on the category or the URL name, although most of those are self explanitory. As I said, filters without someone *looking* at the logs (implying a human) is pointless. And don't think I enjoy that part of the job. Ugh...nothing more depressing than surfing someone else's porn.

>You've got 10,000 employees like I've got half
>Bill Gates's shares of M$.

Must be nice to have so much money. Our NT domain says we have about 9800 employees, but that doesn't include some of our other divisions. (The corporation I work for is on the Fortune 500. You can probably figure out which one without too much trouble)

>If you trusted them, you would never need a
>filter, would you?

Er, the 'trusted individuals' are myself and my group. With great power comes great ...nevermind...

>For all that, you still end up combing the logs
>to improve the filters. Don't you have something
>better to do? Like provide information services?

I don't improve the filters. I have never added one site to the filter list. All I do is report on apparent violations(which is by IP address only; we don't narrow it down to an individual until the investigation is ongoing), and investigate. The filter is more useful as a guide than a site blocker. I could not block anything and it would be about the same for me.

And it is part of my job. Me and the other people in my group aren't vindictive about it, and it is a necessary evil in corporate America.

Does anonymizer work?

[mangu]

And what about http://www.microsoft.com@sourceforge.net ?

Is it "AND" or "OR"?

[mangu]

From your post one can infer that each of those four conditions must be met for an act to be considered libel. However, in this case, one can argue whether a "statement" was made or not.

But let's generalize this from making a statement to any other act. Suppose I perform any action, with negligence, in such a way that damages are caused to someone. Isn't this enough cause for either a civil or criminal process? Morally, at least, one is not allowed to perform any acts with negligence, recklessness, or malice that will cause damages to someone. "Libel" would be just one of the many ways in which such acts could be made.

Peter Principle

[mangu]

A good programmer is not necessarily a good manager. Unfortunately, when the average company promotes someone, they take the best programmer to manage the department.

My solution to this problem: make pay independent of position. A good programmer should get paid more than an average manager.

You think that's weird...

[BobGregg]

While doing research at my new job, I ran across the TinyCobol project on Source Forge. When I tried to click on the link (tinycobol.sourceforge.net), I got a filtering error back too. Category: Sex.

I don't even want to know.

I noticed sf.net isn't blocked

[Nailer]

Thanks for the URL. As I was voting, I notice sf.net isn't blocked. OSS Developers can use sf.net in place of sourceforge while we all vote.

I added www.microsoft.com

[mangu]

They definitely offer "online sales". I once bought a "DirectX SDK CD" online from them.

"Art and Culture"?

[mangu]

The second cathegory in the list mentions:

Art Exhibits/Artists/Art History - Web sites in this category contain virtual art galleries and other cultural topics, such as museums and country customs. Some examples of sites and topics include:

Visual Jazz Art Gallery - Contemporary art

Cartoon Factory Animation

A lesson in Native American Funeral Rituals

If that kind of site should be censored, then what is the purpose of the internet, anyhow?

Re:"Art and Culture"?

[TMB]

SmartFilter is sold as "business productivity software"... ie. to keep your employees doing work rather than surfing the net all day. If your business doesn't involve art, someone visiting an art site is most likely not working.

[TMB]

Disappointment

[jc42]

Man, was I ever disappointed. I typed in my URL, and it said "NOT LISTED". Jeez; what's a guy gotta do to get on such a list?

Hand me my LART dear...

[xixax]

Arghh....

This after a week on the phone to those clueless plonks trying to figure out why I couldn't *(*&%^%%$^% see *&^*&^*&*& Sourceforge. (the suggestion being that I was obviously violating corporate policy, because the PHBs would *never* block something useful by mistake, "maybe because it's a h4X0r site...").

I should have known better than to expect anything other than default brokeness.

My next project shall be a script using a large block of DHCP addresses to shape Smartfilter's source statistics. I know just the code base... oh wait... SourceForge is blocked!...

The Gelatinous cude hits! The Gelatinous cube Hits! You are still frozen in the gaze of the Beholder! The Gelatinous cube Hits! You die!

On a more serious note, will the default policy on this sort of blocking eventually to be, "block it unless it is a RIAA or MPAA certified domain"?

Xix.

Re:This is an outrage!

[mangu]

Is goatse.cx related to sex? To me, the body part exposed so obviously in that site belongs to the digestive/excretory system. Only a male homosexual would claim that the distended hole seen there is a sexual organ!

Well, the only possible explanation is that SmartFilter employs a bunch of male homosexuals to edit their site lists.

Information vs. obsession

[mangu]

The possibility of obsession is also no excuse to deny access to information. People can be obsessed with many things, including the currently dominant superstition.

Actually, access to information is, most likely, the best antidote against obsession. For instance, do you think the 9/11 terrorists would be so willing to suicide if they had ready access to alternative ideas and theories about religion and the afterlife? Limited access to information is the best recipe to fanatism I know.

