IP: CRACKING THE CODE OF ONLINE FILTERING: Edupage, July 20, 2001

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Censorware Project founder Seth Finkelstein has spent the past
> six years decrypting Web filtering program blacklists, an effort
> that has garnered him a Pioneer Award from the Electronic
> Frontier Foundation. His work was also instrumental in helping
> the ACLU win a federal lawsuit against a library Internet
> filtering regulation in Loudon County, Va. Finkelstein contends
> that these tools cannot make contextual distinctions and thus
> block many sites by mistake. For instance, one program blocks
> the National Institutes of Health's Spanish-language site on
> diabetes because the word "hora," which means "hour" in Spanish,
> means "prostitute" in Swedish. Although Finkelstein has
> successfully lobbied the Librarian of Congress to exempt the
> blacklists from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on
> decrypting digital encryptions, releasing them to the public is
> still a thorny issue, as they are considered to be intellectual
> property.
> (New York Times, 19 July 2001)



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