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[For more on the whole deal with COPA see
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Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2000 10:34:55 -0700
From: Bennett Haselton
[You are receiving this after signing up for membership in Peacefire at http://www.peacefire.org/join/. To unsubscribe yourself from this list and cancel your Peacefire membership, see unsubscription instructions at the end of this message.]
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Yesterday morning I testified at the COPA Commission's third and final hearing on blocking software, in San Jose. During the first panel, several speakers commented that they thought there should be an "independent review board" to look at the quality of different blocking programs ("Maybe FamilyPC or somebody"), so I thought that was a nice lead-in to Peacefire's presentation :)
The first new report we presented was on SurfWatch. We collected a list of the first 1,000 working .com domains in an alphabetical listing, and checked them against SurfWatch's "Sexually Explicit" category. Of the 51 domains that were blocked, 42 were obvious errors, and only 9 were pornographic. Since we started with a representative cross-section of all .com domains, this means for every one pornographic site blocked by SurfWatch, about four non-pornographic sites are blocked! A VP from SurfWatch, who testified before I did, said at the time that he hoped more independent groups would evaluate their software. (That's why I like going last.) That report is at:
http://www.peacefire.org/censorware/SurfWatch/first-1000-com-domains.html
We also submitted two reports on FamilyClick and Cyber Sentinel, which we chose because they both claimed high rates of accuracy in not blocking non-pornographic content, and they both had representatives sitting on the Commission (i.e. they were supposed to be the ones grilling me). Those reports are at:
http://peacefire.org/censorware/FamilyClick/familyclick-blocked.html http://peacefire.org/censorware/Cyber_Sentinel/cyber-sentinel-blocked.html
Sites blocked by FamilyClick included a report on the AIDS problem in China, a report on the gambling problem in Washington state, and a page of dietary advice for victims of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Sites blocked by Cyber Sentinel included bios of two COPA Commission members, all of CNN.com, and searches on Wired.com, News.com, Time.com and USAToday.com for "COPA". (This might seem overbroad, but remember that here we're not talking about industry leaders like SurfWatch who have been around for five years and have managed to get their error rate almost all the way down to 80%.)
The representative from Cyber Sentinel did acknowledge that overblocking with their program had been widely reported and would be fixed in their next version. (Of course, if the overblocking was so easy to discover in independent tests, why didn't they find and fix the problem before they released the original program three years ago?) Donna Rice Hughes was unfortunately not attending in her "official" capacity as a FamilyClick consultant so there wasn't much she could say about our report, although the mistakes are not really FamilyClick's fault anyway since they use the third-party I-Gear program.
So, I was pleasantly surprised that the COPA Commission invited Peacefire to begin with (it takes some guts to recognize us at all, since we have the censorware-hacking instructions on our page), and I was glad that, judging from the questions afterwards, many of the Commission members really took in what our reports were saying. Of course, we can't measure their open-mindedness for certain until their final report comes out in November, but in the meantime we were glad for a chance to get our findings into the official record.
Thanks again to everyone for your support, and I hope we'll have more good news soon!
-Bennett
list-peacefire-broadcast-unsubscribe@osiris.978.org
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bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org (425) 649 9024 ```
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