SmartFilter: Way Too Extreme

Another report on SmartFilter by Seth Finkelstein (here was last month's). He's written some software to decrypt the software's blacklist of forbidden sites, and has analyzed what he found. The list of blocked newsgroups is fascinating: sci.archaeology as occult, and comp.org.eff.talk as criminal, for example. He's found "extreme or obscene" sites like hotrails.com ("extreme sports" rollerblading on "naked metal"), gcsextreme.com (custom-built computers for the "extreme gamer," unfortunately at a domain name with both "sex" and "extreme" in it) and extreme-offroad.com (same deal). Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's Web site. Every one of these and many more are blocked as "Extreme," which puts them in the same category as photos of mutilated dead bodies, bizarre hard-core pornography and child pornography.

His discussion of the legal risks of decrypting these blacklists is fascinating too, and (as he likes to say) "a topic in itself." He would like to open up the source to his SmartFilter-decryption tool but feels the legal risk is too high. How sad is that?

Here's Secure Computing's definition of the "extreme" category, and the examples they give ("Pixman's Vault of Porn Pix", "Bizarre & Maximum Perversion").

You can confirm Seth's findings using Secure Computing's own SmartFilterWhere. It asks for your name and phone number; you have my permission to make some up. As of December 7, at 9:45 PM EST, that CGI operates with a Control List updated on December 5 and confirms all of Seth's results that I tried. By the time you read this, they may have quickly fixed all the errors he published, loaded in an up-to-the-minute Control List, and proudly announced that their software is now perfect.

Until the next report.

great for you.

you sound a lot like our politicians. They feel that this and that are bad for the public (Internet, driving w/o a seat-belt, music) and they also feel the need to push this bullshit on us.

Just because Marilyn Manson is weird and his music is not for your taste (along w/ICP) does NOT mean that a filter program needs to block it... There needs to be some sort of decency here. A filter pogram is not to be some fool's idea of what is wrong. It is what society in general believes... I think that this guy should be put into the mosh pit at an ICP show and see how much Faago they can squirt on his ass before he is pounded into the floor :)

Its always 'after dark' somewhere on the net

I hate censorship software and filters with a passion... My pet peeve is that they're becoming more and more common in Australian schools and other public places and, by default, enforce American moral standards on Australian kids. The two societies are similar, but not the same - a point which is lost on our politicians.

There is also the VERY large issue of the banned lists of sites including sites that:

a) in no way qualify as a danger to kids but have fallen foul of a keyword search. eg (large Aussie company Dick Smith Electronics - forced to refer to itself as DSE across its entire web site)

or
b) are listed as an act of spite by the companies providing the software.

with no public disclosure of who is on their lists nor any legal recourse for those companies who are there inadvertently.

HOWEVER, I am torn between my high moral standing on freedom of expression and my ability to decide what I can and can't access, and my desire to protect my kids from some of the very BAD parts of the Internet.

The fact is that if you take the lowest common denominator for the human race and halve it, you're guaranteed to the result lurking somewhere on the net.

Lets assume that I'm a conscientious parent with home computer set up in the full view of everyone. There are still times when I'm not going to be able to be there while my kids are surfing, or at a mates place with decidedly less supervision. Even good kids do stupid things.

Slashdot has, quite rightly, bagged a lot of this software right from the start. What we haven't done yet is come up some alternatives...

So... what are the solutions???

M@T

Re:Please tell me what's bad about this?

Please tell me what the danger is with commercial "censorship" software?

Product often has inflated and unrealistic claims made about it. (Effectivly the companies concerned lie about using people, when in fact they use search engines.) But as it's sofware it drops through loopholes in consumer protection laws.

In my mind, this type of thing should be encouraged, to give parents a tool to protect to their kids.

Maybe it it were to stay in that market. Rather than being pushed into the workplace, libraries and schools. Where different (sometimes radically different) filtering criteria make sense.

Yes, almost all filtering software currently available is next to useless, but it improves all the time, and may someday actually be a useful tool for parents to guide their children's exposure to 'controversial' material.

Exactly how are the products improving, they might have bigger black lists. But there are still the same quality problems. Let alone the fundermental issue that "contravesial" is a moving target and highly dependendant on such things as religious, political and ethnic orientations.

Re:great for you.

Well, these filters are marketed to parents who are trying to keep kids away from obscene material. Lesse. . . ICP has a song that deals with screwing corpses, and Manson will sing about screwing anything that will raise an eyebrow. Chumbawumba espouse anarchist philosophy, not of itself harmful but maybe not what six year olds are ready for. I have nothing against any of these bans on artistic grounds (I was a big Manson fan for a while in high school, actually), but their material is not quite what young 'uns are ready to be exposed to, from the point of view of a person interested in buying this software to use with young kids. These filters are a product, like any other. They target a market, and they tailor to that market. As such, blocking ICP and Manson are within reason. It's the stuff about blocking random computer and sports sites that are signs that the software is uninteligent, and people who wish to use it should think twice before buying it. Remember, this stuff is a product aimed at conservative and concerned parents, not a system of values that is going to be forced upon you unless someone does something boneheaded like force this garbage to be on all public systems. A filter program is exactly some fools idea of what is right and wrong. It is not a general view of society, and would be worthless if it were, because as I can tell there aren't many general consensuses available in society, except maybe "don't kill stuff that can talk, except maybe parrots". Filters are a product. We shouldn't elevate them to a status that they don't really have.

