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Censorware Not Good, Just Better Than COPA
from the something-to-think-about dept.
The thrust of the judge's findings about blocking software was that it blocks a high proportion of pornography, blocks a low proportion of non-pornographic Web sites, and that it is difficult for most kids get around. I think that these conclusions are correct for the purpose of the decision he was making -- in other words, blocking software blocks a high proportion of pornography compared to the law in question, and is difficult to get around compared to the law in question. But let's not get carried away -- blocking software is not that accurate, and not that hard to defeat.
Consider first the accuracy rates cited by the judge. Citing expert witness reports, he wrote, "I find that filters generally block about 95% of sexually explicit material", and then quoted several different rates for overblocking provided by expert witness reports, ranging from about 4% to 11%. I wrote earlier about the different ways to interpret overblocking error rates -- the gist was that if you care about the constitutional issues with filter use, then you look at the percentage of blocked sites that are non-pornographic (i.e. for every porn site that gets blocked, how many research sites get canned along with it), and that number tends to be high. On the other hand, if you simply care about the effectiveness of blocking software in a home setting where there is no constitutional issue raised, then you look at the percentage of non-pornographic sites that are blocked, and that number tends to be low.
For example, suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Web sites in a given sample are sexually explicit, or 100 Web sites out of 10,000. To use Judge Reed's numbers, suppose that 95% of those porn sites, or exactly 95 in this sample, are blocked, whereas of the other 9,900 sites, 5%, or exactly 495 of them, are not blocked. Then the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked is only 5%, but the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn is actually 83% (495 blocked non-porn sites, out of a total of 495+95=590 blocked sites). One of our past studies of blocking software did indeed sometimes find error rates of about 80%, due to errors caused by IP address blocking and filters being tripped up by keywords (even when "keyword blocking" features were supposedly turned off -- because in that case the program still blocked sites on its master blacklist, and those blacklists are frequently built by scanning the Web for keywords).
Another portion of the judge's ruling dealt with the difficulty of getting around blocking software:
After the ruling came out, I tried some of the best-known blocking software programs to see how easily they could be defeated: Net Nanny, SurfControl, CyberSitter, and AOL Parental Controls. Net Nanny and SurfControl apparently could not block https:// sites at all, so I was able to get to https://www.StupidCensorship.com/ and access anything I wanted from there, despite the fact that that site had been public for over a year. Apparently I do have the "technical ability and expertise necessary" to "access the Web through a proxy", but then again I'm not a minor, so, kids, don't hurt yourself trying that.Filtering companies actively take steps to make sure that children are not able to come up with ways to circumvent their filters. Filtering companies monitor the Web to identify any methods for circumventing filters, and when such methods are found, the filtering companies respond by putting in extra protections in an attempt to make sure that those methods do not succeed with their products... It is difficult for children to circumvent filters because of the technical ability and expertise necessary to do so by disabling the product on the actual computer or by accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer and successfully avoiding a filter on the minor's computer... Accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer will not enable a minor to avoid a filtering product that analyzes the content of the Web page requested, in addition to where the page is coming from. Any product that contains a real-time, dynamic filtering component cannot be avoided by use of a proxy, whether the filter is located on the network or on the user's computer.
CyberSitter did intercept the https:// request so it did block StupidCensorship.com, but it didn't know about some of the other proxy sites that we had mailed out to our users recently. One of those did however get blocked because the word "hacking" appeared on the page -- as in,
so it's probably safe to say that if the CyberSitter filter is that paranoid, it would result in a good deal of overblocking as well. AOL Parental Controls also did not block the latest proxies, although it wouldn't let me load sites like Playboy through the proxy, presumably because it recognized the contents of the page and blocked it (so on that point, Judge Reed was right).This site is a tool for circumventing Internet censorship to promote free speech. It does not enable any hacking, cracking or any illegal activities (since it doesn't let you to access any sites that you couldn't access from home anyway).
But none of the products could stop the doomsday weapon, which is to burn an Ubuntu Linux CD and boot from that, bypassing any security software installed under Windows. I can see your eyes glazing over at the thought of kids attempting to do that, but it's merely an unfamiliar process to most people, not actually difficult. (I've been saying for years, that with the greater difficulty of using Linux over Windows, there's nothing cool or clever about running it just for its own sake so you can feel badass, and the only time you need it is if you want to do something that only Linux lets you do. Well, here's something!)
