Slashdot Mirror
Library Censorware Blocks Own Site
squiggleslash writes "The Daily Dayton News reports that a demonstration of a new website for a library in Piqua, Ohio, went horribly wrong when the site was blocked by the library's own censorware. Why? Because the library, founded by and named after businessman Leo Flesh 70 years earlier, had the domain name www.fleshpublic.lib.oh.us. And that key word, 'Flesh,' was a no-no as far as Flesh Public Library's copy of Net Nanny was concerned." And for an extra dose of tragicomic priority reversal, the library actually decided to change its domain name rather than have Net Nanny fix the erroneous blocking. I hope no one at the library wants to read about the fleshpots of Egypt.
Library sites block Censorware's sites!
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible."
Ok... Great.... and what was the point?
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
Someone needs to upload illegal MP3s to the RIAA's server so they can sue themselves under the DMCA!
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
To everyone who opposes censor-ware so much:
What do you purpose we do to keep adult sites from our kids while they're at the library?
When I was in middle school, I didn't have the 'net at home, so I had to use the library's. You would not believe the trouble I had looking up the Trojan War. (Really.)
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
Fixing software by changing a domain name is a horrid solution. It's almost as bad as using software to fix porrly designed hardware.
That is the point where most people learns that they have gone too far. But did they? No, of course not. May this serve as a lesson for future generations.
It's Dayton Daily News, not Daily Dayton News. Of course, being a native, the error was was easy for me to pick up on.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The University of Essex
Cosmic Pussycat Designs (okay, maybe this one should be banned)
you get the idea...
moto411.com
Billy Idol (Flesh for Fantasy) Vegetarianism ("I'm not a flesh eater") Ebola (flesh eating bacteria) Religion ("this bread is my flesh") Do I really need to go on? TW
Does Net Nanny have no user-variable settings? No equivalent of the Cyber-Yes list in Cyber-Patrol? Even if it were not possible to de-filter the url this way, what about direct IP addressing (the library must know their IP address). As a last resort, ask Net Nanny for a minor mod on pain of switching censorware providers.
There is no "www.fleshpublic.lib.oh.us".
well the point is we should all shun netnanny, and hire a new one!
American Library Association v. United States (01-CV-1322) is the latest case to challenge mandatory internet filters at public libraries. The Library Association brief in a lower court case can be found here. The Pennsylvania court recognized the proper weight of the First Amendment issues in the case, finding that the CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) infringed on protected speech. The government appealed and the Supreme Court granted certiorari. Arguments are expected to take place this winter or early spring.
-R
I think websense is the worst of all, considering some of the categories it puts things into.
Archive.org is a "proxy avoidance system"
everything2.com is "Tasteless"
Among other categories: Non-Traditional Religion, Drugs, Alternative Journals, Political Groups, Financial Services, and Activist Groups.
Makes doing research on anything hell.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
Wait,
if the library's censorware censored the library's own site, how did the librarians find out about the censoring without bypassing the censorware?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
http://piqua.lib.oh.us/
After three months of work by the staff, Oda was justifiably proud of the site.
Three months of work? Are you fucking kidding me?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You would not believe the trouble I had looking up the Trojan War.
That's a story about men entering a horse.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
from the article:
Fortunately, a change in the address -- www.piqua.lib.oh.us -- has allowed the library to access its own site.
They changed their domain, they didn't get a new one. That means that the old one no longer exists
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
Informative? Heh, that's even more amusing than the parent itself :)
Reminds me when Slashdot Slashdotted itself. People should learn to stop punching themselves in the face.
Why is this a troll?! How would someone know if those sites would be blocked unless they were in the library or had knowledge about the filtering software? It's on-topic and a legitimate question!! You modders are on crack!
Create a Federal Law: all porn sites must belong to a .xxx domain name.
.xxx domain.
If you don't want your children looking at porn, then block sites in the
Naturally, since this isn't an international law, we'd have to take an alternate approach to non-US adult sites.
