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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?
Well, the most obvious problem is that there are way too many domains to request each one be added to a whitelist every time you want to do something (How many links did you click while viewing slashdot today? Do you want to have to go ask the librarian every time?)
And another obvious problem that we've seen with other censorware is that what one person wants isn't always what another person wants.
And, for that matter, most current censorware applications have the ability to specifically unblock certain sites, so you should still be able to do that.
Because who determines what gets on the "white" list? The same censors who created the blacklist?
Yes, I know you said people could suggest things, but there is obviously an intermediary between the library users and the whitelist. Suggestions to add Goatse.CX are going to get shot down (hopefully), but what about less obvious choices?
If the whitelist is just a blacklist with the criteria reversed, then it's not going to help anyone.
And yes, a human being will probably judge this differently from a keyword filter, but if they had that kind of man-hours, then why would they use the blacklisting software in the first place?
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
It is a very interesting idea, but the workload to keep it updated and maintained would be huge, not to mention examining the websites and making sure everybody likes it before it is added to the list.
.nz (kinda lame, but otherwise everybody would use them for porn) or you can pay for access. I just use my connection at home.
Over here in christchurch, the public libraries have public internet terminals which you can only access sites within
I'm sure others will state this more eloquently than I but one needs to consider the principle of a white list as well as the practicality of it. I feel, and I'm sure most slashdotters do as well, that the default should be "information wants to be free." For people like us, the idea of a white list is almost like capitulating to the censorship proponents.
As far as the practicallity of such a thing, I fear that it will suffer from the same problem that a black list would, namely that it's really agonizing to try to list every notable/worthy item of an enormous list. If I go to a library and get some information and then find out that it's not available and I have to special order it, I usually won't bother putting in my request and I'll turn to other ways of getting the data. I think the same thing is likely to happen if a white list would be instituted. People would get fed up with having to wait and submit a special request. The promise of the Internet as being an immediate source of information would be soured. One could certainly argue along the lines of "Hey, if you want unfettered access to information and can't be bothered waiting a little while, then buy your own computer!" but I would guess that majority of people who use library Internet access probably can't afford one for whatever reason.
In my view, the entire idea of a white list is the wrong way to be thinking of the issue. It seems like the censorship proponents should be the ones stuck doing the extra work since filters are their ideas in the first place. Sticking the poor high school student with extra work because of some over-zealous soccer moms who don't want their kids to look at undesirable Internet sites seems a bit unfair.
GMD
watch this
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.
The problem is that you have to explicitly ask for something to be "unbanned". Gutenburg etc are the obvious examples that show how ridiculous the filtering is, but the base issue is that the government (assuming a publically-funded library) is not only deciding what you can and can't see, but spending your money to do it.
Imagine you were researching a touchy subject (insert taboo of choice here). Would you want to be the one to ask for relevent sites to be unbanned? Or, given the choice, would you prefer to research something else instead?
There are so many problems with your question, I'm not really sure where to start. In the interest of disclosure, I should probably state that I am trained as a librarian, but I do not work in a public library setting. So, I don't have any special concerns about filtering beyond my professional ones.
The whole notion of Internet filtering goes against a central librarian tenet, namely: We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources. It's a great idea, but it has never really been put to the test until the development of the Internet and libraries providing access.
You see, in practice, librarians have always been censors. They decide which books get on the shelves, which books get weeded from the collection, etc., and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Editors edit books in order to make them more focused, lucid, and pleasurable to read. Librarians are a kind of editor - for whole collections. Due to their efforts, you can find the books you are looking for if they are in the collection. You might be able to find other books by looking nearby. Of course, libraries are no longer just about books, there are article databases, special collections, music, videos, and so forth. But for discussion, let's just talk about books.
If I go to my local library looking for John Zerzan's book Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, I'm likely not going to find it. However, I can inter-library loan the item and read it. Some library, somewhere has a copy and I can access it. So, you aren't necessarily limited by the local censor. You have a means around him/her, if you don't have the means to purchase the book yourself.Now, let's talk about filters. Filters are essentially limiting your collection to what's on site. It's like taking away inter-library loan for books. It means you do not have access to the material, period - if your librarian doesn't choose to select it. Think about that for a moment in the context of books. If my librarian doesn't know about Zerzan, then I would not have access to the book.
You might say that I could buy my own, assuming I had the money, but buying your own is kind of counter to the whole point of libraries - its a community collection where people can spend time educating and thinking for themselves. Ideally, they should help diversify thinking, not homogenize it.
Or how about we put it another way, let's talk about your SPAM filters. No customizing of filters, we are all going to use the same one and then people can submit new sites to add to the allow list. How effective would it be to have all incoming mail screened for SPAM only at the sysadmin level. To be effective, it would probably mean that you would not get some of the mail you would have liked to recieved. But no fear, you can always ask for a particular address to be added to the allow list. Or hopefully, someone else has submitted it already. In the mean time, you have no idea what your missing.
Would that work for you? Part of the whole idea is that you need to know what's out there, and with filters that you don't create yourself - you can't.
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.