I encountered a journalist-activist on Twitter, a writer for (among others) Al Jazeera in English, who is nevertheless a free speech activist. We discussed the recent FoxNews.com article that reported, among other things, that the Wikimedia Foundation entirely failed to respond to a “more or less free” offer of filtering software. They need such software, of course, because they are heavily used by school children, and widely available in schools, and yet they host enormous amounts of porn. Anyway, the journalist-activist and I had a charming exchange, the end of which went like this:
Journalist-activist: “Why don’t you simply push for people to purchase NetSpark or similar for home use?”
Me: “…a lot of people don’t have money or expertise to install such a solution.”
JA: “I don’t buy that – free, good filters are widely available.”
Me: “If you find me a ‘free, good filter’ that is ‘widely available,’ I will install and test, and blog about the results.”
JA: “http://t.co/4CHL54yc”
Me: “All righty then! This should be fun!”
First, the Egyptian-made Golden Filter Premium is quite easy to install. However, though I am a certified “power user” of computers (Jimmy Wales called me that back in 2000), I couldn’t immediately find where the software resides. As soon as it installed, the installation window closed, zoop!, and when I searched “porn” in Chrome (my currently favored browser), the window magically closed. So it was working, I just couldn’t figure out where to fiddle with the options. Finally I opened the Task Manager, found the original file location of the exe, read the ReadMe, and discovered that the app is shown via F9 and F10. I would have known the F9/F10 trick if I had read the installation notes, apparently, but who does that?
So once it’s installed, what is the first thing I do? I follow the script I followed when I made this fun video. Results?
It doesn’t filter Wikipedia.org, which is fine. You can use it to block the whole site, if you want. But of course the WMF should offer a more fine-grained filter than that.
The software instantly closes a window as soon as it sees one of the verboten words on it. You may edit the list of verboten words.
I don’t think they know about “fisting” in Egypt. It isn’t in the list of verboten words, so when I type it into Wikipedia, of course I get the article, complete with illustrations. (I won’t supply links here. You can go ahead and search if you dare, but bear in mind that this and the following examples are highly NSFW.)
Next, I go to multimedia search on Simple English Wikipedia, as I did in the above video. Let me try my test searches: “Poseidon.” Yep, there’s the old “Kiss of Poseidon.jpg” which does not actually feature the Greek God.
“Cucumber”? Page 2 of the results (used to be page 1) features some female exhibitionists who are altogether too fond of this vegetable.
“Toothbrush”? Again, page 2 has someone using a toothbrush in a way not approved by the ADA (used to be the top of page 1; Wikipedians obviously were uncomfortable with the bad publicity).
So…this free version doesn’t work. By the way, for what it’s worth, a non-free filter, NetSpark’s, not only caught these examples, it deleted them inline instead of simply blocking the whole page. I’m not saying NetSpark is the only or the best solution, just that it’s the one I’m familiar with and that it seemed to work rather well.
Wikipedia could pay a modest amount of money (I’m not sure what the bottom line bill would be, if over $0, from Netspark) and obtain a solution on behalf of the school children who use their smut-ridden resource. But they refuse. Few parents will want to use “Golden Filter Premium,” in any case. It’s just too clunky, and it doesn’t work the way it should on Wikipedia anyway.
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