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Censorship Your Rights Online

U.S. Gov Agency Blunders With Keyword Blacklist 240

Posted by simoniker from the speeding-up dept.
Anonymous Submitter writes "There's an interesting CNet article which highlights a report released by the OpenNet Initiative. The report examines how "a U.S. government agency charged with fighting Iranian and Chinese Internet censorship is quietly censoring the Web itself". Among some of the sites this U.S. agency accidentally blocks are breastcancer.com, teens.drugabuse.gov, several gay rights websites, and even usembassy.state.gov. Some of the members of the group who prepared this report were responsible for a previous Slashdot discussion entitled "Academics Take On Government Net Censorship". The report raises questions about the potential inaccuracy of proprietary and other secretive filtering mechanisms: who should be responsible for ensuring their accuracy?"
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U.S. Gov Agency Blunders With Keyword Blacklist More

U.S. Gov Agency Blunders With Keyword Blacklist

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  • Slashdotting! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:43PM (#9045992)
    Is this just an excuse to /. the US embassy? Seems like this article is a terrorist plot.

  • A new department is needed (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:44PM (#9046004)
    Perhaps the Department of Homeland Accuracy.

  • Given that... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:44PM (#9046005)
    Given that the mood in Washington is fairly anti-gay rights, what makes you think that one was 'accidental'

    </tinfoil hat mode>

    • Re:Given that... (Score:5, Informative)

      by tyleroar ( 614054 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:49PM (#9046071) Homepage
      Well because as you could see if you RTFA, it lists what keywords are being blocked, Here [opennetinitiative.net].

      • Re:Given that... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fenix down ( 206580 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:55PM (#9046619)
        If you make a filter that blocks everything with the word "gay" in it, it's can't really be an accident when a gay rights site gets blocked. Maybe it was an accident that they added gay to the list? Maybe they were all "hey, is this blacklist, like, a list of words the Chinese will be allowed to look at?" and then the other guy was like "whoa, I don't know" and then the third guy was like "probably, I guess" and then when they found out 365gay.com got blocked they were all "damn, it was an accident, man."
        • If you make a filter that blocks everything with the word "gay" in it, it's can't really be an accident when a gay rights site gets blocked.

          Maybe they really hate pre-1900 literature. Shrub doesn't read ya know...He might not realize that there are other definitions for the word GAY.

    • Re:Given that... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by maximilln ( 654768 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:54PM (#9046125) Homepage Journal
      Among people over 30 I've found that most military personnel are heterosexual upstanding citizens. Among people under 30 I've found that a significant portion of military personnel that I've met are homosexual men or lesbians who couldn't figure out what else to do with their life.

      My observation pool is skewed, though. The pool for the >30 section comes from people I've met throughout life. The pool 30 comes from people that I've had contact with while looking for a roommate in a geographical area that is saturated with military personnel (ie. within 20 mile radius of a military installation). Still, though, all bigotry aside, this indicates to me that the general mood in Washington is,"If they're willing to die in the desert..."

      Oh wait. I guess that's about the same as what you said. :)

      • So what... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Really, who cares what a person's sexual orientation is.

        I'm in my forties and it dawned on me a long time ago that gay people aren't fundamentally different than straight people. Its your uncomfortableness with the situation that's the problem, not the sexual orientation of who you're dealing with.

        I've heard all the nonsense about how gays destroy the "esprit de corp". What utter utter crap.

        Live and let live. And if the guy next to you is attracted to guys, what do you care?
    • No. See, Republicans and Democrats both hate gays, but they still want their votes anyway. So both parties are only passively anti-gay (i. e. they're too lazy).

    • Re:Given that... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @08:52PM (#9047076) Homepage
      Given that the mood in Washington is fairly anti-gay rights, what makes you think that one was 'accidental'

      Who cares? Compared to the fact that the draft board is making plans to draft geeks the blacklisting of certain keywords in govt. computer systems seems a rather trivial issue.

      "In line with today's needs, the Selective Service System's structure, programs and activities should be re-engineered toward maintaining a national inventory of American men and, for the first time, women, ages 18 through 34, with an added focus on identifying individuals with critical skills," [nwsource.com]

      How much more relevant the Slashdot editors choices of blacklisted keywords and the SEC fine of Gates are to the average geek reading slashdot! It will be so good to know when you get sent out to Baghdad to fight for Halliburton, that there are people back in the US fighting for the right of middle ranking civil servants to visit gay web sites during working hours.

