I'm assuming that Canada uses the same television standard as at least one other country. Many manufactuers likely would consider it less expensive to put these chips in *all* of their televisions rather than making specialized additions for Canada.
As a case in point, consider newer automobiles which have their headlights on all the time. Only a few locations (all of Canada and the state of Florida I believe) require headlights to be on continuously. But instead of making specialized vehicles for these locations, automobile manufactuers added the feature to most if not all of their lineup. To consumers, having headlights on during the daytime is advertised as a "safety feature." You see dozens of these cars during a trip on any major roadway in the United States.
When one country accepts these televisions for their additional functions, it allows any other country that wants this technology to easily lap it up. Only the broadcast end of systems will need to be changed. It becomes real easy for someone to turn on things "at the flick of a switch" when the masses already have it in front of them.
(Personally, I believe parents should watch what their kids are doing, and not rely on any regulatory or industry body to do so. Rating and censoring products should only be used as tools, and parents must be able to disable these quickly should said products go astray from *their* beliefs, not the original rater's!)
If reporting potential witness was indeed a real witness, and Connectix has indeed settled with Sony, what does it mean for bleem, which also is being sued by Sony for their Playstation(tm) emulator? What does it mean for all the other Playstation emulators out there (ePSXe [epsxe.com was down at last check], AdriPSX, etc.).
Face it; if someone thought they were going to lose in this case, they did not want to set precedent that would look good for the other side. By the other side letting them not setting a precedent, no ruling has been made.
So the next emulator to go on trial has nothing to cite from this case, and likely will drag out just as long as Sony v. Connectix has. In my personal view, the side that had the choice should have declined settlement, and they just should forced the completion of the case until a verdict or the other side resigned.
While I have no idea how long this link will last, here is the court schedule of Judge Legge, who was presiding over the case. Note that this week was supposed to mark the start of the jury trial. This just seems like someone wanted to run someone out of money until the last possible minute. I do not like this one bit.
As mentioned before, they are now checking if the application is "licensed." Since XMMS is not licensed with them, it no longer can access their database.
XMMS defaults to FreeDB, but in my experience CDDB has had a lot more of my discs than FreeDB does. So it's a shame I can no longer use it.
Times are going to be interesting; people will soon likely rewrite their CD database apps to allow users to arbitrarily specify the application's ID string. Lynx, wget and Konqueror already allow this when it comes to web pages. Gracenote's response to that behavior ought to be interesting.
The fundamental flaw I see with product activation schemes is when a company goes under. Unless they manage to make a "registration disabler" before they close, products installed after a company shuts its doors may never function.
I have yet to see a company mention how it plans to deal with this situation, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Personal computers from the 1980s still work in my house; I see no reason for my current computer to fail due to non-installing software in 2020.
...in terms of load put on a network. When allowed after midnight at my university, ping times that used to be 40-60 ms over multiple T1's reach well over 2000ms with corrupted return packets.
Seriously though, everyone clueless is downloading as much as possible right now. This is as if someone has yelled "fire" in the middle of a crowded theater. I hate to see what will happen when the smoke actually appears, and everyone starts trampling all over each other in search of alternative solutions.
All right. So I'm supposed to read this "LICENSE" file that came with the program. But I'm an experienced Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever user. So I just type "./configure" followed by "make install". I haven't read the license for this program at all.
Granted, some programs do have "click-through" licenses, but most of these are non-GPL, and then few GPL ones that do show the license use Windows installers (one such program is the pre-compiled Gimp for Windows). If you expect me to hit "I agree" on your web page, I likely can find the file by browsing your FTP server directly. If I never reached the license agreement page on your web site in the first place, does it bind me?
It's like the legal print found at the bottom of most web pages under titles like "Terms of Use." Slashdot's parent, OSDN, has such a legal section. But given the headlines are on top of a page, who reads the legal stuff on the bottom?
