Smut Filter Blocks All But Smut Censorship6/20/2000; 7:30:18 AM "When Exotrope Inc. introduced its BAIR smut-blocking software last year, everyone seemed wowed by the company's claims of intelligent filtering." ..."In tests of hundreds of images, BAIR incorrectly blocked dozens of photographs including portraits, landscapes, animals, and street scenes. It banned readers from viewing news photos at time.com and newsweek.com, but rated images of oral sex, group sex, and masturbation as acceptable for youngsters." ...'"I think all manufacturers of blocking software have suckered journalists and politicians to some extent by claiming it is more accurate than it really is," said Bennett Haselton, founder of Peacefire.org. "This is an unusual case because we're talking about a product with a zero percent accuracy rate."' (emphasis mine)BAIR tries to analyse an image and determine if it is inappropriate for children. The thing is, I live at Michigan State University, and while that may not be a famous place for computer vision research, I've still seen what constitutes state-of-the-art in visual identification. On this, the hardest of all problems (because it must evaluate all pictures, not some restricted set about which it can make assumptions), we are not even close to having this sort of problem solved well enough to make a program like BAIR feasible, because such a program requires accuracy in excess of 95% for a parent to be even remotely comforted. ("Our product guarentees that out of 20 attempts to download smut, only one will succeed." is not very comforting to the sort of people who would use these programs.)If this product was actually working as promised, it would be a total breakthrough, not something that would be consigned to a filtering product.Moreover, any company who's site is constantly erroring out, because their database only allows one person in at a time is not worthy of your money. Try visiting their download demo page, you'll probably get this:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005' [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Database 'Activity' is already open and can only have one user at a time. /download.asp, line 24Pathetic! That's absolutely inexcusable!