"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"

Re:Er -- so what?

Your kid comes to you, and says, "Dad, I want to read news:soc.support.youth.gay-lesbian-bi because I think I might be gay", and you say ...

Please also read the discussion about Federal legislation in this area, and legal risks for investigators.

Recursive Filtering

Here's what I see happening in the future (or maybe my idealized future):

One of these filtering progs starts scanning around for "obscene" material. It runs into itself, which, by nature contains "obscene" material, as this is what it is built to catch.

The filter prog filters itself.

This recursive paradox causes a huge explosion that destroys all filtering software.

Endgame.

Just One Question

Has any band, company, charity ever tried to sue a maker of filtering software for lost business due to an erroneous classification?

Perhaps a very LARGE class action suit could solve this problem.

phone number???

They ask for your phone number whenever you want to run their little search engine? Imagine if altavista asked you for your phone number every time you did a search. I'm really getting sick of seeing the word "phone" on internet forms. You know the only reason they are asking is to either try to sell you something or sell your phone number to somebody else trying to sell you something. Basically asking for your phone number is tantamount to asking for a run to the phone and a few minutes of your time, or wasting your employers money. I'm also sick of headhunters seeing my resume on dice.com, seeing it has no phone number but clearly has an email address, looking up my number and calling me. I think we need a movement to divorce all relationship of phone to internet.

Re:It's not really such a mystery....

It's the whole point of religion. "Those that believe are saved, everybody else is doomed".

Er, no, you're wrong. For example, the belief you cite is not a doctrine of the largest single Christian sect on Earth, the Roman Catholic Church (hasn't been since Vatican II). Nor is it a doctrine of Hinduism. Or Buddhism. And those three represent more than half of the religious believers on Earth.

So next time you feel like generalizing on what "all religion" is like, a grasp of actual religious doctrines would be useful to have first.

And before you start slamming into me, first note that I am also an atheist. However, I made sure I knew what I was rejecting first. You obviously didn't.

Chumbawumba

I think it's a little disturbing that Chumbawumba's site was banned, and not because it has anything to do with music, which it likely doesn't. More likely, it's due to the fact that Chumbawumba has extremely leftist views, something a lot of conservatives are obviously not comfortable with.
While I might not agree with all their politics, this is tantamount to banning Nader's site, or Buchanan's for that matter.
I honestly don't see any other reason for them to be lumped in with more 'shock' oriented artists like Marilyn Manson and ICP; they share little musically, or lyrically, or even in their videos. The one 'shocking' thing about Chumbawumba is the politics.
If this is the reason they're blocked, then someone please save me from the Information Retrieval Agency, because I'm a wee bit scared.

Censor Us! Our Poor Little Minds Can't Handle It!

It's one thing to censor the material you let your children access or your employees. That is understandable. Using a filter to achieve this is sensible (you're not going to do it all manually!).

The disgusting thing is that these companies inflict their own political and religious agendas on their own customers and nobody is the wiser.

The problem is that these companies say "Hey, we'll regulate ourselves -- no need for government involvement!" But they are not just regulating themselves, they are regulating the public.

At least when I go to see a movie, I know that the R rating isn't unfairly applied because the lead actor is a prolific democrat or republic or even a $cientologist. The only way to force these companies to behave ethically in their generation of lists and filters is to take every oppertunity to confront them in the most public means necessary and possibly to undermind, reverse engineer and defeat each package as quickly as they put them on the market.
---
seumas.com

You moron

Their music-critic skills need work too, as they block InsaneClownPosse.com, Tupac.com, Marilyn Manson, and even Chumbawamba's website.
No, I think their music critic skills are spot on perfect.
--Shoeboy

Re:Recursive Filtering

Oddly enough, N2H2's "Bess" censoring system allows users to submit sites for "approval", at which point they're immediatly blacklisted. (Any site that ONE user finds offense must be offensive to EVERYBODY, right?)

Imagine my suprise when a friend of mine submitted the N2H2 site for approval, and the web site that allows people to purchase the censoring service suddenly become rated "Obscene" for about 24 hours. :p

To paraphrase The Onion...

I'm torn between a deep hatred of censorship and an equally deep hatred of Marilyn Manson.

