[lug] Filtering Proxies

[Michael J. Pedersen]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 03:40:20PM -0700, Evelyn Mitchell wrote:
> > My solution? An open source proxy.
> Great idea!

I wish I could take credit for it. I saw it on /. many moons ago, but nobody
appears to have bothered with implementation, which is quite annoying.

> > Consider this: With it being open source, we could make the blacklist not
> > quite so dark. In fact, we could provide some truly useful categories which
> > could be used. Make the list public, too, so that users can see what is in
> > what category, and even provide a challenge mechanism for a mis-filed website.
> 
> Ratings would be done on a consensus basis.. a la advogato?

While I'm not an advogato user, I do know what you mean by consensus system,
and I agree that it would be the only way to go with this. Otherwise, with one
person rating a given page, it would be quite easy for serious misfilings to
occur.

> > 1) Categorizing the web would be incredibly difficult, to say the least. We'd
> Trusted moderators look at the work of other moderators, and up or
> down rate their recommendations.

Actually, I'm not so sure that's the best way. It puts power in the hands of
an elite few (the trusted moderators). If this system were to fly, I want the
power to be in the hands of the people at large, not just a few who know the
system. More thoughts on this below.

> > 2) Bandwidth, especially for the blacklist. I can't host it. Especially once
> Sourceforge

Think they'd mind being a download point for the blacklist site, especially
since it would be updated on almost a daily basis once the project gets going?

> > 3) Actual coding. Heck, by comparison to the others, this is small change. But
> Use Zope!

Zope might be good for the administrative interfaces, but for anything else, I
can't help but think it would be bad. Especially for a proxy server. I really
think that C or C++ code is what's required for the proxy server itself, to
maintain some decent speed.

Some thoughts on moderation, categorization, etc.

Within a few minutes, I realized that one feature which must go into the
system is multiple categories for a web page. As an example (though an
admittedly bad one): Consider a page advocating homophobia. For some people,
this goes into hate speech, and for others, this goes into religious speech.
Only if all categories are unblocked do you get the page/site.

Moderation thoughts: Anybody can place a webpage in any category. It takes a
vote of at least two others to remove a page from that category. It's
simplistic, but it's a start.

-- 
Michael J. Pedersen
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