Library Porn Filter Blocks Entire City
from the Toppenish-does-not-exist dept
In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling saying that it was okay to make federal library funding dependent on using porn filters people have been pointing out that many of these filters simply don't work. As yet another example, it turns out that one such popular filter is completely blocking any website that mentions the name of the town Toppenish, which I gather is a town somewhere in the state of Washington. This even occurs in libraries located near the town. To be honest, it took me a really long time to figure out what was wrong with "Toppenish" until I realized what the 4th through 8th letters were. The best suggestion I've heard to route around this ridiculous requirement would be for many libraries to band together and build their own filter which filters out a bare minimum of sites, and use that. Meanwhile, if you're trying to read this page from a library in Toppenish, you're probably out of luck.
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I bet we can find all sorts of sites that are blocked with any kind of filtering technology. The question is: how many people is it really affecting? Two? Three? How many people access the internet from libraries that can't access it from elsewhere, including their home, work, and internet cafes that are all over the place.
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