But in spite of everything, I think the judge's conclusions about blocking software were still broadly correct, because he was comparing the merits of blocking software against the merits of a law that would have prohibited commercial pornography from being published on the Web in the United States. In talking about the "effectiveness" of such a law, the judge and lawyers cited the fact that as many as 75% of adult sites were hosted overseas anyway. But even that high number understates the situation, because hypothetically if all the porn on the Web in the U.S. did get outlawed, it would be easy for anyone to spend all their time looking at porn from outside the country. When you're talking about a supply of content that is so large that nobody could finish looking at it all if they spent the rest of their life trying, it doesn't really matter if 25% or 50% or 75% is located within your legal jurisdiction. I never stop hoping that a judge will say, "Look, pictures of naked people don't hurt anyone, no, not even people under 18. Shoot, when I was 13 and president of Future Lawyers of America, my friend gave me a copy of Playboy as a down payment for my unsuccessful attempts to defend him on curfew-breaking charges in Foot v. Ass, and look how I turned out." But even a judge who firmly believed that people under 18 were harmed by pornographic images, would have found little reason to uphold this law.
Blocked for cause vs. blocked in error (Score:2)
Anyways I'd argue his math is flawed as we don't know the number of porn sites in existance (and how do we rank it? by site? what about mirrored domains pointing to the same content? etc) along with the non-porn sites being blocked (was it offensive material that borderlines porn? Something a parent installing a fi
Re:Blocked for cause vs. blocked in error (Score:4, Funny)
What is it about judges that do it for you? Is it the authority? Or is it just the robes and gavel?
Parent
Re:Blocked for cause vs. blocked in error (Score:4, Insightful)
- As you point out the figures are 'finger in the air' stuff
- How do you define pornography. Like art, I cannot, but I know it when I see it.
But I think the judges point is still valid. Parent installed filters do a better job than the alternatives and avoid constitutional free speach issues - well, maybe I'd better discuss that last point with my teenage son!Parent
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Doomsday weapon easily stopped? (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you're really that afraid of your kids, you can stop that for free, right? Just password your BIOS setup at boot and disable boot from cd/disk. Then, later, if you need to boot from CD/disk for some reason, you have the password to re-enable it.
Wouldn't that fix the issue?
Re:Doomsday weapon easily stopped? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Doomsday weapon easily stopped? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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But if you use a battery backup for the electrified case, all they need to do is ground the case through the procedure.
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Back when I was a kid the trick was to balance on top of dads office chair standing on my toes in order to get to the porn stash.
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Not that any children in my care could survive long enough to open a computer case and remove a CMOS battery...
Why open the computer ? (Score:2)
Re:Doomsday weapon easily stopped? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look. If your kid is smart enough to reset the motherboard and run Ubuntu live CD without your assistance, then maybe you should take the time to sit down with them and supervise their internet activities in person.
Chances are you'll learn a thing or two about computers you didn't know about...
Parent
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More to the point, if your kid is smart enough and crafty enough to download and burn a Ubuntu liveCD, open the case, trip the jumpers to wipe the BIOS password, and set the computer to try booting to the CD before the hard drive, then I have some news for you: your kid will be able to get pornography.
I mean, you try to preserve your kids in a kind of safe-bubble where bad things don't happen to them and dangerous, scary, or sexy things don't enter-- and that's fine. But at a certain point, your kids get
OMG, it's simple (Score:2)
Step 2, if they by pass the security, kick them in the ass really hard and ground them for a week from the computer.
Step 3 - If they continue to ignore your rules, conveniently "lose" them on a camping trip.
Seriously, my parents raised me (who was into computers since age 5) and never had problems with this. They would give me the beating of my life if I did some of the things these kids do. Of course they also just took the time to be parents and explained the worl
Doomsday killer 2.0 (Score:2)
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Step 2: Plug ethernet directly in back of PC
Step 3: Profit
Step 4: Rewire to hide evidence
Admittedly, I've never owned a physical firewall, but I can't imagine it'd be any different than bypassing the wireless router.
