Enough is enough with filters already! They don’t work as their purveyors claim they do. One can still ‘porn’ (whatever you mean by that) with any of these products installed.

The ‘active content filters’ (that screen content as it’s delivered) are context insensitive so that “He caressed her breast softly with his powerful manly hand.” will get the same treatment as “Take a chicken breast and rub it with a cleaved garlic clove…”

It is almost certain that no matter what filter you install it will inappropriately censor content that does not meet the stated criteria for filtering in the advertizing claims or user’s manual (if there is one.)

Some of the filtering packages are so idiotically simple to disengage, dismantle, or disable that even a child could do it. Even more so by an adolescent boy motivated by raging hormones.

Most of the companies that will sell you this stuff will not tell you exactly what they block, what the standards are for being on the blocklist, how the block list is updated both procedurally and then on customers’ computers. In fact many of them tried to sue people who decoded their blocklists. One company that was using the ‘0×94 XOR’ ‘encryption’ method (think Crackerjacks box secret decoder ring) threatened Bennett Haselton of Peacefire with a huge lawsuit for ‘exposing’ this ‘trade secret’, the sophistication of which would have had all of the cypher-heads at the NSA doing spit-takes. All of their bluster and blather was just the usual IP lawyer hot air.

The only fortunate thing about all of this is that the Copyright Office has deemed that the encoding of web filter blocklists are exempt from the DCMA ‘circumvention’ and ‘reverse engineering’ provisions whereby anyone can attempt to decipher a blocklist on the theory that they want to do so to see exactly what the product blocks and verify the advertizing claims of such products.

The .xxx TLD is going to make life a bit easier for many people. Individuals ISPs can offer to block it on their end, much like you can request than calls to ‘900′ numbers be blocked from your telephone. The key issue will be disclosure. ISPs can choose to block .xxx for all customers, but they should state that up front.

Because they are ‘commercial’ speech, perhaps many ‘porn’ sites can be coerced into moving to .xxx land, but handling non-commercial free-speech based sites is an entirely different matter.

But let’s see what’s really going on here:

It’s just the right-wing so-called ‘Christians’ trying to impose their agenda on everyone using the ‘protecting children’ ruse as a distraction. If you really wanted to protect your children, you would not them use the internet unsupervised, would you? Well, would you let them use a chemistry set unsupervised? These can both be considered ‘dangerous’ with the exception that the chemistry set can cause severe physical injury, whereas the ‘danger’ of the internet is that some thought and/or idea may become part of a child’s psyche against their parent’s wishes.

This may cause the child to ask questions which would then result in the parent experiencing a moment or two of discomfort. The worst case scenario would be where the child starts questioning the beliefs and values they’ve been indoctrinated with by their right-wing parents as a result of being exposed to other points of view on the internet.