Re:Information vs. obsession

[possible]

If only information worked that way. Most of the 9/11 hijackers spoke several languages, had lived in the Middle East, Europe, and the US for several years, and were well-educated (engineers for example).

Sometimes people are just evil. Ignorance isn't the explanation, nor is education the solution.

Freshmeat Porn

[ghazban]

I got pulled up by the log checkers by one of the admins at my school for looking up porn when I was browsing freshmeat.net. It didn't really occur to them to actually try loading the page to see whether it was in fact porn. Sheesh.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[alizard]

I bow to your expertise in the area of stupidity, and I'm sure the rest of slashdot feels the same way. Just like 12-year old Kenny can't go into Wal-Mart by himself and by the latest Eminem CD

12-year-old Kenny can. Though I'm sure I could come up with reasons why you shouldn't be allowed to, any more than you should be allowed in an adult discussion of public policy.

Censorware in the workplace is a band-aid fix for bad management. As for its use in schools or libraries, I suggest getting the facts about the databases this class of crapware uses before whining about how nasty we are all about it in public.

The purpose of school and public library Internet access is education. The assignment of site ratings is at best arbitrary and at worst a reflection of a political agenda the management of these companies refuse to share with the public because if it were public knowledge, no institution could afford to be publically associated with these products. Censorware interferes with the educational process.

While I'm sure that given the miserable failure of the educational system in your case, you have no problem with this, the rest of us who pay for it do.

Degrading the operation of these sites to the point where even the PHMs who buy it see that it has problems is something I have no trouble with at all.

A perl script

[Jeremy Erwin]

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use LWP;
$url= "http://www.securecomputing.com/cgi-bin/filter_whe reV301.cgi?new1=1&url_string1=sourceforge.net& amp;results_string1=MP3&category_request1=rm&a mp;url_request=Send+
Request";
$browser = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$browser->agent("Mozilla/4 .5");
for($i=0; $i<500; $i++){
$webdoc = $browser->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url));
if($webdoc->is_success){
print STDOUT $webdoc->title, "\n";
}else{
print STDERR "$0: couldn't fetch $url";
}
}

Re:MP3 players, or MP3 files?

[Wakko Warner]

By blocking access to SF on this basis, these guys have opened themselves up to a massive restraint-of-trade lawsuit from the multitude of people who depend upon the existence of ubiquitous access to SF for various aspects of their livelihood.

It appears that nobody has been blocking your access to crack, however.

The day someone needs "Gnome 2.0" to function (and works at a place that would block it) is the day I start killing puppies.

- A.P.

[META: I didn't post this]

[Bronster]

I just did the same to /. ;)

Help, I can't get through to slashdot to complain about the filter.

Your justifications are not credible.

[HiThere]

Perhaps that's a triffle strong, but not by much. Censorship is bad, but when you hide what you are censoring you have no justifiable expectation of understanding or sympathy.

I don't care what justifications you create. They don't excuse the actions. This isn't murder, this isn't grand theft corporation. But it's on the next tier down.

Censorship that is justifiable must be able to say and prove what it is censoring. Reasonable and trusted people must be able to check, and if you want to limit the number of people who are allowed to check you had better have an excruciatingly good reason. (Weaponizing anthrax comes to mind.)

The "web censor programs" don't meet, or even approach, the bare minimum acceptable criteria. They seem to deny that there could possibly be any doubt that they are moral, despite many past instances of their abuse of the trust that some place in them.

As they were constituted the last time I checked (a brief look, I must admit) none of the ones that I noticed appeared to meet reasonable criteria for being allowed to continue to operate. Several seemed to be clear examples of fraud. Some engaged in political manipulation.

I don't trust your arguments, because those you are asking us to trust have proven untrustworthy, and refuse to prove differently.

Beating the Censorship horse.

[Christopher Thomas]

I don't care what justifications you create. They don't excuse the actions. This isn't murder, this isn't grand theft corporation. But it's on the next tier down.

Censorship that is justifiable must be able to say and prove what it is censoring. Reasonable and trusted people must be able to check, and if you want to limit the number of people who are allowed to check you had better have an excruciatingly good reason. (Weaponizing anthrax comes to mind.)

Um, in order to be censorship, this must significantly hamper the ability of the users involved to access information/speech, yes?

They can look up anything they please at *home*.

How is the work filtering policy censoring what they have access to?

The company presumably has terms of service along the lines of "the company's computers are to be used for work-related purposes only". Where's the problem?

Re:Beating the Censorship horse.

[HiThere]

You are making assumptions as to where the products will be used. But some are used by schools, some are used by libraries, etc.

Some of the people who access from, say, a library, may have no other access. If you block sites that discuss, say, breast cancer, you are threatening their lives, in an indirect and probably non-actionable kind of way.