The problem (Score:5, Insightful)
He doesn't get the driving force behind the people who want these sort of laws. They don't want to reduce the SEM their children see, they want to eliminate it completely and will never be happy otherwise. Which shows just how far out there they really are. You can't uninvent things.
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If there's no porn in the US, then sites abroad will have it. If you force them to disallow porn on the net, only shadier corners of the net will have it. What people don't get is that distance or borders don't matter in the virtual land, whether a server is in Texas or Abu Dhabi doesn't make a difference.
Still, they give themselves to the illusion that you could policy it. Wi
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That's what's crusades are for! Remember, we had an "amen amen jesus jihad" phase too...
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But, you know, some countries on this planet have more pressing problems than to check what kind of material is being stored on their servers. Hell, some are dependent on the income. Why do you think it is such a hassle to convince Russia to shut down AAMP3?
And there will always be countries that don't give a rat's rear 'bout porn on their servers 'cause they still have people shooting each other in the streets.
Now wait, that's also some issue in the US... Strange.
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Wait ... that's "far out there"? The Internet has replaced the encyclopedia as the #1 place schoolchildren go to get basic facts about most of the topics they study in school. And if parents want their children to be able t
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The fact that they beleive they can succeed in the overall goal (no sexuaully explicit material in any
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He doesn't get the driving force behind the people who want these sort of laws. They don't want to reduce the SEM their children see, they want to eliminate it completely and will never be happy otherwise. Which shows just how far out there they really are. You can't uninvent things.
No. They don't want anyone to see it at all. "Think of the children" is just an excuse. I don't really want my kids surfing porn so the firewall blocks it.
I'd still call it a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
If the state dictates what you may see and what you may not, it's not.
Re:I'd still call it a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
I have *never* tried to stop my son from viewing adult material. I have also never found him viewing it. I go for the fairly simple method of telling him what it is, and asking him to avoid it. It's this thing called trust. I trust that he will be responsible *on the whole*. I do not expect perfect obedience.
Probably he has sneaked the odd view at some nakedness. I know I would have done at his age. Interestingly he also shows no sign of becoming a sociopath, or wanting to strangle hookers...
This whole anti porn thing is just some neo conservative delusion that porn == evil. It's bullshit. Porn == naked ladies/men. Yes there is more extreme/nasty stuff out there. I rely on the moral values I have instilled in my son to protect him from such things. I hope that he will feel no need to view such material.
It's all about realising that people cannot be restricted to a rule based existence. You have to help them develop a world view that encourages respect for their fellows. I happen to believe this does not exclude getting hot for pictures of naked ladies.
Parent
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Talking about it years later (and clearly their decision made me who I am - working in media production), the point of them standing firm on not watching pornography wasn't a moral issue at all - it was just simply about having class. They figured if they taught me and my siblings class, it would permeate into everything we did. Since we're all either i
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Have you even pondered the consequences? Doesn't anyone here think of the pedophiles?
Ok, sarcasm aside. I wonder why you're a minority. I guess most parents think that the only way to get kids to adhere to their values is to force them onto them. Which is pretty much the surefire way to get them to rebel
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My poor son hasn't got much to rebel against, as I'm a scruffy, black clothed, computer game playing academic who doesn't believe in working at some shitty job for years just to earn a weekly wage.
To rebel against me he'd have to become an estate agent or something
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Good ol' analog porn (Score:2, Insightful)
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Today you can find things on YouTube that I don't want to see--much less the type of things on the truly XXX-rated sites. There are sex acts that I wish I was blissfully still unaware of! And yet all a lot of these sites have to do is have some button that says you agree that you're over 13 or 18 or ask your birthdate, as if anyone over 6 can't figure that out.
What bothers me is the
And shagging dead deer in WI also illegal... (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic point is (to steal someone else's example): a parent should no more feel it is right to let their child roam unsupervised on the Net then let them roam unsupervised in any major city in the world. It is up to the PARENT and not the INFRASTRUCTURE to ensure their own child's safety, regardless of anyone's view of the morals/ethics/etc of porn and other 'unwanted' content.
