Seth Finkelstein's Anticensorware Investigations - Censorware exposed

October 2003: DMCA Victory - The Copyright Office had renewed the DMCA exemption for censorware:
"based primarily ... by one person, Seth Finkelstein" !
See my April 2003 Library Of Congress DMCA censorware testimony .
(Update November 2006: Exemption expired)

Support needed! Legal and financial support is needed to continue this work!

June, 2002: Federal censorware law overturned . And the court seems to have used my reports as one factor in its decision (Update: reversed )

I'm profiled in the New York Times of July 19, 2001! See Cracking the Code Of Online Censorship

I'm honored:

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION (EFF) PIONEER AWARDS HONOR INTERNET LUMINARIES

Ennis, Finkelstein, and Perrin Presented Awards at EFF's Tenth Annual Pioneer Awards Ceremony
...
Seth Finkelstein - Anti-censorship activist and programmer Seth Finkelstein spent hundreds of unpaid and uncredited hours over several years to decrypt and expose to public scrutiny the secret contents of the most popular censorware blacklists. Seth has been active in raising the level of public awareness about the dangers that Internet content blocking software and rating/labeling schemes pose to freedom of communication. His work has armed many with information of great assistance in the fight against government mandated use of these systems.

My EFF 2001 Pioneer Award page now has all the wonderful nominations describing my excellent decryption work .

My investigations:

• BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity) - a secret category of BESS (N2H2), and more about why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and translators
• BESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images) - BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all image searching to be pornography.
• BESS vs Image Search Engines - BESS bans several general popular images search engines as pornography.
• The Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive - The logic of censorware programs suppressing an enormous digital library.
• SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and language translators
• SmartFilter - I've Got A Little List - Why SmartFilter's blacklist cannot be human-reviewed, and the legal risks of anticensorware investigations
• CyberPatrol - 247 bans for the price of 1 (in collaboration with Art Wolinsky of Online Internet Institute ) - A case study where CyberPatrol banned at least 247 sites in one swoop, and the ban itself was wrong to boot.

• Searching Through The Great Firewall Of China - A simple technique which can be used with some search engines to bypass bans on searching for forbidden words
• Chester's Guide to Molesting Google - Google removes material from their index because of pressure from a newspaper campaign
• Google Censorship - How It Works - Details on Google's mechanism for removing material
• Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad - Spam-defense on Google created bugs
• UK Parliament Mail - The Ministry Of Silly Messages - Reverse-engineering of why mail to members of Parliament was blocked (not fond of pussy-cats and tit-willows)
• Websense - free sex sites and "blacklist wars" - Websense distributes, daily, sites not on other censorware blacklists (I am not making this up!)
• SmartFilter blacklisted as Sex, a computer science library , an anti-censorship site , and Christian , school , book , and health sites

I've co-authored a "White Paper" for the "National Research Council" with Lee Tien of EFF :  Blacklisting Bytes

In addition, see my Censorware Essays

Note I'm the former chief programmer for the Censorware Project , and proud to be an honored member of Peacefire .

However, the work on these pages is not associated with either of those two organizations.