[OS:N:] Re: school filtering

["Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart bmsi com>]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

> Not only are the open source filtering solutions significantly cheaper, more
> reliable, and more effective, but the user of the technology has complete
> control over its use. This is an extremely important point: by using open
> source software for filtering, I have absolute control over what is filtered.
> ANY TIME a freedom-of-speech issue arises, I can fix it. Period. I can
> publish, for the whole world to see (and use), EXACTLY what is filtered[1].

Ultimately, all content filtering is based on human judgement.  Sometimes, 
human judgement can be amplified by technology.  For instance, the
recent "Plan for Spam" article has email users delete mail as either "spam"
or "ham" (non-spam).  A statistical analysis of incoming mail then 
auto deletes mail with a high probablity of being spam.  But its judgement
is based on the human judgement.

I use Squid for web filtering at home and for some clients.  At home, we
have a list of "safesites", which the children are allowed to visit.
(Enforced by iptables and squid.)  They can, of course, ask for additional
sites to be added as they are discovered in google or suggested by extended
family, and I can remove sites that turn out to have a bad influence despite
their seeming innocence (e.g. disney.com).

I would like to see software support for collaboration on community
filtering.  For instance, instead of emailing the latest cool safesites
to each family's sysadmin, there should be an online community list.
Authorized adults should have a convenient method of categorizing 
sites via a servlet/CGI/mod_python/whatever as they are encountered.
Each community would have their own judgements as to what is appropriate
for various ages (e.g., are classical nudes porn?), but by joining
a community with similar values, the work of judgeing each and every site
is distributed over many eyes.

I guess the 'email a list' solution works pretty well (especially with
a script to apply the list to local safesites), but it seems like
there must be a way to improve it.

-- 
			Stuart D. Gathman <stuart bmsi com>
      Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
	"[Microsoft] products are even less buggy than others, in terms of
	    per capita usage." - Steve Balmer, Microsoft Corporation