And yes, "art" sites wouldn't be blocked. But it's a start.
You seem to be pro-censorware. Do you not understand that the software is pathetic?: Porn sites have the word "breast" in them, so let's block the word "breast". What's that ma'am, you want to research breast cancer? Sorry, you've been denied access.
To everyone who opposes censor-ware so much:
What do you purpose we do to keep adult sites from our kids while they're at the library?
Oh no don't show us what we want to see!
Come on quit making stuff which you know we'll want to watch.
Quit writing things with you know we'll want to read. This is America! You can't do that!
Little by little, USA seems to be breeding a generation of idiots with twisted ideas about sexuality and that a naked human being is something taboo, something to fear and something to avoid. Sad.
Who prevents these kids from going deeper into the library and *gasp* opening up a book on ANATOMY! Or a National Geographic with pictures of people from Sumatra, who *gasp* wear no bra!
FUCK COCK SHIT BITCH CUNT.
Guess no one can get their news now.
Reminds me of when I was a lot younger and the only net access I had was from the school library. I was banned, my parents were phoned, and I had to see the principle because they would log every hostname resolved and if they found anything suspicious, they would ban you. I explained at least 10 times that it isn't my fault if a perfectly reasonable site on a free host had a porn advertisement on it.
I argued with the principle for 15 minutes. He'd just repeat "You were accessing bad Internet numbers.". I tried so hard to explain about the concept of images residing under different hosts being shown in innocent web pages, yet he wouldn't listen. I then explained that he should probably learn to understand the technology before punishing me for using it. That didn't get through to him at all. I soon found myself explaining to him that I was amazed that somebody so ignorant, arrogant and most of all retardedly stupid could become the principle of a high school. So I got suspended.
2 months later I had to see the principle again. "Please design the school webpage for us..".
The implementation is awful, but the intent is acceptable. Why can't you go to a library and checkout/read Penthouse? Because Penthouse does not fit in with the mission of a library. The protecting our kids thing is great politics, but little more. I don't buy it and I don't like having others tell me what I should think is something my kids shouldn't see. However, I don't have a problem with a library using some form of control to block access to sites that lie outside of the mission of a public library.
http://www.davpilkey.com/ too.
If I were running a library (which I'm not), of course I wouldn't cencor the internet...I would let the people look at whatever they wanted. I would moniter their activities preiodically, and if I suspected the resources were being abused, I would simply stop the service for that individual.
Anyway you look at it, cencorship is a crackpot solution to problems that should be dealt with using more care than people are willing to put forth.
The librarians would've found out immediately. As soon as they tried to visit their own website, the censoring software would've popped up an alert page saying that it was censored. They wouldn't have needed to bypass it at all.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Because they tried to reach their own site and got a blocked message, concievably?
Who gave this a +1?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
When I went home that year for Christmas my parents got all embarrassed when I announced in front of family and their friends that I would go to the Heyman Center for a good time.
Yet Another Reason To Ban Censorware From Public Libraries.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Sure, the censorware doesn't work very well at all and will probably prevent people from accessing necessary information that contains words that could be used in a "naughty" context.
Sure, people who want to access porn will probably still find a way to do so, rendering this software useless.
Sure, censoring information for any reason is one of the first steps to becoming a facist state.
BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
They went to their bookmarks and click on the one that said Library Home Page.
Ohio's broken mental retardation system
Sigs are bad for your health.
If the parents volunteer or take an interest in their childern how will the parents have time to get their (drink/smoke/party) on?
It reminds me of the time my mom found a hustler magazine under my bathroom sink (you do it too damn it). She tossed it in the trash (censored it), so I walked down stairs and outside the next day and took it out, put it back under the sink.
Honestly people are making a much bigger deal about this stuff. Porn was easy enough to get when I was a kid a decade and a half ago, the fact that the net makes it a tad easier is moot. What do these folks think, seeing a nipple or the occasional double entry will mutate their kids into criminals?