      If news of the plannning were not enough Rumsfeld has denied that the administration thinks that extending the draft is desirable or necessary. If you have been following the real news sites with stuff that matters you will know that Rumsfeld also said that there was no need for more troops in Iraq only a week before they were sent.

  • Extra keywords to submit (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    binladen, linux, communism.

    Those topics are generally disturbing and harmful to both the security and the economy of America.

  • Naughty Words (Score:5, Funny)

    by tyleroar ( 614054 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:46PM (#9046031) Homepage
    Berman said. "Basically, we said, 'Implement a porn filter.' We were looking for serious, hard-core nasty stuff to block...I couldn't come up with a list (of off-limits words) if my life depended on it."
    Rrriite...
    Because he Never Looks at porn ;)

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:46PM (#9046034)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Regex trouble? (Score:4, Funny)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:48PM (#9046047) Journal
    "The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with "gay" in them as verboten--a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site.

    What? Never heard of ...
    push @naughtywords, $banned =~ m/gay\./
    ?

  • IT error? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eagle8635 ( 674636 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:48PM (#9046049)
    Is this the improper setup of a filter? I know that a lot of filters have settings for say, blocking explicit sites (pr0n), but it is possible to tell them to also allow them to visit medical related sites (breast cancer). Did someone not configure it?
    • To get this sort of lashup requires the unique combination of prudery, stupidity, and incompetence that you only get at the Federal level.

    • Re:IT error? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Geoff-with-a-G ( 762688 )
      Some content filterng programs use lists of sites, categorized. This allows you to implement the kind of nuanced policy that you're talking about, (say block Sex/Acts but allow Sex/Education) but has the weakness of allowing anything that hasn't been put on the lists. If someone starts a new porn site, it won't be filtered until the fitering software list is updated. Also, this runs into trouble when a site (say, Geocities or images.google) hosts a huge vareity of content, and blocking the site will block a

  • just plain stupid (Score:5, Funny)

    by adamruck ( 638131 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:48PM (#9046053)
    um... they blocked the word 'my'.... this tells me the people running this program are stupid... nothing more.. I see no evil plot here

  • Common Sense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fostware ( 551290 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:48PM (#9046055) Homepage
    I wish they'd use common sense...

    In school environments, we've always set the Squid filters to allow pages containing health, medical, rights, etc - words likely to give context to what may or may not be blocked

    • Re:Common Sense (Score:3, Funny)

      by jpmkm ( 160526 )
      Yes! I finally figured out the formula to getting schoolchildren to look at porn! Tell everyone to go to healthmedicalrightsbigtitshotsex.com. I'll be a millionaire! Thanks fostware.
    • Everyone agrees at first. Jeez, seems like a botched job, just get someone who knows what she's doing to install the filter.

      But advocates of filters in libraries (and in your school) have been saying stuff like that for years. "C'mon, we can stop people from viewing explicit pRon in the library. All we have to do is install common-sense filtering." The librarians are radicals to oppose such a simple idea, and so on.

      The questions in this /. posting aren't going to vanish because of common sense. Maybe th

  • Censured Words (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rendrago ( 776670 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:48PM (#9046056) Homepage
    The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov). Goodbye any site with the word topic.

  • Brilliant Move (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WebBug ( 178944 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:49PM (#9046063) Homepage Journal
    So, we want the Iranians to visit websites, but instead of allowing their government to censor what they can see, we'll make their choices for them.

    Brilliant. Now I've heard it all. So, when do we start "conserving bandwidth" in the US?

  • George **** & **** Cheney 2004!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by grocer ( 718489 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:49PM (#9046074)
    wow....Bush and Dick are both on the banned word list...ooops.....

    • Well... (Score:3, Funny)

      by h00dLuM ( 630451 )
      At least poor Mr. Powell will be ok.
      • It's nobody's fault but his own he insists on pronouncing his first name like that. He could pronounce it like any sane person would, to rhyme with "pollen"...

  • A bit sensationalist, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ePhil_One ( 634771 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:50PM (#9046088) Journal
    The agency is censoring pages coming into its organization, not the internet in general, like China and Iran are attempting to do. Why it's comical and ironic, this submission is a bit misleading.

    And I dount they have much choice. Government agencies often have this stuff mandated on them to "protect" the workspace, avoid having citizens groups screaming about government employees surfing porn on the job, hostile workplace regulation, etc.

