April 02, 2003

Confused Alex Beam column pro library censorware

Gary Price at The ResourceShelf blog pointed me to a pro-library-censorware column by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam:
"Web filters at libraries are overdue"

It's a somewhat confused piece, perhaps notably so in conclusion:

I know where I stand on this. I'm behind the government and I'm tired of First Amendment shilly-shallying that fills my children's Hotmail screens with dozens of porn come-ons every day.

That's spam. Library censorware won't have the slightest affect on it. This is also another small instance of why I think the word "filter" is very misleading in discussion. Spam is something you don't want to see, but censorware is where an authority doesn't want you to see something. That's an important structural difference.

But, sigh, almost no-one cares what I say. Alex Beam is a columnist. I am barely more than a shouter to the wind.

See what I posted earlier, what I guess I should call the ARE NOT PORNOGRAPHY list.

By Seth Finkelstein | posted in censorware , journo | on April 02, 2003 11:48 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)

Subscribe with Bloglines      Subscribe in NewsGator Online  Google Reader or Homepage
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000241.html
sethf.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-47
8075
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:T6WXVUA63QGCDHRPIPQKCSQQEQ4653CQ
<urn:uuid:1de4e51f-15e5-4170-92f2-5f660e844d6a>
2018-11-21T01:50:48Z
96.126.106.28
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:NCLMB6KOOAA2VYTLEISPVLPYZSVACTQ6
<urn:uuid:afce49c1-3a5d-41c0-a510-5bafc89c48d8>
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000241.html
response
<urn:uuid:ad22fe68-30b3-4588-a270-e1d6a5d99be8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-97-162-208.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/