Please, boys have hormones, they will get access to this stuff one way or another. It's when you force them to supress it and repress their emotions and hormones that they start acting out and punching chicks rather than chasing them. It's perfectly healthy for kids to know about sex, how it's done and more importantly why. The more these leftists fight it the worse off our kids are.
However supervision or trust is not the answer either. What I remeber most about the public library as a kid was it was a place for me to explore. ANd more specificall explore on my own without hovering supervision. freedom for me in a place my parents knew was safe. See what I could find that was new and interested me. Sometime it was a way to find out about things I'd hear about. Even with a very guilty feeling, try to look up a book about sexual reproduction.
I think having a benign (i.e. safe) place for children to roam a bit and explore things at the fringes of their limits is a great idea. Libraries already fill this role well. They are a well controlled but very open environment.
the problem is the internet lets in a less well regulated world. A world without curation or librarians. And that is something for parents to fear. I dont want to curb adults but I certainly do want to curb my children and to protect them from the evils of the world. THis is common sense.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I *am* in a library and I can't see your friggin post.
You know, I'm assuming this is done for The Children (tm).
Just more of the same old stuff: Let something/someone else do parenting duties. Anything but the actual parent, please!
Seriously, the internet isn't a good place for children to begin with. Supervise them yourself. If you can't, don't let them on, because clearly filtering software is garbage. And the internet is NO place for kids!
Quit being shitty parents.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
They're talking about public schools.
Ok, next time I'll include some (humor)(/humor) tags...
People, it's a joke! Don't take me literally! Maybe it wasn't that funny...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Net Nanny is reputed to be one of the most brain-dead filters. My favorite example was its blocking "marsexplorer.org." You'll have to study that a little to figure out why. They had to set up a mirror.
Also (in)famous was AOL blocking discussion of "breasts" as in "breast cancer." another software package blocked women's political groups like NOW, for reasons unknown other than perhaps some twisted political agenda. When this was announced by ahacker, the publisher went ballistic with charges of reverse engineering, etc. Scary but true.
Seriously, that dude trolled, you responded, so his goal has been accomplished. References to "fark" suggest that said troll also reads fark.com, where the "in soviet russia..." was born. You're a pathetic fucking loser too!
Interesting.. the university os Sussex and others in england with "sex" also had problems, not just with their site, but with their mail server too.
This caused them too to change their domain name.
Censoring at the library, and of course only for your own good. Monitoring at the library, only to track down terrorists. A truely free country! Somebody should suggest to cross out all the dirty words in the book with a black marker though, otherwise children could get in a situation where their poor innocent souls actually see the word "flesh" written before them! Motto: "Dont think, we do it for you, because we do it better!" And: "The earlier you get used to somebody else thinking for you, the easier it will be later on"
It's a reference to Yackof Smirnof (sp), Russian comedian from the 1980's.
I sure hope this gets much worse and degenerates to the point where people can't view anything. That way, the majority of the people will finally get outraged and kick all the dead beat politicians out of office for selling out all of our rights to corporations and right wing extremists. I sure hope president Bush is successful in Iraq and spends every breathing hour on it. Tha way the economy will tank even further and ensure he won't get re-elected.
This happened at the main public library in Austin, Texas, too. The library was using a filtering product that used a "three-letter" algorithm -- you can guess the letter combinations -- to block sites.
The name of the main library site is the John Henry Faulk Memorial Library.
Local civil libertarians picketed the Austin Library Commission with signs that read "Free the Ducks!"
That method of filtering was discontinued at the Austin Public Library.
... one of those times where I'd like to be a teacher. As I teacher I would get my students to write a paper on the 'evils' of fascism contrasted against the 'glory' of democracy, and ensure that they had to do research on the net, and at the library.... then write the local congresscritter letting them know that the library does not allow for students to learn this... what kind of society do we want? one where children cannot even learn to appreciate their democratic nation etc... etc... Since I'm certain that sites detailing fascist regimes would be blocked, as would most pro democracy sites... unless they were able to avoid slamming or even mentioning anything anti-democratic....
not that I really give a shit, mind you.... but it'd be kinda funny to read about on the news ;)
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Let's compile a list of bible verses that get blocked by censorware, publish it on the web and have someone at every place that installs NetNanny write a fundamentalist letter to the editor along the lines of "NetNanny censorware blocks our children's access to the WORD".