    • Re:A bit sensationalist, isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:07PM (#9046240) Homepage Journal
      Bingo. This is part of my job. I'm handed a list of keywords to block, and we have the majority of the filters turned on. Anybody complains, I check the site, and unblock it if it's okay. The reasoning that is used to allow this is that the network is 'for official use only'. You want to do some recreational surfing, you can do it at home. Totally different issue from a library/public school.

      Otherwise, we'd have problems with people screaming about us not blocking it the first time somebody was surfing porn and an 'objector' came across it and said they're harrassed.

      It's sad, but the current policy is that 'harrasment is defined by the harrassee'.
    • It's not censoring pages coming into its organization. (well, it might be, but that's not what the article is about)

      It's censoring the pages that people in China and Iran can see, via a proxy server (Anonymizer, which used to be legit) that it is funding as a way for the Chinese and Iranians to get around their government's censorship. That's the whole point: They're replacing the Chinese and Iranian government's censorship with the US government's censorship.

      The Chinese government doesn't want Chinese pe

  • Who needs accuracy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @06:54PM (#9046127) Homepage Journal
    The report raises questions about the potential inaccuracy of proprietary and other secretive filtering mechanisms: who should be responsible for ensuring their accuracy?

    Nobody needs to ensure their accuracy if no one will use them.

    I think they should quit trying to filter out pr0n and drugs etc, and instead focus on scam and advertizing cites. Then maybe I might use their filter.

  • Any content-based restriction on what sites people can visit is improper. Not only does the government have no business playing censor, but it sends the wrong message to people elsewhere, namely that censorship is okay, as long as it is the right kind.

    If they really didn't want to waste resources on anything other than pro-democracy web sites, they could provide access just to specific sites, or they could provide open access but limit bandwidth. The images from porn sites will generally use much more bandwidth than the text of a political discussion. As it stands, the keyword list the contractor used is really hopeless. It just goes to show that there aren't very many words that are likely only to be associated with porn cites. I bet that any number of Catholic sites, for example, are blocked by the "virgin" keyword. In any case, where foreign countries are concerned, keyword blocking should be easy to get around. Instead of putting the sexual terms in your domain name, you put them in meta tags and site text, and you put them there in Chinese and Persian and so forth. How halfway intelligent people with the serious mission of spreading freedom and democracy can waste their time on such a thing is beyond me.

  • Talk about behind the times (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shamino0 ( 551710 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:03PM (#9046206) Journal
    Corporate America stopped using keyword-filters for precisely this reason over 10 years ago.

    I remember by father's inability to access the Middlesex county government page from work because of the string "sex" in the URL. This was 12 years ago. They switched to a different filter system a few months afterwards.

  • Incompetent brainwashing? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zareste ( 761710 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:12PM (#9046277) Homepage
    Christ, you know the world is doomed when your government deploys Nazi-based information control and can't even do THAT right.

  • Majority Rule... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_mad_poster ( 640772 ) <shattoc@adelphia.com> on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:13PM (#9046281) Homepage Journal

    The IBB has justified a filtered Internet connection by arguing that it's inappropriate for U.S. funds to help residents of China and Iran--both of which receive dismal ratings from human rights group Freedom House--view pornography.

    In the abstract, the argument is a reasonable one. If the IBB's service had blocked only hard-core pornographic Web sites, few people would object.

    In other words, censorship is a perfectly acceptable thing to do when the majority doesn't complain about it? What kind of fucked up, idiotic logic is that?

    Whether the majority cares or not is irrelevant, it's not a reasonable argument because censorship is censorship. I'm sure someone will try to spin it that "oh, well, it's the government censoring ANOTHER country", but that's just bullshit too. If you can't extend the beliefs of this country to non-citizens, there's no particularly compelling reason to believe they should apply to us, either.

    Why is it that every time I turn around these days, some sort of idiotic bullshit like this is coming out of the government? Who the fuck let them off their leash anyway?

    • Re:Majority Rule... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dustmite ( 667870 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:20PM (#9047305)

      It also turns the "US as example of freedom to the rest of the world" concept on it's head. I mean, what, you're going to teach other countries about freedom of speech via acts of censorship? Yeah, a real shining beacon of freedom of speech there. Way to be a role model to the rest of the world.

    • Why is it that every time I turn around these days, some sort of idiotic bullshit like this is coming out of the government?

      Simple: because it benefits the powerful elite. Any expansion of government, success or failure, can only benefit government. More often than not, government agencies which fail outright are *rewarded* with more revenue.

  • Fear the church! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Blaubart ( 776564 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:24PM (#9046366)
    You all seem to have missed the point of why this filter was put into place.

