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Worst Censorware Blocks Cannot Be Fixed
The ACLU is threatening to sue a group of Tennessee School Districts for using blocking software that blocks sites categorized as "LGBT" — that is, sites themed around lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues that would not be classified as pornographic. Some of the blocked sites include the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign.
Legally, the school districts' decision to block these sites seems fairly indefensible. The content being censored is political speech, not illegal to distribute to minors, and as the ACLU points out, by blocking these sites the school districts are engaging in "viewpoint discrimination," since the schools allow access to anti-gay sites like Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality (which, ironically, features a disclaimer saying its content is not suitable for children). But, you never can tell with judges. A judge in Utah once ruled in favor of a school that suspended a student for wearing a t-shirt with the word "Vegan." (Do you think the judge would have made the same ruling if the student's t-shirt had said "Christian"?)
However, while the ACLU would be right to bring this case, there may be another unintended side effect. By focusing on the fact that the "LGBT" category is enabled to be blocked in these districts, this sets up a contrast with districts that do not have the "LGBT" category enabled, which could lead people to think that such districts are not blocking LGBT sites. This is not the case.
When a school district buys blocking software, the software comes with an encrypted list of websites listed in different categories; categories like Pornography and Nudity are typically blocked, while categories like LGBT would usually not be. If a site falls into one or more of the blocked categories, then attempts to access that site will be blocked (at least until some reprobates help you get around the filter.) However, it's the blocking company that decides what to put on the list under each category. And even if only categories like "Pornography" are enabled, there are likely to be many non-pornographic sites categorized as "Pornography," and hence blocked wherever that category is turned on.
When the ACLU of Washington sued the North County Regional Library system for enabling blocking software for all patrons (including adults), they asked me to test the Fortinet Web filter that the library was using. I used a random sample of 100,000 .com and 100,000 .org domains and ran them through an automated script to find 536 .com domains and 207 .org domains that were blocked by Fortinet. Of those, about one out of every eight .com sites categorized as "Pornography" or "Adult Materials," and one of out of every four .org sites blocked in those categories, was a site with content that could not possibly be considered "adult" — some of the sites blocked in these categories included the Dabar Worship Center, the immigrant-rights group Families for Freedom, and the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra. Extrapolating these ratios to the set of all .com and .org domains in existence, one could conclude that there were about 71,000 non-pornographic .com sites and 5,800 non-pornographic .org sites blocked by FortiNet as "Pornography" or "Adult Materials" — a number almost certain to grow into six figures when you add in all the sites outside of .com and .org. Years earlier, I had run similar tests for Cyber Patrol and SurfWatch (products which have since been discontinued) and found that an absolute majority of sites blocked by each program were actually non-pornographic, which translated into an estimate of hundreds of thousands of .com and .org sites wrongly classified as "porn."
Only the blocking companies know for sure how such stupid mistakes end up on their lists, but the most widely accepted explanation is that they use machines to crawl the Web and guess which sites are pornographic, and add those sites to their blacklists without any human intervention. In their early years, the makers of SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol claimed that employees actually did review sites before adding them to their lists, but that claim became increasingly untenable as more and more reports came out of sites being blocked with no adult content on them.
Nobody has yet done a similar study for the ENA blocking program, but every blocking program that has ever been tested has had a non-trivial error rate that extrapolates to at least hundreds of thousands of non-pornographic websites being blocked under "Pornography" and similar categories. There is no reason to think that the ENA blocker is different; at the very least, if they claim that it is, then the burden of proof should be on them.
So, the ACLU will probably succeed in persuading the Tennessee Schools Cooperative to stop blocking the "LGBT" category, but that doesn't mean that LGBT sites — or any other category of non-pornographic sites — will no longer be blocked. A student who encounters a blocked LGBT site could request an override, but what if they don't want to "out" themselves as someone who was browsing an LGBT site? Is Tennessee the best place to be known as the "queer who wanted to get around the porn filter"? And there may not be an option of getting an override anyway. Some of the correspondents on Peacefire's mailing list for new proxy sites to get around blockers are teachers who aren't given a password to bypass the blocker on their school's computers.