Do the same with compassionate conservatism lingo, pro-life web sites, NRA... and see how fast NN get's brabded as part of a vast left wing conspiracy.
Someone should tell them that WWII is over, too.
Well, at least in this story it isn't offtopic.
Who suggested that? I don't see it anywhere. Here's an interesting question though: how often is the net being used at the library because someone is too lazy to look something up in a book? Not to mention that the quality of information on the net is dubious at the best of times.
The ant pile goes away, temporarily.
Inummerable ants survive, and many are carried by the wind.
Depending on queen, nannies, and larvae (or whatever the technical terms be), after a few weeks or months, new ant piles begin to pop up over eight or ten acres.
It has gone from tool for supervising internet access to a replacement for said supervision. When my stepdaughter is old enough to actually use teh internet, we will use some form of blocking software- But no form of censorware will be put on our system that does not a) Allow us to override false positives and other sites we think she should be able to see and b) Allow us to add sites to the blocklist.
Censorware that can do both of those things can be a major help to parents and educators. If it misses either capability, it is worse than useless.
Its the Dayton Daily News, not Daily Dayton... I live in Troy, the little town between Piqua and Dayton, and am somewhat surprised to hear that the Piqua library has computers. They didn't last time I was home!
I'm all for blocking software at public libraries, but I also think that there should be bypasses for it for elligable adults.
What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
...but what about every other library in the world? If you're a library, and your domain pisses off the big-brother-ware, you are in trouble.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
I was planning to open the Dr. Samuel Skinflick Memorial Online Museum at www.skinflickmom.com
:)
Damn the luck.
You were looking at porn in the privacy of your own bathroom. That's "normal." Looking at porn in the public library (whether it's on the 'net or not) is seriously messed up. The kind of people who do that are the kind of people that probably shouldnt' be allowed to be in public unescorted.
This is a perfect example of censorship biting itself in the ass, and is why I stand against it. Yeah, keep away from the porn sites, but don't do it with Net Nanny, you nits!
This sig no verb.
Does it have to be actually said?: Keyword filterings of internet searches are just moronic. The censorwareans have yet to demonstrate that keywords bypass the highly integrated nature of Human knowledge. "Flesh" can be sexual, but also medical, religious and generally metaphorical for many other things, like the "substance" of an object or idea.
The only thing that "works" with stopping inappropriate Internet browsing in the public library is the common control of citizens. If you see a kid surfing for pygmy lesbian cheerleaders (which he should do at home, like I do), stop him from doing it. If the confrontation gets awry, just resort to a librarian and perhaps a security guard. Problem solved.
My local library system has browsers that always come up with the same startup page, which is a yes/no statement of understanding. It says that if you surf for the nasty stuff, the library can boot you off the computer and even out of the library, and perhaps can even confiscate your first-born child when you get one.
That the library that censored its own website -- and then changed its domain name to avoid being filtered -- was in deep Ohio, is hardly surprising. It's in the flyover. Don't expect much to come out of Ohio but tomatoes, corn and grapes. (Oh, and also call centers to handle support and billing calls before an Indian company is found to handle the work at 1/2 the price.)
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
The Lumberjack's Exchange: www.lumberjacksexchange.com
Note: This site is not up any more.
I go to the library fairly often. I rarely see anyone using the computers for anything other than research. The porn fiends in my town obviously don't hang out at the library for free porn. What problem are we even solving? To my knowledge, there isn't a line of kids going out the front double doors of the library waiting to see some nip (sorry to those of you of asian descent, this is slang for "nipple") on the libraries computer. Is it that some poor unsuspecting kid just might see something naughty on the computer? Cmon now. Do you allow your kids to leave the house? Then their gonna see some abbhorent things at some point. Granted, DP you don't see on the corner, but the theory is sound. We need to stop trying to police every aspect of every thing that might just be a problem at some point.
