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Whitelists for Overzealous Internet Filters?
Anonymous Coward asks: "We've all seen how plenty of bad examples of Internet filtering in libraries and schools, so I need not list any. After browsing the aforementioned YRO archives &c., I had an interesting proposal. Books that people *want* the public to see are submitted to libraries to be placed on the shelves. So why not come up with a similar solution of the public submitting lists of websites to be *allowed* access from the libraries. Project Gutenberg or The Bible blocked? No problem, just ask a librarian to add the domain to the allow list." Would this be a practical way around overzealous filters?
I live at a boarding school, and I access the internet through the school's internet server.
My school provides internet access (port 80) only through a proxy server, which filters out 'unappropriate' content by Symantec's I-Gear software.
The problem with various white lists is not necessarily the technical skill involved in changing the blocked link,
but the changer's willingness to do so.Especially when the the system providing the internet access is an academic institution, such internet approvals are difficult and touchy, and most often many/most requests are ignored for the sole sake of time.
What's your degree of approval for a site? What if your own morals agree with unblocking the site? On what grounds would a site be unblocked, and how would those unblocks be justified?
There are just too many subjective questions that are unanswered--The presence of censorship bothers me at my school, but I can definitely see where the attempt FOR censorship comes from, and why constant updating of a 'white list' would take too much time.
What if a pro-life librarian doesn't want to grant access to sites about abortion? What if a fundamentalist librarian doesn't want to grant access to sites about birth control or gay issues? What if a librarian doesn't want to grant access to a site he finds politically offensive? You would hope that personal beliefs wouldn't influence these decisions, but you can never be sure.
Two points before anyone flames me: (1) I gave examples of "liberal" sites that were blocked because those are the sites I personally wouldn't want to see blocked from my (future) children. I'm sure the tables could be turned, too, with a liberal librarian overruling a conservative site. [However, my example appears to be more common.] (2) I really respect professional librarians and think they are doing a great job promoting first amendment rights and fighting censorship. I'm sure most librarians would use their discretionary powers appropriately, but I think it is dangerous to let a small group of people decide what information can and cannot be accessed.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
I'm responsible for filtering the internet content of a school district...which is a federal requirement, like it or not. Previously we used SurfControl/SurfPatrol/CyberPatrol/WhateverPatrol, until I determined that we were being extorted for a bit too much money. We (used) to run the proxy on Netware 5...when we upgraded to Netware 6 they wanted lots more money. Even then, we were going to get a product that sucked anyway.
My solution was to take an older machine, sit it in the server room, and run RedHat 8.0, Squid, and Dansguardian. I get blacklists from some nice Norwegians at ftp.ost.eltele.no, and further limit things by using keywords and phrase weighting (nice features of Dansguardian.) There are negative weights for words like "fuck" or "shit"...because, more than likely, these are not to be found in great numbers on pages that are appropriate for the K-12 age bracket. The way the filter works, each word is assigned a weight. "fuck" gets 40 points. If the total of points on a page goes over 80, then it is rejected. "sex" has a weight of 10. So an article on safe sex might be allowed, but "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" would not. Words like "medical" and "research" get negative weights...so if there is an article that mentions sex lots of times, but also includes "medical" and "research"...then it is allowed.
Don't get me wrong...I hate filtering as much as anybody. But coming from a previous school district that had in the past used no filtering, I can tell you that no filtering rapidly becomes a debauched flophouse of goatse.cx and warez. We need filtering, but also need a live mind behind it to make sure it all makes sense. I might add that I have saved a lot of money using Dansguardian and RedHat. Maintenance on the filtering portion is an order of magnitude easier than the ***Patrols that I worked on in the past.