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Censorship The Internet

Webwasher versus Web Content Creators? 91

Posted by Cliff from the why-not-selective-censoring dept.
rjnagle asks: "While trying to access a recipe web page of a friend Mary Anne Mohanraj from work, I was dismayed to find that Webwasher, my company's content filtering application, had blocked it. It's true that Mohranraj's site contains some tastefully written text-only erotic stories, (Mohanraj has published several distinguished books and anthologies ), but apparently Webwasher's filtering rules block everything from the domain--including her writing diary, Sri Lanka travel photoessay, poetry and yes, her reading list of Indian writers. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work. Please answer these questions: How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content? Given that Webwasher's corporate customers rarely tweak Webwasher's default blacklist settings, doesn't this imply the need for Webwasher to make their filtering algorithms readily available? (Apparently, even the product's installation documentation is password-protected). If content filtering programs like Webwasher have a tough time distinguishing between a teacher's educational philosophy and hardcore erotic fiction, shouldn't the software company offer an online form for content creators to appeal being blacklisted? Having lived in Eastern Europe, I've seen firsthand how content filtering (ostensibly for reasons of social utility) has produced a society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens."
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Webwasher versus Web Content Creators? More

Webwasher versus Web Content Creators?

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  • proxies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @04:42PM (#8893490)
    We have a similar situation where I work. There's not much you can do about it, unless you have a solid work-related reason to use a particular blocked web site. At least officially.

    What I've done is create a squid proxy on my home system. Then I used proxy auto-configuration file to use that proxy only for sites that I've wanted to visit that are blocked. (I was already using such a file to block advertisements, adding in a section to use a proxy for selected sites was trivial.)

  • Ummmm... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @04:44PM (#8893503)
    Look, dude, I think that her little story entitled "The Survey" more than qualifies as stuff you wouldn't want to discover your boss reading over your shoulder, ok? Quit trying to turn this into a martyr thing, most people don't have explicit sexual themes in their web pages.

    Try this: print the stories out and mail them to higher-ups in your company, protesting the fact that they were censored. I think you'll only reinforce the opinion that Webwasher is doing a good job.

  • Subdomain (Score:4, Interesting)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @04:53PM (#8893551) Journal
    How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content?

    Put the possibly objectionable content in one subdomain (e.g., naughty-bits.mamohanraj.com) and the rest in the www subdomain (e.g., www.mamohanraj.com/).

    This is of course purely a guess, I've never had the misfortune of going through a content filter.

    You asked what the site can do; of course the site's (would-be) visitor can go through a web proxy , or vnc to his own machine at home and run the browser on the remote box (yes, pictures won't come through as well, but wanking is mostly about the imagination, so you'd probably have a better time at it anyway), or ssh to his home box and wget from the home box and then ftp back to the office, or html tunnel through his home box to the site.
    • Wecome to your new society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens!

      BTW; We noticed that you haven't watched your weekly quotient of approved news outlets this week. Please correct this with at least three evenings viewings of Entertainment Tonight, Celebrity Justice or THE man SHOW.

    • This is probably the best way to do it. Think about the problem from the filtering company's perspective. Since the maintainer of the web site can create/modify/delete their own web pages at any time with any content without having to notify anyone about it (and that is as it should be), they would have to review every single website every single day to see if anything had changed and determine how that content should be categorized possibly by human review. This is, of course, hugely impractical so the sol

  • Learn from spammers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @04:57PM (#8893590)
    1. Do what spammers do.
      Break up any poten<tlly>tially offen<nsv>sive key<wrds>words with gib<brsh>berish tags.
    2. Get a second domain to host the controversial stuff. (might not work if the two are hosted at the same IP, though.)

    • In my opinion as an author, that solution is morally untenable, since it amounts to self-labeling and self-censoring.

      • In my opinion as an author, that solution is morally untenable, since it amounts to self-labeling and self-censoring.

        Your readers wouldn't see such obfuscation, they'd only see the words as you intended them. How does that amount to self-censorship? You haven't actually changed your message, only completely hidden aspects of the medium.

        Compare that to simply not having anyone able to read your work. Does that seem preferable?