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
Their web site totally looks like it was done in 1986! Transparent swirly morphing GIFs? Horrible tiled backgrounds? Yeeeeeee!
Pogo said it best:
"We have met the enemy and they is us."
Banning the word "free" would be a much more reliable way of blocking porn.
I posted this in my livejournal a couple weeks ago:
Finrod's First Rule of Politics
If a political candidate mentions children in his campaign ads that he did not personally sire or adopt, then he is evil.
This could also be known as the Kyle's Mom Rule.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
That's why I wanted to look at some pr0n!
Tux on the library website. *shrug*
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
God forbid he ever had to research Katerina the Great.
Color me idealistic, ignorant, misguided or deluded; but why not create an open-source filter for libraries to use? This would solve a lot of problems.
1) The list of blocked sites and algorithms is available.
2) The community would probably make available separate levels of filtering. Like, maybe a whitelist appropriate for little kids, something else for schools and a narrow list for purposes like libraries.
3) It would be freely available, so politically motivated censorware like NetNanny would see its market eliminated.
Yes, I know this proposal is evil, because it is caving into a bad law. But guess what, the law ins't that unreasonable, it's just that the implementations are downright awful. Most libraries would probably choose to have a modest filter (known porn sites for the most art, maybe all-numeric IPs) than nothing.
Many parents would like to have moderate filtering to kill things like obscene links hidden in slashdot discussions. I mean, even if you're surfing the net w/ your kids, how does it help with stuff like that?
This NetNanny keyword based, politally motivated filtering is A Bad Thing. And a law requiring libraries to install filtering software is A Bad Thing. But, a good, user controlled, community built filtering software is absolutely, positively, a good thing.
The UCLA main research library used to be officially named the "Hugh G. Dick" library -- everyone called it the university library. If the CIPA case gets reversed by the Supreme Court, all libraries will have to think hard about their names (and anyone else who wants to be found by people in libraries).
Lets say there was no censor ware, how long could you look at porn in a public library before you got busted anyway?
A good 30 seconds max I would guess.
Number 1 solution, keep logs of what the users browse (making sure there is a disclaimer on the machines saying your browsing will be tracked).
Whenever you find user #234544 looked up anal whores suspend his internet rights.
...until my google search for "flesh and public" yielded "Piqua Ohio Flesh Public Library".
are we there yet?!?!
If you put some material that you had copyright rights to on one of their servers and made it publically accessable, you'd be completely justified in then doing whatever you wanted to their server.
paintball
Your library sucks!
paintball
right = conservative, left = liberal. Liberals don't like censorship, conservatives are paranoid as all hell about sex. Which makes you wonder how they reproduce.
paintball
Can anybody suggest why Bayesian filtering wouldn't work in the same way as for spam? Surely this would be 100 times more effective than filtering key words or looking for excessive skin tones in images.
Ok, so some poor sole as to surf a shitload of pr0n sites flagging them as bad, initially, but hell, I am willing to make that sacrifice for the common good
When I was a freshman in high school (15 years old) I had to do I project on a book of my choice. So I went to the city library and found "The years of the city" by Frederik Pohl. I thought the description of the book was interesting so I pulled it off the shelf and checked it out.
I started to read the book and about half way through the book there was foul language all over the place. "f___ this" and "f___ that" and so on.
So if I can check out a book with foul language at the age of 15 why can't I go to a web site with the word "flesh" in it?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Yes, I may be offtopic, or trolling, but that still doesnt' change the fact that timothy sux a big one!
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
I have my own story regarding such site blocking:
A couple of days ago, some of us tried to go to our school's band web site ( http://www.northstarbands.org ), and Bess (our filtering service) kindly informed us that we couldn't go to that site since it was labeled "Pornographic".
Um... I don't think a _band_ web site would contain any pornography...
that I have to rely on Republicans to protect me from censorship....