    The US government is trying to help the people of China bypass the censorship that their country has put into place. Why? Simple, to defend the human rights of the people of China. Quite obviously, the US Government has no fear of any possible backlash from the Chinese government in doing this.

    However, the squeals from the many church organizations that would be offended by the US Government giving unrestricted access to p0rn and gay rights websites would be unbearable!

    Fear the church! Fear it more than you fear the largest communist country in the world!

  • That's right David (Score:5, Funny)

    by JohnGrahamCumming ( 684871 ) * <slashdotNO@SPAMjgc.org> on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:27PM (#9046382) Homepage Journal
    One the banned list [opennetinitiative.net] is the word "kitt". pr0n surfers will think this refers to sites like Persian Kitty, but those of us in the know realize that this is all a plot by Knight Industries to prevent the Iranians from stealing plans for the Knight Industries Two Thousand.

    John.

  • keyword blocking is stupid without context (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dj42 ( 765300 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:29PM (#9046394) Journal
    Until filters can understand context, keyword filters will always be stupid. Ass.

  • Accidental? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by taernim ( 557097 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:30PM (#9046405) Homepage
    Among some of the sites this U.S. agency accidentally blocks ... several gay rights websites.

    The submitter obviously is not familiar with the Bush Administration's stance towards anyone who is not hetereosexual. Anything that happens towards us these days that is negative, do not believe for a moment it was just an "accident".

    If you're not convinced, check out The Human Rights Campaign [hrc.org] website.
    • Yeah, I'm sure that Bushie himself approved this list. "Yee-haw! That'll fix them good-fer-nuthin' un-natural gays!"

      Also, be careful; he's trying to get tin foil banned in the US.

    • Re:Accidental? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Mr. Arbusto ( 300950 )
      Social conspiracy is silly.

      This just a case of stupid filtering gone wrong because keywords aren't good for filtering. Keywords are stupid because things that aren't PORNographic GAY PICs with homoSEXual and biSEXual same-SEX COUPLES will be filtered because they are "naughty" words that a lot of PORN sites use to get peoples attention. The same filter would apply to a church fighting GAY and LESBIAN same-SEX COUPLE from getting married. It isn't a personal call by George BUSH or DICK Chenny to put the
  • example of the underhanded nature of governments. We as cybercitizens should be be psszt ngah naghh @!!6 fghar';!) nraaghg!!!! pleased with the way things are going. Go back to your cubicles, the contents of this web-site is nothing but propaganda paid for by none other than the evil Kim Il Jong

  • Instead of spending time helping others route around censorship, the U.S. government hires people to censor the web. These people then accidentally censor U.S. government sites.

    At this point, the intelligent response would be to say, "Oh, we forgot that idiotic ideas tend to attract idiots. Our bad. We're going to go back to sowing free thought around the world now."

    However, the government response will be, "We'll just hire some more people for even more money to implement a better filter. In fact,

  • Censorship is bad m'kay (Score:3, Informative)

    by syousef ( 465911 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:37PM (#9046467) Journal
    Come on. This is a pile of Orwellian BS. What's next. GoodNet (tm) instead of Goodspeak?

    As the amount of information and its accessibility increases the whole idea that you can selectively censor the right things 100% accurately all the time becomes comical. You simply can't have a proliferation of easily accessible information and censor the "bad information" since what is bad is subjective anyway.

    If you must place controls, its more practical to do so on the tools and materials required to perpetrate the "evil" you wish to combat.

    I for once like the access to information that the internet gives me. Its empowering and I've used this information practically not just for entertainment or frivolous uses.

    When doctors have given me and the ones I love incomplete or inaccurate information as they have on a couple of occassions I've been able to get better information and present it back to them to act on it. Its sped up a couple of key diagnoses for my girlfriend and I. In both cases not working out what the problem was as soon as we did would have resulted in each of us spending significant amounts of time out of work (not to mention feeling miserable). We'd each for different medical reasons have been permanently excluded from driving, and would almost certainly have had our lives shortened. Had the information been buried in some public library without any access to anecdotal evidence (usenet) life today for me would be very much worse.

  • No anonymity here! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Memophage ( 88273 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:42PM (#9046515)
    Err... I'm glad that everyone has the best interests of the populations of Iran at heart, but I think there's some confusion about how anonymizer.com actually works.

    Anonymizer.com is intended to keep your identity a secret only from the target web server. From the original article: "they can use Anonymizer.com as a kind of jumping-off point, also called a proxy server".

