School Censorship

C

Christian

Does anyone know any websites that can get me around school
censorship???

www.sun.com is usually not censored also most information on Java comes
through filters usually active in schools.

If you need help on any Java topic, but webpages that answer are
censored then you could ask the Question here. Also I would recommend
you to talk to the people responsible for the filter if this happens
more than once.


Christian
 
R

rossum

www.sun.com is usually not censored also most information on Java comes
through filters usually active in schools.

If you need help on any Java topic, but webpages that answer are
censored then you could ask the Question here. Also I would recommend
you to talk to the people responsible for the filter if this happens
more than once.
It is quite possible for web filters to catch the wrong site. When I
was one of the "people responsible for the filter" I had a request to
release access to a site about West Indian cookery which was blocked.
The front page of the site read: "Red Hot and Spicy"!

rossum
 
R

Roedy Green

Does anyone know any websites that can get me around school
censorship???

I think the way around this would be to reserve a special domain
suffix for adult content(and by that I don't mean home repairs), e.g.
..xxx and force such companies to register only there. That would make
a filter trivially easy. That would leave you with sites like mine
that offend Christians, prudes, hawks, C programmers etc but are not
pornography.

The problem is websites WANT to sneak by filters.
 
O

Owen Jacobson

and force such companies to register only there.

How, exactly, do you propose to do that? Particularly given that
CCTLDs like .us and .to and so on are entirely free to set up their
own rules about what kind of content is allowed within them.

The .xxx/.porn/.adult TLD is one of those "good on the surface,
fatally flawed in practice" ideas that doesn't really help for a
number of reasons. Here's two:

1. Whose definition of "adult content" are we using? Amsterdam's?
Canada's? The US's? Afghanistan's? Israel's? Some worst-common-
denominator mix of all of them?

2. What impetus is there for any business to make it easier for
people to interpose filters between them and potential customers?

If non-pornographers are permitted to register in .xxx, there's also
the problem of who gets to own, eg., microsoft.xxx -- is it the
software giant, who want to protect their trademarks from dilution
(even though porn is a totally unrelated market)? Or is it a hardcore
tiny-and-limp fetish site?

The supposed utility of a .xxx domain is even worse if registration
within .xxx rather than .com or .ca or what-have-you is voluntary.
While it's trivial to filter out all .xxx sites, filter vendors would
still have to do the exact same level of filtering they do today to
catch all the porn in other TLDs.

Fundamentally, DNS is a weak tool for categorizing by content.

-o
 
C

Christian

rossum said:
It is quite possible for web filters to catch the wrong site. When I
was one of the "people responsible for the filter" I had a request to
release access to a site about West Indian cookery which was blocked.
The front page of the site read: "Red Hot and Spicy"!

rossum
I was in school victim of such filters...
its a bit stupid if hot or sex are blocked words...

as without hot no hotmail ...

Filters that just look for words are simply to stupid and should not be
used. If you really want to code some good filter, a good approach might
be to repolish your knowledge in AI. As this seems to be a job for an
expert system.
 
R

rossum

I was in school victim of such filters...
its a bit stupid if hot or sex are blocked words...

as without hot no hotmail ...

Filters that just look for words are simply to stupid and should not be
used. If you really want to code some good filter, a good approach might
be to repolish your knowledge in AI. As this seems to be a job for an
expert system.
We got our firewall as part of a package, including various lists of
blocked sites which could be switched in or out as required. I got
the distinct impression that somewhere there were a lot of bored
college students surfing websites and classifying them for a bit of
money. Some of the classifications were bizarre. It was a bit more
sophisticated than simply looking at the text contents of the page,
that all too easily falls foul of the "Scunthorpe problem":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

At the time I was working for a supermarket and the team developing
recipes for the backs of the packets needed to access the site.

rossum
 
M

Martin Gregorie

Owen said:
How, exactly, do you propose to do that? Particularly given that
CCTLDs like .us and .to and so on are entirely free to set up their
own rules about what kind of content is allowed within them.

The .xxx/.porn/.adult TLD is one of those "good on the surface,
fatally flawed in practice" ideas that doesn't really help for a
number of reasons. Here's two:

1. Whose definition of "adult content" are we using? Amsterdam's?
Canada's? The US's? Afghanistan's? Israel's? Some worst-common-
denominator mix of all of them?

2. What impetus is there for any business to make it easier for
people to interpose filters between them and potential customers?

If non-pornographers are permitted to register in .xxx, there's also
the problem of who gets to own, eg., microsoft.xxx -- is it the
software giant, who want to protect their trademarks from dilution
(even though porn is a totally unrelated market)? Or is it a hardcore
tiny-and-limp fetish site?

The supposed utility of a .xxx domain is even worse if registration
within .xxx rather than .com or .ca or what-have-you is voluntary.
While it's trivial to filter out all .xxx sites, filter vendors would
still have to do the exact same level of filtering they do today to
catch all the porn in other TLDs.

Fundamentally, DNS is a weak tool for categorizing by content.
The idea was proposed by IANA in 2005, only to be killed by the US
Commerce Dept because the American Religious Right lobby objected.

The same would probably happen to any other proposed 'adult content' TLD.
 
P

Peter Duniho

The idea was proposed by IANA in 2005, only to be killed by the US
Commerce Dept because the American Religious Right lobby objected.

Actually, the adult media industry opposed it as well.

When those two groups both agree on something -- specifically, that it's a
bad idea -- it's a pretty good bet it is. :)

Pete
 

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