We're SO screwed.
paintball
Well, I have to agree. The domain name is really inappropriate for the content. The word "flesh" does have a provocative connotation, I don't care what anybody says.
I'm sure the Japanese Fish Billionaire, Mr. Fuck, who recently dedicated a library to Yale is just as f*cked.
A friend of mine is a 10-12th grade math teacher.
He is young and very dedicated to his students. He has a long last name, something like 'pasquerella'. His students often call him "Mr. P"... You can guess the rest.
It is unfortunate, but his website to help students is blocked by censorware.
Mind, even if the Bush mindset elevates this kind of puritanism to a pervasive social imperative, let's not forget it was Clinton who signed the goddamn law linking funding to the use of blocking software. Moral of the story: ugly conservatism doesn't issue only from Republicans.
Have you *seen* the sort of books they have in libraries? Some of them have every single *one* of the words you can't say on television in them.
Not to mention all the un-Christian/Islamic/Jewish/Buddhist/Zoroastrian texts packing the shelves. Some of them, I know you're going to find this hard to believe, are even *un-American!* Why, I myself found a copy of the Communist Manifesto *right out in the open.*
Don't even get me going on the photography or "art" departments. ( The very existence of which vilolates the precepts of major religous groups)
A public library is the primary weapon in the arsenal of freedom. Is it any wonder that most people and all governments are, at least in some respects, agin 'em?
KFG
I don't really understand why it is so bad for kids to know about sex from a very young age. As long as the sources are reliable and suitable (ie. not porn, but sex education) for children, this age-old taboo can be gotten rid of with time. At least my parents talked about it freely when I was a child, and it's made things much easier for me (my first time was two days ago). We even compare experiences.
The thing is you cannot count completly on parents to watch your kids, but at the same time you can't block half the internet because of some word or set of words in it. But I do believe there has to be some happy medium between the two, like start off by just banning well known porn sites, ampland, drbizzaro, goat.se, playboy.com (even though it does have good articles.) and pro-Actively remove stuff as it comes along. the thing is a lot of porn comes up that is unwanted, if a kid misspalls, a url, it could easly send him into a pop-up ring of every form of sick and twisted porn you could imagine.
n/t
Bush had nothing to do with this. This was started by the democrats 4 fucking years ago. Get over your self righteous liberal ass and move the fuck along please.
As if there were no books on the subject.
Seriously, why is it that the slashdot community thinks that installing filtering software on a library's computer systems renders them useless, or, worse, renders the entire library useless? I just don't get it. There are still plenty of worthwhile books on the shelves. If they don't have the hard-bound book or magazine (or CD or LP or book-on-tape or whatever you want), then you go buy it yourself. Same thing with their computer systems. You don't like what you can get through their internet connection? GO GET YOUR OWN UNFILTERED FEED . It's not the job of the government to provide this to you. I cannot fathom why people extrapolate the fact that we have libraries in most cities to mean that the government has some Constitutionally-mandated responsibility to provide access to every resource under the sun.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
My local library system has browsers that always come up with the same startup page, which is a yes/no statement of understanding.
You guys got a yes/no option? geez, here at my school, all we get is a message box warning (in annoyingly contrasting colours) saying if we look at naughty things, there'll be dire consequences- we get only one submit-button: "I understand"; not really an option then is it? more of a confirmation that "I will obey" (end robot voice).
Oh and i did i mention this is in a friggin university?! (Kennesaw SU to be a little less vauge) Lesson learned, loud and clear: Big brother will always be with you.
If libraries would implement an open source solution like Dan's Guardian (http://sun.dansguardian.org/), they could have asked their admin to add sites to the white list whenever they were found to be OK. This software has no secrets, anyone can see what it blocks and why.
I think some censorware is inevitable and if the choice comes down to censored internet or no internet, I'd vote for a sanely-censored internet.
In the column of links to the right of the story, there's another headline:
Beavercreek police service cuts likely
Bruce Schneier thought it was funny. He wrote about it in his CryptoGram newsletter.
