Tau Zero's Journal: Somebody's brain-dead

.... So I get to work today, and in between trying to find bugs I decide to scan Slashdot. Only I find that yro.slashdot.org has somehow found its way onto the "banned" control list for the second time this year (without explanation), and so have ask.slashdot.org and www.windsofchange.net.

Did I mention that there is no mailto: link for submittal of erroneous blocks?

I swear, the OA department at <censored> has to be run by morons.

Don't you just love web filters? (not)

[ekuns]

And to think our friends in Congress (United States) want these sorts of things legally mandated to protect the young and the innocent. While a nice idea in theory, these filters are TERRIBLE in practice. Doing work web surfing, I regularly run into miscategorized web pages.

An example from a month or two ago was a web page describing how to configure Tomcat and various connectors between Apache and Tomcat. I figured out how the filter was populated by whichever company my company employs, because the w

This just occurred to me

[Tau Zero]

I would not be surprised if we now have more accurate automated tools for classifying spam than the filter companies use for classifying web pages.

Isn't that ironic?

Re:This just occurred to me

[ekuns]

It's definitely more ironic than anything Alanis Morrisette has sung about. :)

And it's all driven by demand. The IT departments are always overworked and underbudgeted (I assume that is generally true everwhere) so they don't worry much about the false positive rate in the web filters. And most computer geeks aren't going to install a web filter at home. But when it comes to SPAM filters, well, the average computer geek WANTS to use one, so there is pressure to make them run well.