        However, on a purely ideal level, I agree with you. Censorship should si

  • Google cache (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Can you not use the Google cache of the site you are trying to access?

  • There's always a way (Score:4, Informative)

    by max born ( 739948 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @05:20PM (#8893736)
    Start here: open proxies [dmoz.org]
    • Start here: open proxies

      Except that most content-filtering packages will also prevent access to known open proxy servers. Credit them with some intelligence!

      As others have mentioned, you should be able to get away with setting up a private proxy on a home machine - but make sure it's only visible/accessible to you, or the nanny software will eventually spot it, and block your home machine.

      Apart from that, advise your friend to host explicit and non-explicit stuff on separate domains. Her main domain

      • http://peacefire.org/circumventor/simple-circumve n tor-instructions.html

        Simple CGIProxy-based open proxy with SSL for Windows 2000/XP. How's that?

        BTW, another reason you want to make a proxy only accessible to you is so that unwanted activity cannot be performed over your connection - you don't want your box to be a link in a spamming, or other illegal activity, do you? They WILL trace it to your box, after all...

        However, does anyone have ideas for turning an old Linux box into a secure open proxy that
        • I don't think your employer will be happy about you going to these lengths to browse sites at work that they have chosen to block. It's hard to claim that you ended up on a site accidentally when you've created a back door specifically to circumvent their policies.

  • Translation.... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "It's true that Mohranraj's site contains some tastefully written text-only erotic stories"

    So the site contained so-called artistic porn. Are you surprised that a net-nanny style content filter would filter porn???

  • If webwasher could do it so could spam filters (Score:4, Insightful)

    by samjam ( 256347 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @05:24PM (#8893757) Homepage Journal
    If webwasher could do it so could spam filters.

    We havent managed it with spam filters and I doubt webwasher is going to solve this problem just to suit your (left aside) off-work browsing at work.

    To fit your bosses needs, web-washer draws a very blunt line. It cuts out the dirt and the providers of the "dirt". You think its a special class of "dirt" that just looks like the regular dirt but thats OK really because its only enjoyed by people who have the patience to read the full story maybe? I think your boss thinks things are just fine.

    So just don't use webwasher at home.

    Sam

  • Imagine that: a porn site got filtered! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @05:28PM (#8893781)
    Well, would you imagine that! A porn site got filtered by a program created to filter porn sites!

    I thought they only filtered things like sites that talked about breast cancer.

  • Begging to be fired, anyhow.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zcat_NZ ( 267672 ) <zcat@wired.net.nz> on Saturday April 17, 2004 @05:50PM (#8893899) Homepage
    Do what I do;

    Download 'putty', and SSH to your home machine.
    From there you can run links, epic4, slrn, or basically any other text-based app. Nothing gets filtered, nothing incriminating shows up in the logs at your workplace, nothing ends up in your work cache or your local cache. And if you're worried about the boss walking in run screen first and have a 'top' session running that you can quickly switch to.

    The problem is, your workplace is between a rock and a hard place; they can be sued for 'allowing' porn in the workplace but there are simply NO content filters that can reliably decide what is or isn't porn. Hell, even people's views of this differ. The best they can do is just block anything slightly dodgy, and if you really need to go there you'll have to get it all OK'd by the higher-up's.

  • It's not that hard to get past corporate web filters. Just use SSH tunneling to your home computer & surf the web. Or use one of the many anon. proxies...

  • civil case and PICS (Score:3)

    by sir_cello ( 634395 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @06:44PM (#8894164)

    Firstly, there's a W3C standard PICS that can be used to provide fine grained content identification, though sadly it is little used.

    Secondly, it's obvious to me as someone with legal training that this area is ripe for litigation: i.e. the case where webwasher incorrectly denies access to your site to a large audience (i.e. its entire product base) and where you lose revenue.

    If you're reading this from the future and the litigation has already occurred: I told you so.

    • Re:civil case and PICS (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      the case where spam filters incorrectly denies access to your site to a large audience (i.e. its entire product base) and where you lose revenue.

