|
|
|
  |
| Australia Rejects Mandatory Censorware |
|
 |
|
| MSN Spaces and its Silly Word-Blocking |
|
|
|
posted by Jamie McCarthy
on Friday December 03, @08:56AM
from the space-between-the-ears dept.
|
|
|
|
|
|
BoingBoing has a story today on how Microsoft's new blogging tool, MSN Spaces, does word-based blocking of your blog entries. Sad and funny. I saw two stories in the blogosphere today on MSN Spaces -- one a video demo of how to post to it, which I yawned past, and this censorship story, which I'm, well, blogging myself.
|
|
|
|
|
| Pentagon Admits Censoring Casualty Sites |
|
|
|
| COPA Sent Back To Lower Court By SCOTUS, 5-4 |
|
|
|
| Slimming the Net, Open-Source Style |
|
|
|
posted by Jamie McCarthy
on Thursday May 27, @12:00PM
from the much-ado dept.
|
|
|
|
|
|
NewsForge has an article today on how U.S. and Open Source Censorship Slims the Net. Interesting quotes from censorware providers (it's better than governmental censorship, doncha know) and some discussion of whether open-source censorware is better than closed blacklists.
|
|
|
|
|
| Back to 1996, Part II: the U.S. Government |
|
|
|
posted by Jamie McCarthy
on Monday May 03, @12:07PM
from the deja-vu dept.
|
|
|
|
|
The U.S. government, eager to show oppressed nations how we allow free speech, is blocking the people of China and Iran from accessing our embassies, drug education, email, and gay sites.
Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. 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)... 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.
|
|
|
|
|
| Google and Spam-Filtering: Back to 1996 |
|
|
|
posted by Jamie McCarthy
on Saturday April 24, @07:40AM
from the bad-old-days dept.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Remember the bad old days of 1996 when censorware was like CyberPatrol and CyberSitter: utterly atrocious, almost too bad to be worth criticizing? Well, the bad old days are still here. The difference is that, with the kind of censorware we have now, many, many more people are affected.
CNET brings us the story Google's chastity belt too tight, in which it's revealed that Google's SafeSearch feature blocks PartsExpress.com, GirlsSchoolOfAustin.org, Pornichet.org, and RomansInSussex.co.uk. Unbelievable.
And an EarthWeb column, Is One-Fourth of Your E-Mail Getting Lost?, explains that the overanxious spam filtering provided by ISPs like NetZero, SBC/Yahoo!, and Mac.com blocks one-quarter or more of requested email (corporate newsletters and the like). The majority of the ISPs they studied in 2003 got worse in the second half of the year, presumably as they adopted stricter anti-spam measures. You can download Return Path's whitepaper here.
|
|
|
|
|
| Public Libraries, Disable Your Filters |
|
|
|
posted by Jim Tyre
on Thursday April 08, @07:21PM
from the good-advice-from-an-expert dept.
|
|
|
|
|
|
First Monday has a new piece by Mary Minow, a former librarian and currently a lawyer and library law consultant. In the piece, Lawfully Surfing the Net: Disabling Public Library Internet Filters to Avoid More Lawsuits in the United States, Minow argues that, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in the CIPA case, United States v. American Library Association, public libraries may be less at risk of a lawsuit by adopting and following an aggressive policy of disabling censorware.
Minow defines two types of public libraries:
Cautious Public Library installs filters and tries to follow the law as written: its policy is to unblock a site when an adult patron asks a librarian to unblock the site for bona fide research. Cautious Public Library will disable the entire filter rarely, if ever.
Quick Public Library also installs filters, choosing a vendor that offers minimum blocking. Its policy allows patrons to sit at a public terminal, and select FILTERED or FILTER DISABLED access, after clicking that they are at least 17 years of age. No librarian intervention is required.
Minow contends: While I leave the technical issue on how to disable filters to others, I am prepared to write in no uncertain terms that the risk of a lawsuit is, perhaps surprisingly, far greater for the Cautious Public Library than for the Quick Public Library, which in fact bears very little risk of litigation under federal law.
The piece is well worth reading for libraries still struggling with what to do after CIPA was upheld, and by all who think that everything was lost in the Supreme Court decision.
|
|
|
|
|
| Saudi Arabia's Censorware -- An Inside View |
|
|
<
Yesterday's News
>
|
|
|
|
Last update:
22:50 GMT (15+ min delay). For informational purposes
only. Not intended for trading purposes. If you're silly enough to do
something based on this data, we're not liable.
Data courtesy
Finance::Quote.
|
|
|
|
|
]
