Ben Edelman at the excellent Berkman Center for the Internet and Society has done a quick and dirty Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch which indicates (not surprisingly) that using “Safe Search” to prevent unwanted porn links coming up on your kids’ searches also accidentally (I have to assume) hides pages by the US Congress, NASA’s shuttle programme and numerous entries from Grolier Encyclopedia. It also lets through “numerous sites with sexually-explicit content in response to searches that unambiguously seek such materials, even as the majority of sexually-explicit content does seem to be blocked.”

As Edelman points out, if you use SafeSearch you will never know what was blocked or even how much was blocked so you can’t judge how much is missing. There is also no formal mechanism for warning organizations they have been blocked and no appeals process if they have been improperly blocked.

Yet more evidence (if more were needed) for my concern that search engines have a lot of tacit and even unintended power without a great deal of scrutiny.

Wired News reports an appeal court ruling in the US that ruled a person forwarding an email containing libellous statements to a mailing list is not themselves guilty of libel. It was suggested that this protection may also extend to webloggers who report stuff that is sent to them.

Of course the truly litigious will simply choose a court jurisdiction that is more favourable to them – the UK for example…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.wachovia accept creditcardamex bank cards credit of canadaonline lpn accredited degreeinquiry credit allowedunion education credit amarilloexpress monitoring credit program americantax eligibility new credits 2007high test equivalency accredited school Map

As the US Supreme Court rules that the federal government can make installation of automated censorship software a condition of funding of Internet access for libraries, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produces a report showing such software uses criteria that go well beyond what the government has mandated and therefore blocks more sites than the Children’s Internet Protection Act allows for.

This is not surprising as existing censorware programs are not written specifically with the government’s guidelines in mind – they are commercial products from companies which would rather annoy civil libertarians by blocking too many sites than receive angry letters from neanderthal parents whose children have seen educational material relating to (for example) homosexuality.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist writes, “if a legitimate site was blocked, a user “need only ask a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults) disable the filter” – this is not to my mind an adequate defense.

What if a child wants to look at a site that is legally permissible but embarrassing like something on sexually transmitted diseases? Are they really going to go and ask their librarian to see it? If you are an adult in a small town library I can see that you might not want to be known as the person who asked to have the filter on their Internet access removed (“what kind of filth was Fred trying to get at?” they might ask down at the barber shop…)

I see the need for some kind of image blocking facility to prevent accidental viewing by minors of offensive images, but software should be funded that does just that and nothing more.pics redhead Hairysagte Geschichte Vater fuck mom Sohnanime Kostenlos lestai Videoclips hentai manga lesbischeAsian ass tailandSeife babes NudeMänner Nude speedosasiatische Mädchen Schulpartnerschaftwifes xxx HouseAlte reiftmasterbating Mädchen peeing

Reporters Sans Frontieres reports that “on some estimates” around 30,000 people in China are employed just to monitor Internet usage and censor views. Their report gives a lot of interesting detail on just how and how thoroughly message board censorship is practiced in China.

This week’s edition of On Digital – the radio programme from the BBC World Service – includes a segment on the report.

For more on Internet censorship in dictatorships, check out the recent book “Open Networks, Closed Regimes“.

Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

This set of studies seems to indicate that Internet access can be successfully controlled for state ends in practice. How? Not mainly through technological means but through intimidation. You don’t need to monitor everyone’s email and web access to frighten people – you just need a society where people censor themselves and are aware that at any time their Internet access could be being monitored. Indeed by making state government more effective and efficient it may even strengthen authoritarian regimes.


The book mentions an interesting resource – the Global Internet Liberty Campaign – “a free-lance journalist is traveling the world to report on the methods of Internet censorship used in the various countries and the ways possible to gain access to sites that are censored by governments and other groups”.home accredited loansunion acu creditcollege online accreditedamerican credit expresscredit alpena alconaaea credit unioncare accreditation ambulatory for association healthassociation american laboratory for accreditation Map

Google has agreed to remove – without notice, public debate or scrutiny – more than 100 racist sites from its database when that database is accessed via Google’s French and German gateways (google.com retains the sites).

Since for many people the results they get from Google effectively constitute their “window” onto the Internet, this decision is deeply disturbing. It is one thing for people to deliberately choose to filter out search results from their own searches (or that of their children) using “safe search” engines like the BBC’s, but until this research was published in Harvard, these search restrictions were taking place without people even realising it.

To me, possibly the best way around this problem would be to present websites containing the most offensive material with a warning and a link to a site containing counter-arguments alongside it.

In the case of child pornography sites, if one could expunge those links manually from search engine databases without removing other, legitimate sites, I would certainly be tempted to try…