Whitelists for Overzealous Internet Filters?

Anonymous Coward asks: "We've all seen how plenty of bad examples of Internet filtering in libraries and schools, so I need not list any. After browsing the aforementioned YRO archives &c., I had an interesting proposal. Books that people *want* the public to see are submitted to libraries to be placed on the shelves. So why not come up with a similar solution of the public submitting lists of websites to be *allowed* access from the libraries. Project Gutenberg or The Bible blocked? No problem, just ask a librarian to add the domain to the allow list." Would this be a practical way around overzealous filters?

Many problems

[Mr_Person]

Well, the most obvious problem is that there are way too many domains to request each one be added to a whitelist every time you want to do something (How many links did you click while viewing slashdot today? Do you want to have to go ask the librarian every time?)

And another obvious problem that we've seen with other censorware is that what one person wants isn't always what another person wants.

And, for that matter, most current censorware applications have the ability to specifically unblock certain sites, so you should still be able to do that.

basically doesn't help -- think it through

[josephgrossberg]

Because who determines what gets on the "white" list? The same censors who created the blacklist?

Yes, I know you said people could suggest things, but there is obviously an intermediary between the library users and the whitelist. Suggestions to add Goatse.CX are going to get shot down (hopefully), but what about less obvious choices?

If the whitelist is just a blacklist with the criteria reversed, then it's not going to help anyone.

And yes, a human being will probably judge this differently from a keyword filter, but if they had that kind of man-hours, then why would they use the blacklisting software in the first place?

Re:basically doesn't help -- (how about .kids.us?)

[brianjcain]

Because who determines what gets on the "white" list? The same censors who created the blacklist?

I think that the .kids.us domain could accomplish some of these goals. You make a good point, though -- even in a regulated system there is potential for inaccuracy/censorship/abuse. (Especially if it's run by a government agency.) But it's much better than a million third-parties (NetNanny, et al) coming up with their own whitelists.

Re:basically doesn't help -- think it through

[afay]

I think that this could work in conjunction with certain kinds of filtering software. For example, a lot of filtering software will create a rating for a webpage based on the number of "questionable" word counts. If the rating is above a threshold, the page will be blocked. Unfornately, this blocks a lot of decent pages and this is the kind of situation where a whitelist would come in handy.

Re:basically doesn't help -- think it through

[Oculus Habent]

Exactly. A whitelist system would be most effective if used in conjunction with a blacklist system.

Quick disclaimer - I think the best "content filtering system" is an authority figure (parent, teacher, librarian, etc) watching the user. Disagree at will.

First, let's be honest. There are far too many people who are under-educated about computer and the Internet who live scared little lives because the media tells them they should to believe that we will be without blacklists any time soon. It may stand against principle to say, "I don't agree with it, but here's a way to make it better" but if no one had the insight to use logic like that, the world would be one hell of an awful place. Let's move on, shall we?

The biggest, and most complained about problem of a filter is that it blocks sites that it "has no reason to block." Obviously, it thought it did, and until there is a re-design of the blocking engine or a specific exclusion, it will continue to do so. Many filters also make use of blacklists, which is a perfectly acceptable method to ensure that patently offensive content doesn't make it through.

Now, I could go into a long inquiry of the term "patently offiensive" but I will say only this: there are a few things which are considered unsuitable for general consumption by ethical standards, i.e. society as a rule does not believe they should be publicly addressed. Pornography generally falls into this category. While this does not mean society believes pornography is unacceptable as a whole, it does mean those magazines are typically partially covered and/or out of reach of small children. In my opinion, this is a fair standard for Internet blacklists.

So while blacklists are implemented, very few filtering programs stop at blacklists. This is where the ambiguity and the problems occur. Thousands of differnet blacklists can be maintained, suited to cultural, religious, moral or personal beliefs. They can be tuned for specific issues. While the same can be said of filters, the control is always diminished, and either something bad will slip through, or something good won't. Enter the whitelists.

Just as blacklists are maintained for specific reasons, so can whitelists. Indeed, a plethora of options is beneficial to the cause. They can overlap without any harm, and individually tailored lists allow people and organizations to select both what they think is bad, and what they think is good. They can set clear territories of on-and-off limits, and let the filtering software handle the middle-ground.

Of course, no filtering software is complete without the ability to override it. It would be especially nice to have the option to send reports of disagreements with the filtering software, so that maintainers of blacklists, whitelists, and the filtering software could all take a look into the needs and problems of their tools.

But don't just listen to me. Think about it for yourself.

Re:basically doesn't help -- think it through

[bill_mcgonigle]

Because who determines what gets on the "white" list? The same censors who created the blacklist?

No. At most libraries they install a commercial product with pre-defined lists and filters. The whitelist would be an exception list defined by somebody else. This is a check and balance.

Here's how it could work:

• The author submits their site to the whitelist database.
  
• Volunteers rate this site for n categories of information (sex, violence, health content, etc.).
• There could be two categories of reviewers, explicit and accidental. The explicit reviewers could review sites regularly (say, all the librarians in the country could do one a day). The accidental reviewers would be volunteers who have a browser plugin or sidebar, that would notice if a (happened upon) visited site had an entry in the database and would provide a review form.
  
• Users would need ratings, and a voting system would be needed to prevent mis-ratings. For example, a porn operator might open an account and rate his site as "health information". But n other users didn't rate it that way, so his vote is ignored and his 'karma' goes -1 for each site in disagreement. Eventually, low karma users aren't counted in the tallies.
  
• The local administrator (the librarian) could choose how many agreeing votes would be necessary to whitelist a site (3, 10, etc) to establish a confidence interval.
  
• This would be a moderately expensive system, since you'd probably need to register users through the mail, to reduce fake accounts. This would take a small staff, and therefore require a modest access fee (say $10/mo/library). Some system could be worked out whereby explicit reviewers could reduce their cost by, say $0.10 per required review. A small under-funded library could eliminate their cost by reviewing a hundred sites a month this way. Users with poor karma would not receive the credit.
  

Interesting

[__aafkqj3628]

It is a very interesting idea, but the workload to keep it updated and maintained would be huge, not to mention examining the websites and making sure everybody likes it before it is added to the list.

Over here in christchurch, the public libraries have public internet terminals which you can only access sites within .nz (kinda lame, but otherwise everybody would use them for porn) or you can pay for access. I just use my connection at home.

Practical vs. Principle

[GuyMannDude]

I'm sure others will state this more eloquently than I but one needs to consider the principle of a white list as well as the practicality of it. I feel, and I'm sure most slashdotters do as well, that the default should be "information wants to be free." For people like us, the idea of a white list is almost like capitulating to the censorship proponents.

As far as the practicallity of such a thing, I fear that it will suffer from the same problem that a black list would, namely that it's really agonizing to try to list every notable/worthy item of an enormous list. If I go to a library and get some information and then find out that it's not available and I have to special order it, I usually won't bother putting in my request and I'll turn to other ways of getting the data. I think the same thing is likely to happen if a white list would be instituted. People would get fed up with having to wait and submit a special request. The promise of the Internet as being an immediate source of information would be soured. One could certainly argue along the lines of "Hey, if you want unfettered access to information and can't be bothered waiting a little while, then buy your own computer!" but I would guess that majority of people who use library Internet access probably can't afford one for whatever reason.

In my view, the entire idea of a white list is the wrong way to be thinking of the issue. It seems like the censorship proponents should be the ones stuck doing the extra work since filters are their ideas in the first place. Sticking the poor high school student with extra work because of some over-zealous soccer moms who don't want their kids to look at undesirable Internet sites seems a bit unfair.

GMD

Re:Practical vs. Principle

[pross]

In a better world GuyMannDude's excellent post would have ended this thread and persuaded all the governments of the world to end censorship. But this isn't a better world. Those of us who are opposed on principle to any kind of censorship are somehow going to have to try to explain our point of view to the honest-if-muddled proponents of blacklisting - to parents who don't want their children to be exposed to porn on the Net - to battered wives who don't want their husbands to learn how to batter them without leaving marks - to grassroots Republicans who think that any criticism of American foreign policy is unAmerican. We at /. are *right*, philosophically and historically, since it's been demonstrated over and over again that without freedom of speech and its corollary, freedom of information, no other freedom is secure, yet the world is full of people who don't know that *their* liberty is at stake every time they say "This is disgusting! Someone ought to put a stop to it." Surely there *must* be a way of teaching people this obvious truth? It's not as if it were something trivial. We're fighting for the survival of hard-earned civilised values here.

Practicality?

[MacAndrew]

The difficult calls are over the gray area, which begs the question of who decides what's in and what's out, and what "appeal" procedures are available, say to a librarian who can issue an on-the-spot waiver. i relish the idea of going to a librarian to ask if I could "please" see a site.

Google currently claims to be indexing 3 billion pages. The size of the task is unbelievable.

The most important thing of course is how asinine the idea of filtering libraries is. It's not the librarians asking for this. I hope the First Amendment deep sixes it, and then we'll only deal with wonky filters if we choose to. To the extent that local libraries and schools want to filter what is appropriate for children, they can make that call on their own, perhaps subscribing to a trusted-source whitelist; this is appropriate only because children have reduced 1st A. rights. Whatever happens, and I'm talking to the would-be censors, don't condemn the adults to seeing nothing more than what is fit for children (see Supreme Court decision in Pacifica).

