When Muni-WiFi Becomes Vehicle For Muni-Censorship

from the looking-out-for-the-taxpayer dept

Wed, Aug 23rd 2006 11:01am — Carlo Longino

Broadband Reports points out a press release which says the Culver City, California, will install filters on its muni-Wifi network -- which covers all of one square mile -- to weed out porn and P2P traffic. While the city might have the right to do so, these decision seems surrounded in silliness. First, filters don't work, and as has been shown time and time again, cracking down on certain types of file sharing just means people will find others to use -- so installing and maintaining filters is hardly an effective use of city money. But it gets worse: in the press release, a city official says "It was only after we saw an activity report from [the filtering vendor] that we realized there were potential problems," which sounds like they were sold a solution to a problem that doesn't exist -- which is par for the course in the filtering business. Furthermore, he adds that accessing porn or P2P "is clearly not something tax dollars should be paying for" -- what's next? Banning the use of city streets if you're driving to a strip club or pursuing otherwise legal, but governmentally determined "undesirable" activities? It's hardly surprising that Culver City is home to three movie studios, and the MPAA is wetting its pants in delight at the plans. So, if you had designs on going to downtown Culver City and getting you some hot P2P action, think again -- it's an MPAA-approved piracy-free zone. Well, it would be, if filtering actually worked worth a damn. But somehow that seems beside the point, since Dan Glickman still managed to get his name in the press release.

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15 Comments

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Luke, 23 Aug 2006 @ 11:23am

Filters work in one sense: they filter out legitim
When I worked at a public library several years ago, we had a pretty regular group of porn addicts who would come in to view porn on the library computers. Filters did not work. These people had nothing better to do than to come to the public library to try to find porn -- do you really think Googling everything possible until you get to porn is really going to be out of the question for them?

Conversely, I had to explain the reason to a woman doing research on breast cancer why she couldn't access some sites she needed. Filters irritate, they don't protect. Technology is not the problem here.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Aug 2006 @ 12:02pm

Might be the only square mile of California that you can't get porn.
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Grandfather Time, 23 Aug 2006 @ 12:45pm

so wasting time, and city money on a filter that won't filter much of anything is better than wasting city money on porno and a few songs?
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theDeadlyEyebrow, 23 Aug 2006 @ 12:45pm

Yet another reason to get the hell outta this backwater dirthole nation.
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The Truth Beacon, 23 Aug 2006 @ 1:41pm

Re: (comment by eyebrow boy)
No, wasting our tax money on something like Muni WiFi is another reason to get the heck out of places like California which is too overrun with rampant liberalism to sort actua basic human needs from the wants that you should have to work for and earn.
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John, 23 Aug 2006 @ 2:02pm

Spend the money wisely
How about filtering out adware, and malware that the planets most insecure operating system has created a different multi billion dollar industry for (in addition to porn). The author is right, it's a waste of taxpayers money to 'eliminate all we think is evil on the net' and furthermore ya control freaks. IT WON'T HELP.
Another option is, taking that money and offering 'net education' courses for free to the community on ways the internet could be used as a positive force for the community.
I call it focus on the positive, not what you believe is the negative.
my $0.02
John
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Paul, 23 Aug 2006 @ 2:02pm

Filtering P2P
Filtering P2P for muni networks is imperative, and contrary to this techdirt author, not futile by any means.
It is very possible and feasible to tag packets and connections as P2P and block them, regardless of any port hopping the program may do, we do this with the community networks that we provide.

Everyone knows that P2P causes bandwidth problems with large networks; it decimates smaller networks. Even with extreme bandwidth limiting per user it doesnt take many people maxing out to kill a pipe, and P2P is the quickest way to do that.

Trying to filter porn, however, is useless as I don't think anyone has quite figured out if a jpg contains nudity on a packet based level
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Aug 2006 @ 2:41pm

Re: Filtering P2P
It is very possible and feasible to tag packets and connections as P2P and block them, regardless of any port hopping the program may do, we do this with the community networks that we provide.
This kind of filtering works about as well as porn filtering: it doesn't get it all and it gets a lot it shouldn't. Especially with encryption.
Everyone knows that P2P causes bandwidth problems with large networks; it decimates smaller networks. Even with extreme bandwidth limiting per user it doesnt take many people maxing out to kill a pipe, and P2P is the quickest way to do that.
No, everyone doesn't know that. It makes no difference if a packet contains information for a P2P application, video conference, VOIP, FTP, streaming music or whatever: a packet still takes the same amount of bandwidth. It's silly to think that a P2P packet takes more bandwidth. Your argument sounds more like that made by the providers who engage in the deceptive practice of marketing "unlimited" service that really isn't.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 Aug 2006 @ 4:52pm

Re: Re: (comment by eyebrow boy)
wifi access is a basic human right
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I wish I had muni wireless, 23 Aug 2006 @ 4:55pm

Re: Re: Filtering P2P
Can't you just encrypt your packets to foil content-based filters?

There has been some interesting work in the computer vision community on detecting if an image is primarily composed of a naked person. Primary authors are Forsyth and Fleck, and also other work by James Wang. Google for it... I'm too lazy to look up complete references for you people.

Although a packet of email may contain as much bandwidth as a packet of mp3 or video, there are more packets associated with the latter. But yes, everyone in a city ftp'ing the latest linux distribution will kill a network just as dead as everyone downloading the latest Madonna video. Perhaps the way to address all this is with a daily bandwidth limit per user. Do whatever you want, but don't exceed 1 Gb per day.
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Scott, 23 Aug 2006 @ 5:47pm

Government internet
Hey, I've been saying this for a while. I don't understand why people who rail about Bush and the Patriot act would ever connect their computers to a government run internet. The internet is the one thing government hates the most, because it can't control it. Muni wifi is the first wave of an assault on the internet by government. First, free wifi. Then private companies go out of business and it's all government run. Then government begins filtering out porn, drugs, p2p, illegal, harrassing or offending language and websites. Next government begins watching our internet activiity and monitoring us. Get the m*****f******* government off the m*****f******* internet!
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Charles, 24 Aug 2006 @ 1:42am

Filtering P2P
Who said all P2P was illegal. Isn't MGM now using Bittorrent to distribute movies? It is also used to distribute other legal content.

If P2P is eating up the bandwidth has the capacity been properly sized? Again it seems that a technology (P2P) is being vicitimized. As is often stated on this site, efforts should be spent on proposing legal alternatives that consumers would use.
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Randal L. Schwartz, 25 Aug 2006 @ 6:09pm

I pointed this out in my blog post
"Why muni-provided 'free' wi-fi is a bad idea": http://use.perl.org/~merlyn/journal/30016
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bill daul, 26 Aug 2006 @ 3:50am

When Muni-WiFi Becomes Vehicle For Muni-Censorship
Two thoughts:

1. think of it is practice...so when big brother decided you shouldn't know how your elected officials are or how to contact city departments or read any liberal media...they will be able to do advanced filtering with ease.

2. wait until they filter out Google Earth or Mapquest...because they don't want terrorists to be able to know where "places" are.

I look forward to the extinction of man so that the dolphins and porpoises can take over...they will probably do a better job of caretaking the planet...too bad man won't be around to see it...assuming we don't extinct life in the sea too!
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ku, 8 Oct 2006 @ 6:46pm

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