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Censorship Your Rights Online

Internet Filter Plan Hits Snag 127

Posted by jamie from the egg-on-the-face dept.
Censorware in public institutions? Congress is pushing for it, but the current bill has a surprising opponent: at least one of the censorware makers. A major-brand corporate V.P. is quoted in a recent AP story as saying: "Things that mandate specific technologies probably aren't the best solution here. Let the free market decide...." But the interesting technical story here is yet another statistical analysis by Peacefire. They looked at five popular packages and showed that for every ten appropriately-blocked domain name, there were anywhere from four to forty domain names just randomly censored. Ouch.
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Internet Filter Plan Hits Snag More

Internet Filter Plan Hits Snag

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  • Yes, boys and girls, there is an easy way to filter out the worst filth on the internet, a way to rid yourself of all the "steve case ate my balls" homepages and 99% of all the sick, gay, goat and kiddie porn out there.

    Are you ready for it?


    Ban everything under geocities. Duh. Any stupid troll could have figured that one out.



    Kris
    botboy60@hotmail.com
    Nerdnetwork.net [nerdnetwork.net]
  • I doubt there are any sites that "randomly censored". Maybe inexplicably censored, or unintentionally censored, or inadvertantly censored, or even extraneouslyy or gratuitiutously censored.

    Censoring sites randomly would be pretty hard to code given the number of potential URLs. I guess of course you could do it by IP number, but what would be the point.

  • Re:Peacefire Analysis (Score:5)

    by mooredav ( 101800 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:23PM (#682351)

    Wouldn't it make sense to also consider the percentage of unblocked pornographic sites?

    I asked Bennett Haselton (of Peacefire [peacefire.org]) the same question. He replied by mail (8/5/2000):

    Bennett Haselton wrote:

    The information is not intended to persuade people who support censorship because by that age people generally don't change their mind anyway. The information is to help people such as librarians who are embattled in their local community because they don't censor Internet access on their computers.

    If we focus on the fact that blocking software doesn't block enough pornography, then we're betraying our cause because part of the point of what we're doing is that pornography is not harmful. Now, how do you persuade people to believe *that*, if they already have formed the belief that porn is harmful? I don't think you can, which is why we have the censorware-disabling instructions on our site; you can't reason with parents not to use the software, so we can at least give people a means to get around it...

    -Bennett

    In fact, judges typically decide court cases because of what is wrongfully blocked, rather than because not enough material was censored.

    (PS: Sorry for posting private email, but I think that Bennett would approve)

  • Problems: too US-centric, and too difficult to police. If J Random 1337 w4r3z d00d (a resident of, say, the UK) puts up his '1337 warez site complete with the standard porn banners, but puts meta tags up saying it's rated the same as the Teletubbies site, who can stop him? Do you then go the route of Australia and tell all the ISPs in the US to block certain websites? I suppose it would be a solution to this problem [satirewire.com].

    Even when they're in the US, you're still going to have to track them down, etc; if their pages are hosted outside the US, tough bikkies.

    --
  • Filtering/blocking based on Domain names is fatally flawed.

    That's why there are software like Internet Junkbuster [junkbuster.com], or Guidescope [guidescope.com].
    No matter what the domain name is, it's still blocks ads. (Oh, hello /. admin... sorry for blocking your ads :P)

    So, the same thing can be used to block porn sites. (Ok, at least Junkbuster will try to block every domain's ads. Don't know about Guidescope...)
    ---
  • Sadly they block even many GNU projects. This is not fun and games anymore.... luckily I found a GOOD solid way to bypass bess. I fear documenting it, since it may lead to a fix. So I just won't.... but there are ways around bess's filtering mechanisms.

  • Peacefire stats (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One important omission that Peacefire has historically made time and again is to ignore the differences between Web servers dedicated to a single Web site and those that serve up multiple Web sites for multiple domains from a single host (so-called "virtual hosts," as Apache refers to them). It is possible for a Web server to have, say, both a pr0n site and a neighborhood church site on the same server--different domain names, but same IP address. It is not uncommon for Web filters to make the error of blocking both sites in such a case, because of the difficulty in determining whether or not a single Web server handles multiple "virtual" sites. The ability, or inability, to resolve this kind of problem is an important distinguishing performance factor for evaluating Web filters, but Peacefire and its cheerleaders seem to prefer glossing over such complications because it makes it easier for them to draw colorful, simplistic, haha-aren't-those-big-bad-censors-stupid conclusions. (Yes, I know, it's not in Peacefire's best interests to be fair about such analyses anyway.)
  • The problem is that little Jimmy is more likely to understand the technology than said parent, and be able to either bypass it, or steer his parent's ISP-choosing towards one which doesn't do this.

    --

  • The funny thing about censorship... (Score:4)

    by brianvan ( 42539 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:33PM (#682357)
    ... is that it's never a mistake to censor anything that doesn't deserve it.

    Those who fight for censorship ultimately claim that it's for the good of society to prevent certain information from seeing the light of day. The main fallacy behind that line of thinking is the idea that information can harm people, directly or indirectly - when in truth, information is just the composition of ideas and thoughts, while it's MOTIVATION and FEELINGS that actually cause harm and discomfort.

    Anyway, you could reason that censorship advocates hold no value for the information that they want to be censored. This means that there IS a set of information that they consider to have value, because they at the very least have to have thoughts and ideas that motivate them to feel that other thoughts and ideas are bad.

    One ugly result of this logic is that censorship advocates are motivated to tell you what you can't have available, but are equally motivated to have control over information and communication systems so that what you ONLY see is the information that they consider valuable. Not all censorship advocates directly feel this way, but if they thought this deep about it, they'd come to this conclusion. Luckily, the Internet is under no such threat of control overall...

    My main point: With this logic, if non-offensive information is censored unfairly, that's okay. Why? Censorship advocates discriminately consider a certain set of information valuable. By definition, it has to be in the set of information that they know and have learned already. So the set of information that they consider as value-less includes the entire set of information that they are unfamiliar with. Therefore anything they don't know about is worthy of censorship. If a website that they do not know about happens to be censored, there is absolutely no problem in that; strangely, if information that they value happens to be censored, they're enraged when they find out - but until they find out, or if they don't find out, then it's not possible for it to be a problem, because what they don't know has no value to them.

    On the other hand, if you don't selectively discriminate among groupings of ideas and thoughts, then all information possibly holds some value - and none of it should be censored. This is what we like to call freedom...

    This you should not forget, however: You can't control or affect other people's motivation and feelings without altering their frame of reference - their entire collection of knowledge and information. And you can't control or affect other people's actions without imprisoning them or altering their motivations and feelings. If you do not pay attention to the spread of information, you leave everything to chaos theory. Sanity issues aside, people in general will not infringe on the basic civil rights of others if they are correctly guided through our collection of human knowledge. In the end, we do need to make sure that information is presented properly for all human beings to maintain order on this planet... otherwise you WILL have suicide bombings and 4-year olds getting upset at pictures of naked women. It's just that discriminately preventing information from being presented to certain people is not fair to those people, not the proper way to share information, and certainly not a foolproof way to prevent anyone from having misguided ideas, thoughts, motivations, feelings, and actions. (Columbine HS being the most tragic and convincing argument of this)
  • Well, at least stuffing the site in the category 'Hacking' makes some sense (After all, one of the things that Peacefire does is post instructions on how to circumvent these filters.) It's certainly better than the blanket all-categories filter that most of the programs seem to do to peacefire. (Of course, I suppose that this program may do the same thing if the admin lifts the restriction on the hacking category. Does anyone know?)
  • Ethics and moral are good. If you have enough money to technically afford them. Lots of them... Democracy is much more economical. This may be too picky but... how are you comparing ethics and morals to democrarcy? Ethics and morals are concepts of how we should act and democracy is a form of government. Seems to me the three can coexist quite nicely. Now I just have to figure out why you need money to have ethics and morals.
  • This solution might work if:
    (a) the 3 filtering packages were all 'nearly correct'.
    (b) they had completely independent heuristics.

    As an (extreme) example, if 3 filter programs each blocked a ramdom 20% (1/5) of sites (I'm not saying that they do), this approeach would block an effectively random 10% (13/125) of sites.

    My guess is that with this approach (based on what I've heard about the current filters) is you'd hardly get anything blocked except for anti-censorware sites like Peacefire, or where they have common heuristics (like anything with the word 'breast'). Still worse than useless.
  • Instead of talking about the internet in libraries, how about talk about bringing the libraries online!!!!

    You won't even have to go to a library anymore! You would be able to access ALL the books without paying, from anywhere in the world!! woohoo capitalism! way to go government! talk about some spending cuts!!!

  • While I'm not comfortable with the idea of censorship, I wonder if segregating all the porn sites into one Top Level Domain (.sex, .xxx, .eros, whatever) would be enough so that those who want to can "filter" out all sex. domains.

    This concept would be the cyberspace equivalent to a red light district in meatspace.

    The hard part would be policing the conversion of www.mysexsite.com to www.mysexsite.sex. And who pays for this conversion...

    I'm just wondering if there are any effective content filtering solutions out there that would really work at keeping out the porn but allowing "socially approved" versions of sexually related content (e.g. sexual dysfunction support groups, sexual health, etc.)

  • And the stock answer: You don't enforce it. You just set it up, and say that the same organization cannot own the .xxx and a .com, .net, or other variation (Although they will be allowed to move to the .xxx domain for free, and the .com can be forwarded there for a little while.) Ten to one, most porn sites will jump at the chance, because if you're not in the .xxx domain, porn surfers won't go there.

    There will be a few holdouts, of course, but few enough that doing it by hand will be doable. What's left are the geocities spammers and so forth ... but from my observations, they tend to last about 3 minutes and carry no porn anyway. Also, of course, sites that their owners don't consider to be porn ... if someone wants to make the judgement call that those should be censored as well, then they can invest in a censorware product, but it seems that if it's that questionable, then the sites should be available at the library, etc.

    You will have a few left getting through, but the number of wrongfully blocked sites will hopefully be dropped down to nearly nil. It seems to me that this doesn't really offer any drawbacks from the current system, and could be beneficial. So why not try it?

  • Bah. Since when can the U.S. gov't mandate legal policy in foreign countries? Even if (and its a HUGE if- it were *possible* to enforce this technically, (which it isn't), do you really think all those fortune 500 companies that make up all the special interests groups would be delighted to spend $$$$$$$ to refurbish all their web properties? Never happen.
  • Most browers keep a history. Why don't the parents just check the history every few days to see what the kids have been looking at? Sure the kid could delete the history but make that part of the computer use rules. Delete the history, no more computer use for little Johnny. My biggest concern with the censorship issue is that the government is trying to do the parents job. Parents have an obligation to control what their kids are exposed too. Lazy parents want the government to do it for them.
    Now this doesn't deal with filtering software in schools and libraries. So, why doesn't each institution decide on their own what solution is best for them. Ideally hire someone to monitor the lab. They don't even have to be that attentive. It's gonna take a lot of balls to look up porn when the lab monitor could stroll by to see what youre doing at any minute
  • If I ran a censorware company, I wouldn't want government meddling in this area either. Before long, they'd be mandating standards, examining results, holding hearings, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It's not too much of a stretch to see some agency deciding that it's their duty to the people to regulate the censorware makers to assure that they're doing an adequate job, and to punish those who don't measure up.
  • What about making the porn sites get rated here: RSAC [icra.org]?

    Would that work better than word based filters?

    --
  • So I loaded in the first "falsly blocked" site on their list (celebrity.com) and checked it out. It has a bunch of pictures of different celebrities, in a somewhat porn-site like format, but no actual nudity.

    That's odd that you say the above, since when I just checked celebrity.com, there was definitely substantial nudity there, from the first banner ad onwards. If you don't believe me, follow any of the links from this page [celebrity.com] on their site.

  • Re:The Answer is VERY Simple (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Server1: syn port 1433, Hi, you awake?
    Server2: syn ack, Yep.
    Server1: ack, Oh good.
    Server2: Won't you login?
    Server1: Don't mind if I do!
    Server2: Got a user name?
    Server1: sa
    Server2: Password?
    Server1: blank
    Server2: Okey-dokey
    Server1: Your admin is an mcse, isn't he?
    Server2: Why yes, how did you guess?

    The CIA won't be pissed that you just took down their sql server, will they? After all, it invited you!
  • >How many libraries ever carried issues of Hustler in their magazine rack anyway?

    the library I always went to as a kid used to carry some porn.. a dutch library (ofcourse... ;)

    //rdj
  • Actually, that site is a-celebrity.com, I know this because I went to celebrity.com and it was clearly porn. Not bad I might add. But I was in search of some backgrounds. So I found the page you were talking about and the correct address is a-celebrity.com and there were some nice backgrounds there, found a new one for xdm. thanks
    a-celebrity.com would be blocked under the Lingerie setting, as an earlier poster said. A couple of clicks gave me this: Alyssa-Milano [a-celebrity.com] - certainly a nice piccy, and definitely not pr0n, but it falls inside the list of subjects that were requested to be blocked...
    --
  • I did spot checks on 4 different domains; none of them were in the least way blockable (promotional sites for various normal products.)

    I'll agree that a-celebrity.com [a-celebrity.com] is in the lingerie category and that this is an error from Peacefire; however, I think sniping on Slashdot after checking one data point just isn't good enough. I won't even talk about the voteups...

    Eivind.

  • Censorware only really works on static sites, like political ones.... Free speech ones...

    Very true. For example, I can't get to the Peacefire statistical analysis -- it's blocked by our corporate Cyber Patrol filter :-( The interesting thing is, that after looking at Cyber Patrol's 12 categories [surfcontrol.com] under which a site may be blocked, I can't see that Peacefire falls into any of them...

  • Re:Really...? (Score:3)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Tuesday October 24, 2000 @02:24AM (#682374) Homepage
    ...for example, consider the following snippet from SurfWatch's "about" page [surfwatch.com]:

    SurfWatch adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find.

    Compare this to the tag line above Google [google.com]'s search box:

    Search 1,247,340,000 web pages

    For argument's sake, let's say that a scant 1% of the internet is home to "objectionable" material worth adding to a filtering database. Though the real figure is undoubtedly higher than this, it'll be a good starting point for the purposes of this excercise.

    Now, assuming both groups are telling the truth in the above blurbs, in order for SurfWatch to have 100% of the objectionable web content checked and indexed, it would have taken them 31,183 days, or approximately 85 years, to cover 100% of objectionable web sites at their current rate of roughly 400 new sites per day.

    This strikes me as a somewhat problematic figure, as at this early stage in the history of computing (circa 1915,) the Internet was pretty much restricted to an elite group of individuals and organizations who owned or had access to one of the zero computers in existence.

    Now, I guess, the only question is whether Google or SurfWatch is lying...

  • This is one of the problems with letting machines decide what should be filtered. The machine may filter out all "sex" sites -- including sites concerned with biology, like animal and plant reproduction.

    True, but the problems reported by the Peacefire study are far worse than that. For example: Cyber Patrol was tested using their "Partial Nudity," "Full Nudity," and "Sexual Acts/Text" filters turned on (and no other filters). Among the sites blocked: an attorney's site (http://www.a-attorney-virginia.com) [a-attorney-virginia.com], and a home inspection company (http://www.a-actionhomeinspection.com) [a-actionho...ection.com].

    If this is the type of gaffe we can expect for selecting sites which contain nudity or sexual content, what can we expect for other categories which are more nebulous, like "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling?"

    By the way: Peacefire does link to Cyber Patrol's category definitions [surfcontrol.com] in their analysis of that product. I picked them because they had a high error rate which was pretty illustrative of the problem, but there were several other products reviewed with similar error rates.

  • ; however, I think sniping on Slashdot after checking one data point just isn't good enough.

    Good enough for what?

    Good enough to declare the entire thing a sham? no, of course not.

    Good enough to be concerned about peacefires actions? When they are calling other people liars and claiming that there were no "borderline" cases in those they declared "falsely blocked", yeah it is.

    Good enough to make a comment on /. encouraging a more skeptical view of Peacefires "studies" than had currently been given? You bet your ass.

    I made it perfectly clear that I was commenting only on the one page, but that it was the only page I had checked. I also made it clear that I did not have time to sit around cutting and pasting all the sites (why didn't they include links, anyway?) but that I wanted t give a heads up to anyone who wanted to investigate the investigators.

    I would note that in many cases, a single example out of many investigated has been enough to discredit any filterware arround here. I find nothing inapropriate about people finding a single example that only seeks to call peacefire into question interesting.

    -Kahuna Burger

  • censored (Score:3)

    by danboy ( 48146 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @11:59AM (#682377) Homepage
    while trying to access the survey from inside our corprate intranet i got this FORBIDDEN by rating check You naughty person. Shame on you.

    You are not permitted to access the URL http://www.peacefire.org/error-rates/ due to the policies established by !@#@!#.
    The following list defines content that is deemed inappropriate use of !#@##@!;'s internet connection:

    Nudity
    Gross Depictions
    Militant/Extremist
    Questionable/Illegal/Gambling
    Racism/Ethnic Impropriety
    Satanic/Cult
    Sexual Acts
    Violence/Profanity

    If this is an error, and visiting this site is neccessary to perform your job, then you should contact the IT Department Manager.
    (And we take back calling you naughty, too.)the ^##$##$ is where i blocked out the company's name. made me bust out laughing at my cube though.

  • What about sites on Tantric Hinduism?
  • Maybe these companies should be thinking twice about basing a business on trying to create software to do a task that, as you've just pointed out, is pretty hopeless (all issues of whether it's a good idea or not aside).

    And they should definitely be thinking twice before making claims about personally checking each URL which can easily be demonstrated to be false.

    [TMB]
  • Of course looking at false negatives (not blocking a site that does containt porn) would be useful, but that is a time consuming analysis. It would require a Peacefire worker to look at each of the nearly 1000 unblocked sites and determine if they contained porn.

    The review they did is pretty easy. The only had to review the 5-50 sites that were actually blocked.

    False negatives obviously occur, because SurfWatch accurately blocked 9 sites while CyberPatrol only accurately blocked 4 sites from the same list.

    So yes, statistics can be used to show anything they want, and in this case they wanted to show the number of false positives in 1000 domains, and they did just that.

  • I notice that in the Peacefire comparison, the only number they consider is (# of non-pornographic sites blocked)/(total # of sites blocked), i.e. the number of false positives

    They use this statistic because it is the only one which is possible to obtain. To get the number of sites which should be blocked but aren't would require knowing where every single pr0n site on the internet is, which is completely unfeasible.
    ------------------
    A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
  • So if the concern is that for any given access control package a certain number of sites may be blocked which should not be, why not use a proxy which has say, 3 of these packages loaded up on it. Certainly each package probably has mistakes in its resolution routine, but the odds of an perfectly innocent site being mistakenly blocked in 3 different packages seems rare. 2 out of 3 say OK and you are in....

  • Re:Really...? (Score:3)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <[gro.hsikcah] [ta] [todhsals-muiriled]> on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:03PM (#682383)
    I mean ... short of hiring a full-time staff that exclusively surfs through the entire web

    Many of these companies claim that the blocked sites are individually reviewed by human staff. One of the points of the Peacefire analysis was that these claims are false (and as you imply, they're pretty ludicrous claims to make in the first place).
  • Virtual hosts are really common, and have been for as long as these censorware companies have existed. So, yeah, if the censorware can't deal with virtual hosts, AREN'T those big bad censors stupid?

  • The ability, or inability, to resolve this kind of problem is an important distinguishing performance factor for evaluating Web filters, but Peacefire and its cheerleaders seem to prefer glossing over such complications because it makes it easier for them to draw colorful, simplistic, haha-aren't-those-big-bad-censors-stupid conclusions. (Yes, I know, it's not in Peacefire's best interests to be fair about such analyses anyway.)

    Ugh, let me answer this troll. You don't need the data to know that the filters are bad. As someone who knows a fair amount about AI (Artificial Intelligence) it's obvious to me that censorware claims promise more than the best AI currently available, but use the stupidest algorithms (keyword match, flesh-tone counting, etc.). The only decent tactic is a human-picked access control list, but a few people simply can't censor the entire net. Even then, human-picked lists have their own problems because they tend to be politically motivated and impractical (which is possible since the blocking strategies are secret).

    Therefore, it should be obvious that Peacefire doesn't need to make up any data. They should have an ample supply of true facts to work with. Contrast this to the exhorbitant claims of the censorware vendors (CyberSitter: "Guaranteed to block over 97% of all objectionable content!")

  • Me too! aren't they the best?
  • If you are concerned about censorware sneaking through Congress because the general population is uninformed about the hazards, you should go visit the linked story (or a similar story running now on CNN.com). AP and CNN are businesses, if a story gets a lot of traffic, they will print more like it. Nothing better than co-opting really mass-market media to spread your message.
  • Wouldn't it make sense to also consider the percentage of unblocked pornographic sites?

    Not really. Hmm, yes and no. One of Peacefire's arguments against filters is that it is technologically unfeasible to implement an accurate and effective filter. Given the size of the Internet and the state of AI used to apply filters this is true.

    This argument consists of 2 sections:

    • there are way more porn sites in existance than are blocked, and more are on the way all the time (size of the Internet)
    • there are too many sites falsely blocked (false positives) (state of AI technology)

    This little piece of analysis addresses the second point. It's just easier. To prove the first you need to find all the porn sites then see which ones aren't blocked. If dozens of filter companies with millions of dollars of resources can't do it, Peacefire ceratinly can't. And of course you can't estimate the size of porn Internet in relation to the entire Internet (the size of which is more or less known or can be estimated reliably). It's like proving a negative, it has to be exhaustive.

  • Politicians trying to get the vote of the moral majority. Conservative parents want their children protected from the "evils" of the internet, no matter what the cost. People tend to forget that children are not the only ones using the internet at libraries. What about college students? What happens when someone without access to the internet in their home needs to do research on breast cancer? the Holocaust? religious cults?

    Politicians have to cater to those people that vote. And since the "moral majority" and the like always turn out in huge numbers to vote, they're important. The less the people that disagree with them vote, the more important they become.

    If young people voted in higher numbers than old conservative types, young people would be more likely to be catered to.
    ---
  • 1: Some may know this phrase: "If Mohamed doesn't get to the mountain then the mountain comes to Mohamed." That is the first historical record of the existence of the Internet...

    Uhm, no, the quote was supposed to show that even great men like Mohammed are humble. It reads 'if the mountain does not come to mohammed, then mohammed will come to the mountain'.

    As to how this is supposed to be the internet is totally beyond me...

  • For the record, I would apply for that job. Surfing for porn, sounds like my life already.
  • Two wrongs don't make a right.

    Two (or 3 or 4) broken software packages put together don't make one good one.

  • oops. I accidentally moderated this down. I'll reply to cancel.

  • Proxy (Score:2)

    by curril ( 42335 )
    The following akamaitech links should get around that little problem, with the added bonus that akamaitech won't be blocked completely anytime soon.

    http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.peacefire.o rg/ [akamaitech.net]
    http://a123.g.akamaitech.net/7/123/21/000/www.peac efire.org/ [akamaitech.net]

  • Libraries have always been "censored" - there has never been a library that has carried every single book & periodical in existence, so I don't see any moral mandate for a library to allow for unlimited internet access.

    Every time a librarian chooses to purchase or not purchase a book, they're engaging in "censorship". How many libraries ever carried issues of Hustler in their magazine rack anyway?

    What is the matter with this proposal: Blocking software is installed in a library, perhaps even one with a high degree of false positives. If a site happens to be blocked, a patron would come up to the librarian and request that the site be enabled. The librarian would check the site from their desk workstation, and if it was deemed appropriate, the block would be lifted. This is essentially the role librarians have always had: organizers & diseminators of information.

    The only condition would be that blocking software operates by allowing selective enabling rules to override the built-in rules. I assume most have this feature; not being a user of the software I don't know the details.
  • The library in question could have easily filtered this out -- by NOT FACING THE COMPUTERS TOWARD A WALL to allow the 'net users as much privacy as they had. (Of course, they could have popped over to the photographic arts section and found a book that was probably just as thrilling.)

    I think this is a lousy idea. What if the person is looking for information on HIV, human sexuality, non-Christian religions or something else that might subject them to public ridicule or ostracism?

    Why not just publish a monthly list of all books checked out from the public library, including the identity of the borrowers.

  • If you checked sources then you may find a curious fact that both proverbs exist and for quite long. "the mountain will come to Mohamed" is somehow a way to say that even if one does not wish to achieve a fate then the fate will forcefully achieve you. As you may know the Prophet did not want to accept the role that was given to him. However, in time, he understood that he had to do it. No matter the hardships and barriers in front of him. It is still a question to consider if he did go to mountain Arafat or montain Arafat reached him...

  • The Old Mentality and the Sea (Score:3)

    by resistant ( 221968 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @03:46PM (#682398) Homepage Journal

    [...], filtering based on domain names is incredibly simple to bypass. [...] Just open up a dos box, ping the host, and it will give you the IP address. Put the IP address in the address bar in your browser, and you're there.

    Look for censorware to block these IP addresses as well, as soon as someone at one of these censorware companies walks into a wall hard enough that he accidentally and temporarily has some sense knocked into him.

    Before anyone starts frantically grabbing his pornography onto floppy at the local public library before even this loophole is closed, consider that even this slightly clueful measure is easily enough defeated by the use by site operators, of dynamic IP addresses connected with domain names via CNAME DNS records (in this context, aliases to such temporary subdomain names as are available at DHS [dhs.org]). The practice therefore by censorware of blocking whole IP address ranges will accelerate the use of massive, dynamically switched IP address range pools (by overseas operators, probably), so that ultimately even IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses are no longer of much use as a guide to exactly from where data is arriving.

    A world-wide information infrastructure based largely on immaterial information itself has by its very nature an almost infinite capacity for sneaky, slippery deception that makes a total mockery of any attempt to clamp down on it. One can easily envision for instance, an explosion of anonymous resurfers [anonymizer.com] which themselves as needed use the techniques mentioned above.

    The more the censorware tries to block off the sea, the more the sea will leak around every barrier placed in its path. In the end, as always, the sea will win.

  • One point about this Columbine HS tragedy. Well I have been on this Earth for quite some time. And, as far as I have seen, children have been in the possession of weapons for quite a long time. There seems that even in America it is practice to get your child to shoot range to get some practice. Besides there are children that acted as soldiers/partisans in several wars. I have never noted such a gratuit and massive killing made by children anywhere before.

    Now if everyone well remembers, the event happened when a harsh campaign for gun controls, "family values", children censorware and some other things was going full steam. Couldn't this be one of the MAIN reasons for what happened? Dissident children, haunted by "new values, new morale", poisoned by the santity of politicians and the damnation of the showbizz? What will happen to a child that sees Rambos, Commandos, X-Files, Dooms, Quakes, Hot Pussies and, suddenly, people mark him as a degenerate because his family does not carry "the values", a delinquent because he passes his time seeing "what children shouldn't see", a criminal because he can shoot? What this child, who listed the Mein Kampf and tell him he is an uncurable outsider will decide? What ideas/dreams/fantasies will roam in his head while he sees the "right" children, those that still eat Chuppa-Chupps, M&Ms, those who never carried a gun but consider that they are more "right" than him? What he is thinking about those that read comics and schoolbooks, he who have eaten the forbidden fruit, who have read the secret scrolls from Hell. He the warrior, the mage, the exorcist in the shadows... What happens if parents/teachers try to _force_ such child to become "exemplar", cut him access to computer, books, try to adapt him to these abstract family values so to become a "normal" member of the society? A society that he already despises and incriminates?

    Frankly what censorship will help to do with such child if he have already seen the whole trashcan?
  • Ethics and moral are beyond Democracy. Democracy accepts even the expression of those values that are against Democracy itself. Democracy is not just a form of government but also a form of civil action on society. Do not miss American Democracy with Democracy as a philosophical concept. A concept of decision taking, expression and communication that gives freedom to express his own ideas and take decisions on the base of election. American Democracy has got a too mechanical stamp on ruling terms for the last times and has lost many of its civil values expressed by its creators.
    The enforcing of ethics or any form of moral concepts is a blow against Democracy as they violate the principles of free thought and expression. Besides they are expensive. There should be organisms to control this enforcing. In Internet this means more people, more hardware, more programs. Now you know that all this costs money and also that Internet grows exponentially on most fields. To keep such filters working, to hold up the growing amount of information you need more money, more hardware, more programs. And it is impossible today to achieve this. Or you blow up your connection or you are forced to admit that Democracy is not only a better value but also more feasable in terms of economy of resources. Sincerly I believe that Democracy wins in this world, mostly because it costs less to hold it up...
  • >And if you are in a public place using a public access terminal, you really have no reasonable right to assume that the teacher or librarian would not do so. Unless, of course, you ask any librarian who agrees with the American Library Association's Bill of Rights at http://www.ala.org/work/freedom/lbr.html. Librarians are not going to take the role of parents. How can you expect a librarian to parent a child when each parent has a different set of beliefs as to the raising of their child? This is why librarians are against censorship. The parent's role is to raise their child, and if the parent cares about what a child sees, then the parent needs to watch the child. The library's role is to provide equal access to information. The parent's/patron's job is to select the material they want to view. If parents are concerned with what their childer are exposed to, then they need to be involved in making those choices with/for their children.
  • I'm not sure you understand what censorware claims to do. The companies say they don't block anything that isn't necessary, meaning they block only specific pages instead of whole sites.

    The site you refer to has those glamor shots as you say, but only if you go several pages deep into the site. Therefore, the main page should not be blocked. Additionally, if you check out any of the other sites that were wrongfully blocked, they're even more obvious mistakes. Most of them are just 'under construction' pages.

  • Well, on MY server it's more like:

    server1: SMTP server ready.
    server1:-bugs/gripes to postmaster@...
    server1:-unsolicited commerical e-mail is NOT authorized to access this service
    server2: hey, want some spam?
    server1: you're in MAPS, your access is illegal, go fuck yourself

    Remember that most anti-hacking laws are stated in terms of "unauthorized access to a computer". That *should* include connecting to the SMTP port to send spam, when it is explicitly stated that such usage is unauthorized.

  • Are we talking Libraries and schools only? OR do they want to mandate bars, resturaunts, and trainstations ect? Censorship sucks. They Gov't seems to think all net users are horny porn seeking chesters. I think I'm offended. :p
  • There have been some reports on sites that weren't blocked. I remember either at peacefire or the censorware project seeing something written where they tested the sites in adult categories on Yahoo, which are mostly static and have been there a while, and found a poor rate of blocking. It would make sense to block everything the search engines come up with since that is the easiest way for someone to find porn, but the censorware companies haven't taken that simple step.

    Also, I recall that the most complete search engine has only cataloged about 10-15% of the internet. I think its safe to say that the censorware companies haven't even come close to searching this much of the net, and therefore the vast majority of porn is NOT going to be blocked.

    using Censorware is like wrapping saran wrap around your monitor to protect your kids. It just doesn't work, and more importantly it CAN'T work from a technical point of view.

  • donkeyhumper.com (Score:3)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @11:39AM (#682406) Journal
    Once Again, donkeyhumper.com [donkeyhumper.com] is banned again.

    go figure


  • Two things: First, the First Amendment protects the right NOT to speak as well as the right TO speak. The government can't force people to label their sites without running up against the First Amendment.

    Movie and tv rating systems, however ubiquitous, are at least technically voluntary. Voluntary web rating works well at the far ends of the spectrum (kids content & p0rn sites that don't want kiddie traffic), but less well in the middle. (And of course, not at all on usenet....)

    For example, what should /. rate itself? Or a news site with personal ads? News sites and large complex sites with user-generated content are the toughest cases, and yet a browser-filter that uses self-rating isn't going to *do* anything at this point if it doesn't filter out unrated sites. Maybe there will be a mass industry movement to voluntarily rate and label....

    Second, just FYI, RSAC is ICRA [icra.org] now. They wanted to develop a more international content labeling & rating scheme, which should be launching soon.

    Liza

  • Well, that's what's being debated... Is accessing information unfiltered one of your rights? Tell your representatives in Congress whether it is or not!
  • I had great fun writing this satirical, but entirely factual and sadly much too long to post in full, Step By Step Guide for Schools & Libraries to their new responsibilities if the Istook-McCain-Santorum federal filtering mandate becomes law.

    http://www.ala.org/washoff/fltrguide.htm l [ala.org]

    The most amazing aspect of this proposal, among many, is the fact that if your computer or Internet access is paid for by e-rate subsidies, the definition of a minor is under 17 but if the computer in the same school or library is paid for by either Title III or LSTA, the definition of a minor is under 18. So schools and libraries would have to apply different rules to 17 year olds, depending on what computer they were using!.

    I also love the fact that in an era of increased demand for privacy protection, particularly for children [kidsprivacy.org], this law would also require schools to monitor everything kids do using school Internet access. Sounds common sense, but what if the school allows dial-up access from home? Then the only way to comply is to install monitoring software. Who gets access to those records? How long are they kept? Do you really want to create a complete record of every site a kid has looked at K-12?

    Liza

  • Something about ...double check those URLs and HTML tags I think...

    --
  • The original link was to the general AP site, so as soon as I submit that rebuke, it gets fixed. Well me mudder and me fadder.....

    --
  • I'm a Librarian, and when exactly am I supposed to check the site from my station and enable it for the user. "My station" is used for checkout, check in , reserves, and reference. I am supposed to do this between supervising unattended children, breaking up fights, solving computer and copier problems, explaining the rules, and sometimes actually answering a reference question? Who comes first, the person who wants a site unblocked or the person who needs help finding a book? This AIN'T MY JOB to determing what you can and cannot see! You want a book this library doesn't carry, I can get it on loan. You want an Internet site, good for you. Telling you a site is O.K. is too much like parenting for me.
  • It doesn't take a lot to look up porn just to get the librarian to react, what it takes a lot of guts to do is for the librarian not to react the way that is expected. When teens (or men) put porn on the screen for me to see as I walk by, I usually say "Honey, I'm married. Ain't nothing there I haven't seen before."

  • Did my own check of peacefire's check... (Score:4)

    by KahunaBurger ( 123991 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:03PM (#682416)
    Checked out one of their individual reports, where they stated this :

    We tested a Bess proxy server with the following categories enabled: "Adults Only", "Hate/Discrimination", "Illegal", "Porn Site", "Sex", "Violence", "Alcohol", "Chat", "Drugs", "Free Pages", "Gambling", "Tasteless / Gross", "Profanity", "Lingerie", "Nudity", "Personal Information", "School Cheating Info", "Suicide / Murder", "Tobacco", "Weapons", and "Personals".

    So I loaded in the first "falsly blocked" site on their list (celebrity.com) and checked it out. It has a bunch of pictures of different celebrities, in a somewhat porn-site like format, but no actual nudity. Then I went back and really looked at the list of what they had enabled. "Lingerie". In other words, they had choosen a setting to test it on that pretty much says "This blocks that hide-the-nipples, victoria's secret type supersoft porn, not just nudity." And many of the pictures on this website fell exactly into that catagory - cameron diaz's upper toso wearing nothing but her hands holding her breasts, the same with a "fan dance" fan over the relevant areas, another celebrities wearing tiny black bras and panties, or panies and an open shirt just barely covering the nipples....

    Now this is just one site from one of their tests, but then its the only one I checked, and they are lying about it not fitting one of the catagories they chose to block for their test. Is it still blocked if they tested the filter for porn only? I don't know. But that (very) little investigation gives me some serious doubts about the honesty and objectivity with which these "tests" of filterware are being conducted.

    If I had time this afternoon I'll check a larger sample of their results, but I shouldn't even be making this post, so don't wait up. Anyone else who wants to do skeptical spot checks on them (read the "checked" items carefully) please follow up.

    -Kahuna Burger

  • What I'm Afriad Of (Score:4)

    by Mignon ( 34109 ) <satan@programmer.net> on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:04PM (#682417)
    When a company enters the business of making a filter program, one of their assumptions is that there are no rules out there. Thus they must rely on what have been shown time after time to be flawed heuristics to detect "objectionable" material. However, if the US government gets into the act, they may try to fashion legislation forcing web pages to include some meta tag indicating their content, with penalties for content that doesn't match the tag. Then they would lump untagged content with "objectionable" material, requiring it to be blocked, leaving the burden on webmasters to update their sites.
  • It's sad to see what this country is coming too. Want to know why a bill like this is going to be passed? Politicians trying to get the vote of the moral majority. Conservative parents want their children protected from the "evils" of the internet, no matter what the cost. People tend to forget that children are not the only ones using the internet at libraries. What about college students? What happens when someone without access to the internet in their home needs to do research on breast cancer? the Holocaust? religious cults?

    The real moral question is not whether you want your horny teenager looking at porn in a public library, but what happens to the people who need legitimate information but are denied.

    -Antipop

  • Re:Problem with filters (Score:3)

    by bgarcia ( 33222 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:04PM (#682419) Homepage Journal
    get your pr0n from home. Dad's bookmarks will probably have all the best sites listed already anyhow.
    Note to Self: Delete bookmarks file before son reaches age 5.
  • I just want to remind everyone that, even if CyberPatrol did vet every site by hand, it would still be censorship, and therefore still be a Bad Thing (IMHO).

    If the Government contracts to someone to do their Censorship for them, it's often much, much worse: the company can be much more secretive about what they censor ("Trade Secrets! Trade Secrets!"), and we can't hold them to the same strict first ammendment standards that the courts hold the government to.

    -Dan Milstein

  • I don't think that the spammers are storing things on your email system. There's a transaction that goes something like this:

    Server 1: Hi, you awake?
    Server 2: Yep, whaddya want?
    Server 1: I have some mail for User1, will you accept it?
    Server 2: Sure, I'll accept mail for User1. Send it over.
    Server 1: Ok, Here it is.
    Server 2: Ok, got it. Need anything else?
    Server 1: Nope.
    Server 2: Ok, see ya.

    The recieving server always makes the decision to accept the gift of the email, or not too. Nothing is being dumped on the recieving machine without permission. As soon as it is accepted, it's the property of the second server, so it's not true that the property of someone else is on your system.

  • Censorship (Score:3)

    by Wreck ( 12457 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:07PM (#682422) Homepage
    Yo Jamie. Please get your terms right.

    They looked at five popular packages and showed that for every ten appropriately-blocked domain name, there were anywhere from four to forty domain names just randomly censored.

    The packages in question do not block "appropriate" (what's that?) sites, while censoring random ones.

    The packages block both types of sites. The action of preventing a URL or whatnot from being seen is "blocking", "stopping", etc. (If you want to claim that "censor" just means "block", then you should have said that the software "censors" both types of sites, good and bad alike.)

    I get really fed up sometimes with people to whom "censor" apparently means, "block information I think is OK".

    Censorship is about power, about using repression to prevent people other than oneself (or one's wards), from contacting texts. If I choose not to look at, or spend money on, the New York Times, I am not censoring it. Only if I prevent someone else from doing so, am I. Censorship has nothing to do with the information content of what is blocked; it is just as much censorship for the State to forbid the reading of Playboy as the New York Times.

    Note, though, that the courts have supported such censorship in many areas of First Amendment jurisprudence, usually in order to prevent children from accessing information. The questions do not revolve around "censorship", then, but "compelling interests" and "least intrusive means", etc.

    Blocking software installed on public computers is censorship. But it is the power relationship of the State to the individual that determines that, not the blocking per se. And furthermore, whether or not such software will be emplaced has nothing to do with whether it is "censorship". It has to do with the "compellingness" of the need for it, and what alternatives there are, and how the Supreme Court feels the day it comes before them.

  • I think the proper response is: "Sucks to be the company that tried to get into this market."

    Especially if they try to claim that they do have a staff member verify all blocked pages, as is mentioned in the linked story.

    I wouldn't try to start a perpetual motion engine manufacturing corporation unless I was a master scam artist.
    ___

  • There are two problems with this approach. One is that different packages may very well have similar heuristics for determining what to block. Sites that mention, say, breast cancer are still likely to be blocked. This can be quite serious. I'm a scientist, and my workplace uses a filter program. One of the sites that it blocked was a site that had time sensitive information about submitting grants for breast cancer research. The people who needed that information needed it right away, and it was extremely obnoxious to be forced to demand that it be put on the non-blocked list. The big lesson from this is that it only takes one incorrectly blocked site to ruin your whole day.

    The flip side is that not quite all blocks are done by heuristics. Some sites are deliberately blocked for commercial or political reasons- the Peacefire site itself is possibly the best example. This is another case in which the different blocking companies are likely to agree, so again you have falsely blocked sites. The difference is that in this case they're blocked because filtering companies in general don't want you to see them.

  • One person's smut is another person's erotica is another person's art. Most people could agree that "Cum Guzzling Coeds" belongs in .xxx, but there is a lot of material that can't be so easily categorized.

    The other danger is that labels can lead to censorship. There are many theaters that are unable to show a NC-17 movie, regardless of social or artistic value, due to lease restrictions.

  • Stock one-size-fits-all solution.

    Here's the stock one-size-fits-all answer.
    How do you enforce that all "pornographic" content goes into .xxx? What about borderline sites? Who decides what *MUST* be in .xxx?
  • Australia is passing laws that force consumers to use censorware.

    While the laws still exist, they have been *totally* ignored - the one exception being porn sites are no longer hosted in Australia. The regulatory body responsible, and the government itself, have absolutely no interest in the matter.

    This probably has to do with the fact that the vote of the bible-bashing independent senator the government was chasing at the time is no longer crucial.

  • The friggin top ad banner on the page I just looked at was one with the animated gif of a completely naked woman urinating that says "Pee Fantasy"

    While I do not have the software that blocks banner ads automatically, I do the functional equivelent with my good old fashion brain. I did not look at the banner ads, but at the content of the page.

    And what you are saying is that peacefire are the baldfaced liars, not me. They claimed that the site had been falsely listed as a pornography site. My point was that it did fit the non-porn filters that they had enabled, by the page content that I witnessed. You stating that there were also pornographic links is not an argument against me, it is a support of my conclusion that peacefire is cooking the books.

    -Kahuna Burger


  • Especially in a library, of all places?

    There's plenty of objectionable content among the books. And it's much harder to filter books than it is to filter net-sites.

    OTOH, maybe the censorware is a good thing... make the kids look for their porn and bomb-making materials the old-fashioned way. ;)

    [Note to the sarcasm-impaired: the preceding paragraph was not meant to be taken seriously!]

  • I'm not sure you understand what censorware claims to do. The companies say they don't block anything that isn't necessary, meaning they block only specific pages instead of whole sites.

    Well, since there is no product that self describes as "censorware", there is nothing that "censorware claims to do". And your idea that filterware companies should, could or claim to block only individual pages sounds pretty silly. I mean, seriously, you actually expect them to block every single page within any given porn site individually, and just keep checking back and entering each day's new pages after a careful examination of each page? I would LOVE to see anywhere is their self description that actually warrents that.

    Now they may well be obligated/want to avoid blocking entire domains that are non-centralized. An individual college student putting blockable material on his university page need not lead to the blocking of the entire university site. But a page such as a.celebrity.com that is clearly a centralized site can certainly be blocked entirely if a large number of pages contain blockable material and the intent of the rest of the site is to promote that blockable material.

    Come on, do you think that a filterware list should make sure not to block the big black page on a porn site that says nothing but "you must be 18 or older"? I suspect that either you are the one who doesn't understand filterware, or that you are just playing the "strawman hypocrisy game".

    -Kahuna Burger


  • It's ILLEGAL. We can argue till the cows come home about whether it should be, but if kids are breaking the law in plain view on (and with!)library property, the library staff can get in trouble for contributing to delinquency.

    There will doubtless be an outcry at that point for censorware, if not for outright removal of internet access from libraries, once the situation is made public. And that screws everyone.

    Sort of like how, even if you think drugs should be legalized, standing outside the library where the legal smokers go, smoking a joint, is probably not the wisest move...

  • Problem is.... (Score:3)

    by dr_labrat ( 15478 ) <spooner@g m a i l .com> on Monday October 23, 2000 @11:45AM (#682449) Homepage
    Filtering/blocking based on Domain names is fatally flawed.

    Domain names are basically really, really cheap and people can move from domain to domain with no real problem.

    Kind of like whack-a-mole.

    People who want porn will get porn. News letters will (spam for the rest of us) supply the latest domain name.

    Censorware only really works on static sites, like political ones.... Free speech ones...

  • Library and schools. But it can go further: Australia is passing laws that force consumers to use censorware. The first step is always "protecting children" which soon developers to protecting us from ourselves.

    Did you know what the English Church/Government tried to shutdown Shakespear in his day? It's no different today. Books like The Red Badge of Courage and This Side of Paradise were called "violent" and "pornographic" in their day. Reading both of those greatly benefitted me as a child, and probably millions of others too.

    We need to end censorship, for children and adults. Having access to reality doesn't hurt children. I'd rather have a child learn about the anatomy of the opposite gender than grow up in a world that condemns realism.

  • Problem with filters (Score:4)

    by Tin Weasil ( 246885 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @11:46AM (#682451) Homepage Journal
    This is one of the problems with letting machines decide what should be filtered. The machine may filter out all "sex" sites -- including sites concerned with biology, like animal and plant reproduction.

    For this to work in a way that does not filter out "non-offensive" sites, it would require HUMAN BEINGS to actually logon and check each site themselves to see what kind of content is on that site.

    Another problem is that the institutions doing the filtering could very well find themselves liable for EVERTHING that DOES NOT GET FILTERED. This would be bad.

    A few years ago I was in a public library and there were a couple of youths (under 15) downloading pornography to floppy disks. The library in question could have easily filtered this out -- by NOT FACING THE COMPUTERS TOWARD A WALL to allow the 'net users as much privacy as they had. (Of course, they could have popped over to the photographic arts section and found a book that was probably just as thrilling.)

    I think the best bet for schools and libraries is to avoid filtering and simply SUPERVISE the children. A little shoulder surfing never killed anyone. And if you are in a public place using a public access terminal, you really have no reasonable right to assume that the teacher or librarian would not do so.

    I guess the lesson here is: get your pr0n from home. Dad's bookmarks will probably have all the best sites listed already anyhow.

  • All that needs to happen is legislation that spammers have to pay per spam. Advertisers have to pay postage to put their stuff in my mailbox. If I take my wares to Uncle Bob's storage, he's gonna charge me monthly to keep my stuff. My stuff now exists on his property. It's a simple matter of economics.

    If Joe Spammer wants to store his wares on my property, then a monthly fee is due. It's that simple.

    I don't think that the same deal with telemarketers apply here. A telemarketer has to be told not to call after one time. However, he's not really storing anything on your property, just wasting some of your time. There are so many spammers out there (and the ability to forge so readily), that it'd be impossible to enforce the same kind of idea. Even if they were to implement something like this, the idea of tracking the forgers (which is what most people would start doing), would be a logistical nightmare.
  • No, but it's a good idea to allow it. I'd also argue that censoring public access to information (i.e. libraries) based on discriminatory standards (i.e. allowing religious sites but not atheist sites) is a violation of free speech rights.

  • WebSense-orship... (Score:3)

    by Stavr0 ( 35032 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:11PM (#682454) Homepage Journal
    Gee, I'd really like to read that article about error rates, but my company's proxy responded ...

    WEBSENSE
    Access to the desired Web page is restricted at this time.
    Reason: The Websense category "Hacking" is restricted.
    You requested: http://www.peacefire.org/error-rates/
    ---
    Vote Inanimate Carbon Rod in 2000

  • Does anyone know how accurate Peacefire's stats really are? Bess is configured by the individual site administrator to block different categories based on their local acceptable use policy. You also have the ability to block sites individually. Does Peacefire take all this into account or are they just spreading more FUD?

  • The success of sussex (Score:3)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:12PM (#682457) Journal
    Back in 95 there was an attempt here to implement a censorware system. Reasons were various and did not included moral/ethical issues. One of them was porno. Porno was killing all channels and we had to do something with it. The few weeks this system lived have shown:

    1: Some may know this phrase: "If Mohamed doesn't get to the mountain then the mountain comes to Mohamed." That is the first historical record of the existence of the Internet...

    2: What is porno for you, for him/her? What is erotics? What is medicine? Besides how easy is to filter jpgs or gifs?

    3: You first shut porno, then erotics, then the picture of every woman, then the word "woman", then the word "man", then every word, then the Internet...

    4: This was the Soviet Union some years ago. So if you say censorship, people ask: censorship? Censorship? CENSORSHIP? @%@*%$* C-E-N-S-O-R-S-H-I-P????????!!!! Hold the doors! The crowd is coming to take the Lubianka!!!!

    5: Ethics and moral are good. If you have enough money to technically afford them. Lots of them... Democracy is much more economical.

    However the end of this was really simple and stupid. One very BIG GUY needed some information about the University of Sussex. Naturally the system didn't allow him to get into this little town. But the guy needed BADLY this small town. When he got the news why he couldn't reach it when he needed so BADLY, he made a BIG NOISE and THREATENED to send the whole University to court. It ocurred that, juridically, such filters are equivalent to "surveillance measures". If you don't have a badge and you don't carry a court order, you don't have the right to use them. The system was promptly removed. It was the first and last censorware experiment here. Right now, if a channel is stuffed with pictures of hot chilly chicks we don't have the right even to sniff it... :))))))))

  • [stock rant] (Score:3)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @12:15PM (#682459) Homepage Journal

    [stock rant on the subject]

    • [T]he Constitution of the United States

    • Amendment I
      Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.