HIS name is in the banned list.
The latest Slashdot meme.
to remove their blocking software, problem solved. But these niggers insist on fuckin wif ya! Dey be ho's of the furst ordah! They iggy de law ands be thinkin at ya dat dey be in charge. Dem is niggers and cannot be taught!
How is that foot icon related to your rights online? Does it have anything to do with one's right to walk barefoot?
Congratulations! Slashdot.org is now censored under the no-no word: Flesh.
My school completely and utterly defeats the purpose of censorware. For instance: www.theonion.com is blocked, and www.cexx.org is blocked. However: Most porn sites, and everything2 is not blocked. And everything else that is blocked can be unblocked using google caches. Go us...
Type 'porn' in google. You'll get a list of sites who defined THEMSELVES as serving porn.
.xxx domain if you feel you have a pornographic site? Most responsible pornography sites already have tags for NetNanny etc so that if you just set the censorware to filter tagged sites only, you'd get the same effect without have to add another law to the huge list we have already.
Now if they take the word 'porn' out of their tags, so as to get by our filtering, we still win, cause now their site won't show up in a search engine.
That was hard.
Great. Who gets to decide what is pornograghy? Is this self administered, that is to say you should sign up under
Then, after you notice your smoking crater which used to be your domicile, you call a general contractor to build a new one over the anthill you missed.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
SquidGuard is a filter that works with squid. It has a list of approximately 100,000 entries in their list of blacklisted pornographic sites. They make it easy for an administrator to unblock a site.
bitch ass moderator who moderated my shit down?
It's either informative or in the very least funny.
paintball
Why do anal retentive pedants insist on being grammar nazis.
English is a living language.
Languages evolve.
For the last few centuries we have been using the plural version of the second person pronoun to refer to a single person ie you instead of thou, which is the correct singular form.
So, having lost the ability to distinguish, except by context, some people have invented youse as a plural, or y'all.
This upsets the anal retentive pedants, while the rest of us accept this as the normal evolution of the english language.
Within the slashdot language community, a dialect has evolved in which down-modding is understood by the whole community, except maybe new-comers and anal retentive pedants.
GET OVER IT!
Sorry, a library is not a daycare that you can dump your kids at and ignore. It isn't a Disneyland created to keep your children safe at all costs. Libraries exist to help create a well educated public, to encourage the spread of information and to support the spread of new ideas necessary to keep democracy flourishing. To support these goals, information that you may object to your children seeing must be available to adults. Any restriction on this information for adults is unacceptable.
And somewhere there is someone who wants to keep your kids away from things you think are perfectly safe. When the paranoid religious group decides to bar links to Harry Potter fan sites as "Occult" or breast cancer information sites as "Sexual". It's not possible for a library to come up with a perfect filter for everyone. Unless you filter to the extreme, some parents will be horrified that their child has access to to information about halloween. Unless you have no filter, some parent will find some information filtered that they want their child to have access to. (And do you think a child that encounters a "Access Denied" is going to ask the librarian to unblock it? Heck, most adults would be too embarrassed to do so!)
No system will work for everyone. Heck, no system will work for most people. And any system will irritate many patrons doing legitimate research.
Ultimately responsibility for filtering what you child sees is your responsibility. If you're not confident that you child is mature enough to handle whatever he comes across, you are responsible for keeping your eye on him. Even before the internet, you could find novels with graphic descriptions of sex and violence and books encouraging racism and violence, yet you don't seem to worry about that.
Your child is your responsibility. Just because you're too lazy to keep an eye on your child is no reason that my library experience should be diminished.