      Sorry, the Internet is still voluntary, and hopefully always will be.
    • i.e. the case where webwasher incorrectly denies access to your site to a large audience (i.e. its entire product base) and where you lose revenue.

      Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this will happen. The situation is identical to when non-spammers have their email blocked by anti-spam blacklists; the people who provide those lists just say "we're not blocking anything, we're just providing a list". I'm sure webwasher will say the same thing: "Don't blame us, we're just providing a list."

      (Oddly enough,
    • If you're reading this from the future...

      Just a guess, but very few people are reading it in the past, and unless someone was over your shoulder as you typed it, not many in the present, either.

  • I can hear webwasher's excuse already... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by perlchild ( 582235 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @07:20PM (#8894302)
    webwasher, like most filtering software, uses static "blacklists", so they can't tell if someone really uses a single domain for multiple purposes, or if it's someone using the "not-so-raunchy" bits to do like spam, and intersperse "not blacklisted" material to contour the blacklist.

    Unfortunately until some form of dynamic(updated to the minute or less: bandwidth costs for the filtering providers...) blacklisting of pages occur, this type of "block everything unless we know its good" will stay prevalent.
  • Why are you surfing for recipes for work anyway?
  • If you have access to a web server with PHP, all you heed to do is to create a simple PHP document that includes the blocked page.

    First of all, make your script take the parameter $url. Then make it spit out the entire document up to and including .

    Then have it spit out (You might have to escape those quotes):

    Then have it spit out the rest of the document, and hey presto, your PHP script will act like a mirrored version of whatever page you put into $url.

    Of course forms and other dynamic content will
    • It should spit out the entire document up to and including the head tag.

      Then it should insert a base href tag into the head tag of the document you're accessing that points to php_self()?url=$url , which makes your script + the url parameter the base URL for all links and images in the document. Basically, the script is telling your browser to pass any file through itself instead of going to the blocked site.

      Then include the rest of the document.

      You migth want to add some autodetection so that it doesn't
  • but my company runs Websense on our system to prevent looking at specific stuff that may not be work related. They also block access to the free html proxy servers online so you can't do that. Here's my solution: Run sshd on a machine, in my case Debian Linux. Install apache and also CGI Proxy on the same machine. Using Putty or the ssh client of your choice create a tunnel for port 80, and then access your site via http://localhost/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi and you will be able to proxy securely and anony

  • At work? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @07:59PM (#8894484) Homepage Journal
    I have to ask why not have this blocked at work? Is this in any way work related? My guess is no. You compare this to Eastern Europe but there is one HUGE difference. You can surf to it on your own computer on your own internet connection on your own time.
    Now if your city, state, or nation where blocking it I would say that is wrong. That your company is blocking it is totaly up to them I could also not be surpised if you got a little note from someone when they look at the logs and wonder what the heck you where doing surfing there during work hours.
    • You didn't read the post did you? Leave aside for the moment the question of whether employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work. Please answer these questions: How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content?
      • But the author added this junk at the end. "Having lived in Eastern Europe, I've seen firsthand how content filtering (ostensibly for reasons of social utility) has produced a society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens."

        Trying to connect compnay policy about internet usage with freedom of speech issues is just a load.
  • I've written a simple forwarder that works in theory. It will forward a web site and change any or tag (case sensitive) in HTML AND other files to include a base href tag that redirects URLs in the document to the script.

    http://home.no.net/david/mirror.php.txt
  • ...keep "objectionable" content off of any domain that you don't want to be potentially blocked. Either use a sub-domain for the "questionable" content or use another domain altogether. Keeping things in a "grey area" on your site is more likely to get you blocked than keeping things "clean."

  • Unquestioning citizens? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by C10H14N2 ( 640033 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @09:24PM (#8894858)
    Having also lived in eastern Europe, it seems to me that such regimes have produced some of the most questioning, cynical and generally skeptical people on the planet. Don't confuse apathy with assent. Not so long ago, most companies I worked for blocked the ENTIRE internet from employee computers, so I really don't care if they're going to filter some minor subset of it. I can do my unfiltered personal surfing at Starbucks on my breaks and at home at night. What's the problem?

