Do you know it when you see it?
Our internet time is getting progressively whittled down towards nil these days, as Adam wants more and more interactive playing and arises earlier and earlier to engage in it. So very little gets done if it requires sitting at a keyboard: email, Skyping, posting to this document, recreational research and browsing, all have taken an increasingly distant back seat to child-raisin’, or wine-drinkin’ -to-recover-from-same. Still, one site I visit as daily as possible is BoingBoing[1]. A recent thread there has been on the topic of censor-ware, the filters that corporations or (worse) governments install in order to restrict the web-browsing of their subject peoples. Two days ago the New York Times picked up the story. Apparently this is turning into something of a firestorm.
In this post, you can read about how BoingBoing has been classified as pornography because its posts contain an average of 0.5% borderline-NSFW images (tiny ones at that). The censor-ware in question, in BoingBoing’s case something called (tautologically) “SmartFilter”, is happy to block 100% of posts if 0.5% of them can be (fuzzily) classified as pornographic.
Where is this going? Of course, it’s the prerogative of corporations and (some evil) governments to keep their chattels away from material they deem unseemly. But it seems that no deeming of the seemly is going on here. You can ensure that your site is blocked by this sort of filter by posting a picture of Michelangelo’s David[2] — presto, PORN! In fact, one blogger is encouraging everyone to do exactly that, saying “Maybe if enough of us do so, SmartFilter will just collapse under the weight of its own odious censoring.”
If mannerist renaissance art will get your site flagged as pornographic, this leads to the question: how smart is this SmartFilter?
Not very, apparently. BoingBoing has a comprehensive collection of ways to defeat it. If you’re reading this, and therefore obviously able to access this smutty, smutty blog, you may not need it, but MacGyver-like, it never hurts to add to your store of know-how, and tomorrow you may find yourself blocked.
This topic interests me implicitly, but just today it took a personal turn, when I received an email from a new reader:
[...] discovered your blog through a link in Michael Manske’s Glory of Carniola[3] to a familiar (?) pair of tits[4][...] And then guess what happened: Content Keeper live-blocked access to Isoglossia classifying it as Pornography / Sex. Of course, this only boosted my determination [...]
So the David’s Carrara crank above is superfluous: isoglossia is already porn. Whether it was the (clothed) breasts that did it, or mention of Magda’s breastfeeding, or last summer’s post on scallops as food porn will probably remain a deep mystery. How long we have been pornographic I also know not, and if it weren’t for this kind reader I might never have learned that I have apparently been cyber-transformed into an internet pornography magnate.
Guess I’ll have to grow a mustache and buy a van now.
[1]Or bOINGbOING, as you wish.
[2]Assuming it’s not a copyright infringement, which is a whole other can of worms here.
[3]q.v., s.v.p.
[4]If you’re just joining us, those celebrated (garbed) tits are here (really, when you get right down to it, SFW).
I was tempted to write an entry full of dangerous words that would get you flagged even more (if that’s possible) but decided agains tit.*
*Ha!**
**Sorry. Very juvenile of me.
Comment by Jane — Thursday 9 March 06 @ 04.57 MST+2.00
Hello! I’m back, by appointment with His Royal Highness the Web Administrator himself.
Let me just note how nastily Content Keeper sucks. First of all, it blocks access to ALL streams, videos and sound files, bar midis and wavs. It bars access to ALL health sites (not just sexual health ones). And so on. Our IT people have openly admitted that they are using it as a bandwidth saving device rather than as a ‘get back to work’ one. I think it must be the kind of thing they use in places like Saudi Arabia…
Comment by Loxias — Thursday 9 March 06 @ 08.42 MST+2.00
Jane: thanks for doing your part to boost our Google ratings.
Loxias: at least your IT people are honest about admitting the true purpose of the software. If, as you say, it is smart enough to block sites containing words like “Essex” and “Sussex”, it can’t help productivity much other than by paring down accessible websites to a tiny fraction. It makes me wonder why they don’t just unplug the whole interweb and be done with it. Now THAT would save some bandwidth.
Comment by sgazzetti — Thursday 9 March 06 @ 09.09 MST+2.00
At my last job (government facility) we could not even search for anything that fell into a ‘holistic’ or ‘new age’ kind of category — it was blocked every time as ‘occult’. For example, I could not even visit the site of my acupuncture clinic.
In Minnesota we have a devil worshipper running for governor. (I’m not kidding here. Anyone willing to pay the $117 filing fee can throw his hat in the ring.) But, just for the sake of argument, I wonder how that would work if he won: Would government agencies block access to the governor himself?
I hated those filters. Although I did get a lot more work done. Hmmm. I might be onto something there.
Comment by Susan — Thursday 9 March 06 @ 18.09 MST+2.00
JD, I am so proud of you! Of course, we all knew that someday your perfect combination of talents would come to this.
Comment by gaoo — Friday 10 March 06 @ 00.11 MST+2.00