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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!
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.
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.
How about paying attention to what your kids are doing? How about instructing them on what you think their appropriate behavior/actions should be while they are online? How about not just dropping your kids off at the local library and assume that it is free babysitting? Of course, if you really believe your local library should babysit your kids, then make sure you vote accordingly so they are well funded enough to afford the extra position. Or maybe, here's a thought, you can get your ass over there and volunteer to do the computer babysitting yourself.
I don't see why Penthouse wouldn't fit within the mission of a Library. I can be quite political at times. Same with Hustler and Playboy. Libraries archive knowledge and like it or not, these periodicals actually contain reasonable amounts of knowledge.
Now, I can see them requiring an ID to see the magazines, but shouldn't you be able to get past Net Nanny with an ID too?
TW
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.
Great. Who gets to decide what is pornograghy? Is this self administered, that is to say you should sign up under .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.
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"
Not trying to flame or troll you. I know you ment it sarcastically. I just figured I'd mention whenever I see this argument actually used by people, I wonder what makes them think that keeping children ignorant of the truth won't make them suseptable to lies. Don't question your elders; Don't ask questions; Don't talk back; Just do what you are told. It gives me chills to think of how many kids are taken advantage of because of this by people with sinister intentions. People that are ignorant, and have no problem remaining so, make good sheep for the wolves.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Yes, and the problem is a company (or a government entity like a school district) buys this software to block "porn", sees these other categories, and decides to activate them as well. I've done projects at a number of places like this, and have noted the strangest sites blocked. I mean, sites on finite state machines blocked, mainly because they were affiliated with a non-US university domain (my best guess). What is scary here isn't the blocking but the fact the blocking list is proprietary and undisclosed. The blocking companies can restrict whatever they want, get use of their software mandated by the government, and suddenly we find environmental organizations' Web sites are unreachable by a huge part of the population. I am very uneasy with government money spent on secret content filters censoring public resources. If libraries want to block sites - fine. They should acquire blocking software with an open, published blocking list and be prepared to publicly defend each site they are blocking. Heck, why not just set up a "Censorship Board" and have it meet periodically to get citizen input on what is being blocked? If the sites you are blocking are so evil, then you should have no problem with ordinary citizens reviewing the ENTIRE blocking process in the open. Or, why should a company like Websense be allowed to make public policy in secret?
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
What about "The Joy of Sex?" Almost every library has that book. If there was a "perfect filter" it still would not be able to cope with social changes. "The Joy of Sex" caused (and still causes in some places) a stir when it was released but in the end it was deemed library worthy.
So your local library doesn't stock Penthouse. Well, that's their perogative, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Ideally, the library is about free access to information and what is considered approriate is always in flux.
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
It would be interesting to find out if changing the name breaks the covenant that established the library, perhaps Mr Fleshs decendents might have a case for retreiving the money there forefather donated?
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
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.
If you read the parent, it complained about the lack of readability, not the lack of Flash.
The morons are using a background containing solid black when essential text on top of it is black.
They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.
The icons are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.
They link to pages that are under construction without indicated that such is the case. (Check out the mad Tux action in this one - quite amusing considering they used Frontpage.)
They use ALL CAPS for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.
They use single line breaks instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.
It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.
Last but not least, the site lacks an overall unified graphical language. Standard graphics are not standard, but are different from section to section (yet shared between some sections). The lack of stylistic uniformity creates an unstructured site that is hard to navigate. It would have been better to use only one or two fonts and have common graphics for all sections, perhaps color-coded for different sections of the site (like /. for example).
Flash hardly improves readability, and the parent post said nothing about that, so don't even go there.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
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.
There are a few things I'd like you to understand:
1) Nobody likes a punctuator. If you really have nothing better to say then you're even more of a dull person than you make yourself out to be.
2) It has already been pointed out by another person with too much time on their hands that I used the wrong form of principal. Maybe certain shut-ins should try reading entire threads before they waste their time.
3) I explained above (again, try reading the post) that I would have normally not have used the American term for school heads. To me it's "headmaster", but I wanted to comform to the masses, the Americans, so that they wouldn't get confused. Now, again, if you read above you'd see that I'd NEVER used the word before, so it is an acceptable mistake to use the wrong form. Perhaps I've only ever seen it written by other people who also happened to get it wrong? Do you see how it's not a big deal?
4) For the love of God, GET A GIRLFRIEND.
5) Briefly looking at some of your other comments, you seem to think that "..." at the end of most sentences is good English. I do hope somebody laughs at you for it one day.
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
Since the rules for obscenity center around what the local community finds objectionable, I don't think the Bible would rise to that level.
Irrelevant. My point was that if you can ban something because you find it offensing or objectionable then *I* get the same right, and so does everyone else. You'll wind up with a completely empty library.
I wasn't the least bit serious about the incest by the way. It was just a convient pretext: Oooo! Incest! Ooo! Yelling and screaming and banner-waving, ban the books!
A local public library's mission, in my opinion, is a place to nuture education. The data they stock is a means to an end.
Yes, but penthouse contains a variety of data, and that data can be legitamately usefull. Pron magazines do have serious articles, and it is not unusual for those articles to cover topics not often covered in other magazines, and they often take a unique approach. They also tend to contain excellent political satire
And even aside from the serious articles, they contain number legitimate topics of research. Sex, porn, morality, even the magazines themselves - all serious subjects. They also tend to have unique advertizing, cigaretts, liqour, cigars, drug paraphenalia, herbal drug substitutes, adult toys. How have those forms of advertizing changed in the 30-odd years since Playboy Issue 1 was printed? The list of legitamate potential research is endless. How about an investigation into the changing standards of beauty, perhaps estimating the weight of the models? Does it correlate with the prevelance of anorexia?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.