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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."
Would you want work done by a bunch of students with a single day of training to be up for review?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Shifting through and categorizing thousands of pages a day requires cheap untrained workforce.
It is my duty to point out that "Taliban" is Persian for "Students".
Well, at least no one saw that one coming. No one could ever have predicted that a government mandate issued to private company would wind up being sourced to the cheapest possible labor.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Does it matter if it's a group of students or a group of politicians? or a group of little old ladies? or a group of aliens from Betelgeuse?
In all seriousness, it doesn't matter *who* does the censoring, they'll always get it wrong. Only the end viewer requesting the page can decide if something is "hardcore" or merely "erotica". Nobody can decide what standards are acceptable to anyone else.
I could care less who is doing the categorization. There are going to be mistakes. The important thing is being able to challenge the rating. Most of these content filtering products have URL category lookup and you can report sites that need further review.
McAfee http://www.trustedsource.org/en/feedback/url
BlueCoat http://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp
The rest are easily found via google or from their respective support sites.
[...] decisions on whether porn is 'hardcore' or merely 'erotica' [...]
Where do I apply?
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
I've seen far too many political sites and blogs ranging the entire political spectrum being labeled as "hate speech". While true, the opinions are very strong. But I would hardly call that HS.
I'm sure they could do it cheaper anyways. :D
I called it a mighty Sperm Whale, she called it Finding Nemo.
I understand we want to protect the pure eyes of the public from disgusting content. Well, actually I don't, if nobody gets harmed in the making of the images, to each one is fantasy. Furthermore, it is not like bestiality is around every click, and seeing a nipple is not going to traumatize anybody, we all have two, don't we ? For the sake of the argument, say we buy the idea that internet 'needs' to be filtered to protect the public from seeing "things". Doesn't it defeats the purpose, when little Johny is protected from porn from 1 to 18, then gets to watch objectively offensive and disgusting porn, the kind of things that makes you despair about humanity, but for 20 hours a week, as a student job to pay tuition ? Am I the only one to think that the work-watchers are going to increase by a wide margin the exposure to insanely offensive material, that otherwise nobody encounters without actually looking for it ?
If they're using a feather, its erotica. If they're using a chicken, its porn.
Have gnu, will travel.
Those who want blocking on THEIR OWN PCs should have it. The more the better. :)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Does reading it make you want to commit genocide?
Yes=Hate Speech
Wow. Like 80% of the comments on the internet are hate speech -- I had no idea. (Yes, genocide -- I wouldn't want to miss the actual poster by slaughtering their twin instead or anything like that. Genocide is much harder to miss with.)
The reason why I swear so much is fuck you. :)
Censor this, bitches.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
TFS and TFA make it clear that this is a service being offered to customers as an opt-in system. What the heck is wrong with offering customers that choice, especially given that they can presumably change their mind at some point in the future (when their kids are old enough to view porn).
Customers will be asked to make a choice over whether they want filtering on their connection or not. Adult content blocks will not be implemented by default.
I would say that so long as the system is both opt-in and voluntary, it shouldn't be a problem. As long as the censorship system isn't mandated by government AND people are free to choose filtered or unfiltered access, where's the harm?
The law of the big number works in their favor. Yes, you, me, and a few more will easily get around those filters. And we might also be interested enough in politics and the world in general to actively go out of our way to do so.
How many others do? For the masses who don't give half a shit and would only see this if they get sent there, and promptly see a "blocked content" sign (which will certainly soon be conflated with blocks for malware and the like, considering the company that produces the blocker), this will work quite well.
For reference, see China.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Until the early 1980s, there was a lot of pornography tourism (not really sex tourism, they only came for the "dirty" magazines and films, getting hookers or hook up with someone for casual sex have always been easier in UK then in Sweden, not even weighting in the language barriers, which was considerable for English speaking tourists in Sweden during the 1960s) from United Kingdom to Sweden. British men coming to Sweden only to buy a suitcase full of porn. There was even some Swedish cinemas, catering pornographic films chiefly to British porn tourists. When the pornography tourism from UK diminished, most of the then existing sex shops and cinemas in Stockholm and Gothenburg was closed down.
Until the early 70s, there was also lot of British women who visited Sweden to buy sex toys, and even condoms and lubricants. Nowadays only a small trickle of women from Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and similar Catholic countries do that.
The related sex tourism to Denmark (where prostitution is legal, but with some restrictions) from UK have never diminished, but in this tourism the UK men is not alone, there are plenty of sex tourists from other countries visiting Denmark too, ironically, even some Swedish sex tourists (Sweden have some of Europes hardest laws against prostitution, and the Swedish police uphold them meticulously).
However, he admits the very sites the small team is asked to judge are those that are the most subjective. âoeDrawing the line between erotic and hardcore pornography is probably the most difficult," he said. "Another thing is websites that go into extreme left or right side [politically], but still do news or something like that."
Anti-nuclear - extreme?
Anti-abortion - extreme?
Anti-GM food - extreme?
Right to wear burka- extreme?
Calling politicians corrupt - extreme?
Calling politicians scumbags - extreme?
Muslim sites that are not in English - extreme?
Christian fundamentalist - extreme?
The gov't should not be supporting this company in any way.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
There's some strange filtering imposed by the last two mobile operators I've used. Orange and T-Mobile have blocked various pages that I've tried to access from Google searches with the claim that they're adult content. Boring stuff like recipes or how to install a phone extension (yes, dangerous territory). Following their link to review the block page always results in them confirming the block was valid. The occasional times I've been able to see the Google Cache link, it's always been innocuous. Sounds like people with a day's training, but I doubt they were smart enough to be students.