Now IANAL, but I doubt the GPL nor most web sites' terms of use would hold up in court. You can not be bound to what you do not have to read.
Granted, having students run networking can be a good idea. I myself personally am a student in charge of five servers.
But having students run their own things is like a fox guarding a henhouse. I have to find students to help my run the network, which is not an easy task. Many of the people I have screened I found to be known hackers to other admins. Other students have come up to be asking for more access because they want to run IRC bots and other such items (which are prohibited by school policy). Meanwhile, I am constantly pressured by faculty to bring new students into the "inner circle." Many of these students know little more than HTML.
Can students run servers? The answer is most definitely yes. But I would not rush to give them root access, control over routing tables, or control over firewalls quite yet.
Sooner or later, someone will find a way to query these tags at a distance, or listen at a distance as another reader closer to these tags queries them. I would assume that such attacks would be similar to the so-called "tempest" attacks we talk about being conducted against computers.
A PBS special (I believe as part of Nova) showed a espionage expert watching a user type on a keyboard in an office complex across the street. He claimed he could have been a quarter mile away and still receive that data. This gives a potential watcher plenty of distance; they could mount such a watching device in the cable junction box on your street.
I would assume that 96-bits of data would be sent at a reasonably slow rate for accuracy, although likely slightly faster than that of a keyboard. Given that fact, I don't see how these devices would avoid remote detection against a determined party. While we may not have to worry about big brother or big business doing this to everyone, I worry that many private investigators likely will jump at the chance. "Wonder what your spouse is doing? Wonder no more..."
Granted, these could have some good uses as well. Combining existing at-the-door alarm systems with a database of which items were recently sold, and many thieves would just give up. But a permanent way to deactivate these tags after sale must be provided. The tag likely doesn't keep track of who has queried it.
People will just hand out their privacy given any percieved benefit, no matter how small. That's how all the quote-on-quote "spyware" companies survive - people either do not know about the side effects, or care.
Has anyone here actually looked at a web site privacy policy? They're pretty scary at times. "Basic usage information" can mean an awful lot - in fact, whatever someone can dream of.
I hate responding to my own story, but it is the *hardware* that doesn't support power management. Instead of your standard APM suite, they add frills I don't use. These include things such as BIOS-based remote diagnostics that can be run over a modem, and a boot menu choice that allows me to boot off a special partition to configure the RAID array (useless if the array fails, I might add). The *software* (operating system, etc.) can not enable something that the hardware can not do.
And yes, I realize that spinning hard drives down may be a very bad thing, but who says the CPU's can't be put into an idle mode? Even ethernet controllers nowadays have lower power modes they can go into while not actively transmitting.
The first attempt to pass this bill failed. What are the odds of it passing this time, especially in the face of corporate lobbyists?
How might this bill be modified as it passes through the legislature? Could it become the opposite of what was originally intended?
Site A contracts site B to provide inline content/ads/etc. for their site. What does site A have to report about site B's policies? What happens if site A's understanding about site B's rules is incorrect, or site B changes them without contacting site A?
How explicitly will companies have to spell out details of their user tracking techniques? Too many web sites use the phrase "basic user information such as..." in their privacy policies, allowing them to give an incomplete list.
There are two high schools in my district. A student in my high school's marching band put up a page mocking the rival school's marching band. It wasn't anything serious (at least from the view of someone else attending said school).
When the school found out about it, he was forced to take the web site down, and got in-school suspension for a week. Granted, we didn't think it was a big deal, but the administration thought it went too far.
In Japan, they also are running out of power. To compensate, they literally are throwing solar panels on everyone's roof they can. These installations are done by the power company for free with the understanding that any excess electricity goes to their grid for free. Blocks upon blocks of houses have been equipped like this.
I wish I had a link to give out, but unfortunately I only know about this through seminars. Granted, solar panels are usually ugly (there are roof shingle versions, but they are expensive and output less power than the big ones), but would you rather be ugly with power, or beautiful without it?
