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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