>On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 03:50:20PM -0500, Matthew Gaylor wrote:
> I'm carbon copying this message to Seth Finkelstein, who I consider
> the pit bull of the anti-censorware opposition. And I have a
> question for Seth- Dell's use of the paraphrase comment "illegal
> purposes" reminds me of the various categories that filtering
> software uses to describe a site. I wonder if Dell didn't run the
> Weigand site into a filtering application to make the decision not
> to sell one of their computers to him?]
I called Dell to try to verify the story myself before
commenting. An official response I received seems to indicate that
they did indeed flag "Weigand Combat Handguns Inc." as suspicious from
the word "Combat":
"We recently received an order from a customer whose company name
included the word "combat." We cancelled the order to give us enough
time to follow up with the customer and be assured that the sale
would be in compliance with U.S. export law."
Obviously, I do not think Dell is willing to discuss the details
of their system of searching for suspicious keywords. In general, this
sort of simple matching against bad words is a very simple programming
task. One of the concepts I try to convey to people is that there is
no magic in censorware, no amazing artificial intelligence that has
any sort of judgment (despite any manufacture's hype). It is a common
feature of many programs to have the ability to enter a list of bad
words, and if any of the bad words match, deny service. And this
incident is an example of just how intelligent such keyword-matching
can be.
Myself, I would have thought that the word "Handguns" would
have been a stronger flag than "Combat". But who knows what's in their
blacklist? Those entries are almost always kept secret. Perhaps the
matching went from left to right, and the word "Combat" kicked out the
laptop order before the program even saw the word "Handguns".
Dell could have bought any of a number of commercial programs,
or written their own simple keyword-checker for integration with their
order processing system. It really doesn't make a difference here.
Computers aren't magic. Computers are dumb. It's the human element
which is crucial here. A simple match of a word against a blacklist is
then blindly treated as indicating some sort of illegality, and a
procedure of better-safe-than-sorry then takes over. This incident is
a small case-study in one context. But the idea, and the implications,
are quite general.
Remember this incident the next time anyone tries to claim
that censorware is so much better now.
--
Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sethf.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circuits/19HACK.html
BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php
BESS vs Google: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php