The kernel per se is not monolithic; it has not been that way since 2.0 introduced the usage of modules. Many if not most drivers can be build as modules (although they can for the most part be complied directly into to the kernel as well). When properly designed, modules can be taken in and out of the system at will. So if you are not using your sound card, the system can remove its driver from memory, etc.... Drivers being provided with the Linux source code are more of a convinence issue than anything; many drivers actually are maintained independantly of the main Linux source code tree (should you need them).
If someone does not want you to have full access to their module's source, they can supply it as a module with a built-in symbol table. This also can be done if you do not want to recompile your modules for every new kernel. For the most part, these types of modules work within a kernel series (2.2.x, 2.4.x, etc.) So when you upgrade your kernel using modules with their symbols precompiled in, you *don't* necessarily have to recompile the module.
(Now IANAL, so please pardon me if I screwed something up here...)
One of the facets under common law is that if someone doesn't use something for ten years, does not show any significant effort to maintain it, and someone else does these actions instead independant of the owner, the latter person gains the right to use that property as they see fit without the ability for the original onwer to prohibit them from doing so. Typically this is used with tracts of land, but I suspect it could apply to other things.
Now this is not quite a transfer of ownership, but it still is something significant. The question then arises as to if the latter person can then give copies of the item to everyone. It's hard to say; I don't know any court precedent here. A court case like this would be interesting to see.
It just goes to show you that you can't block peer to peer filesharing without requiring end-to-end authentication for all Internet connections. Don't laugh; the MPAA/RIAA is probably working on this right now.
Change the CTCP (client to client protocol) VERSION response to mimic that of a standard IRC client, make the protocol look like a few people talking, and change the channels you use, and it will become reasonably hard (albeight not impossible) to systematically identify these programs.
If I remember right, Napster originally was based off of the IRC idea as well. Unfortuately, IRC offers little anonymitity as to the source. An IRC server put in debug mode captures all the messages sent through it, and your connection IP is available to anyone online. We'll see how this one works. Hopefully we won't end up with a bunch of additional people flooding the system to take control of channels; IRC is overburdened with DoS attacks against servers already.
Chances are, that's it. Compile Linux's 2.4.0's PPPoE support (as a module or built-in) instead and a pppd patched to support it. I know people that ran into this, and this is the fix.
Umm... That's the 11 or 12 digit numbers. The 10 digit ones are just you having to type the area code on to all exisiting numbers, as well as new ones.
The old number (with area code) (234) 555-1212 would be dialed 2345551212, even if you were in the 234 area code before.
If you read the article, you will see that California was complaining about the fact that only half of the numbers were being used while phone companies requested new area codes. The reason for this should be obvious, but isn't.
When someone stops using a phone number, phone companies wait a significant amount of time before reassigning it. This is done to prevent people from dialing a new customer thinking they are the old one by accident. Statistics are often kept on how often a discontinued line is dialed. Once this rate falls below a certain mark, the number is flagged for reuse.
In addition, phone companies really do not like assigning similar numbers unless a company requests an exchange to themselves. If I was 555-1212 and you were 555-1213, the chances of your friends dialing me and vice versa goes up dramatically.
So which would you prefer? Dialing 10 digits, dialing new area codes for the town next door, or having phone numbers reused so quickly that you dial your friend's old number by accident only to find a stranger? When people misdial someone quite often, phone companies often allow the victim to switch their phone number *again* for free. This can be a pretty nasty loop.
Remember The Hornet Archive? It was a place where module music makers (remember those formats?) could post their music online. There was no profit made for the musicians, but it was a chance to be widely heard for free. Users of the Hornet Archive could either get the music online, or purchase CD-ROMs full of the songs, all without the registration mumbo-jumbo that too many modern sites have.
The closest thing I can think of to the Hornet Archive is Trax in Space. They also are a source of module music. Unfortunately, they have also gone the way of MP3.com and require registration.