    [end of stock rant on the subject]

  • I think all the packages let the buyer override selected URLs. If I, as an administrator, had time to blow correcting the bad information, why would I waste the money by buying a pre-built list? It's just not realistic to think that this is going to happen on any large scale. In this respect, Bess appears no different than any of the other products. Choosing what categories to block isn't going to help much; as Peacefire has shown us, most filtering packages are incapable of following their own category guidelines.

    --
  • I'm in a computer networking class at my high school and they are the most paranoid people I've ever seen. We can't have internet in our networking room for some bizzare reason like we'll take down the school LAN.

    I think schools, libraries and the like are seeing the internet as a giant smut pool. The Internet has become synonymous with porn. It's sad because there are actually TONS of useful resources on the internet. Luckly some of my more open minded teachers let us use the internet on a daily basis. I have yet to hear of one single student going to an inapropriate site.

    But, reguardless, my school would support this bill in a HEART BEAT. I believe many schools are like mine. If they could they would have a person watching over the shoulder of every student at any time.

    Let kids know that this is not the place for inapropriate material and let them know the consiquences, but filtering software required on all computers is a bit hasty. The kids using these computers won't go to these sites at school, especially if they know the sites are being logged.

    In conclusion, I feel that filters are freedom hindering devices that don't even work because they can't bloock every site and they block some that are genuinely good. Let the people police themselves.

  • The ethical problem here, as I see it, is the difference between choosing not to spend limited resources on obtaining something ... and choosing to spend limited resources on deliberately blocking access to something.

    Big difference, when acting as disseminators of information. NO library in existence currently could possibly hold every last bit of information out there. Some libraries specialize in certain sorts of collections, and many libraries spend a considerable amount of resources referring patrons to places that have what they don't.

    Installing blocking software would be more like throwing out books that someone donated.

    IMHO at least.
  • The said: "..we tested the first 1,000 pingable .com domains.."

    I work for one of the largest hosting house for adult content and we block pings at the routers to help protect aganst DoS, etc.

    They should actualy check for a valid response from port 80 if they are checking port 80 content filters. Otherwise, they're testing a ping filter.

  • Maybe these companies should be thinking twice about basing a business on trying to create software to do a task that, as you've just pointed out, is pretty hopeless (all issues of whether it's a good idea or not aside).

    It also is pretty hopeless to make a decent translation program. I view things like babblefish and the like as being pretty crude, but they are free, and if it doesn't know for sure what something is, it leaves it. I think it might be a good idea if the censorware programmers took the same approach. It might be a good idea to leave in words like "breast" and "Dick" since they can be talking about anatomy class, or someone's name. However, I can't think of a non-vulgar or non-pornographic instance of "cum guzzler" or "suck my dick" which would be fine to block in my opinion.

    The real fallacy here is not how unreliable censorware is, but of the expectations these ignorant politicians, christian groups, family groups, etc. are about the usefulness of the software. There is no substitute for parental guidance. We should have learned that from the generations that have grown up watching TV already. If these people really cared about what was good for the children, they would take care of them properly and not try to rely on broken software to do their jobs for them. If people can't take the responsibility to raise their children, they shouldn't be having them in the first place.

  • > It might be a good idea to leave in words like
    > "breast" and "Dick" since they can be talking
    > about anatomy class, or someone's name.
    > However, I can't think of a non-vulgar or
    > non-pornographic instance of "cum guzzler" or
    > "suck my dick" which would be fine to block in
    > my opinion.

    I can.

    "I can't think of a non-pornographic instance of 'cum guzzler' or 'suck my dick'"

    Well isn't that a non-pornographic instance RIGHT THERE!?! (Well, it certainly didn't give ME wood to read it...maybe it did for someone else?)

    > The real fallacy here is not how unreliable
    > censorware is

    No the real fallacy is that FUD is the major driving force behind policy. There is NO evidence whatsoever that this is harmfull to children.

    I dunno about YOU, but as a child I was exposed to porn. Completely by accident I was getting into things that "I shouldn't have" and I saw porn. The same has happened to about every other person I know. Either they found some of their parents stash (my friend's fiance was telling me about the time her 5 year old came into the room exclaiming "hey mommy you have to see this" only to find he found oneof her porno tapes) - or their friends find it and expose them.

    Everyone that I know, who was exposed to porn, grew up perfectly normal. Why? because it *IS* a normal occurance.

    The simple fact is this...parents want to protect children. They fear every possible thing that could happen. They are paranoid. Companies that make censorware - and people in congress making laws - are nothing more than preditors. They fan the flames and scare parents. They prey on that fear and use it to make a buck.

    -Steve

  • Re:Problem with filters (Score:3)

    by TheCarp ( 96830 ) <sjc@NospAM.carpanet.net> on Monday October 23, 2000 @07:25PM (#682470) Homepage
    > 99% of all the fathers out there peeked at
    > more then their share of playboy's and
    > penthouses growing up

    I may not be a father (really - there are enough people in the world. I am seriously considering just getting that tube tied off - and I encourage all men to do the same - not one child - zero!) but I know I saw my fair share of bare skin when I was a kid.

    FOund my fathers playboys at age 7. Didn't get into them until I was 12 though. At around that age I was jerking off every day after school - ocasionally twice a day. Noone told me about it - or showed me how...hand just naturally found gland and magic happened.

    Thats the way it is with most people. Thats the way it has happened since around the time that thumbs became popular. (possibly longer but - they do make it so much easier).

    > What worries me are some of these pervs out
    > stalking kids in AOL chat rooms

    Why? there are many more of them that arn't online.

    > ured two 14-year-old girls over

    Oh come now....14 - they got hair down there. They know whats going on. WHo wouldn't want to fuck teenagers? As one comic said "thats why there are laws against it. Our forefathers were out there going to congress 'hey they are fucking our daughters!'" well ok 14 is a bit young. Certainly, legality aside, 16 or so should be fair game. As long as you can stand listening to N Sync and the backdoor boys that is.

    Course as my friends fiance points out - 2 girls is wated on most men anyway - we don't know what to do with just one of them.

    Besides - as far as I can tell girls are much more honrey than guys anyway - they just hide it better and are a bit more discriminating.

    -Steve

  • Peacefire Analysis (Score:4)

    by ElJefe ( 41718 ) on Monday October 23, 2000 @11:47AM (#682473)

    I notice that in the Peacefire comparison, the only number they consider is (# of non-pornographic sites blocked)/(total # of sites blocked), i.e. the number of false positives. Wouldn't it make sense to also consider the percentage of unblocked pornographic sites?

    I guess this is just another example of using statistics to prove whatever you want. I'm opposed to filtering as much as Peacefire (well, maybe not quite that much), but they should still try to give unbiased facts.

    -Chris

  • bad on so many levels (Score:3)

    by L-Train8 ( 70991 ) <Matthew_Hawk.hotmail@com> on Monday October 23, 2000 @11:55AM (#682475) Homepage Journal
    As a parent, I wouldn't mind a filtering product in libraries and other places that blocked only hardcore porn. Unfortunately, no such thing exists. The software blocks lots of non-porn sites and lets through tons of porn sites. To me, that makes the product worse than useless. It creates a false sense of security in parents, who think this will keep their children from seeing porn at the library. It absolutely will not. And it raises free speech issues about what legimate sites are "inadvertantly" blocked.

    It took me a while to come around on this issue, but until and unless the technology improves dramatically, filtering is a very bad idea.

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