Exposing the secrets of censorware since 1997
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Essays
| by Jamie McCarthy: by Jim Tyre: by Jonathan Wallace: by Seth Finkelstein (former member) by Michael Sims (former member) |
About The Censorware Project
The Censorware Project was formed by a group of writers and internet activists in late 1997. Our goal is to bring to light information about censorware products which is, by its nature, hidden. We are:
Bennett Haselton is a freelance programmer living in Seattle. He is the coordinator of Peacefire.org, an organization advocating free speech rights for young people on the Internet.
Jamie McCarthy is a Gen-X computer programmer who has read enough science fiction to recognize that technology brings a promise that is not always fulfilled. He hopes that in ten years, the Net will still be a free medium where people can share any thoughts with anyone - and not have begun the slow slide to the packaged, licensed mediocrity of TV, radio, and film. When he's not fighting privatized censorship, he writes perl code for NewsForge or historical essays on the Holocaust.
James S. Tyre is a practicing attorney in Culver City, California. Professionally, he has represented free speech interests for more than twenty years. Personally, his views on free speech were formed after a few encounters with public school authorities when he was a pre-teen.
Jonathan Wallace is a software executive and attorney based in New York City. He is co-author with Mark Mangan of Sex, Laws and Cyberspace (Henry Holt 1996), a book on Internet censorship. He publishes The Ethical Spectacle, a monthly webzine covering ethical, legal and political issues.
Two of our founding members, Seth Finkelstein, and Michael Sims are no longer affiliated with this project. We've had our differences, but their past contributions and accomplishments were, and remain, much appreciated.
General Contact Address. Want to write us? Try censorware@censorware.net. If you're a member of the press writing on deadline, prefix "press" to your subject line and we'll be more likely to reply quickly.
Privacy Statement. This webserver, as do just about all servers on the internet, logs the time, your IP address, your browser, and what URLs you requested. If this concerns you, perhaps you should take advantage of a service like the Anonymizer, which hides your IP address from the websites you browse. You can click here to browse this site anonymously (but it may be rather slow since you're using the free anonymizer service).
If you contact us in email regarding this website, we will keep your name and our correspondence private within our group unless you give us the OK. Unless you write in to flame us, taunt us, or otherwise be an obnoxious jerk, in which case we may post your email just for people to laugh at. Don't say you weren't warned. Oh, and we don't like junk mail and won't give your email address to spammers or anything like that.
Copyright. All of the work in the public areas of this site is intended for free public dissemination, including of course research by students. We do like our work to be credited. Please credit either the author or "The Censorware Project" as appropriate, and provide appropriate references so that your readers can refer to the original source (a link to censorware.net, for example, or a correct citation in a document which cites these pages).
If you're writing for the internet, do not copy our work in its entirety; link back here instead. The principle is that your reader should be able to see, years from now, any corrections or improvements we have made, rather than your outdated copy.
Do not reproduce any material from this website for profit without written permission from one or more members of the Project. Caution: fully 50% of us are lawyers. Don't say you weren't warned.
Financing. The Project has no external financing and is not supported in any way. We donate our time and money to maintain this site, and we work hard at it because we think it's a worthwhile thing to do. If you wish to contribute to a group fighting censorware on the internet, we won't take your money, so please send it instead to the ACLU, the ALA, PFAW, or another group active in fighting censorware.
Just to be totally clear: we are unfunded. Our opponents, principally the Religious Right, have annual budgets in the tens of millions. The corporations that make the software we analyze have annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Their stock valuations give them a market capitalization of, well that's hard to know exactly, but again, "tens of millions" is an indisputable figure.
We have been falsely accused of being funded by "the pornography industry," so let's get that one out of the way right now. Every sex site on the internet wants desperately for censorware to succeed, because it gives them an excuse to say they're not being seen by kids. For example, check out how far playboy.com will go to make sure they are blocked. Or look at any other sex site; most of them have warnings on their front page and links to a variety of popular censorware programs.
The pornography industry is in bed with the Religious Right on this one issue: they both want to see censorware used as much as possible.
Slashcode. This website is powered by Slash, an open-source database-backed engine for news and discussion websites. Slash is brought to you by OSDN, a secretive and powerful cabal of open-source websites that somehow got mixed up with VA Linux. Jamie McCarthy happens to work for VA, so if you have questions about using this code for your own site, he'd be the one to talk to.
Questions/Problems? Please direct technical inquiries to this site's webmaster, Jamie McCarthy, at jamie@censorware.net.