Then of course — you know what's coming — there is the other "larger sense" in which unblocking the LGBT category doesn't "fix the problem," which is that there would be no "problem" if we didn't think of teenagers as children instead of adults. You've probably already decided which side you're on in that debate, but consider it as a scientific question instead of a moral one. Do you think there is any objective evidence that teenagers, if they were given the opportunity to have the same rights and responsibilities as adults, would behave differently from adults to a large degree — more differently than, say, men and women behave from each other? The trouble with the "evidence" that we gather from personal interactions is that it's not truly objective — if someone believes that teenagers are immature and adults are not, they're likely to see and remember only the pieces of evidence that confirm that belief. A true double-blind experiment might involve talking to someone through a computer terminal and rating the other person's "maturity" just based on their responses. That's a start, but the trouble with that experiment is that adults tend to know a larger set of words, so a participant might rate the other person as more "mature" because of their large vocabulary, even though having a large vocabulary is completely different from having mature thoughts or logical reasoning skills. A fairer test might be to take a non-native-English-speaking adult and a native-English-speaking young teenager who scored about the same on a test of English vocabulary, and see if participants could tell the difference in maturity between those two test subjects while talking to them through a computer terminal. I am not aware of any experiment along these lines that has been done, but this is the sort of evidence of differences between adults and minors, that would be truly objective.
Most of the evidence in favor of the innate "adulthood" of teenagers is also anecdotal and not scientific, but it is compelling. As psychologist Robert Epstein has pointed out in The Case Against Adolescence, for thousands of years humans in their early teens were giving birth and raising children of their own. That obviously does not mean that that is a good idea in today's society, it just means that somewhere along the way, we must have lost sight of the level of responsibility that human teenagers are biologically capable of handling. If one of our Stone Age forebears could be brought back to life, he might eventually get used to the Web, but he'd probably always be amused by the idea of Web blockers for teenagers who are older than he was when he was raising his first child.
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-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Because while little Timmy can have his internet activities monitored by his parents at home when he gets to school his parents wishes are cast into the ditch because other people have decided they know what is best.
People love to demonize parents for not getting involved in the lives of the children but when those children are outside of their control for eight hours a day what are they to do?
Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment. I figure most of this comes down from haters who look for any chance to embarrass or otherwise annoy religious oriented Americans who send their kids to public school. The parents are legally responsible for most of the actions of their kids and legally prevented from knowing about many of them.
Public education should have standards on EDUCATION. What a locality wants to do beyond that should be off limits to the Feds. As long as they don't try to indoctrinate based religion/race it should be fine. The problem with education is that the system is keeping parents out and then blaming them for it.
Let them be more involved, but realize freedoms you claim the students don't have should not be granted by the system over the wishes of their parents. If you do that then you absolve the parents of any liability for their children thus making them wards/products of the state. Then again maybe that is what these people want.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What does this have to do with anything? I don't know. I'm just typing furiously away at the keyboard to make my boss think I am actually working (while alt-tabbing to wikipedia and google images).
Enjoy :D
There has been a rush to really start cracking down on what people can do at work or school via the internet. Most often these implementations are reactionary measures to a discovery that people are doing all sorts of things that admin types deem as unacceptable, although in many cases people were never actually informed of this... Anyway, the root here is really a lack of understanding and communication on what is actually expected of people, and how this goal should be gone about.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Transgender people feel that they are trapped in the wrong gender body. They face much of the same stigma as LBGQ people. They are often mislabeled as gay. Thus they often find themselves in the same category as the rest regardless of where they would like to be.
Some gays and lesbians don't like transgendered people. Many others are okay with them. Some gays and lesbians don't like bisexuals either, but they keep the B in the acronym anyway. It's just a convenient acronym for identifying a set of people who are often discriminated against for sex/gender-related reasons.
lgbt wont be happy till they get "equal time" to indoctrinate kids.
But why isn't that fair? Wanna bet that these assholes aren't on the block list? These nutballs even keep a list, making the blocking very easy. If "indoctrinating kids" is your objection, you'd expect them all to be blocked, right?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Transgender" doesn't necessarily mean people who "cut off their genitalia." From what I understand, it can refer to people who do not psychologically identify exactly with the bipolar genders of male/female.
It can also refer to intersexual people, i.e., people with sexual characteristics of both genders. This is more common than most people realize, but often newborns undergo "corrective" surgery to assign them to one gender category or another.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Exactly what laws is the school breaking by not allowing them to access certain sites?
