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

[Mark Hughes]

Hi Stephen,

> That is, you would appear to believe if "some" students do
> manage to access "some" net porn websites from school,
> then this must mean that school filtering "clearly does
> not achieve its objective."  Who said that effective school
> filtering must completely block ALL porn websites or else
> it doesn't meet its objectives?

Actually, I think this particular point is relevant to the porn site
issue.  We know there are a gazillion porn sites, and the number of
sites is growing at a fast clip - I dunno what the figures are, I'm
sure someone else involved in this area does.

Suppose there's 100,000 porn sites world wide.  If the censorware
successfully blocks 99% of the sites, then there are 1,000 sites not
blocked.  That's still a quantity so large that:

a) the students don't seem to be having any problem finding them when
they want to.
b) there's far more than anyone can ever really look at

The key issue is the repetitive nature of the content - as my mum says
about porn, 'it gets pretty boring because there are only so many ways
you can do it'.  If 1,000 porn sites are not blocked, that's more than
enough for anyone because the content is essentially all the same.

If you block microsoft.com you achieve your objective - there aren't
two Microsoft's.  If you block fed.gov.au you achieve your objective -
there aren't two federal governments; you can't get the content
somewhere else.

But because the content on porn sites is so numbingly repetitive, if
you block 99% of porn sites you've failed to make that content
unavailable - ALL the content you've blocked is available on the porn
sites that have not been blocked.

The content of the porn sites is so repetitive you could almost
consider them a network of proxy servers all delivering slightly
different presentations of the identical content.  Blocking 99,000 of
100,000 sites is very significant if the content of each site is
unique.  But if the content of every site is the same, blocking 99% is
a failure.


Regards, Mark

Mark Hughes
Director
Effective Business Applications Pty Ltd
effectivebusiness@pplications.com.au
www.pplications.com.au
+61 4 1374 3959




> -----Original Message-----
> From: stephen loosley [mailto:stephen@melbpc.org.au]
> Sent: Monday, 23 October 2000 21:38
> To: effectivebusiness@pplications.com.au
> Cc: Link Institute
> Subject: RE: [LINK] Survey Finds Support for School Filters (USA)
>
>
> At 01:05 AM 23/10/2000 +1000, Mark Hughes wrote:
>
> > I've just been informed by the staff of my son's school that the
> > students have been accessing pornography sites from the school
> > PCs despite the censorware.. So the censorware used by the NSW
> > Dept of Education clearly does not achieve its objective..
>
> Why do you and Danny think of school filtering in such
> *absolute* terms?
>
> That is, you would appear to believe if "some" students do
> manage to access
> "some" net porn websites from school, then this must mean
> that school filtering
> "clearly does not achieve its objective."  Who said that
> effective school filtering
> must completely block ALL porn websites or else it doesn't
> meet its objectives?
>
> Obviously "complete" edu filtering is probably currently
> impossible, and, so what?
> How many students would perhaps be facing serious
> enrollment / legal problems
> if we didn't have one form of web/url filtering for the
> most "guess-able" porn sites?
>
> Again I would assert, from both pre-and-post-filtering
> personal experience,
> that school filtering is working well for the average
> "chalk-face" art teacher,
> (or whomever), and that this means that Ms Art Teacher can,
> and does, use
> the web with her students ... but that without filtering
> she possibly would not.
>
> Mark, to schools it *just doesn't matter* if our
> porn-filtering isn't perfect. It works
> quite well enough to prevent thoughtless guessing of porn
> URLs by our students.
> This lets my colleagues and myself *actually teach* website
> design and creation
> for example, without worrying about any students getting
> themselves banned from
> our student network etc, because of one thoughtless and
> idle porn-site URL guess.
>
> As far as many teachers are concerned, I'd guess, kids are
> the only issue and that
> nothing else (eg School / EdDpt reputation, or whatever)
> really matters one little bit.
> By the way .. our email filtering resources for incoming
> (only) email also works well.
>
> Cheers, Mark ..
> Stephen Loosley
> www.stephen.ws
>
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