UNBlocked by Cyber Patrol

[Filtering Facts]

UNBlocked by Cyber Patrol

Response to "Blacklisted by Cyber Patrol" http://www.spectacle.org/cwp/isps.html

Disclaimer:
In his "Blacklisted" report, the primary author, Jamie McCarthy, makes
repeated references to myself, and quotes e-mail messages from me and
portions of my website.  Cyber Patrol is a product of Microsystems, Inc.
David Burt and Filtering Facts do not work in any capacity for Microsystems
and are not associated in any way with Microsystems.  Opinions expressed by
me and Filtering Facts are mine alone and do not represent the views and
practices of Microsystems.

The authors of "Blacklisted" have produced a list of 67 URLs that are said
to be inappropriate blocks by the filtering product Cyber Patrol.  Of these
67 blocks 58 were unblocked within 24 hours of notification, including
www.geocities.com/westhollywood, www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip, and
www.tripod.com. 

The authors admit to producing their list of bad blocks by working from a
decrypted "blacklist" from Cyber Patrol.  The authors claim they were only
using a portion of the blacklist, yet refuse to produce the list, or to even
estimate how large a portion they were using, or to describe what
methodology was used to review the list.  Therefore, the 67 blocks cannot
represented as a statistical sample and can only be evaluated against Cyber
Patrol's entire list of 57,000 blocked sites.  If all 67 blocks are excepted
at face value, that amounts to about .1% of the entire blacklist.

Of the remaining 9 blocks,  4 are clearly  selling pornography:

1) http://www.instantaccess.com    Click on "visit the sites" button.

2) http://www.drjack.com    Advertises itself as "Dr Jack's Things is One Of
Northern California's Hottest BBS's Specializing in Asian and  other Adult
Images - Over 40,000 files online! 13 gigabytes"  http://www.drjack.com/djthing/

3) http://www.satisfaction.simplenet.com/    Appears to be a shut down porn
site.

4) http://phantom.datamg.com   Contains an "XXX network" at
http://phantom.datamg.com/links.html

The remaining 5 appear to be blocked in other categories.

Because the number of sites presented is one tenth of one percent of the
total, well within any reasonable persons margin of error, and the bad
blocks were removed within 24 hours, Filtering Facts has no hesitations
about continuing to recommend Cyber Patrol.

Keep up the good work, and Merry Christmas!

*****************************************************************************
David Burt, Filtering Facts, HTTP://WWW.FILTERINGFACTS.ORG
David_Burt at filteringfacts.org