“Let’s face it. A lot of the commercial software that is
censorship focused is of questionable value, and in general the
technology currently in use has come under fire for not being
terribly effective. The vast majority of these censoring packages
have a list of sites (URL’s) that they block, and possibly a list
of keywords that they block. This typically results in lists of
sites that are very out of date (have you ever tried to keep track
of all the pornographic websites online? I can’t imagine a task
like that), and sometimes overly general (for example if faced with
a large website that had 50 pornographic webpages would you block
each one, or just block the entire domain?) and keyword lists that
block legitimate sites with medical information and similar.
One would assume that if you are buying a software package that
claims to block certain types of information it is reasonable to
expect that you can find out exactly what it is blocking by
default.”
“So, on the one hand we have companies selling software they
claim will censor out certain kinds of content, and on the other
hand we have activists claiming (and in some cases having
proved):
- The software blocks many legitimate sites, and is hard to
correct - The software doesn’t come close to blocking all the sites that
contain content they claim be blocking - The software won’t list exactly what it is blocking if you ask
it to censor say ‘nudity’ (does Leonardo DaVinci’s “David”
count?) - The so called problem that these software packages claim to fix
aren’t really an issue at all”