We need a site that simply lets users upload and download their music, with a quick check done to make sure the works are original. It's as simple as that.
I would petition ibiblio or a similar site with lots of mirrors to do the task, but such a system with MP3s requires lots of bandwidth. I wish the Internet was back to the good old days again where everyone didn't want to know everything about you.
What I think is annoying everyone (but isn't mentioned outright yet) is that these (and many other) sites are blocked without a clear explanation of why they were blocked beyond a category heading. These category markings are not always accurate. An anonymizer is not a sex site, etc., (although it could be used to proxy one).
What censorware makers need to do is give a one or two sentance discription of what a site is/does *and* why they chose to block a site beyond the few bits needed to denote categories. In order to do this, they must have their teams revisit every site and have *real people* write these comments.
If they this, their databases likely would more than double in size. But at least consumers would know exactly why a site was blocked besides someone being checkbox happy...
If you want interesting censorware, try Antivirus! That's right - Antivirus comapanies sometimes decide to block sites using their Internet scanners. For instance, McAfee Antivirus' Internet scanner has two web sites blocked by IP address and name - one of which is Digicrime (Harmless, but will show you holes in your web browser!). Dr. Solomon's will say that the opening JAVA on this site is a virus, but it isn't (depending on your web browser, it might actually run *before* Dr. Solomon catches it). Norton AV ignores Digicrime entirely.
This just raises the question -- how do *you* really know what's on a web site? Could "censorware" be changing it? A major company could make their Internet software refuse to access their competitor's site, claiming to be protecting you. Or it might just change the content to something you never would imagine was wrong...
Sorry to spoil the party, but what is the anime crowd going to do in the United States when the DMCA is in full force, and they can not (legally) bypass region codes to view Japanese Anime?
Personally, I have imported compact audio discs from outside the US (including Japan). If these were DVD-audio disks, I likely would be unable to use them. Now granted, we were able to convince the powers-that-be that we wanted the real stuff once, but how often are we going to have to do this?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming that Canada uses the same television standard as at least one other country. Many manufactuers likely would consider it less expensive to put these chips in *all* of their televisions rather than making specialized additions for Canada.
As a case in point, consider newer automobiles which have their headlights on all the time. Only a few locations (all of Canada and the state of Florida I believe) require headlights to be on continuously. But instead of making specialized vehicles for these locations, automobile manufactuers added the feature to most if not all of their lineup. To consumers, having headlights on during the daytime is advertised as a "safety feature." You see dozens of these cars during a trip on any major roadway in the United States.
When one country accepts these televisions for their additional functions, it allows any other country that wants this technology to easily lap it up. Only the broadcast end of systems will need to be changed. It becomes real easy for someone to turn on things "at the flick of a switch" when the masses already have it in front of them.
(Personally, I believe parents should watch what their kids are doing, and not rely on any regulatory or industry body to do so. Rating and censoring products should only be used as tools, and parents must be able to disable these quickly should said products go astray from *their* beliefs, not the original rater's!)
Drexel (Philadelphia, PA USA) has a complete map of their wireless setup. It was started back in 1998, and is still being expanded today.
If reporting potential witness was indeed a real witness, and Connectix has indeed settled with Sony, what does it mean for bleem, which also is being sued by Sony for their Playstation(tm) emulator? What does it mean for all the other Playstation emulators out there (ePSXe [epsxe.com was down at last check], AdriPSX, etc.).
Face it; if someone thought they were going to lose in this case, they did not want to set precedent that would look good for the other side. By the other side letting them not setting a precedent, no ruling has been made.
So the next emulator to go on trial has nothing to cite from this case, and likely will drag out just as long as Sony v. Connectix has. In my personal view, the side that had the choice should have declined settlement, and they just should forced the completion of the case until a verdict or the other side resigned.
While I have no idea how long this link will last, here is the court schedule of Judge Legge, who was presiding over the case. Note that this week was supposed to mark the start of the jury trial. This just seems like someone wanted to run someone out of money until the last possible minute. I do not like this one bit.
