Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Where has all the pr0n gone?
I just saw on CNN that:
The article discusses COPA and Congress' previous attempts to end explicit adult content online before it gets more into this study conducted by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. Stark analyzed the information collected from ISPs and search engine companie when the Justice Department subpoenaed them. And here's a bit of what he found:
Or, as ITWeek UK likes to think of it: Internet is 99 per cent porn free!
The San Jose Mercury News allegedly has a copy of the report. But they show (on their website) only a few statistics and not any details or excerpts. Disappointing.
I have not found Stark's report yet, but I did find a wealth of backdround information and documents about COPA and at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check it out!
"About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study."I find that suprisingly LOW.
The article discusses COPA and Congress' previous attempts to end explicit adult content online before it gets more into this study conducted by Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley. Stark analyzed the information collected from ISPs and search engine companie when the Justice Department subpoenaed them. And here's a bit of what he found:
"Stark also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.Except for the overseas porn. But, anyway...About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.
But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found."
Or, as ITWeek UK likes to think of it: Internet is 99 per cent porn free!
The San Jose Mercury News allegedly has a copy of the report. But they show (on their website) only a few statistics and not any details or excerpts. Disappointing.
I have not found Stark's report yet, but I did find a wealth of backdround information and documents about COPA and at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check it out!
Labels: COPA, EFF, filters, search
