Small Victory In The Filter Wars

latcarf writes: "The article here reports what happened in the American heartland when a councilman raised a fuss over filtering at the local public library. In this case, the forces of reason prevailed because the library had policies and procedures for casual monitoring of internet use and because the librarian, who had to defend the rejection of filters, was well informed. While the article doesn't say it, the librarian's information about the problems with filters came, in no small part, from SlashDot discussions. This is just another example of Slashdot's important contribution to the social discourse." Heh. I don't know what the poster is basing his statement on, but it sure would be nice to think the information in places like Slashdot, Peacefire and censorware.org was useful in this particular case.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It is scary to think slashdot may be having an impact on how officials think. And cool.

That rules

[ToastyKen]

If only that poster had a source for /.'s involvement, this would be worthy of the front page. :)

Redefine the "Slashdot effect"?

[dlc]

• While the article doesn't say it, the librarian's information about the problems with filters came, in no small part, from SlashDot discussions

This is interesting, but not really surprising. Slashdot, as a community (without counting the trolls), makes up a significant part of the technical population. Slashdot readers, on the whole, tend to be well educated, informed, and concerned. When a story gets over 500 comments, with 200+ moderated to 2 or higher, chances are pretty good that there is going to be some pretty insightful (legitimately insightful, not "+1 Insightful") stuff in there. There are few ways that are better to get public opinion than a peer-reviewed, peer-moderated community forum.

For officials to take the time to read a public forum, like Slashdot, not only shows some enlightenment on the part of that official, but also shows that democracy does work -- public forums such as slashdot, Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org], and others, are the vox populi, even ones that are not "officially" sanctioned.

darren

Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

Hello? What about privacy?

[gbnewby]

From the article: "We're not standing there watching the screens, but there are people always at the staff desk," Fredine said. "We're there to help people, but in that process, we obviously have to know what is on that screen."

What the librarian is saying is that there is absolutely no privacy - they keep a casual eye on whatever a patron happens to be doing at the computer.

Think about it. This is like someone wandering around after you in the library, monitoring what books you're interested in. This is a crummy policy. Most libraries have policies that are quite different - specifically saying they do NOT monitor and will NOT give out any identifying information about what people are doing with the Internet.

You can come up with your own ideas about the risks of having a easily visible screen on your Internet terminal (even if you're not doing anything questionable). Or, if you want some help, check out my paper: Information Security in Libraries [unc.edu] (sorry, it's in RTF format so you need to download and convert).

• Greg (teaches librarians [unc.edu] in the gentle arts of geekdom)

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion