Comments on: What are YOU looking at?

By: bayard

bayard — Wed, 25 May 2005 21:15:05 +0000

I would be interested to know just how much money has passed to Watchdog, particularly as they are using open source software for filtering/proxying (squid), which has cost them nothing. Any school could very easily run their own caching proxy on an old PC for practically nothing, and could make their own choices about what to provide access to.

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By: Rayna

Rayna — Thu, 19 May 2005 00:27:45 +0000

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20050518023403702

Education Minister Trevor Mallard should withdraw approval of software that a North Shore high school pulled from its computers today following student protests, says Nandor Tanczos, the Greens’ IT and Youth Issues Spokesperson.

From Aotearoa/New Zealand after students cry no fair over censorship of infoshop.

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By: stuey

stuey — Tue, 17 May 2005 05:55:54 +0000

Excellent press release from the “NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists”:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0505/S00043.htm

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By: Brian Boyko

Brian Boyko — Tue, 17 May 2005 04:40:22 +0000

In addition, I would like to point out, that, so long as your not behind a national firewall, the Internet routinely views censorship as “damage” and routes around it – a number of proxy websites have been developed solely to get around these over-protective filters.

There is no way to filter the internet without some degree of problems. Machines net false positives and miss some sites, while human censorship presents it’s own controversial problems. The best solution is simply to not let kids of a young age go onto the internet unsupervised.

Filtering software might work as an “opt in” or “safe-sites only,” method for the littlest of kids, but trying to filter the internet in schools is amazingly short-sighted.

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By: stuey

stuey — Tue, 17 May 2005 04:37:41 +0000

Personally I reckon that the software that maintains a “ban list” is so bad (i.e. it will never manage to include all the websites that shouldn’t be shown and as frog says it will include sites that should be shown), that I think that schools should instead use software that maintains an “allow list”. So all websites in the world are banned, unless a teacher has specifically allowed the students to access that website.

Ideally this would be very quick and easy to do. The teachers would assemble a list of standard media and reference sites and add to it all the subject-specfic sites that they are talking about in that lesson, and then if a student searches on google and finds a site that they would like to visit, they can ask the teacher to add it to the allow list. The teacher would check it out and if it is OK then they can add it, and if it isn’t OK then they wouldn’t. This approach (allow rather than ban) also means that sites that have no objectionable content, but are “time wasters” (e.g. idolblog, virtual super12, trademe etc) would not be allowed.

Finally, the allow list should also be able to have fine-grained permissions, so that certain classes or age groups would have access to sites that other classes do not.

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By: David Farrar

David Farrar — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:40:12 +0000

I share the concern over Watchdog. Most filters have a degree of unreliability, but this one seems quite bad.

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