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Once again, it's called a WHITELIST
I am still befuddled that basically no one on the planet gets the fact that blacklists and filters do not work, but that even so that is not the only way to control Internet browsing.
When I saw: Library Turns Off All Internet Access To Avoid Porn on TechDirt today it opened up these old wounds.
USE WHITELISTS PEOPLE, NOT BLACKLISTS.
And this could work on a nationwide library scale, a whitelist they share of known reputable non pornographic resources allowed in the library. Fairly easy to setup and maintain, with admins allowed to modify and add/remove sites on the list, which could then be shared to a central repository. What we need to understand here is it is ok, in situations where filtering at ALL is required (kids, libraries [by stupid law], etc) to simply provide a very small subset of the web and not try to update some dumbass blacklist based expensive product every day. Blacklist based products provide a list that is already out of date the minute it is updated, it is the Internet after all, allowing all sites and blocking a known bad "list" is impossible. On the other hand, though it is never really discussed, blocking ALL traffic and allowing known good is actually effective (though yes it does limit things severely, the question is using a limited subset that is *known for sure* to not contain whatever material you want to block, or rather a non limited set that you know for sure does contain 10% or so of the material you want to block - is 10% good enough for your kid, or your library?).
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RE: Once again, it's called a WHITELIST
Hi Atrox,
I agree that we need to keep kiddies away from pr0n etc but I believe that whitelists are a great way of controlling people and removing freedoms.
If you require content to be on a whitelist, then you're going to require that someone approve that content as being "suitable".
All that does is give more power to faceless bureaucrats to control what we can and cannot learn and what we can know about the machinations of companies and government.
Can you imagine a leftist newspaper getting whitelisted even in today's climate? How about in 10 years' time if we continue in this merry fashion of repealing everything from the Magna Carta onwards? Can you see Al Jazeera being whitelisted?
If you start require that public internet access points have whitelists then you are making a knowledge divide between those who can afford to have their own internet connection at home and those who cannot.
This is would be a backwards step: the principles of equality of opportunity are what western civilisation has been working towards quite consistently for the last century or so (200 years if you take the US founding fathers and the French Revolution as being true to their words, which they were not... but that's a different story). We have consistently aimed for all people, irrespective of wealth, to have at least a basic education and awareness of the world at large. To introduce an income-barrier to education would be a retrograde step to say the least.
To put it crudely: remember that *uninformed* poor people will vote conservative as that plays the populist political line even though conservative gonvernance offers them little comfort from life's realities.
As to what a better solution to both black and whitelists is... stuffed if I know!
RE: Once again, it's called a WHITELIST
StuP, I completely agree.
Maybe I did not express myself quite accurately. I would prefer that public Internet connections have NO FILTERING. Ideally I would like for, let's see, PARENTS to pay attention to kids and for adults to be more responsible than to be surfing pr0n in the library.
What I meant was that when the choice comes down to a filter versus just turning off the Internet connection - rather than the choice of filter or not - then a whitelist is what we should use, not a blacklist.
In the case of the library in reference in the article they turned off the Internet connection because they were legally obligated by the brilliant U.S. government to filter Internet connections. What I meant was a better, cheaper choice, would have been to create a whitelist.
That said, I completely admit that that limits things to some list someone considers "acceptable." But I would argue the same is true of a blacklist and again blacklists do not work 100%.
I use a whitelist at home, for the kids, because blacklist based "solutions" just cannot keep up and 10%, 5% even 1% porn is too much for the "kid" purposes - and too me that fails the entire blacklist concept.
To summarize, whitelist when you MUST have a filter at all, preferable no filter.