[LINK] Survey Finds Support for School Filters (USA)

[Danny Yee]

stephen loosley wrote:
> Imho a number of linkers may be surprized at the local edu support
> for filtering.  Quite simply, it works, and works well for schools, and
> has been working for years. Why are some linkers in denial re this?

Stephen, I'm interested in exactly what you mean by "works"?

If by "works" you mean "students have not been able to access anything
their teachers don't want them to on the net, but have not been
blocked from accessing material their teachers would have considered
appropriate", then I simply don't believe you (*).  There may not
have been any *complaints* about inappropriately blocked sites, but
how would students know to complain about most of them?  And there
may not have been much fuss about ineffective blocking of "porn"
(or whatever the bogeyman of the month is), but since students have a
vested interested in not reporting loopholes or failures to teachers
*and* schools have a vested interest in not having weaknesses in their
filtering publicised in the media...  I think serious underreporting
is inevitable.  I have no idea what the scale of problems with
censorware in schools is, but I think we can be confident it's worse
than it appears on the surface.

OTOH, if by "works" you mean "keeps the parents/government/bureaucrats/media 
off our backs", then that seems like a reasonable pragamatic
justification to me :-).

Danny.

(*) Quite apart from anything else, this is a strong AI problem.