Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: RE: Size of the web, and attempts to filter it
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:55:41 -0500
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 10:50:06 -0500 To: farber () cis upenn edu From: "Dorothy E. Denning" <denning () cs georgetown edu> Dave, My understanding is that at least some these filtering programs operate with disallow lists. For example, Cyber Patrol has a CyberNOT list. That would mean the default is allowed -- unless you fall within a subdomain of something else that isn't (don't put your Web pages on a site that hosts a lot of porn :) Many interesting problems in computing are intractable if you insist on a brute force approach to find a perfect solution. That's why we have heuristics and it's made computing all the more interesting and challenging. In this case the filtering companies can fall back on feedback when their heuristics fail. Parents will complain if stuff is allowed that shouldn't be, and site owners and groups like the Censorware Project will complain when stuff is excluded that should not be. For example, after Censorware complained about 67 sites blocked by Cyber Patrol in late 1997, 55 were taken off the CyberNOT list. DorothyFrom: "Shaya Potter" <spotter () yucs org> To: <farber () cis upenn edu> Subject: RE: Size of the web, and attempts to filter it Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 09:42:24 -0500 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal This is missing the point that the effective censoring programs aren'tgoingto say "we will allow the entire internet, but disallow specificsites", butare going to essentially disallow the entire internet, and then allow selective sites. Most users/families/companies don't need access to every possible site on the net, and it's much easier for them to deal with requests to add sites to the allowed list, than to try to keep up withsitesto add to a disallowed list. This isn't such an original idea, as many firewalls can act in this way (disallow everything, but what I explicitly allow), and I have seen ads for ISPs only targeted at families that specificaly do the above. Shaya Potter
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- IP: RE: Size of the web, and attempts to filter it Dave Farber (Jan 26)
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- IP: RE: Size of the web, and attempts to filter it Dave Farber (Jan 26)