It may be wrong and hardheaded and backwards... but I'm sorry... it _is_ the schoolboard's right to do it. If they really wanted to, they could block Mac Sites and keep IBM sites or block Evolution Sites and keep Creationist ones. They're not bound by the US Constitution since they're not the Federal Government and I highly doubt that you can classify a local school board as the State Government, so they're probably not bound by the State's Constitution, either. The schoolboard is subject to state _laws_ and local ordinances, neither of which say anything about this, I am guessing.
This sort of thing is determined at PTO meetings by elected school board officials, and therefore, the appropriate action is to take it before the schoolboard, before a PTO meeting, and to parents and teachers who make the decisions, not some judge who is likely to uphold whatever the aforemetioned committee happens to decide, even if it's something as stupid as the right to ban a kid for wearing a t-shirt.
This may sound weird and backwards and stupid but I actually think that's how it should be: the local community decides what they want, specifically, so long as it meets certain state standards. Some may want 5th Grade Sex Education, others may want to wait until high school. Some may want to "shield" their kids from the influences of the world and keep out anything related to sexuality, others may think it's important to teach tolerance. Certainly, if this were a predominantly Quaker Community, nobody would even raise an eyebrow. And if you don't like the community, there are several million others in the US to choose from.
The Seattle Women's Jizz Orchestra isn't pornographic?! How could you possibly come to that conclu--
Wait, what's that? Jazz, you say?
Oh. Ohhhhhhhhhh....
Never mind.
While we're at it, why are Country and Western lumped together, but Folk is separate?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
you said the problem
"oftware company to develop a filtering solution that blocks 100% of what you don't want kids to see"
translate
"[someone else] filters reality for your child how you feel it should be filtered with no action from you"
what it should be is "parents take the time to teach their child about the world and what is appropriate when and where"
i'm just getting sick and fucking tired of parents that want to shove all the problems onto someone else and when that someone else doesn't get it right they sue them.. i'm sorry but that someone else never agreed to raising your child..
personaly .. i feel if a child fucks up the parents should be punished along with the child. lets get some accountability in parenting for a fucking change
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I'm your classic "woman trapped in a man's body." By all appearances, I'm a man, but from even before I started school, I've felt female. Nobody would know the difference between me and a normal guy if I didn't tell them. In fact, I've only ever told one person because there is so much stigma about transgendered people. Lots of people can't wrap their head around why someone would identify as the opposite sex. As you point out, it's even more unacceptable than being homosexual.
So, I'm attracted exclusively to women. That makes me straight because I have a penis. However, deep inside, I feel that I am a woman. Does that make me a lesbian with a penis? If I were to undergo gender reassignment, does that make me a lesbian or a straight man without a penis?
understand where the issues over sexual orientation based discrimination comes in now?
btw, I'll probably never go ahead with SRS or attempting to live as a female... I'd make a horrible looking woman thanks to the changes after 20 years of testosterone coursing through my veins. So, if I don't cut off my genitalia, does that make me "normal" as far as you're concerned? Am I just quirky if you notice my tertiary characteristics like multiply pierced ears, tramp stamp, and shaved legs? Will that make you assume I'm gay?
To save anyone from having to look it up, parent is referring to the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, which has been interpreted as giving the several states the same responsibility for upholding the Bill of Rights as the federal government. The fact that school boards are not the federal government in no way diminishes their responsibilities under the First Amendment.
--Obyron
...I'd be fine with a filter that stops the GBT, but letting L through would be fine. :)
(And yes, I understand the idiomatic usage, but aren't L's actually just a subset of G? Why do they get their own category like that?)
-Styopa
Yes, Bennett Haselton is famous for being verbose and embedding extraneous arguments within a larger debate (sometimes diluting his original point).
In this case, his point about scientifically judging the maturity of teenagers is that it would entirely obviate, using rigorous evidence, the need for these web-blockers at all (at least for people above a certain age). That would certainly be progress (rather than debating about how much to block, wouldn't be nice if we had a good metric by which to say "we don't need to worry about censoring at all for this class of people").
