Re: GEN:Internet Filter question

[Carol Simpson <csimpson@TENET.EDU>]

Deborah J. Stafford wrote:

> I have two  questions;  If I have a site with extremely graphic pictures but am
> very careful to make any text, headings, titles etc extremely innocous so that
> any key word filter would not focus on any of my text - would the site be
> blocked without a human viewing the page?

It depends. Filters that block based on word scans would almost
certainly let the page pass. More sophisticated filters that look at
filenames of images, etc. might not. And of course, if the page has
already been submitted to the filter company and added to their block
list, then it would not pass.

>
> Second - to what extent would an accdeptable use policy stating that students
> are not to go to unacceptable sites be an infringement of the library bill of
> rights?  What is the difference between blocking a site and forbidding someone
> to go to the site?

You have a dilemma here. What about the student who does a search, and
(as most search engines do) is presented with a hit that is poorly
described or described not at all? The kid clicks on this hit, and up
pops a page with totally inappropriate material. He didn't go looking
for this; it just somehow fell into the "pot" of the search he did.
(Some folks put inappropriate tags in the "metaheaders" of their pages
(several search engines use these to locate information) to get hit from
competitors - like Ford might put Chevrolet in their metaheader to get
folks looking for Chevys to see their products, too.) The kid did a
search on something appropriate and something off-the-wall shows up. Who
hasn't had that happen? But if you enforce the AUP too strictly, you are
going to blast a kid who didn't actively do anything wrong.

Here is another filter scenario: Filter companies maintain filter lists.
Porn is popping up on the Net like topsy. The block lists get bigger and
bigger. I seriously doubt that the filter companies go recheck those
lists to see if the pages blocked are still active, so the block lists
grow exponentially. Loading up that list when your computer starts takes
lots of RAM and lots of time. So what do the filter companies do?  They
truncate their lists to save disk (and transfer) space.  This practice
results in things like this:
A site is named: www.university.edu
They have web space for students under this structure:
www.univeristy.edu/cgi/student/ppages/
A couple of students (OK, I'm begin generous!) put up some nasty pix.
The address of one might be:
www.univeristy.edu/cgi/student/ppages/~jsmith/funstuff/ohwow.html
 Once A Big Filter Company discovers that this particular domain has
shown up in their block list a few times, they decide that the whole
bunch of them are worthless and simply truncate a whole section of the
domain to save space (and their time) in the block list like this:
www.university.edu/cgi/student/*
So what about the student who has put up a whole site of links to poetry
resources, or other appropriate material? They get blocked, too, simply
because someone in the university (or other) community got carried away.

Carol Simpson
Mesquite (TX) ISD
csimpson@tenet.edu

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