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Filters Are Bad |
Have you ever had a last
minute report to write, and tried to do research at school during lunch?
Oftentimes you find a link that promises to be everything you’ve
wanted and searched for, but when you click on it, the image of an
annoying brown dog comes up. This
means that because of one reason or another, the powers that be found it
unacceptable, and you can’t view it.
Most of the time, this restriction is only because it’s a free
webpage, and that makes research at school extremely annoying.
The problem with the Bess filter is not that it’s ineffective,
but that in trying to block the undesirable websites from which our school
administrators are trying to protect our virgin eyes and minds, it does
away with one of our civil liberties—freedom of speech.
Junior Tyler Reynolds commented, “Yeah, like
pornography.” And although
this comment may not represent all of the student body, it does serve to
show that the filter is blocking out many of the things it is supposed to.
The
filter is set up to block webpages in certain categories.
When you are on a computer doing research, each time your computer
sends a request to the Internet to download information it has to go
through the Bess server, first, which checks a database of websites, and
either blocks the site or passes it on to your computer.
It is supposed to block out pornography, hate or discrimination
material, illegal activities material and violent webpages.
However,
it is not the prevention of access to this that annoys most students.
It’s the secondary categories, the ones that block out free
webpages and message boards. Although
our school doesn’t seem to filter the gaming or entertainment websites,
it does block the ones that most people use.
Filters
like Bess screen out all webpages from free hosting services, like
Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, and various other free services.
It doesn’t discriminate between webpages, it just blocks all of
them out. Which basically means that if a person cannot afford to buy
webspace for their ideas to be published online, they will be
automatically filtered by the filtering program.
And although there are many disgusting hat pages available on free
hosting places, the reality is that those are only and insubstantial
fraction of the total. Websites
about math and science are filtered out with the hate pages.
In
many classes, students need to do research, and when half of your sources
are blocked out because they’re on free servers, it’s extremely
frustrating. In this way, a
lot of really helpful websites by students and teachers are filtered out
along with the personal websites, and a lot of useful information is lost.