  • don't you (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mattboston ( 537016 )
    understand. your company pays a lot of money for their internet connection and for their hardware and software to make the best use of it, and it's being wasted by people like you surfing porn or useless crap not related to your job. Not to mention they are obviously paying you way too much since you are spending your time browsing the internet. Most upper management people still associate IT with being cost centers instead of revenue centers, and it's for this reason. "Well sir, we need to upgrade our
  • The possibilities always exist:

    S = Spicy (spice levels can be modified on most recipes, but these are intended to be hot...)
  • Having lived in Eastern Europe, I've seen firsthand how content filtering (ostensibly for reasons of social utility) has produced a society of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens.

    You don't have to go to Eastern Europe to find a society full of ill-informed, unquestioning citizens. The U.S. does just fine in this production.

  • it's not all that complicated (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hak1du ( 761835 ) on Sunday April 18, 2004 @03:53AM (#8896012) Journal
    Leave aside for the moment the question of whether employees should do personal surfing on company time or what type of material is appropriate to view from work.

    But that is the key question. If it was actually blocking work-related material, you could complain to your network manager that Webwasher is blocking content that you should be able to get at. Then, your network manager would either complain to the Webwasher company or switch to a different product.

    Given that it is recipes you are trying to read from your work machine, that path is blocked. Therefore, Webwasher works within the requirements of the people who chose to install it, namely your company. Why should anybody unblock anything then?

    As a practical solution, use ssh and/or VNC to connect to an outside account and you can do all the surfing you want there.

  • get another domain (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Sunday April 18, 2004 @04:19AM (#8896048) Homepage
    Domains are cheap. Put the stuff that isn't work/child/whatever safe on a separate domain.
  • This Slashdot post was rather unnecessary and pointless. Mostly it seems that this Mary Anne Mohanraj's friend has written this to plug the site's various pages. And, believe it or not, also includes links to erotic stories on and off that site. This post, in my opinion, shouldnt have been selected at all.

    • Re:Plugging (Score:2, Informative)

      by m.koch ( 703208 )
      This Slashdot post was rather unnecessary and pointless. Mostly it seems that this Mary Anne Mohanraj's friend has written this to plug the site's various pages.

      I would second this. It wasn't necessary to include 7(!) links to original site just to state that he is not able to browse recipes at work and to cry 'censorship'.

  • seriously, groups.google.com (Score:4, Interesting)

    by way2trivial ( 601132 ) on Sunday April 18, 2004 @10:04AM (#8896750) Homepage Journal
    I was using groups to look up some technical information on a cell phone, a lot of the results came back from alt.2600

    now groups.google.com is blocked, and they tell me they won't unblock it.

    • That is nothing short of insane. groups.google.com is a really useful resource for a lot of different things. I can't imagine a place of work that would keep it blocked.
    • >now groups.google.com is blocked, and they tell me they won't unblock it.

      Easy solution.

      You research the answers on your own time at home and print them out.

      When you come back to work the next day explain you now know the answers from groups.google, maybe even flash the printouts, but as you learned them on your own time you'll need your home DSL connection company-funded if you are to continue working in this manner.

      If they refuse, then you simply do the one day productively with your new answers an
  • In the corporate world, its not about 'free speech' or free - anything.

    You are supposed to be *working*, not surfing friends web pages..

    Entertainment surfing. Thats what we do at home.. and THERE its an issue of free-whatever and id be pissed if i was being filtered at all... ( unless you are a child.. then you have few rights again and its up to your parents to figure out what is accepable for you )

    • You are supposed to be *working*, not surfing friends web pages..

      I work as tech-support for a college project at a local community centre. The college did not get to choose the Internet Connection, so it came with the default strict filtering in place. (RM SafetyNet, by the way. They won't pay extra for SafetyNetPLUS)

      The filtering gets in the way of my work!! I either have to use workaround or research things in my own time at home because of how strict it is.
      Some sites are blocked due to content - p

  • From the other side... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jonny 290 ( 260890 ) <brojames@@@ductape...net> on Sunday April 18, 2004 @03:36PM (#8898806) Homepage
    as a manager, i must say that my company filters stuff for a reason. all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources. Respect your employer a bit, for god's sakes. surf on your own time.
    • all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources.