We have arbitrary social rules about when someone is "old enough" to do certain things (drive a car, drink alcohol, buy porn). These standards vary wildly from culture to culture (in some cultures, even adults are not allowed those things), and are never based on evidence. Just "gut feelings" about maturity. So he proposes that some standard be established, and that standard tested against average adults, teenagers, children, etc. If it can be shown that a 15-year old is statistically indistinguishable from a 28-year old in terms of how they are able to reason logically, and how they react to, say, pornography; then it doesn't make sense to block the 15-year old from porn sites.
I agree with Haselton on this point. It's ridiculous that in this day and age we are still basing most of our legal rulings on untested "gut feelings" about how people behave, and how they are affected by external events/forces. We can do better.
The ACLU has happened on yet one more issue that would be completely a non-issue if schools were not an extension of government.
Schools should be able to do whatever they want, or whatever the parents want.
When the Bill of Rights was written, it's intention was to restrict what laws congress writes, not the sites should be in whitelists and blacklists in a web filter.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
It can also refer to intersexual people, i.e., people with sexual characteristics of both genders. This is more common than most people realize, but often newborns undergo "corrective" surgery to assign them to one gender category or another.
Corrective surgery can only correct the physique.
If you are lucky, your brain is as "all male" or "all female" as your average guy or gal and the doctor guessed right when he did the "corrective surgery." At this point, you are no longer intersexual.
Although the term "intersexual" usually means having ambiguous genitalia and other obvious physical characteristics, it should really mean "between genders" whether in the genitals or in the mind/brain. By this definition, people who are "trapped in the wrong body" or who are psychologically neither "masculine-normal" nor "feminine-normal" would be described as intersexual, even if their body outside their brain was completely male or female.
Note I said "masculine/feminine-normal" not "completely male/female" - if you survey all the people who self-identify as "completely male" and give them thorough physical and psychological tests, the vast majority will have very few if any distinctly feminine female characteristics, but a sizable minority will have dominant psychological characteristics that are normally considered feminine. The opposite will be true for those that self-identify as completely female.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm iffy on the whole concept of blocking content. People just need to learn to surf responsibly, and teach their children right and wrong. And no matter what, children are going to be exposed to smut, mostly by their peers.
That being said, there are clear cases where the sensorship is wrong, and technical explanations are not adequate excuses.
Professionally, I worked as a chip designer and software developer for air traffic control systems. I've made my share of mistakes. I've coded bugs and had to fix them. But when that happens, I take it VERY seriously. Yes, the ATC systems have sophisticated fail-over systems, but the last thing I want is to have ANY chance of increasing the probability of putting airline passengers in danger. "Oops, sorry." doesn't cut it, and once a bug is discovered, I certainly can't dismiss it. I have to fix it right away!
If you know anything about this history of the USA and plenty of other free countries, you know that people are willing to trade their lives for freedom from oppression. And I generally think of censorship as oppression. Of course, I'd prefer that there were no blocking software. But with it being there, all I can say is that there's no excuse for leaving discovered blocking errors unfixed for any length of time. People's rights are being infringed, and the people who develop these blockers need to take those rights seriously.
As long as there is censorship, there's going to be a slippery slope. The law must protect people against abuses of censorship laws. There needs to be checks and balances. There are laws that let the police search your home. The check against that is that they have to have a warrant issued by a judge, which means they need to show significant probably cause. A balance against that is called "exigent circumstances", where if they believe someone's life is in danger, they can enter a home even without a warrant. The balance against THAT is that even WITH exigent circumstances, things they find in your home are likely to be inadmissable in court. Likewise, with censorship laws, there needs to be other laws that come with penalties for abuse of the censorship laws. If you censor, you're taking on a huge responsibility, because false positives and false negatives are not something you can just brush off.
Homosexuality was very historically accepted. See: ancient Greece, the basis of Western Civilization.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I'm not against the former, though I'd be repulsed if one tried to come on to me.
Why? I've been married for better than a decade and, over the years, I've rejected several advances from ladies and a couple from guys - Not sure why that is - My wife tells me that I'm an ignorant flirt. But it's not much different - You let them know that they're barking up the wrong tree and, typically, they back off and look elsewhere. I've actually had much more trouble rejecting straight women than gay men (I've been literally tackled twice, but liquor was involved).
The latter though, just seem wrong...
