If you were the president of a censorware company spotlighted for its bad blocks, wouldn't you respond to the embarassment by doing everything you could to repair the problem? If your product was then dragged into a lawsuit which hinged on whether or not you blocked innocent sites, wouldn't you redouble your efforts, to make sure it blocked only hardcore porn?

Log On Data did all that, removing many of the bad blocks we, and the Loudoun County lawyers, called to its attention. At the same time, it introduced many more blocks of innocent sites, so that a year later, the product is no better than it was. Why?

The answer is that filtering the net is almost impossible. By one estimate published in Science magazine more than half a year ago, the Internet consists of more than three hundred twenty million documents, and growing by several hundred percent per year. According to Brewster Kahle's article in the March, 1997 Scientific American, the average lifespan of a document on the web is 75 days. Putting those figures together, you end up with a minimum figure of around 250,000 webpages changing every single hour of every single day - and increasing exponentially. No censorware company is capable of deploying a team of surfers to look at that many documents. Remember - you don't know which 250,000 out of the whole web changed last hour... (And in his deposition in the Loudoun County case, Michael Bradshaw testified that the "team" responsible for making the final decisions for X-Stop consists of two people. Two.) Instead, most such products rely on automated spiders to select sites for addition to the list. A true AI, more sophisticated than any yet invented, would be necessary to distinguish art from medical texts from porn. Instead, these crude tools select sites which are added to the blacklist with little or no human review. How else could sites like the Beantown Bombers or the Ardennes weather information site end up blocked? What human looked at them and decided they were gross pornography or bestiality? Do you believe X-Stop when they tell you humans review all the sites added to their list?

Censorware is a peculiar brand of snake oil. ¹ ("Snake oil" meaning something sold without consideration of its quality or its ability to fulfill its vendor's claims. The term originally applied to elixirs sold in traveling medicine shows. The salesmen would claim their elixir would cure just about any ailment that a potential customer could have. Listening to the claims made by some censorware vendors, ``snake oil'' is a surprisingly apt name.) Here's a few warning signs that you are about to be suckered:

• Marketing hype - If they have to pump up their product with overzealous marketing, ask yourself why?

• Technobabble - Don't assume that you don't understand what they're saying because you "don't know computers". If it isn't clear, it's probably intentional.

• Secret algorithms - Why won't they tell you how sites are really added to the blacklist? "some humans add sites" is not sufficient.

• Revolutionary breakthroughs - When AI is invented, you'll hear about it.

• Rave reviews and other meaningless accolades

• Attacking other product's failings - Why are they trying to sell you by convincing you other products are bad?

Now let's take a look at X-Stop. Just go browse through the X-Stop site, then follow along:

• Hype - We hardly know where to begin. The entire X-Stop site is hype. Try to pin down just what X-Stop does, in non-hyperbolic terms. We dare you. Just count the exclamation points.

• Technobabble - The Mudcrawler is a perfect example. A Pentium with an internet connection running some software. Why do they confuse the issue? The site used to have vastly more technobabble on it, but has been improved. For example, one of their press releases went like so:

  "Wash., D.C. March 19, 1997 At a capital reception today the existence of a new order of "bloodhound efficient" trackers knows as QUARXs was revealed by LOG-ON Data Corp. of Anaheim, CA., an advanced Internet research organization. "When a new child pornography site appears on the web, give us thirty-six hours and we will identify him. Once we do, he can never escape the grip of the QUARX that the "MudCrawler" assigns to him. This will be a blocked site in the "MudCrawler's" library of obscenity, according to Michael S. Bradshaw, LOG-ON Data's C.E.O.

  "The MudCrawler is housed behind a thirty foot wall of glass. The red glow coming from the room and the white lab coats worn by the engineers assure you that something serious is going on inside," said Bradshaw. When asked, Bradshaw indicated that the "MudCrawler" was not a search engine. He went on to say that it might best be described as a creator of virtual lightspeed hunter/tracker entities, called QUARX. After it creates these QUARXs, the MudCrawler programs them and monitors their activity. In the event of need, in terms of workload, QUARX are cloned. Each QUARX is given specific assignments, along with proven data value mapping for each sortie. "

  Virtual lightspeed hunter/tracker entities? Your alarms should be going off by now.

• Secret algorithms - Mudcrawler, "44 criteria" (sort of like the 11 herbs and spices), Direct Address Blocking (which is the exact same thing that all censorware products do - exactly), etc.

• Revolutionary breakthroughs - "X-Stop is a revolutionary new software program designed to help you protect your family from offensive Internet material like sexual acts, perversions, bestiality and fetishes....."

• Rave reviews - Karen Jo Gounaud's meaningless praise, plus plenty of stuff about X-Stop and all other censorware products in the computer industry magazines. In general, you should take anything you read in a computer-hype magazine with a grain (or a kilo) of salt. A whole genre of magazines like "Family PC" have sprung up, existing solely to maximize sales of computer software to parents who aren't completely computer-savvy. You will not find out anything useful about filtering software (or any other computer product) from such magazines. If a magazine has a review of any product without a corresponding discussion of their method of analysis, just throw it away, it was written by the software vendor.

• Attacking other product's failings - X-Stop is again a bad offender in this category.

So is X-Stop snake oil or not? Of course it is, as are almost all censorware products. ² All those others are lying to all of their customers, because they know the customers will have difficulty evaluating their claims, will find it impossible to know exactly what's being banned. (That's where we come in.)

Censorware is not capable of improvement, because the job it sets out to do is an impossible one, given the inherent limitations of current technology. There aren't going to be any breakthroughs in artificial intelligence any time soon, and the WWW is continuing to expand at a tremendous rate of growth, doubling in size every few months, making an impossible job -- well, impossible. No matter how many "QUARX" you deploy. Yet censorware continues to enjoy a reputation which even Ronald Reagan (or Bill Clinton!) would envy. Criticism slides off. Computer-hype magazines ignore the criticism in their desire to sell product for their advertisers. And only the end-user, be it parent, school, or library, ends up suffering by purchasing snake oil.

X-Stop is the most-scrutinized software on the market. It has been the subject of a legal battle going for a year now. The ACLU, CWP and Mainstream Loudoun have been exposing bad blocks on their list left and right. Both X-Stop and the Loudoun library's defenders insist that X-Stop is the least-overbroad product available.

When will censorware products lose their Teflon reputation? If you're a parent, you might choose to accept overbroad banning -- but you should know what you're getting into, and you sure won't find out anything bad about the products from their company websites or from computer magazines. And if you're a public institution, please, don't waste the public's money believing that any product can restrict itself to filtering only obscenity. It's just not possible. X-Stop is the best example of that.

If X-Stop couldn't do any better than this, after a year of intense scrutiny in court, what do you think other blacklists are like?

- The Censorware Project

1 - We cheerfully stole from the FAQ discussing snake oil in cryptography. Cryptographic software and censorware have much in common, both being products which the end-user cannot review. You have to take the vendor's word for what is in a censorware blacklist or exactly what is done to an encrypted message, and human greed being what it is, you can probably assume that you wil be lied to to some extent, and often to an extremely great one.

2 - There is one product in existence which makes its short list of banned sites open for inspection. That's perhaps the only one which can make verifiable claims about its blacklist.

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