From: sethf@athena.mit.edu (Seth Finkelstein) Newsgroups: alt.internet.media-coverage,alt.censorship Subject: Re: Surfwatch on TV Date: 15 Jul 1995 21:54:46 GMT Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 47 Message-ID: <3u9df6$gi9@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> References: <3tse12$stf@news.nyc.pipeline.com> <3tt5iv$et9@crl14.crl.com> In article tsalagi@netcom.com writes: >In article <3tt5iv$et9@crl14.crl.com>, David Cassel wrote: >>Even fixed, that highlights a major problem. Surfwatch is a "black box". >>They won't release what sites are being blocked; you have to trust them. > >They probably realize that the *second* they put out a list of Banned Sites, >that list will be the hottest thing on the net (and the banned sites will be >getting free advertising). > >Who knows? Maybe they're trying to find a way to market the list themselves. SurfWatch strikes me as some sort of an extremely sophisticated joke. I don't know yet if it's a good joke or a bad joke, but I can't figure out why the irony isn't blindingly obvious. In the style of Bob Newhart's old one-sided telephone conversation comedy routines: Hello? Yes I'm a parent. Yes, I've heard of the Internet, that's the 83.5% pornographic place, right? It says so here in _Time_, right next to this weird picture of a guy getting it on with his computer. You say you've got a product that blocks all the nasty sites. Gee, that's pretty good. How's it work? Oh, I subscribe, and every month you send me a long list of locations that my kid should *not* look at. Your program reads this list. I see. My kid's already got a fake ID. What's to stop him from getting a program that uses your list as the places to visit? You haven't thought it out that far? Well, get back to me when you have. Nice talking to you. Hold on a minute. Maybe you could send me the list for myself? Screw the kids! Wait, I didn't mean that like it sounded! No, not the FBI, nooooo ... The most obvious thing that follows is a SurfWatch decompiler. That's evident. Look at all the game copy-protection breaking programs that exist. Their program is readily available and can be examined in detail. Encryptions such as Adobe fonts or VCR+ codes gave much less to work with, but were eventually broken. This has to be absolutely obvious to them. So what's their thinking? Are they playing both sides (censors and thrill-seekers?)? I don't know. The effects of labelling can be scary, but this implementation is very amusing. -- Seth Finkelstein sethf@mit.edu Disclaimer : I am not the Lorax. I speak only for myself. (and certainly not for Project Athena, MIT, or anyone else).