Who decides?

[molo]

This doesn't help. You still have the question of what is acceptable and what is not. Why should we let some librarian or town council decide that for us? Besides, not many people are going to feel it socially acceptable to go ask the librarian to ask for access to subculture or deviant sites.

Reluctance to change..

[Provolo]

I live at a boarding school, and I access the internet through the school's internet server.
My school provides internet access (port 80) only through a proxy server, which filters out 'unappropriate' content by Symantec's I-Gear software.

The problem with various white lists is not necessarily the technical skill involved in changing the blocked link,
but the changer's willingness to do so.Especially when the the system providing the internet access is an academic institution, such internet approvals are difficult and touchy, and most often many/most requests are ignored for the sole sake of time.

What's your degree of approval for a site? What if your own morals agree with unblocking the site? On what grounds would a site be unblocked, and how would those unblocks be justified?

There are just too many subjective questions that are unanswered--The presence of censorship bothers me at my school, but I can definitely see where the attempt FOR censorship comes from, and why constant updating of a 'white list' would take too much time.

Re:Reluctance to change..

[penguinboy]

Logic would have it that there should be no problem here. If an organization has implemented a filtering/blocking system, it should have a clear policy as to what is not allowed. And given that most filtering systems use vendor-supplied lists, it is quite possible that the lists will contain sites that are not forbidden by the policy. The restriction on those sites ought to be removable, then.

The approval/disapproval trickiness begins with the implementation of any filtering policy, not just with unblocking of sites.

Chilling...

[JimDabell]

The problem is that you have to explicitly ask for something to be "unbanned". Gutenburg etc are the obvious examples that show how ridiculous the filtering is, but the base issue is that the government (assuming a publically-funded library) is not only deciding what you can and can't see, but spending your money to do it.

Imagine you were researching a touchy subject (insert taboo of choice here). Would you want to be the one to ask for relevent sites to be unbanned? Or, given the choice, would you prefer to research something else instead?

Palm Beach Atlantic University

[Gangis]

My best friend's university down in West Palm Beach, Florida (which happens to be a Christian school) has a filter that works like that. An upperclassman is hired to review sites and update the "allow" list. There's a 2-day waiting period for each site to review, and it's pretty much an effective system. It does frustrate me though, since most of the sites I visit are blocked (And no, they're not porn sites or anything like that. :P)

Re:Palm Beach Atlantic University

[Gangis]

Oh I forgot to mention, my best friend told me a story that last year, the guy was taking bribes to allow porn sites through the filter. He was caught. According to him, he was arrested and charged with felony and got a pretty stiff sentence. So don't do it, folks!

Internet Filters

[daigu]

There are so many problems with your question, I'm not really sure where to start. In the interest of disclosure, I should probably state that I am trained as a librarian, but I do not work in a public library setting. So, I don't have any special concerns about filtering beyond my professional ones.

The whole notion of Internet filtering goes against a central librarian tenet, namely: We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources. [ala.org] It's a great idea, but it has never really been put to the test until the development of the Internet and libraries providing access.

You see, in practice, librarians have always been censors. They decide which books get on the shelves, which books get weeded from the collection, etc., and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Editors edit books in order to make them more focused, lucid, and pleasurable to read. Librarians are a kind of editor - for whole collections. Due to their efforts, you can find the books you are looking for if they are in the collection. You might be able to find other books by looking nearby. Of course, libraries are no longer just about books, there are article databases, special collections, music, videos, and so forth. But for discussion, let's just talk about books.

If I go to my local library looking for John Zerzan's book Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization [tatteredcover.com], I'm likely not going to find it. However, I can inter-library loan the item and read it. Some library, somewhere has a copy and I can access it. So, you aren't necessarily limited by the local censor. You have a means around him/her, if you don't have the means to purchase the book yourself.

Now, let's talk about filters. Filters are essentially limiting your collection to what's on site. It's like taking away inter-library loan for books. It means you do not have access to the material, period - if your librarian doesn't choose to select it. Think about that for a moment in the context of books. If my librarian doesn't know about Zerzan, then I would not have access to the book.

You might say that I could buy my own, assuming I had the money, but buying your own is kind of counter to the whole point of libraries - its a community collection where people can spend time educating and thinking for themselves. Ideally, they should help diversify thinking, not homogenize it.

Or how about we put it another way, let's talk about your SPAM filters. No customizing of filters, we are all going to use the same one and then people can submit new sites to add to the allow list. How effective would it be to have all incoming mail screened for SPAM only at the sysadmin level. To be effective, it would probably mean that you would not get some of the mail you would have liked to recieved. But no fear, you can always ask for a particular address to be added to the allow list. Or hopefully, someone else has submitted it already. In the mean time, you have no idea what your missing.

