STILL Blocked by Cyber Patrol

[Jamie McCarthy]

First, an erratum.  Yesterday, quoting David Burt, I wrote:

>>4 are clearly selling pornography:
>>
>>1) http://www.instantaccess.com    Click on "visit the sites" button.
>
>Huh?  No such button.

David meant to refer to http://www.instantaccess.net/ , which is the site
we indeed mentioned in our report, and which indeed sells sexually
explicit material.  I apologize for not double-checking the facts before
jumping on what David wrote.

And, http://www.satisfaction.simplenet.com/ does indeed contain explicit
material and little if anything else -- it's just not accessible from
the homepage, so we missed it.  Again, my error.  We didn't do our
homework as carefully as we should have.  Neither of these sites should
have been included in our original report.


That said --


We pointed out approx. 1.5 million webpages which were wrongly blocked
by Cyber Patrol.  Despite their damage control effort, releasing two new
CyberNOT lists in two days, approx. 1.4 million of those webpages are
still blocked, including truly bizarrely blocked sites such as the
National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry and the Air Penny website
(which sells Nike shoes).

This is _after_ they were informed of these errors through a very public
press release and website.

To put it another way, they have gone from wrongly blocking (at least)
0.75% of the entire web, to wrongly blocking (at least) 0.70% of the
entire web.  Considering the immense size of the web, either way it's an
error of enormous proportions.

Furthermore, _none_ of the newsgroups we mentioned was unblocked.
soc.feminism is still blocked as SexActs.  rec.games.chess.analysis is
still blocked as Gambling and Profanity.  alt.coven is -- despite the
company's promises earlier this year to stop discriminating against
pagan religions -- nevertheless blocked.  Plus hundreds of others.

We do not consider this much of an improvement, and in our opinion,
their dismissive and incomplete response only raises _more_ questions
about whether they have anything like the proper infrastructure in place
for dealing with the inevitable numerous misblocks.  We believe this
only emphasizes our point:  that the software is attempting to do an
impossible job.

Our analysis is now at <http://www.spectacle.org/cwp/aftermath.html>.


--
 Jamie McCarthy                                     jamie at mccarthy.org
 http://www.absence.prismatix.com/jamie/