    This is correct. The client sends a request for a web page (say google.com) from anonymizer.com (or sedayama.com, or barandaz.com, or whichever). The anonymizer goes out, fetches the page for them, and then feeds it back. In this way, google.com has no idea who they are.

    Since anonymizer.com's server is in California, all data must be sent between the server in California and the client in Iran, through the country's firewall and whatever sniffer programs they have running.

    In no way whatsoever does this process prevent the Iranian government from snooping the connection between the browser and anonymizer.com to see whatever the heck the client is looking at. In fact, it makes the censor's life easier. All they have to do now is scan for all data to or from anonymizer.com, sedayama, etc. Then they can either parse the data and see what banned sites the client is viewing, or just assume that they're up to no good, raid their house, confiscate their computer and look at the browser cache.

    According to the Opennet report [opennetinitiative.net], the only real "anonymizing" functionality of this site comes from converting URLs from text to hexadecimal, and the obfuscation from the anonymizer site having to change URLs and IP addresses whenever the Iran government blocks one.

    I think the IBB is doing these people a grave disservice by advertising that sites can be viewed anonymously, when in fact they can't. Even if the connection was completely encrypted with SSL, the government censors could determine that a connection was made to an anonymizer site, and that the client is worthy of further investigation.

    Again, from the OpenNet report: "Iranian users may not be aware that their use of the service may identify them to Iranian government authorities as citizens wishing to view forbidden content, or as supportive of the ideas found within that content."

    Enough said. The people who run the IBB Anonymizer project should realize it was a well-meaning but flawed concept from the start, and it can actually be counter-productive by exposing Iranians who trust the claims of anonymity.

    Those claims should be retracted and a big warning banner posted on the site(s), or the project should be killed outright.

  • Out of curiousity... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:43PM (#9046524)
    Does the US government also attempt to help circumvent other countries' internet censorship laws, such as, say, those of certain Western European countries? Or is it just the countries we're not quite married to (yet)?

  • censorship? prudery? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jsahol ( 621872 )
    Agreed that this is a poor implementation of an internet filter, but... Calling this censorship is not quite right: the service opens up big chunks of the internet for people who never had it before, and that is a fact. It's like a complaining that someone didn't hand over the keys to their car instead of just giving you a ride. Calling it prudery is also unfair. There are several arguments for a (properly done) filter, some of them mentioned in the article. 1. US Taxpayers don't want to fund porn surfing

  • OpenNet, Open Source (Score:4, Funny)

    by ozbird ( 127571 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @07:48PM (#9046568)
    Nice to see that the browser screenshots are Mozilla with the Modern theme instead of Internet Explorer.

  • My site? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Sardak ( 773761 )
    I'm currently setting up a website that has the word 'blown' in the name (no, it has nothing to do with pr0n, I'd just prefer not to have my server start on fire). Do I have anything to worry about? I noticed today that my site no longer shows up in Google searches.

  • Hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DaveLatham ( 88263 )
    So, I may be missing something obvious here, but can someone tell me why China and Iran don't just block anonymizer.com?

  • Sexual Harassment and Porn (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brian_Ellenberger ( 308720 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @08:04PM (#9046694)
    From: http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_harassment.html

    "Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment."

    The "offensive work environment" has been defined to include porn. See this on Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/harris.html

    "Even though CP had not been offended by her co- workers' bawdy remarks, she believed that the posting of pornographic pictures demeaned women. She complained to her supervisor who refused to ask the employees to remove the pictures. Shortly thereafter, more pictures were posted. After again receiving no response to her complaint, CP filed a charge.

    Based on these facts, an investigator should find that the conduct was unwelcome, i.e., that CP subjectively considered the pornographic pictures to be abusive. Her willingness to engage in sexual banter is not material to assessing her perception of the pictures."

    IANAL, but at this point it is a completely reasonable argument that employers should install anti-porn software by default and that failure to do so constitutes neglect. And I'm sorry, but these issues about sexual harrassment were brought up far before Bush. And mostly by left-wing feminists (see Tailgate, Clarance Thomas, et al). If the government didn't install these filters and someone was viewing porn and it offended someone else then there would be a big scandal about it and Bush would be portrayed as the anti-feminist woman hating porno president.

    And the poster forgot the obvious difference here between Iran and the US is that you can go home to your own computer if you want porn! You do not have the right to view porn on government (ie tax payer owned) computers. Heck, technically you don't have the right to view breastcancer.com unless it pertains to your work! So if you don't like the government's filters, tough. If you need the site to do your work email the admin. Otherwise, don't view the site on the taxpayer's dime.

