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.
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.
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.
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
Because the U.S. Congress decided that libraries have to implement software like Net Nanny or else lose federal funding.
The American Library Associate is fighting the law in the U.S. Supreme Court:
http://www.ala.org/cipa/
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.
The point is people who don't know any better are using completely useless filters to "protect" their children. They are as effective as using a howitzer to remove an ant pile.
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.
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
if you had read the article you would have seen that their solution was to change their domain name.
heck you don't even have to read the article, it says in the summary.
you're quite stupid, aren't you?
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."
If you're worried about what your kids see, then it is your job as a parent to do one of the following:
A) Monitor them closer
B) Trust them
C) Ban them from all things that may put bad thoughts into their heads
A and B are good solutions. C is the solution that censorware takes...the easy way out. When are people going to step up as parents and take responsibility for their kids instead of pointing fingers? Personally, I would tell them how I feel about the matter and trust them. If they want to look at porn, the internet is just one of many ways to go about doing it. I'm sure kids still steal their dads' magazines and show them to all their friends.
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
Have them ummm, errr, read books? Gasp! Shriek! Oh, the inhumanity!
Sigs are bad for your health.
Ah, yes, the latest karma whoring strategy. Post a vague and completely unrelated quote from a well-respected authority, without commentary, and wait for the mod points to roll in.
Test succeeded. You can start doing this as a logged-in user now.
Or... intriguing. Maybe this is just chaff. You know, a distraction so the people with mod points will spend their points on this post, leaving them with no points for down-modding the trolls. Great strategy! Brilliant!
I write in my journal
They are as effective as using a howitzer to remove an ant pile.
Bad analogy. A howitzer would be a supremely effective way to remove an ant pile.
In this case, though, the problem is that the software blocks legitimate sites while letting pornography sites through. This is more like attempting to use a howitzer to remove an ant pile, missing the ant pile completely, and hitting your own house, after which the ants move in set up an even bigger ant pile in the smoking crater where your house used to be.
I write in my journal
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I dont know.
I'm still waiting for the version that doesn't let me browse slashdot at a threashold lower then 3.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bad analogy. A howitzer would be a supremely effective way to remove an ant pile.
You and I have startling differences of opinion on what is or isn't "effective". I define "ineffective" as that moment before you look at the smokey ash of your former home, next to the ant's former pile and say, "Whoops!"
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 ant piles gone tho......
since that was the intended result, id say it was effective.
As for collateral damage..........
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.
Tux on the library website. *shrug*
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
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.
All's true that is mistrusted
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).
Thus, it would be illegal to host adult content on your own webserver unless it belongs to a .xxx domain.
.jp domain. .au domain. .cx domain (*shudder*). .uk domain. .ru domain.
Or a
Or an
Or a
Or a
Or a
The list goes on and on...point is, you'll notice that all of these TLDs are outside the control of the U.S. government.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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
Because the U.S. Congress decided that libraries have to implement software like Net Nanny or else lose federal funding.
The American Library Associate is fighting the law in the U.S. Supreme Court:
Yes, and they won. Several months ago.
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
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
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
Netnanny, and all censorware, are snakeoilware.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.
Okay, so I'm being a grammar nazi, but since when did the term "down-modding" enter the lexicon? Even accepting the geek abbreviation, "mod" and its verb form "modding", you can easily say, "... with no points for modding the trolls down". Why do we have to re-write grammar (and of course, spelling) with every post? It's a bit like commenting your source code, not required for compilation, but recommended for better readability.
More than mere navel gazing.
Don't hire slashdot proofreaders? You mean, I shouldnt put my karma-score on my resume? Goddamn it, don't tell me that three months' of effort is a waste!
More than mere navel gazing.
When I've "changed" my domain, I've always left the old one up and pointing to the same server. Unless NetNanny was doing reverse DNS to discover alternate names, there'd be no good reason to discontinue the old one. You'd also wind up breaking any old existing links to the website. There's lots of good reasons why, if the library had that original domain, it should have left it active.
For all you know, someone hacked the Piqua library's home page and sent a juicy story to the local paper.
O.K.
I bite. So its a Federal Law in which country? I presume you want the U.S of A.. But i recall some other countrys on this planet, like maybe France or the U.K. or even Fidschi. So how do you enforce this Federal law on the Internet?
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
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."
Okay, so I'm being a grammar nazi, but since when did the term "down-modding" enter the lexicon?
;-)
About forty-five seconds after "downgrade," "downlink," "download," "downplay," and "downsize." Late 20th century. Blink and you might miss it.
If you wanna get all technical, Herr Grammarian, "downmod" is an inverted portmanteau phrasal verb. It's constructed in the same fashion as the "back" verbs: backbite, backfire, backscatter, backslide, backstroke.
There are a few "up" verbs as well: upbraid, upchuck (heh), update, upend, upgrade, upheave, uphold, upholster (just kidding), uplift, uplink, upload, upraise, uprise (usually in the gerund form "uprising"), uproot, upset, and upstage.
I feel pretty okay about my use of "down-modding." So good, in fact, that next time I think I'll drop the hyphen.
I write in my journal
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.
The problem with the censorware is that they also filter political sites they disagree with.
Our policy at our local library is that unless a resource violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms it is illegal for us to remove it. Patrons with children sign an Internet Use Agreement which states that we do not use any filtering software and that it is their responsibility to be aware of what their children are doing online.
Parent have to take responsibilty for their children. This goes for books etc. as well as the Internet.
AFAIK the law in Canada forbids censorship in libraries so we don't have funding problems because of this.
I was assuming that the covenant would specify that all references to the library in any literature, which would include the URL use the name Flesh, that would be standard in that type of contract though I'm not privy to the terms of this one.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I'm glad you feel good about using downmod again, but looks like I'm only as Nazi as Napoleon (and too lazy to deepgoogle it). What "inverted portmanteau phrasal verb" means?
More than mere navel gazing.
A phrasal verb is a verb that consists of more than one word. The line between a verb-adverb pair and a phrasal verb is blurry, but some examples may help. "To ask out," in the sense of to proposition for a date, is a phrasal verb. In this case, "out" is not an adverb describing the verb "to ask," but rather an integral part of the verb phrase. Another good example is "to have to do with," as in, "This sentence has to do with phrasal verbs." If you examine each part of the phrasal verb-- "has," "to do," "with"-- it makes no sense at all. But taken as a single verb, it carries meaning.
An inverted phrasal verb is one in which the word order is reversed. If the phrasal verb is "to play down," the inverted form is "to down-play."
A portmanteau is a word that is composed of two or more separate words smooshed together. "Down-play" is a hyphenated word; "downplay" is a portmanteau.
So if you start with a phrasal verb-- "to play down"-- invert the order-- "to down-play"-- and remove the hyphen, you end up with an inverted portmanteau phrasal verb: "to downplay." Same idea for "to downmoderate." Of course, "downmod," and its counterpart "upmod," carry the same meaning and are easier to type.
I write in my journal
bitch ass moderator who moderated my shit down?
It's either informative or in the very least funny.
paintball
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.
-
- - 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
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.