Stardate 20010809.0501 (On Screen): As if to demonstrate yet again the futility of trying to filter the Web to protect children, Mickey Kaus recently was informed that AOL's parental filtering had put him on the blackest of blacklists, so that his site couldn't even be accessed at the setting of "Mature Teens". (My Goodness!) To this day he has never figured out exactly what it was that set off their spider, but it was an automated response to something or other that he wrote. The web is just too large and changing too fast for human evaluation of every site. The alternative is a permission-based system instead of a block-based system, where you can only see sites if they've been approved. Apple tried this and it rendered the web useless for its users because nearly everything was off-limits. As a result, it was hardly used at all and recently Apple announced they were
ending the program.
Of course, if USS Clueless had somehow managed to land on one or another of the parental block lists I doubt I'd know. My regular readers (all five of you) are not generally the kind of people who'd be using that kind of software.
Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that Kaus found out that AOL only evaluates most sites once every 90 days. Do you have any idea how many porn sites spring up every 90 days? Thousands, baby, thousands -- to judge from my email. My friends Ashley, Heather and Desiree have been telling me all about them. (Nice ladies! I wish I could remember where I met them, though.) (discuss)