    Brian Ellenberger
    • By your reasoning, if the government <b>didn't</b> install these filters on every backbone server on the internet and someone was viewing porn and it offended someone else then there would be a big scandal about it and bush would be portrayed as the anti-feminist woman hating porno president.

      As a side issue, he has already portrayed himself as the anti-feminist woman hating president, sans porno.

      And, you're right, Iranian citizens can not go home to their own computers to watch porn. And, I,

    • Re:Sexual Harassment and Porn (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They don't install anti-pr0n software. They install the default filters that ship with the filtering product and then require "justification" to unblock.

      I work for a local govt agency which uses the Websense filtering software. It throws up a warning when you try to access a domain which is considered non-work-related, reminding you of department policy regarding internet use but allowing you to click through, except for pr0n, etc., which is blocked absolutely - no clicking through.

      So far, so good. I cann
    • And the poster forgot the obvious difference here between Iran and the US is that you can go home to your own computer if you want porn!

      Ironically, many Iranians actually have more porn access than Americans do. TV in Iran is heavily censored, and it's goddamn boring too. As a result every Irani who can afford one has a satellite dish, and although the gov't at one point managed to block the politically sensitive Farsi-language NITV [www.nitv.tv] from LA (apparently from Cuba [pbs.org]), they have no hope of shutting down th

    • Very different scenario (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phorm ( 591458 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @11:59AM (#9052036) Journal
      The failure here was not in neglecting to install a monitoring/blocking system, but to take proper action upon notification.

      Read: her supervisor who refused to ask the employees to remove the pictures

      Employees were posting pictures, and the employer didn't make them stop nor offer disciplinary measures. I wouldn't expect to get away with pr0n at work, and I'd definately expect to be disciplined (perhaps fired) if I tried to. It appears that both the other employees and the employer were definately at fault - but not for lack of filtering.

  • Bypassing keyword filter? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RotJ ( 771744 )
    Could you still view blocked sites through the IBB service if you enter the IP address [hcidata.co.uk] instead of the domain name?

  • Weird keywords (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RotJ ( 771744 )
    Some of the keywords, like "anime", "chat", "tv" seem to be aimed at non-pornographic entertainment sites. They also block "proxy". Maybe they don't want people to use a proxy to bypass their proxy (if that's at all possible). I still don't get "my" and "you". I also don't get why they blocked "anime" but not "hentai".

  • Great idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:59PM (#9047517) Homepage Journal
    After all, keyword blacklisting worked for "hierbal v!aggra" and "peenes emlargermint" so it should work for terrorists and drug dealers as well... Seriously though, the fact that keyword blacklisting is totally useless should be obvious to anyone who ever watched a gangster movie. The question is which keywords do you blacklist? Should there be words like "bomb" or "heroine"? No, because gangsters don't use them. Does it mean we should blacklist "object" and "good shit"? No? So I ask you, which exactly keywords should we blacklist? Only then, when we have this question answered, we can discuss whether blacklisting or censorship is a good idea. Because I, for one, don't want Project Gutenberg be foolishly forced by some fucking illiterate imbeciles to remove the literature of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka!

  • censorship or social control? (Score:3, Funny)

    by dkalley ( 776724 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @12:26AM (#9048395)
    I recently read an article in the American Journal of Primatology with the following keywords. infant-licking, attractiveness of mothers with newborns, female relationships, and ring-tailed lemurs. The keywords would direct you to the paper; Intra-troop affiliative relationships of females with newborn infants in wild ring-tailed lemurs. Can you imagine the flags this would raise with monitoring software or your success with blocking? Out of context the keywords would paint you as an extreme pedophile or someone with obscure sexual attractions. A question to ask is whether this practice is merely censorship or another way to functionally define what is normal or deviant behavior within society? Homosexuality is taboo, so the word gay is taboo. Our historical relationship with the female body to sin is represented as well as other 'deviant' sexual behavior. On a lighter side, at least microsoft, georgebush, and arnold-schwarzenegger.com were blocked!
  • This seems strange. I fails to understand why, if a repressive government like Iran/China is blocking a ton of websites they disagree with, they would allow a US proxy site to go unblocked. Surely they could just block all access to anonymizer.com and the IP ranges used by its servers?

  • Duh... block images... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @08:50AM (#9050165) Homepage
    If they want to block porn and save bandwidth, all they need do is not serve images.

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