I wish I could fault you for that, but frankly it gives me the heebie-jeebies too. But the fact that it creeps me out does make me sympathize with the fact that they feel ostracized.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
whose only chance to have any social interaction with that superhot chick is when she needs him to teach her how to configure tor, or that anoymous proxy, or even just rdp
so please slashdot, for the sake of geek kinship, just let this whole issue slide
leave the poor 14 year old geek's only source of social capital in the brutal world of high school society intact
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The case of interest here would be Tinker Vs. Des Moines. Decided by the Supreme Court in 1969, It held that while the school had a compelling interest in curtailing certain rights that would otherwise be unacceptable violations of certain civil liberties, (in this case the first amendment, though the decision seems to apply to others) speech that was non-disruptive to the school environment could not be denied.
It's a complicated decision, and there has been MUCH discussion on exactly how Tinker does and does not apply, but it would seem to blow several of your arguments out of the water. One, that school districts arn't bound by the Constitution, not being "Federal government agencies". They are (Bound, that is, not federal). They get have special dispensation due to the fact that there is a compelling government interest in educating children, and that interest can justify curtailing certain civil liberties, at least as held by this case. But that shows clearly that school districts are held to constitutional tests, and are clearly NOT outside the jurisdictional bounds of the constitution or the federal court system.
Now, just what contributes to disruptive speech, acceptable curtailing of rights, and other issues has been argued fiercely, often in other SCOTUS cases. However, schools are NOT private entities, and cannot censor at will without substantial cause.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
Exactly why we shouldn't have Public Education involved with anything "sociological" and teaching PC crap and all that, and trying to correct the crap that parents subject their children to.
And while you may want(or not want) kids to know about that stuff, other people don't (or do). Who is gonna sort out what is allowed, or not allowed?
If we cut the crap out of the schools, and let parents instill their values (or lack thereof), then we won't have these types of crap showing up in schools in the first place.
And what may be okay for 16 year olds may not be appropriate for 7 year olds. And while you may want your 7 year old to know everything about everything, who are you to say that is okay for everyone else's kids too?
Here's a suggestion. Lets focus education on, you know ... reading, writing, math and science, and perhaps some art and music, and getting people literate before we start our little social experiments.
I work for a school, and there aren't enough hours in the day for teachers to teach all the required crap, and it is REALLY showing up.
When I go to McDonalds and the bill comes to $5.58 and I give the brain dead clerk $6.08 and she starts to cry because she can't figure out the change we have a seriously under educated populace.
It happened when the state started to demand that parents turn their kids over to their schools. You want to fix the problem? Look to the cause of the problem.
Good luck with that.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm asking this in the full knowledge that someone will mod me down and call me names - but I'm ignorant on the topic:
Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things. The first three are people who like to have relationships and sex in ways that aren't historically accepted. Fair enough, and I can get behind efforts to stop discriminating against these people.
The latter, at the extreme, cut off their genitalia. This is a group I have a little more trouble viewing as "normal". Or am I just too hung up on the extreme?
You are too hung up. You have a problem with it, so what do you think would the laws of a muslim country like Iran say about it? You'll be surprised: If someone wants to change their gender in Iran, they are considered to be ill. It is a medical health problem. As an ill person, you can expect that the state will help you. And that is what they do. And since nobody knows how to change a person's mind about these things, and it is known how to change a person's body, the body has to be changed. Which is interestingly exactly the same thing that happens in Germany, for the same reasons.
Give me a break. The idea that a heterosexual man finds another man coming on to him revulsive is not some failure of empathy, latent homosexuality, an expression of homophobia, or due to immaturity.
Heterosexual guys don't like gay guys coming on to them and find it revulsive. It's been that way for 20,000 years and is not going to change. Guys who do like other guys coming on to them are called homosexual.
Note that the original poster didn't say "and therefore I poured gasoline over him and set him afire" or "and therefore me and my friends beat him up" or "and therefore I think we should put all gays in concentration camps." He simply said he felt an inner revulsion. So what. For all you know, he was polite about it and amicably declined.
I would find myself revulsed at a woman with a moustache coming on to me - does that mean I have deep-seated facial hair issues? Do I lack empathy? Should I question my own shaving practices? According to your line of thought, simply saying "no thanks" while being revolted inside means I've somehow done something wrong.
Saying that the original poster is somehow defective, evil, or less enlightened because someone gave him the heebie-jeebies is ridiculous. You can fault someone for how they choose to act, but not how they react inside.
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