The Net was never devised to be an extension of child-safe Disneyland and should not be subverted to be one. Why should I be blocked from reading papers on X-Ray Crystalography because of some hamfisted filtering built deep into a Tier-1's manditory COPA mechanism? Especially if neither I nor the benign site in question are in the US.
Please note, US lawmakers, that quite a lot of the world and the Net *is* outside the US, BTW.
Rgds
Damon
Why the recalcitrance? (Score:4, Insightful)
What is needed is a comprehensive, open source filtering system that requires you to contribute without any anonymity. Imagine something like the Wikipedia for filtering, but you have to mail a copy of your identifying information, and contribute under your real name to control trolling. That, and a multi-tiered categorization scheme to capture such nuance as "bland, risque, sexy, NSFW--ever!! and Possibly Illegal porn." Oversimplification perhaps, but just a thought. I think a great filtering system could be built if it were done in public, with transparency and room for people to configure it to their moral views.
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I don't understand why people act like censorware's mere existence is a bad thing. It is a good way for people to police themselves, which is how most enforcement of morality should be. When I have kids, I plan to use it.
I have no problem with its existence - but I hate to see parents think it is a suitable replacement for parenting. As indicated in the article and its links, the software both fails to block porn and it blocks non-porn. Plus, the world doesn't have filters installed.
I also plan to teach them, especially my sons, about the dangers that come with it so that they know that it's worse than they suspect. To be honest, as a Christian, I'd far rather walk in on my kids getting wasted or stoned, and I say that as someone who comes from a line of alcoholics.
Now you've completely lost me. I certainly control what my kids are allowed to see on the TV and computer, but I would rather find them with a dirty magazine than wasted on drugs. Your kids will most likely see a naked person at some point
That sounds like a challenge (Score:5, Funny)
To protect this adult discussion from children (Score:3, Funny)
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"Secure Computing"
ROFL
Why censor young human beings? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here we go again... or did we actually stop (Score:4, Insightful)
The porn industry is willing to let you block their sites via a tag or two. Blocking software will protect small children when you turn your back to clean the kitchen. Blocking systems would have protected the teacher.
There are many ways to attack this problem, none of them are a silver bullet. The one thing that cannot and should not be regulated is the parents responsibility to protect their own children. It's a big wide nasty world out there. Children will find out about it sooner or later, they can't be protected from it forever.
There is needs for solutions that protect public library systems, solutions that protect work systems, solutions that protect home systems. Even if all these are 100% effective little johnny might still get porn over at his friend's house. Nothing is foolproof and we should not be trying to legislate something to be foolproof or to assign blame when it isn't.
PARENTS need to be paranoid, not just blocking software packages. They should use all that they deem necessary to protect their kids, not what the court deems necessary. The best way to protect them from porn is to educate them, use blocking software, talk to them, use filters, educate them, and did I mention that parents need to talk to and educate their own children rather than rely on t he court to do it for them?
Read about this yesterday (Score:2, Informative)
Christian Science Monitor had a commentary about this ruling [csmonitor.com]. To sum it up for the /. crowd -- age-verification laws exist for pretty much any other pornography sold in the United States, the internet should not be an exception. Fundamentally she's correct, although, IMO, COPA itself would realistically have a trivial effect on kids seeing porn, since it just pushes providers off-shore.
Additionally, here's SCOTA's case summary and opinions [cornell.edu] on this law. The ruling on this was 5-4, same votes per judge
I'm not sure the judge is right (Score:2)
Restrictiveness should not necessarily be equated with onerousness. Instead it should be equated with which materials fall under the law's restrictions. The point is that if there is a valid government interest in regulating certain content, the government cannot use this as a pretext to sweep away other content it doesn't like.
For example, lets say the government doesn't want troop movements to be publicized in advance: a legitimate inter
Decentralized filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod up (Score:2)
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Porn is not everywhere. censorship is not needed.
There is nothing more mani
Re:An Axe to Grind (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed I can. He'd go "eewwwkkk! yuck! See how big that one is? And with a donkey? Awsome!
I hate to tell you this, but that won't be the first porn that 8-year old have seen. And anyway, there is little evidence that porn is really more damaging for kids than e.g. the Bratz dolls. (Forgive me if that fad has already passed away, feel free to replace with the new equivalent :) )
Parent