As mentioned before, they are now checking if the application is "licensed." Since XMMS is not licensed with them, it no longer can access their database.
XMMS defaults to FreeDB, but in my experience CDDB has had a lot more of my discs than FreeDB does. So it's a shame I can no longer use it.
Times are going to be interesting; people will soon likely rewrite their CD database apps to allow users to arbitrarily specify the application's ID string. Lynx, wget and Konqueror already allow this when it comes to web pages. Gracenote's response to that behavior ought to be interesting.
The fundamental flaw I see with product activation schemes is when a company goes under. Unless they manage to make a "registration disabler" before they close, products installed after a company shuts its doors may never function.
I have yet to see a company mention how it plans to deal with this situation, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. Personal computers from the 1980s still work in my house; I see no reason for my current computer to fail due to non-installing software in 2020.
...in terms of load put on a network. When allowed after midnight at my university, ping times that used to be 40-60 ms over multiple T1's reach well over 2000ms with corrupted return packets.
Seriously though, everyone clueless is downloading as much as possible right now. This is as if someone has yelled "fire" in the middle of a crowded theater. I hate to see what will happen when the smoke actually appears, and everyone starts trampling all over each other in search of alternative solutions.
All right. So I'm supposed to read this "LICENSE" file that came with the program. But I'm an experienced Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever user. So I just type "./configure" followed by "make install". I haven't read the license for this program at all.
Granted, some programs do have "click-through" licenses, but most of these are non-GPL, and then few GPL ones that do show the license use Windows installers (one such program is the pre-compiled Gimp for Windows). If you expect me to hit "I agree" on your web page, I likely can find the file by browsing your FTP server directly. If I never reached the license agreement page on your web site in the first place, does it bind me?
It's like the legal print found at the bottom of most web pages under titles like "Terms of Use." Slashdot's parent, OSDN, has such a legal section. But given the headlines are on top of a page, who reads the legal stuff on the bottom?
Now IANAL, but I doubt the GPL nor most web sites' terms of use would hold up in court. You can not be bound to what you do not have to read.
Granted, having students run networking can be a good idea. I myself personally am a student in charge of five servers.
But having students run their own things is like a fox guarding a henhouse. I have to find students to help my run the network, which is not an easy task. Many of the people I have screened I found to be known hackers to other admins. Other students have come up to be asking for more access because they want to run IRC bots and other such items (which are prohibited by school policy). Meanwhile, I am constantly pressured by faculty to bring new students into the "inner circle." Many of these students know little more than HTML.
Can students run servers? The answer is most definitely yes. But I would not rush to give them root access, control over routing tables, or control over firewalls quite yet.
Sooner or later, someone will find a way to query these tags at a distance, or listen at a distance as another reader closer to these tags queries them. I would assume that such attacks would be similar to the so-called "tempest" attacks we talk about being conducted against computers.
A PBS special (I believe as part of Nova) showed a espionage expert watching a user type on a keyboard in an office complex across the street. He claimed he could have been a quarter mile away and still receive that data. This gives a potential watcher plenty of distance; they could mount such a watching device in the cable junction box on your street.
I would assume that 96-bits of data would be sent at a reasonably slow rate for accuracy, although likely slightly faster than that of a keyboard. Given that fact, I don't see how these devices would avoid remote detection against a determined party. While we may not have to worry about big brother or big business doing this to everyone, I worry that many private investigators likely will jump at the chance. "Wonder what your spouse is doing? Wonder no more..."
Granted, these could have some good uses as well. Combining existing at-the-door alarm systems with a database of which items were recently sold, and many thieves would just give up. But a permanent way to deactivate these tags after sale must be provided. The tag likely doesn't keep track of who has queried it.
People will just hand out their privacy given any percieved benefit, no matter how small. That's how all the quote-on-quote "spyware" companies survive - people either do not know about the side effects, or care.
