That proposed filter

Greg Dwyer is col­lect­ing mater­ial on the pro­posed inter­net fil­ter­ing in Aus­tralia. So I am shar­ing my thoughts and par­tic­u­larly my exper­i­ence with the fil­ter­ing soft­ware I now look after at the State Lib­rary of WA, with you as well as Greg.

The lib­rary star­ted using fil­ter­ing soft­ware after a few incid­ents involving mem­bers of the pub­lic access­ing por­no­graphy on pub­lic access com­puters in open areas of the lib­rary. The fil­ter­ing soft­ware is provided by a major inter­na­tional pro­vider and has a block­ing list updated twice a week.

When I was given con­trol of the fil­ter­ing soft­ware, I had a good look at what sites where blocked and par­tic­u­larly the excep­tions that where added by my pre­de­cessors, because the fil­ter was also applied to the staff inter­net access and with very con­ser­vat­ive set­tings, block­ing a num­ber of categories.

Amongst the sur­prises, where:

• World movies pay TV chan­nel web­site is clas­si­fied as por­no­graphy and blocked.
• A site aimed at provided very basic health inform­a­tion (includ­ing sexual health) to pre-teens was clas­si­fied is sexual mater­ial and blocked.
• The web­site of a well known Aus­tralian gay and les­bian book store is clas­si­fied as sexual mater­ial and blocked. Even though the same books, often with more details are avail­able through Amazon, which is not restric­ted in anyway.
• An online Aus­tralian store spe­cial­ising in hor­ror DVDs was blocked. I believe graphic viol­ence is the cat­egory. How­ever, the great major­ity of the DVDs could be pur­chased on Amazon with equally graphic descrip­tions, which is not restric­ted in anyway.

So what will hap­pen if a book is pub­lished in the US and is refused clas­si­fic­a­tion in Aus­tralia. A good example would be a book on vol­un­tary euthanasia, which while top­ical in the US, there is no reason for Amazon not to stock it. Unfor­tu­nately such a book would be refused clas­si­fic­a­tion in Aus­tralia. So how would the Aus­tralian fil­ter­ing regime deal with Amazon selling the book and mak­ing excerpts avail­able on the web?

Block access to the Amazon site. This would appear to be nor­mal course of action, if a site has any restric­ted con­tent, the whole site is blocked. So how would the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment deal with inter­na­tional cri­ti­cism of their action of telling a retailer in another coun­try what the can or can not sell in any other coun­try, by pun­ish­ing them, by block­ing access to the Aus­tralian market?

By block­ing access to the pages per­tain­ing to that book on Amazon&#8217s site. There are a num­ber of issues:

• There is a lot more work involved in block­ing indi­vidual pages than sites.
• Page block­ing fails with dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated content.
• Why block pages on some sites and block com­plete sites on other occa­sions. The have and have nots of fil­ter­ing, treat­ing Amazon and other big sites dif­fer­ently from smal­ler retail­ers without the clout.

Ignore it, because it is too dif­fi­cult. Which again raises the issues of the have and have nots of fil­ter­ing, treat­ing Amazon and other big sites dif­fer­ently from smal­ler retail­ers without the clout.

Our fil­ter set­ting where changed last year after dis­cus­sions with senior man­age­ment, to just por­no­graphy and mali­cious sites. Since that time, the num­ber of pages blocked has fallen dra­mat­ic­ally and there was only one issue. A mem­ber of the pub­lic was behav­ing inap­pro­pri­ately when access­ing por­no­graphy on a pub­lic access computer.

A review of the fil­ter log found that the per­son tried and failed to access 17 dif­fer­ent por­no­graphic sites, before suc­ceed­ing on the 18th attempt. Fur­ther invest­ig­a­tion of the log files, indic­ate that this was not the only time mul­tiple attempts to access por­no­graphic sites was made. Often more than 20 failed attempts are made, before either suc­cess or giv­ing up, which appears to be a rare suc­cess. While the fil­ter­ing soft­ware is good and blocks access to the great major­ity of por­no­graphic sites. Repeated attempts by a determ­ined per­son will gain access to pornography.

With the reduc­tion in the num­ber cat­egor­ies has also reduced the num­ber of sites blocked, it still appears to be a small pro­por­tion of false pos­it­ives. It is very frus­trat­ing to be research­ing a web devel­op­ment issue, only to find the site which may have the answer blocked. Par­tic­u­larly when you access the site by other means (laptop with 3G broad­band card or mobile phone) and find no reason why that site should be blocked. It hap­pens in less than 1% of all sites I try to access, but it is frus­trat­ing for me and I always have altern­at­ive meth­ods avail­able. It will be more frus­trat­ing for our cli­ents who are research­ing obscure top­ics and do not altern­at­ive access.

Based on my exper­i­ence, I would say the fil­ter will have not have the desired effect that Sen­ator Con­roy or the Gov­ern­ment desires:

• People seek­ing por­no­graphy or refused clas­si­fic­a­tion mater­ial will keep try­ing until they find the mater­ial they want. Fil­ters may block the major­ity of this con­tent but can not block all of it. There is a lot of that mater­ial on the inter­net and people we keep try­ing to find it until they succeed.
• People seek­ing very spe­cific inform­a­tion, will get frus­trated as on occa­sions site they are referred to are blocked for no appar­ent reason.

The com­mer­cial implic­a­tions for web com­merce could be quite dra­matic, will the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment block access to Amazon and eBay for dis­play­ing and selling RC mater­ial? Will the gov­ern­ment com­pensate to retail­ers for lost income when their sites are incor­rectly blocked? How many retail­ers will use the fil­ter as a weapon, by com­plain­ing about com­pet­itor sites deal­ing with adult con­tent? Will spe­cial­ist retailer sites be blocked, while the the more gen­eral retailer selling the same products is not?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.