Would that work for you? Part of the whole idea is that you need to know what's out there, and with filters that you don't create yourself - you can't.

Don't Legitimize Censorship

[npadgett]

The simple fact of the matter is that, if you start having whitelists for these Internet filters, you're legitimizing the filters. and are encouraging their entrenchment in libraries.

philosophical difference

[jefe289]

Put the work-load, or the zealous filters aside for a minute....

The question is:

Do you generally trust content of unknown origin?
The "zealous filters" could be applied either way to try and either BLOCK or ACCEPT urls that aren't explicitly entered into the ruleset.
Anyway...
-jeff

AKA permissive filtering

[mcSey921]

I've seen this approach referred to (without irony) as "permissive filtering". The high school I used to admin for briefly toyed with the idea when a vendor brought it up as a "sure fire" way to reduce our liability with their $5000 piece of software. They dropped the idea when I told them it would perfectly CYA us, and all I'd need was one extra full time employee to check and enter websites requested by teachers and students;)

rather nasty from a maintenance side

[transiit]

The poster specified websites, and not servers or URL's, which is the first problem:
If it's by server, that's a very large amount of content that a single entry claims as "OK for library use."
If it's by URL, it doesn't allow much for letting a document be moved around on the same server.

If a domain name lapses, then there's no guarantee regarding the content if it's picked up by a new owner.

You could submit a URL, wait for it to be approved, and then change the content.

Would it be a master list for all sorts of libraries, or would you need to submit a particular reference to each individual library system?

If you're going the master list route, you might as well already be setting up the filters in the first place.

If you're going with the per-library list, it means there will need to be somebody to maintain that list there, and anyone who wants their site white-listed will have a huge number of places to inform.
I'm not sure it's the easy answer it wants to be.

-transiit

This has the same potentials for abuse

[cafebabe]

What if a pro-life librarian doesn't want to grant access to sites about abortion? What if a fundamentalist librarian doesn't want to grant access to sites about birth control or gay issues? What if a librarian doesn't want to grant access to a site he finds politically offensive? You would hope that personal beliefs wouldn't influence these decisions, but you can never be sure.

Two points before anyone flames me: (1) I gave examples of "liberal" sites that were blocked because those are the sites I personally wouldn't want to see blocked from my (future) children. I'm sure the tables could be turned, too, with a liberal librarian overruling a conservative site. [However, my example appears to be more common [com.com].] (2) I really respect professional librarians and think they are doing a great job promoting first amendment rights and fighting censorship. I'm sure most librarians would use their discretionary powers appropriately, but I think it is dangerous to let a small group of people decide what information can and cannot be accessed.

Filtering and Whitelists CAN be made to work...

[BJZQ8]

I'm responsible for filtering the internet content of a school district...which is a federal requirement, like it or not. Previously we used SurfControl/SurfPatrol/CyberPatrol/WhateverPatrol, until I determined that we were being extorted for a bit too much money. We (used) to run the proxy on Netware 5...when we upgraded to Netware 6 they wanted lots more money. Even then, we were going to get a product that sucked anyway.

My solution was to take an older machine, sit it in the server room, and run RedHat 8.0, Squid, and Dansguardian. I get blacklists from some nice Norwegians at ftp.ost.eltele.no, and further limit things by using keywords and phrase weighting (nice features of Dansguardian.) There are negative weights for words like "fuck" or "shit"...because, more than likely, these are not to be found in great numbers on pages that are appropriate for the K-12 age bracket. The way the filter works, each word is assigned a weight. "fuck" gets 40 points. If the total of points on a page goes over 80, then it is rejected. "sex" has a weight of 10. So an article on safe sex might be allowed, but "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" would not. Words like "medical" and "research" get negative weights...so if there is an article that mentions sex lots of times, but also includes "medical" and "research"...then it is allowed.

Don't get me wrong...I hate filtering as much as anybody. But coming from a previous school district that had in the past used no filtering, I can tell you that no filtering rapidly becomes a debauched flophouse of goatse.cx and warez. We need filtering, but also need a live mind behind it to make sure it all makes sense. I might add that I have saved a lot of money using Dansguardian and RedHat. Maintenance on the filtering portion is an order of magnitude easier than the ***Patrols that I worked on in the past.

Re:Filtering and Whitelists CAN be made to work...

[shepd]

>I can tell you that no filtering rapidly becomes a debauched flophouse of goatse.cx and warez.

Why is that?

My bets are it's because the teachers are being idiots and aren't treating pornography on the internet in the classroom the same way they'd treat a student reading Hustler in class. And the problem is that when there's a filter, the teachers are declawed: Anything they say against it will be met with "Well, why didn't these filters you're supposed to have protect my kids against it?".

Just my opinion...