[Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the category system

[WereSpielChequers]

------------------------------

>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:31:14 +0300
> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filtering without undermining the
>        category        system
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAJ9-EK+ed2G9PTQqw4a9CJQr7PzKgKiP3DJE=n1ua9JnUnXBDA at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:55 PM, WereSpielChequers
> <werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> > OK in a spirit of compromise I have designed an Image filter which should
> > meet most of the needs that people have expressed and resolve most of the
> > objections that I'm aware of. Just as importantly it should actually
> work.
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter
> >
>
> I really read that with a huge deal of thought. I keep coming to the same
> conclusion here that the people who don't not only believe a workable
> system is desireable, but actively ignore the fact that what they are
> proposing is not real world workable seem to dominate the side in
> favor of some filtering scheme.
>
> Case in point: (from your proposal)
>
> "Whilst almost no-one objects to individuals making decisions as to
> what they want to see, as soon as one person decides what others on
> "their" network or IP can see you have crossed the line into enabling
> censorship. However as Wikimedia accounts are free, a logged in only
> solution would still be a free solution that was available to all."
>
> No, that is just simply not logically sound. Period. Wikipedia has no
> control over what happens to content or the formats or abilities of
> their scripts or whatever, as soon as it goes out of a intarweb pipe.
> Period. Not tenable, even if you believe a non-censorship
> enabling implementation is a good thing (I don't, but I am trying to
> address the insanity of believing that it could ever be accomplished.)
>
>
>
> --
> --
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
>
>
> The issue of whether external agencies could hack this has already come up
on the talkpage.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WereSpielChequers/filter

The difficulty for anyone trying to do that is that they would be attempting
to read millions of pages as a logged in user without a bot flag. So they'd
probably get blocked as a denial of service attack. Even if someone
subdivided their calls and created multiple accounts to read parts of the
project from hundreds of different PCs they would only learn that someone
had filtered in or out certain images.  To replicate the filter they would
need to have each of those accounts flag certain images as filtered or un
filtered - and at that point I would suggest that this has become a much
more difficult thing to hack than simply extracting some of our existing
categories.

As your the second person to raise this I'll add an explanation to the
proposal as to how this can be countered.

WereSpielChequers