Censorware can't work. It simply can't. The internet is growing too fast to restrict. New pages with "bad" content are being added rightnow, and new pages with "good" content are being added. Censorware has no hope to keep up. Search engines with an easier job (find everything, and try to find everything) can't keep up. How can a censorware manufacturer accurately make all of those decisions? Deciding that a given page is "reasonable political commentary" or "hate speech" is extremely difficultt, even for humans. A computer has no hope. Check out Michael Sims' "Why Censorware Can't Work" article for more details. Furthermore, censorware must filter any web site that could possibly redisplay content from another web site. This means that all censorware must always restrict translation software web pages. There are a number of articles documenting this problem, here are just a few: "BabelFish blocked by censorware", "SmartFilter's Greatest Evils", and BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE (censoreware vs privacy & anonymity"
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Guys, in these pages I've many times read about the benefits of Spam Assassin to get rid of SPAM.
I can vouch for it working, getting rid of some 99% of the SPAM I *used* to get.
How is this any different? I understand that using S/A still means I get one or two SPAMs per day, and I know that I shouldn't "delete" them, but set them aside and check periodically in case something legit got filtered.
It's give and take, guys. Rules based web filtering works rather well. I've been using Dan's Guardian (free for noncommercial use!) and after a bit o' tweaking, it's working rather well for me.
I know, I can't look up "tits" in an online thesaurus, but it's rules+scoring method, similar to Spam Assassin, does give me > 99% just fine.
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If a parent chooses filtered access then they have to sign a disclaimer acknowledging that such software is inherently inaccurate and absolving the library of responsibility for under- or over-filtering.
If a parent 1 (correctly) doesn't trust the software to provide only appropriate information to the child, and 2 doesn't want to either assume the burden him or her self or 3 trust their child enough to give them full access, then 4 the kid doesn't get any access at all.
This system seems to me to work really well, because it puts the responsibility for choosing squarely on the parent's shoulders where it belongs.
Image said company getting premium support access on www.lotusexpert.com and not being able to use such support.
Philips blocks just about everything that is useful for work (and, surely, lots of sites that aren't, but that's OK). I work there for a short time still (just limited to one project) and I don't get a Lotus Notes account, because "for only 6 months this requires too much effort". But there is no SMTP server. BUT I'm supposed to collaborate with external developers of the embedded software development environment I'm writing (Linux-RTAI, realtime drivers controlled by KDE frontends, btw. KDevelop rocks!).
The solution? Browsing via SSH-Port-Forwarding -> NTLM-auth.pl -> https-ssl-proxy.pl -> NT-Proxy -> Webwasher (which can't filter https, of course) -> NT-"Firewall" (bah!) -> my own machine at home, on a leased line. No filtering at all. I'm reading my mail on my own machine via SSH through the same tunnel. And some colleages are already asking how I'm bypassing the filtering system (standard answer: "With Linux." ;)
And the weirdest part is, my boss is OK with that, as long as I can do my work. The first week I wasn't networked yet I had to run to his machine about 10 times a day to be able to read and send my (company) email. I think that helped. :-)
Home Page
obviously named after Bill Gates's penis!
FRA: STFU GTFO
I agree. Take all religious tomes [out] of a public library.
While I certainly don't want libraries teaching or promoting any religion, I think all the religious tomes should be available at the library. They are important research material, just like Mien Kampf.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If libraries want to block sites - fine.
Libraries are the only access ti the internet some people have, thay should not censor anything.
If you think that some speach on the edges of what is acceptable does'nt need protecting, then think again. If we don't protect what is on the edges then the fiels of what is acceptable will shink, and sooner than you think we will find ourselves in iran or nazi germany.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Damn sure it will. It was youthful exposure to double entry that set the likes of Kenneth Lay and Robert Maxwell on the road to committing serious crimes. For the sake of our children we must block access to dubious sites like this, full of references to double entries.
Well, I have to agree. The nickname is really inappropriate for the content. The word "irvinehosting" does have a provocative connotation, I don't care what anybody says.
Cybernot works great for filters and blocking "bad" sites.
Naughty slashdot readers.
In a former life (about 4 years ago) we tried this sort of thing and ended up with the same problem.
The reason. Our address - Beaver House.
Seems some mistakes get made over and over again with 'censorware'.
Sigh.
At least get the name of the paper right in your article. That's the "Dayton Daily News" thank you very much.