--- From: "William K. Dobbs" <duchampat_private> To: "Declan McCullagh" <declanat_private> Subject: bad words Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 00:12:13 -0500 Declan, The discrete charm of robotic thinking: I never imagined a newspaper reporter would use email filtering software to root out posts with "bad words." Then it is revealed an entire major newspaper is using the stuff. Why would editors and reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel allow a contraption to make such judgments, to act as a censor? I sure hope that other media outlets will not go down this road. -Bill Dobbs X-Failed-Recipients: gpabstat_private From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemonat_private> To: duchampat_private Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 13:13:38 -0500 This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim). A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: gpabstat_private SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data: host newmail.jsinc.com [207.170.24.146]: 550 Banned text appeared in header or body: 'fuck' Chicago Reader [Chicago, IL] February 7, 2002 http://www.chireader.com/hottype/index.html HOT TYPE By Michael Miner [excerpt] Make the World Go Away If you sit at an office computer, you may have noticed that half of your E-mail peddles XXX Web sites. Last month Don Wycliff, the Tribune's public editor, wrote to lament this flood of spam into his office, and the particular difficulty newspapers face in doing anything about it. "There are technological responses to porn spam, of course -- filters and blocking devices,"he wrote. "But any filter or blocking device involves trading off a measure of openness for a reduction in annoyance and the other costs that spam imposes. Newspapers, which must be as open to the public as possible, ought to be loath to close themselves off in any way that can be avoided." But a few papers have decided to live with that trade-off. The other day William Dobbs, a gay activist in New York who's a critic of hate-crimes laws, explained his case against them in a phone call to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter and followed up by E- mailing her some news stories. One was a column that Alexander Cockburn had written in June 2000 for the New York Press. Cockburn's piece began, "We're just about 31 years away from the great Stonewall riot, which set the tone for years of defiant gay insurgency. Stonewall was about defiance. It was a Fuck You to the forces of repression, to the forces of the state. So where's this spirit of defiance today?" The Journal Sentinel bounced Dobbs's E-mail right back to him. Dobbs was startled to read an error message that announced: "Banned text appeared in header or body." Dobbs tried again, making it "F/K You" this time, and Cockburn's column sailed through. Then Dobbs called me. "We're trying to strike a balance between the functionality of the business and free speech, and trying to protect the working environment," explains Jim Herzfeld, the Journal Sentinel's vice president for information technology. But the technology is "pretty crude," which is why the occasional Alexander Cockburn essay is rejected too. <end> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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