Has anyone here actually looked at a web site privacy policy? They're pretty scary at times. "Basic usage information" can mean an awful lot - in fact, whatever someone can dream of.
I hate responding to my own story, but it is the *hardware* that doesn't support power management. Instead of your standard APM suite, they add frills I don't use. These include things such as BIOS-based remote diagnostics that can be run over a modem, and a boot menu choice that allows me to boot off a special partition to configure the RAID array (useless if the array fails, I might add). The *software* (operating system, etc.) can not enable something that the hardware can not do.
And yes, I realize that spinning hard drives down may be a very bad thing, but who says the CPU's can't be put into an idle mode? Even ethernet controllers nowadays have lower power modes they can go into while not actively transmitting.
salemnhpolice.com
Registrant:
Richard Slade (rslade@n2.com)
66 Millhaven Dr.
Concord, NH 03301
US
salemnhpolice.org
Registrant:
s***
Jack raoch (rammstein1979@beer.com)
2marybellowsdrive
salem, nh 03079
US
There are two high schools in my district. A student in my high school's marching band put up a page mocking the rival school's marching band. It wasn't anything serious (at least from the view of someone else attending said school).
When the school found out about it, he was forced to take the web site down, and got in-school suspension for a week. Granted, we didn't think it was a big deal, but the administration thought it went too far.
In Japan, they also are running out of power. To compensate, they literally are throwing solar panels on everyone's roof they can. These installations are done by the power company for free with the understanding that any excess electricity goes to their grid for free. Blocks upon blocks of houses have been equipped like this.
I wish I had a link to give out, but unfortunately I only know about this through seminars. Granted, solar panels are usually ugly (there are roof shingle versions, but they are expensive and output less power than the big ones), but would you rather be ugly with power, or beautiful without it?
The kernel per se is not monolithic; it has not been that way since 2.0 introduced the usage of modules. Many if not most drivers can be build as modules (although they can for the most part be complied directly into to the kernel as well). When properly designed, modules can be taken in and out of the system at will. So if you are not using your sound card, the system can remove its driver from memory, etc.... Drivers being provided with the Linux source code are more of a convinence issue than anything; many drivers actually are maintained independantly of the main Linux source code tree (should you need them).
If someone does not want you to have full access to their module's source, they can supply it as a module with a built-in symbol table. This also can be done if you do not want to recompile your modules for every new kernel. For the most part, these types of modules work within a kernel series (2.2.x, 2.4.x, etc.) So when you upgrade your kernel using modules with their symbols precompiled in, you *don't* necessarily have to recompile the module.
(Now IANAL, so please pardon me if I screwed something up here...)
One of the facets under common law is that if someone doesn't use something for ten years, does not show any significant effort to maintain it, and someone else does these actions instead independant of the owner, the latter person gains the right to use that property as they see fit without the ability for the original onwer to prohibit them from doing so. Typically this is used with tracts of land, but I suspect it could apply to other things.
Now this is not quite a transfer of ownership, but it still is something significant. The question then arises as to if the latter person can then give copies of the item to everyone. It's hard to say; I don't know any court precedent here. A court case like this would be interesting to see.
It just goes to show you that you can't block peer to peer filesharing without requiring end-to-end authentication for all Internet connections. Don't laugh; the MPAA/RIAA is probably working on this right now.
Change the CTCP (client to client protocol) VERSION response to mimic that of a standard IRC client, make the protocol look like a few people talking, and change the channels you use, and it will become reasonably hard (albeight not impossible) to systematically identify these programs.
If I remember right, Napster originally was based off of the IRC idea as well. Unfortuately, IRC offers little anonymitity as to the source. An IRC server put in debug mode captures all the messages sent through it, and your connection IP is available to anyone online. We'll see how this one works. Hopefully we won't end up with a bunch of additional people flooding the system to take control of channels; IRC is overburdened with DoS attacks against servers already.