      If you'd give your employee a pink slip for reading non-work-related material, what the heck are you doing here?

      (And if you're my boss... I was just looking up some coding tips, honest!)
      • No, if they were CIRCUMVENTING THE FIREWALL.

        Please read my post before making snarky replies. Kthxbye.
        • You: all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources.

          Me: If you'd give your employee a pink slip for reading non-work-related material, what the heck are you doing here?

          You: No, if they were CIRCUMVENTING THE FIREWALL.

          I see your point, in part. They tightened up the firewall at my work after the "I Love Y

    • Respect your employer a bit, for god's sakes. surf on your own time.

      Employers often forget about the concept of "your own time" when it's convenient to them. You'd never expect a salaried employee to work late or finish something up at home, would you?

      If not, good for you. But with all the employers out there who expect people to "live to work," the employees should be allowed to do a little living at work.

      On the topic of "respect your employer," that also goes both ways. Installing porn filters

  • Where do you draw the line? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 18, 2004 @04:38PM (#8899147)
    The thing about content filters is that everyone's viewpoints and intentions are different when they come up with the filters. Take these examples: a typical home user, an employee of a 50,000+ employee corporation, a network administrator for a grade school, and a network administrator for a 50,000+ employee corporation. Each of these people have very different needs in a content filter and that is where the problem comes in.

    You mention a single website that included some recipies in addition to some erotic material. Supposing I worked for the large corporation and was in charge of tweaking the content filter and that domain name was brought up. After quickly inspecting the website, I don't think that I would hesitate to block the entire site. Looking at the nature of the author of that site, I could see the possibility of the URLs to the erotic material either changing or being more graphic in the future, and the safe way to eliminate those possibilities would be to simply disable the domain. In this situation you have the single author of the website that may be upset if the site is blocked.

    Another example would be moderately malicious websites and/or advertising websites. Again, supposing I was a network administrator for any company and we didn't want any of the employees installing any 'malicious' software, I would choose to block sites that tried to install software that I myself deemed 'malicious'. These sites would include n-Case, MyWebSearchBar, WhenU, and many others that offered 'malware' or 'spyware' or any other software that indicated they could possibly be either of these. I actually work for a company where I manage the content filter, and my viewpoint is that I block the entire site if I notice any malicious intentions from it. These 'malicious intentions' can even come in the form of Gator trying to install itself when visiting the site. These immediately get labelled in my book as malicious sites and they are banned entirely. Is this the best way to do it? Maybe or maybe not, but that is my viewpoint on it and it's how I manage the content filter.

    Now if I a company that created a web content filter, I would want these same malicious websites blocked by default, however that would probably never happen. Many of those are backed by corporations that could easily file lawsuits against my content filtering company for labelling their site and/or software as 'malware'.

    Just some ramblings here, but the basic idea is that everyone has a very different viewpoint when comes to content filtering. Nobody wants their content blocked, but often blocking it fits much better with the viewpoints of those implementing the filters. In the case of erotic material, most everyone that implements a content filter blocks all erotic and pornographic material. It is impossible to make everyone happy when it comes to content filters.
  • 1) Mirror the content, with permission. Set a web server up at home, get a DynDNS and BOOM: you have a nice way of getting at the content you want.
    2) SSH (or even better, VNC) into home and browse that way. This also becomes easier with a DynDNS name.
    3) Download the content into a floppy disk at home or something, maybe put it on a USB key. wget -r is your friend.

    I have the same thing at my school, and the problem is that port 22 is blocked, meaning that SSH doesn't work, and proxies also don't work (becau
  • I remember a few years ago, we had a problem wherein a church's website was being blocked due to "sexual content".

    The problem was, the church's website was being hosted on our dedicated server, which had one IP shared amongst several websites, which used host-headers to differentiate. One of the sites on the same IP was "lindyporn.com", which was a joke site we put up that allegedly contained pornography related to the Lindy Hop.

    Content filters had snagged "lindyporn.com" as a bad site, and then blocked

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