Comments on: Search filters

By: vivian

vivian — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:56:46 +0000

Question, for Eszter, SethF or anyone else. There are two ways kids see ugly-stuff online – (1) when they actively seek it out, and (2) when it pops up following a typo, or in email. As a parent of a preschooler who can read, I want him (and us) spared situation (2). There is no hope of preventing (1) and probably no point either. But for truly unsolicited excrement and the youngest surfers, what software do you recommend that will block the most awful material without also blocking dictionaries with cuss words in them, ACLU pages and the like? In my fantasy world, such software would have no political ramifications, and would allow parents to gradually reduce the range of blocked material, until the kid hacks into the system – at which point the pawn becomes a queen.

By: Harald Korneliussen

Harald Korneliussen — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 08:59:54 +0000

Filters should in most cases be warning/logging based. It’s stupid for a company to block all “non-job related” sites, because all use cases can’t be listed up, and it’s a pain to contact network administration every time. Instead, make a page pop-up:
“Warning: the following page is not considered job-related by the monitoring system. All activity will be logged. Are you sure you want to continue?” (Then a textfield where you can write a note in the log as to why you access this site, and a continue button)

By: soubzriquet

soubzriquet — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:07:59 +0000

Andrew: It isn’t surprising that they haven’t become better. There is a vast disconnect between the marketing material of these censore-ware companies and the machine learning literature.

As I understand it: It is known that such approaches will perform poorly in the domain. It is known why they will perform poorly. Despite claims (unsubstantiated) by various commercial entities to the contrary, it isn’t known how to significantly improve this performance.

As it stands, it seems to me the censors have to trade off between a really large number of false positives, and being trivial to defeat (resulting in a really large number of false negatives)

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:02:01 +0000

Blocking that site seems ridiculous. There’s the famous story of filters blocking info relating to Super Bowl XXX because xxx=pornography. That was in 1996 or so. It doesn’t seem like they’ve become much better does it?

By: y81

y81 — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:44:47 +0000

It is widely feared that allowing employees to view pornography will lead to sexual harassment suits. I am not aware of any actual cases on that, but the costs of a single lawsuit would surely exceed the gain from allowing broader web access, so in that sense the fear is legitimate. I suppose the same logic applies to white supremacist or other racist websites, though personally I have always suspected that this type of filtering is just bloatware.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:37:15 +0000

Are there any good aspects to censorware?

Keeping children from seeing pornography and keeping workers from seeing pornography at work seem to be the main motives, and to me neither of these justifies monkey-wrenching a major form of communication. (Workers will still wste time no matter how many sites you block; they’ll just waste time differently.)

Political censorship of any kind, including neo-Nazis, seems especially problematic. This is a genuine slippery-slope, and it’s my understanding that some filters use the neo-Nazis and “hate speech” as an entering wedge to justify blocking most kinds of dissident speech.

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:05:55 +0000

One of my most enjoyable work stories is the administrative process I had to go through to manually remove the “safe cite” safeguards from my work computer.

I was trying to build a case against a defendant who I strongly suspected was a member of a white supremacist group, but all of my on-line “research” was being blocked my software that was filtering out white-supremacist websites.

It was a fun day sitting in the techies’ office and explaining why it was crucially important that I be able to get access to “whitierulez.com” or something like that.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:16:38 +0000

I’d like to recommend all the research I’ve done on censorware:

http://sethf.com/anticensorware/

Unfortunately, I’ve had to abandon decryption research because of the prospects of a lawsuit (and no funding, and generally not having it reported either :-( ).