Fighting Censorship...

...well, kinda.

The U.S. government concocted a brilliant plan a few years ago: Why not give Internet surfers in China and Iran the ability to bypass their nations' notoriously restrictive blocks on Web sites?

Soon afterward, the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites such as BBC News, MIT and Amnesty International.

But an independent report released Monday reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov)...

The IBB has justified a filtered Internet connection by arguing that it's inappropriate for U.S. funds to help residents of China and Iran--both of which receive dismal ratings from human rights group Freedom House--view pornography.

In the abstract, the argument is a reasonable one. If the IBB's service had blocked only hard-core pornographic Web sites, few people would object.

Instead, the list unintentionally reveals its author's views of what's appropriate and inappropriate. The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with "gay" in them as verboten--a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site...

"In addition, the words 'my' and 'tv,' which are also domain suffixes, are filtered by IBB Anonymizer. As a consequence, all Web hosts registered within the domain name systems of Malaysia and Tuvalu are unavailable."

One commentator notes that the filters also block the word 'asian'.

House-hunting (and meme answers)

Spent half of yesterday looking at houses. Fell in love with a beautiful place which had lots of space, and lovely stamped-tin ceilings, and an attic room (I have a secret fondness for attic rooms) and, oh, lots of endearing features, but was being auctioned the same day and expected to get slightly more than we can really afford. Will check whether it made the auction; if it got passed in, we might make an offer on that. It was a beautiful, beautiful house... *sniffle*

But at more affordable end of the scale, looks like we'll be making an offer on the first place we saw (during this run of house-hunting, at least). It has its flaws (small bedrooms, lack of parking, probably needs some re-wiring) but it's livable, and the price range isn't bad. Sydney prices have cooled off a little; they're still high, but it looks like we sold our old place in the mountains at the height of the boom and we're buying during a slump. Without that good fortune we'd be hard pressed to afford anything livable; I feel sorry for the vast majority who aren't so lucky.

( And answers for last Friday's quiz. )