Re:CyberSitter over-zealousness

Jennifer Cram, Manager Library Services (jcram@qednsl.qld.gov.au)
Fri, 16 Jan 1998 15:06:39 +1000 (EST)

Not only true but only part of the problem with Internet Filters. They
censor part words (trying finding assessment or association - Americans
spell backside, "ass"), euphemisms and replacements - so if you look up
beer you will get everything but Fourex as those who replaced the word sex
with xxx soon moved to xxxx to stay one jump ahead, and to make matters
word, some are them appear to be nigh impossible to fully uninstall.
Some allow you to turn that facility off, some don't. Some tell you
what they censor, most don't.

What I find most disturbing is that while they tend to advertise
themselves as protecting children there is a nasty far-right bias. So, you might not be
able to find out how many prisoners are on death row by state, you will
definitely not be able to find that information by race, but you will be
able to access photographs of the body of Ted Bundy, the serial killer,
post-execution.

On Fri, 16 Jan 1998, Tony Barry wrote:

> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 15:12:04 +1100
> From: Tony Barry <tonyb@netinfo.com.au>
> To: Ross Johnson <rpj@ise.canberra.edu.au>
> Cc: Link - mailing list <link@www.anu.edu.au>
> Subject: Re:CyberSitter over-zealousness
>
> At 2:51 PM 16/1/98, Ross Johnson wrote:
> >It's yet another clue that this kind
> >of software it doomed to fail because it simply cannot live alongside
> >other legitimate machine applications because you have no way of knowing
> >what it's doing to your data.
>
> Utterly incredible. It such a stupid way to do things you would think it
> couldn't possibly be true.
>
> Tony
>
> __________________________________________________________
> mailto:tony@ningaui.anu.edu.au |Phone/Fax +61 2-6241-7659
> mailto:tonyb@netinfo.com.au |Phone +61 4-1242-0397
> http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry
> Ningaui Pty Ltd, GPO Box 1680, Canberra City, ACT 2601
> Maintainer of the link network policy list link@www.anu.edu.au
> Visiting Fellow, Department of Computer Science, FEIT
> Australian National University
>
>

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