Chances are, that's it. Compile Linux's 2.4.0's PPPoE support (as a module or built-in) instead and a pppd patched to support it. I know people that ran into this, and this is the fix.
Umm... That's the 11 or 12 digit numbers. The 10 digit ones are just you having to type the area code on to all exisiting numbers, as well as new ones.
The old number (with area code) (234) 555-1212 would be dialed 2345551212, even if you were in the 234 area code before.
If you read the article, you will see that California was complaining about the fact that only half of the numbers were being used while phone companies requested new area codes. The reason for this should be obvious, but isn't.
When someone stops using a phone number, phone companies wait a significant amount of time before reassigning it. This is done to prevent people from dialing a new customer thinking they are the old one by accident. Statistics are often kept on how often a discontinued line is dialed. Once this rate falls below a certain mark, the number is flagged for reuse.
In addition, phone companies really do not like assigning similar numbers unless a company requests an exchange to themselves. If I was 555-1212 and you were 555-1213, the chances of your friends dialing me and vice versa goes up dramatically.
So which would you prefer? Dialing 10 digits, dialing new area codes for the town next door, or having phone numbers reused so quickly that you dial your friend's old number by accident only to find a stranger? When people misdial someone quite often, phone companies often allow the victim to switch their phone number *again* for free. This can be a pretty nasty loop.
Remember The Hornet Archive? It was a place where module music makers (remember those formats?) could post their music online. There was no profit made for the musicians, but it was a chance to be widely heard for free. Users of the Hornet Archive could either get the music online, or purchase CD-ROMs full of the songs, all without the registration mumbo-jumbo that too many modern sites have.
The closest thing I can think of to the Hornet Archive is Trax in Space. They also are a source of module music. Unfortunately, they have also gone the way of MP3.com and require registration.
We need a site that simply lets users upload and download their music, with a quick check done to make sure the works are original. It's as simple as that.
I would petition ibiblio or a similar site with lots of mirrors to do the task, but such a system with MP3s requires lots of bandwidth. I wish the Internet was back to the good old days again where everyone didn't want to know everything about you.
... right now, anyway. Check out http://www.verisign.com/developer/index.html I believe each of those certificates are $400.00 US *per year*.
What I think is annoying everyone (but isn't mentioned outright yet) is that these (and many other) sites are blocked without a clear explanation of why they were blocked beyond a category heading. These category markings are not always accurate. An anonymizer is not a sex site, etc., (although it could be used to proxy one).
What censorware makers need to do is give a one or two sentance discription of what a site is/does *and* why they chose to block a site beyond the few bits needed to denote categories. In order to do this, they must have their teams revisit every site and have *real people* write these comments.
If they this, their databases likely would more than double in size. But at least consumers would know exactly why a site was blocked besides someone being checkbox happy...
If you want interesting censorware, try Antivirus! That's right - Antivirus comapanies sometimes decide to block sites using their Internet scanners. For instance, McAfee Antivirus' Internet scanner has two web sites blocked by IP address and name - one of which is Digicrime (Harmless, but will show you holes in your web browser!). Dr. Solomon's will say that the opening JAVA on this site is a virus, but it isn't (depending on your web browser, it might actually run *before* Dr. Solomon catches it). Norton AV ignores Digicrime entirely.
This just raises the question -- how do *you* really know what's on a web site? Could "censorware" be changing it? A major company could make their Internet software refuse to access their competitor's site, claiming to be protecting you. Or it might just change the content to something you never would imagine was wrong...
Sorry to spoil the party, but what is the anime crowd going to do in the United States when the DMCA is in full force, and they can not (legally) bypass region codes to view Japanese Anime?
Personally, I have imported compact audio discs from outside the US (including Japan). If these were DVD-audio disks, I likely would be unable to use them. Now granted, we were able to convince the powers-that-be that we wanted the real stuff once, but how often are we going to have to do this?