Now if the librarians knew what was being blocked, they could at least warn people that this was the case. But when the censor programs hide the fact that they are censoring medical research as erotic ... and you can't tell.

The librarians are rather coerced into having the software installed (sometimes they fight, and some of the fights have been successful). But this doesn't mean that they know what it does in any detail. That's kept secret.

The businesses will probably say it's for business reasons, but that says nothing. It's a tautology. I suspect the reasons are that:
1) they'd be ashamed to admit what they block
2) if it were known, people wouldn't use their software
3) political opinions are more easily shaped if you don't know how your information is being tampered with
4) ... well, you can extend the list a long way

Note that I'm not claiming that all of these reasons apply to each individual who makes the decision. Companies are not unitary either as a group or within the individuals who make decisions within them. Different decision makers have different motivations. But I've seen signs (i.e., evidence, but hardly proof) of each of these motivations in past reports of blocked sites. And as long as the lists are secret, I will continue to believe that the reasons continue to apply. The companies are not willing to prove otherwise, and they have not been punished at all for their past misdeeds, and they have exhibited no signs of remorse. (PR statements saying "we'd never do that!" don't count.)

Re:Beating the Censorship horse.

[Christopher Thomas]

Some of the people who access from, say, a library, may have no other access. If you block sites that discuss, say, breast cancer, you are threatening their lives, in an indirect and probably non-actionable kind of way.

By this argument, charging money for a newspaper is also threatening lives, as people who can't afford a newspaper might miss an article about breast cancer.

I don't buy it. Information about truly important matters is always freely accessible by a variety of means. Internet access is not a vital part of life.

You have also failed to explain why, if we presume that unfiltered internet access *is* vital to well-being, it's the business or library's responsibility to supply it.

Filters suck. We know this, and chances are the people using the filters know this too. They're used anyways, to show "due diligence". This is a very, very important thing to show to avoid getting sued into oblivion. Whether the filters work or not is immaterial.

Re:Bullsh*t, burn b****h, burn!

[buss_error]

I normally just pass this type of stuff by without comment, but I really have to say you are off base on this one.

Much as I hate censorship, there are legitimate reasons to block access/record the attempt. Like at a middle school. Or High School. Or primary school. Or work. But not the public library.

Now, my personal view is that I'd rather my kids go see some porn rather than, say, Mission Impossible or Die Hard. But have you seen some of the porn these days? See B###### RAPED AND THEIR TENDER PINK P###### TORN TO BLEEDING MEAT. That is somewhat upsetting to me.

Face it. There are some sick puppies out there, and I don't want my kids meeting up with them.

Now, as far as filtering at work: Listen, I pay you to work, not putz around on porn sites. No, I don't care if you are on break or not, bandwidth isn't free and others need it to do what I pay them to do. If you have a problem with that, then the door is right behind you, don't let it slam you in the a## on the way out.

This isn't about freedom to do your own thing. This is about getting the job done or school work. You want to surf porn, go right ahead. At home you fool. At home.

What is VA Linux doing?

[jsse]

It SHOULD be VA Linux protesting against blocking of sourceforge.net by SmartFilter, rather than expecting thousands of /.ers to do the job for them.

P.S.

[commodoresloat]

Just curious, are you going to censor the Harry Potter series from your daughter?

If you have to ask that question, then you have absolutely no idea what the discussion is about.

Frankly, as far as "occult" goes, Harry Potter is as much a threat to your daughter as Marilyn Manson (and in fact Mr. Manson remains far more Christian, if that is an issue). The "occult," and the reasons we accept censorship of ideas that fall in that category, is precisely what this discussion is about. You're the one who's been bringing up irrelevancies such as what happens if your daughter is bombarded by animal sex on the internet.

Also, just an aside: I'm no angel on the internet, but I have never come across animal sex, unless you count the goeatse guy. I think unless your daughter is specifically seeking out animal sex sites, she's unlikely to be constantly bombarded by them.

They are not wrong. It should be blocked

[Tensor]

This in in accordance with the rest of the blocks on the site. Edonkey2000, kazaa, imesh, gnutella, all are blocked as MP3 sites ...
are they mp3 sites? NO.
Do they have software for the p2p sharing of files? YES.
Does sourceforge have any p2p appz for d/l? YES.

Following that resoning, should it be blocked ? YES.

I am NOT saying i would block it. But according to those rules it should be. Its might be easier to block the ports all of these use but it helps to prevent ppl waisting company time and bandwidth neither of which are cheap.

Not intended as a flamebait, just facts.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[extrasolar]

"I bow to your expertise in the area of stupidity, and I'm sure the rest of slashdot feels the same way."

Sure, so you feel messing up the voting system is a constructive action?

"12-year-old Kenny can. Though I'm sure I could come up with reasons why you shouldn't be allowed to, any more than you should be allowed in an adult discussion of public policy."

