The NYT Discovers That, Lo and Behold, Web Filters Don't Work
from the finally-figuring-these-things-out dept
Web filters are seen by lots of people as some sort of silver bullet for so many of the ills they see on the internet, whether it's stopping piracy or blocking child porn or just "cleaning up the internet" in general. But there's just one small problem with filters: they don't work. Despite claims from politicians and other groups, they simply aren't effective, and often end up blocking desirable content while letting undesirable stuff flow through. Given the long history of filter failures, it's a little surprising to see people who seem shocked that filters don't work. The latest example comes from The New York Times, which has discovered that YouTube's Safety Mode filters don't really work at all. The company's weak defense of its poor filters seems more like a shrug of the shoulders than anything, creating an impression that the filters are there for appearances and little else. The NYT does deserve some credit, though, for recommending that parents take an active role with their kids in helping them determine for themselves what's inappropriate viewing material on YouTube. That's really the bottom line: you can't expect filters to replace parenting.![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: web filters
Companies: nytimes
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Those filtering programs seemed cool for about 30 seconds when they first came out. Then I realized how worthless they were. And study after study and article after article confirmed it, and expanded on the reasons why they suck.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Wrong dept.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Techdirt Writer Needs to write Better Titles
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Those that work on a blacklist/whitelist structure will always fail because so many new sites appear every single day. They can never keep up, while some have a tendency to block perfectly legitimate hosts because one or two pages (or even hyperlinks) violate some form of moral code.
Those that filter on other criteria may keep up with new sites more easily, but they are more error prone - block mentions of "sex", and nobody in Middlesex can Google their own county; block mentions of breasts and no woman can look for information on preventing breast cancer or donate to a breast cancer charity, and so forth.
My workplace uses Websense to block certain traffic, but it's full of holes. GMail is blocked via gmail.com, but mail.google.com works fine. Twitter is blocked, but the Firefox Echofon extension gets through no problem. It's so full of holes it's ridiculous, yet my company pays them thousands per year for "protection"...
Anybody who uses these for any purpose other than "plausible deniability" is a fool. Anybody who uses these as a catch-all solution to block child porn or to block objectionable content from children instead of actual parenting should be shot.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
NYT fails to disclose Conflict of Interest
It is shameful that the NYT doesn't mention this conflict of interest in the article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/mar/08/apple-ipad-ad
http://gadgetwise.blogs.n ytimes.com/2010/04/16/is-youtubes-safety-mode-safe-not-very/?partner=rss&emc=rss
http://www.gua rdian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/02/apple-sues-htc-iphone-patents
[ link to this | view in thread ]
NYT & more
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Wrong dept.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Filters
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070315/075847.shtml
Sounds like a B movie
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Filters as a reminder
I certainly don't rely on our web filter to block all improper surfing, that is impossible. Improper surfing is a management issue not a technology issue.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Filters
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Filtering at work vs home
Now, at home it's a different story. I advocate using OpenDNS since it's free and is pretty good for keeping the majority of hardcore content away from young eyes. But the wife wants it locked down tight, so she insists on BSecure from American Family Association. It's a pain in that it blocks all kinds of legitimate content, but in over 6 years, our family has never happened upon anything approaching questionable, much less offensive. And all of the sites we need to use work just fine.
Now you will probably conclude that we're bad parents because we don't leave our PC filterless and allow our children to learn from all of the offensive content they might find, but the whole point of the filter is so that we don't have to babysit the kids every time they want to get online. We can be assured that they won't get anywhere that we deem inappropriate. We do use the PC with them, and interact with them, but there are also many times when everyone is busy and the kids will be on the Internet unsupervised.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
No filter is 100%
It may block 50% of the bad stuff, and 20% of the stuff it should NOT block. Sometimes some protection is better than none even if it means blocking some valid sites. It is all in the level of trade off your company/ISP is willing to live with.
I know at work we have some major filters running. I have had working sites blocked with-in hours. I fill in a request to get the sit unblocked and it is unblocked for a few days then the automated filters updates and kicks in again to block the site under some NEW rule. Lucky I work in a area with lots of IT professionals who have a passion for accessing many of the blocked sites - home proxy servers work wonders around any filters.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Web Filters
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Filters as a reminder
I ensure productivity by having deadlines. If you meet deadlines with quality work, that's all that matters. If you don't, I don't care why (with certain exceptions -- illness, etc.) -- you need to find another job.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
The intent of webfilters is to block freedom of speech and desirable content that competes with big media. Politicians use everything that they claim they want it to block as a pretext.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
PaintBall had the word "pain" in it and was rejected.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
will never work
[ link to this | view in thread ]
delivered, with 95.6% blocked by the
various anti-spam measures
With only a small portion of email
traffic being delivered, the anti-spam
measures in use appear to be
cumulatively effective.
The various anti-spam measures currently filter out over 95% of email traffic, greatly reducing the volume of spam that customers receive, without causing significant problems with false positives. Anti-spam measures are doing their job, reducing the threat of spam to a manageable security process. This process still requires focus, expertise and resources, but it is arguably predictable.
(slides 28 and 29)
http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/res/other-areas/anti-spam-measures/studies/spam-slides
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]