Food for Thought

[Jason Clinton]

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Becker, Rob wrote:
| As such, I wonder, can a bayesian filtering
| algorithm similar to what has been proposed for screening out spam be applied
| to the problem of inappropriate content and protecting children from it?
| Most browsers already keep a cache of content we have viewed.  How difficult
| would it be to add a mechanism allowing the user to drop bad content into one
| cache folder for filtering out bad content?  It would be fairly safe to
| assume that content not labelled bad was at least acceptable if not good.
| Could organizations that police adult sites then publish lists of words and
| their weights from the corpus of sites they have on blacklists for use by
| parents and other concerned entities?  How difficult would it be to utilize
| this in a pro! xy?  It would seem as though there is a a great need for
| filtering software that actually works and can be flexible enough to keep
| kids from inappropriate content, or workers away from games without rendering
| a large part of the internet inaccessible.  Just some thoughts sparked by the
| recent discussion of filtering content.  One other note, could such a tool
| also be used to increase the relevance of internet searches?  Any thoughts,
| ideas, links or dialogue are greatly appreciated. Thanks. Rob

What would prevent kids from accessing alt.sex.* via NNTP for pics and stories
or the likes of http://www.nifty.org via a publicly accessible telnet Lynx
terminal? What's next? Are we to revert to chastity belts to which a child must
ask for his parent's key to go the restroom? Will you hire public servants to
listen for the sounds of masturbation in public bathrooms or follow your 12 - 18
year olds to and from the bathroom yourself? How 'bout morning 'sheet checks'
and those X-10 cameras installed in their bedroom?

For every wall there is an equally greater ladder. If a child is actively
seeking pornography, it's time for them to see it. They're going to masterbate
one way or another.
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