Kind of a hypocritical suggestion, wouldn't you say? Oh, sarcasm I'm sure...

"Censorware in the workplace is a band-aid fix for bad management. As for its use in schools or libraries, I suggest getting the facts about the databases this class of crapware uses before whining about how nasty we are all about it in public."

I'm sorry, but the burden of proof is all yours. If you have some articles that you'd like to link to, I would be interested enough to read them. Not that your tone would cause me to respect your position, anyway (I am aware that most of that is my fault).

"Censorware interferes with the educational process."

Without, children do not get access to the internet. While it is possible that the schools would use this tool as a means to a political agenda, I think even this is better than the few textbooks they will be taught with anyway.

The post I responded to was a silly suggestion and I responded thusly.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[alizard]

First problem: you don't have your facts straight. I'm sure I'm not the first, or even the thousandth person to tell you that.

12 year old Kenny can buy Marilyn Manson, etc. at WalMart or more likely, Best Buy.

Sure, so you feel messing up the voting system is a constructive action?

In this case, certainly. The only way a PHM/PHB who decided to buy the filterware is going to be persuaded that something is wrong with it is from experience, if he's even capable of learning from that. If his favorite news-related sites are inaccessible, that might actually make him wonder what the hell he's bought.

With respect to censorware, try Peacefire. It would work better if you had an open mind, but I'm not sure if you've got one to open.

I really don't care if you respect me or not. I can not respect you as a person, regardless of your technical expertise, if any.

Another fact you don't have straight. It isn't a decision between filterware access to the Net and no access in schools and libraries for children anymore, except in areas where the school board or library board of trustees are imbecilic fuckheads like you.

CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) was shot down in flames by a Federal Court. The three-judge panel didn't buy the horseshit you believe, either. Despite the best efforts of DOJ attorneys to present your flawed arguments in the best possible light.

Hmmm... dumbest people with an Internet connect... are you an elected public official or do you actually work for a censorware company? You obviously aren't bright enough for Microsoft.

Filtering is to avoid liabilities.

[jotaeleemeese]

Lets say an slashdotter posts here that he knows Bill Gates, Ballmer and the rest of the big guys are dumping tomorrow all their MS shares.

And the bozo works for MS.

Or for a financial advisor.

The company that employs him may be found liable if this individual used company equipment (i.e. Internet access) for his diatribe.

What about pr()n or racism?

TO open in the workplace some material deemed either sexist or racist and willingly or unwillingly expose coworkers to this could make the company liable as well.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[extrasolar]

I am getting real tired of being insulted by you. And I never said anything about respecting you personally. I have this nasty tendency of giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Really, when I talk to people in online forums, respect is something I usually take for granted both ways. Without that, there really isn't any point in posting, is there?

Anyway, the most enlightening part of your posts is your sig, so good night.

Maybe you'll wake up not so cranky next time.

Disrupting the enemy.

[Martin Spamer]

added http://www.microsoft.com under criminal skills.

microsoft.com does not stick, but oracle.com did :)

Also rather that a direct assault, label them accuratly but rather extremely, and rely on Human nature to do the rest.
so riaa.com is Entertainment, and Entertainment is likley to be commonly banned on commercial networks.
fast.co.uk become Political, and so does the bsa.org.uk.

Also relable friendly sites as unlisted.

Re:Disrupting the enemy.

[Martin Spamer]

I've just labelled all their affaliate sites found here:

http://mpaa.org/relatedsites/index.htm

as either political or entertainment.

Re:Yes, being stupid will solve all our problems..

[ryanwright]

I am so tired of reading that. Wal-Mart does not censor or mute anything.

I usually don't reply to ACs, but: Bullshit. My closest buddy owns a CD which was purchased from Wal-Mart. The naughty words are muted out.

They do however, reject products that they consider unsuitable, as do all retailers everywhere. Their one-step-further is simply to tell the suppliers what changes would make their products acceptable to them. It is up to the supplier to make those changes or not.

Let's see, a major multi-billion dollar retailer pressures suppliers to censor their product and you claim it isn't the retailer's fault? Hogwash. It is 100% Wal-Mart's doing. Perhaps they don't actually take the product into the studio and remix it, but they are directly responsible for the media censorship that goes on as a result of their policies.

My personal opinion: I have no problem with Wal-Mart carrying family friendly material. It's good that children can purchase music and movies at Wal-Mart and their parents don't have to worry about objectionable material. The problem is, of course, that censorship does no good: The kid still knows what they're saying. The core message (usually negative) of the artist is still there, and the kid is going to sing right along with it.

You either carry the material as-is or don't carry it at all. Censorship is frowned upon by most intelligent people and while I support Wal-Mart's right to do whatever they damn well please, I sure as heck don't agree with and I'll still protest their decision.