Britain's Broadband Censors: a Bunch of Students

nk497 writes "British ISPs have been told by the government to offer their customers parental control systems to block content like gambling sites and pornography, but the McAfee system used by BT and Sky leaves the tough censoring decisions to a small group of barely-trained students. While much of the categorization work is done using an automated system, decisions on whether porn is 'hardcore' or merely 'erotica,' or whether a page contains hate speech, is left to a team of five to ten people with a day of training — and the job is apparently popular with students. McAfee doesn't publish the list of sites it hands to ISPs to block, making it difficult to see if your own site has been misclassified."

Comments

In the interests of inflammatory discourse....

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is my duty to point out that "Taliban" is Persian for "Students".

Re:Of course it doesn't hand the list out

[sir_eccles]

Knowing how lazy students are, they probably just copied the list off someone else.

Re:It's simple

[PPH]

If they're using a feather, its erotica. If they're using a chicken, its porn.

Re:Of course

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yeah. Stop a minute to consider the sheer level of evil genius here. They have a government mandate to pay college students to look at porn. It's like Lex Luthor paid Machiavelli to come up with a business plan.