--

Slahdot, "Smart"Filter, and Work

I work on a military installation that uses SmartFilter to prevent access to sites on it's blacklist. Imagine my surprise Monday morning when trying to get my daily dose of Slashdot to find out that this site is listed as being unaccessable because it is a "chat" site.
I'm sure someone will remark that Slashdot could not possibly be considered as a work related site, therefore the military is justified in blocking it. That maybe true, but as a systems administrator there are several sites that I normally frequent to find out what crackers are up to. I cannot access these sites at work (since SmartFilter blocks them) and must do so at home to keep abreast of news on the computer security front.
"Smart"Filter and all the other packages that pretend to "protect" people from the "evils" of the internet only end up restricting access to many of the sites admins/programmers/techies access to do their jobs. When will the companies that produce these pieces of crap realize that they are selling parents and companies pipe dreams that they can block out the undesirable aspects of the net? It is far more effective for parents to spend time with their kids surfing the net and helping them avoid areas they want to be off limits. Most companies have clear policies about what is considered acceptable usage; employees who violate those rules should be dealt with as the company sees fit.

Re:great for you.

Chumbawumba espouse anarchist philosophy, not of itself harmful but maybe not what six year olds are ready for.

Oh well, that's alright then. As long as it's only political censorship.

They AREN'T changed, the form is *DUMB*

Type in as:
http://www.insaneclownposse.com
http://www.gcsextreme.com
http://www.extreme-offroad.com

If you don't type that EXACTLY (http and www,
not case-sensitive), you will get a misleading result

Re:great for you.

Will parents install it? yes.

No. Smartfilter is priced in the thousands per year range. It gets installed by institutions and corporations in a proxy, then the entire company is forced through the proxy. I know -- I installed it in a previous job. Of course, if I knew what was in this report, I'd have been more hesitant.


...phil

Re:Please tell me what's bad about this?

How long a list would you like? What's bad about this is:

• Censorware vendors are misrepresenting the capabilities of their products. They claim it does something which it does not. They claim it doesn't unfairly block material when clearly it does.
• It is installed on firewalls and other up-stream systems such that the end-user doesn't get a say about the level of blocking. This is almost never appropriate, and sure to bite you in the butt in unforseeable and inopportune ways.
• If you attempt to point out the flaws in their products, the censorware vendors will attempt to sue you for violation of some imaginary intellectual "property" (trade secrets), or for violating the license "agreement". Even if you prevail in court, you're still out thousands of dollars in legal fees defending against what is nothing more than an act of harassment.
• Censorware blocklists belie a socio-political agenda, almost always closely allied with extremist religious factions. Sites discussing secular humanism, gay/lesbian issues, family planning/birth control, or any of the other extremist's hot-button issues are summarily blocked, and then they deceive you about the reason they're blocked. (Particularly incriminating of their lack of intellectual honesty is how they consistently block sites critical of their own product.)
• There is no conclusive evidence that uncontrolled access to Internet content -- or, indeed, any kind of content -- is going to irreversibly "damage" anyone. Thus, the fundamental assumption that censorware is needed at all may well be flawed.

I'm not interested in denying people the right to make a choice about whether to install censorware or not. Individuals can make whatever choice they want about whatever level of brokenness they're willing to live with. But in order to make that choice intelligently, they need to be truthfully informed of what this stuff really does. So far, that's not happening to the degree it needs to.

Schwab

#1 Reason Why Filters Suck:

Search Results:
SmartFilterWhere confirms that the URL(s) you have entered are currently listed in the following SmartFilter Control List Categories shown below.

http://goatse.cx NOT LISTED

Block extream sports sites, but allow goatse.cx? Did a troll write this list? :p

Legal risks

Jamie writes:

His discussion of the legal risks of decrypting these blacklists is fascinating too, and (as he likes to say) "a topic in itself." He would like to open up the source to his SmartFilter-decryption tool but feels the legal risk is too high. How sad is that?

IAAL, and to me, this is the more important part of the piece. He's written a tool which arguably is legal because of the LOC exemption for censorware research to the DMCA anti-circumvention provision, but (understandably) he's reluctant to distribute it, allowing for a more full analysis of SmartFilter's flaws, because there is no similar exemption for distribution of anti-circumvention tools.

We here on Slashdot have seen tons of stories on the flaws of censorware, but the message is one still not gotten by much of the media or the general public. A truly exhaustive analysis of SmartFilter or other censorware products would help, but LOC's "half a loaf" exemption prevents that from happening without some reasonable fear of legal risk.

It's not really such a mystery....

as to why they block things like sci.archaeology, is it? Remember that almost all censorware out there has a Christian Fundie slant, and it's easy to see that if junior discovers archaeology then dinosaurs, biology and evolution are next, and then from there you'd might as well write him off as another anti-creationism devil worshiping Darwinist!

Re:It's not really such a mystery....

Christian Fundie slant? How does your slant explain this?

news:soc.religion.christian - "Christianity and related topics." blacklisted Cult/Occult
news:soc.religion.christian.bible-study - "Examining the Holy Bible." blacklisted Cult/Occult
news:soc.religion.christian.promisekeepers - "The Christian group Promise Keepers." blacklisted Cult/Occult
news:soc.religion.christian.youth-work - "Christians working with young people." blacklisted Cult/Occult

I have a better explanation: All around, in every direction, censorship sucks!