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

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:


>> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:55 PM, WereSpielChequers
>

>> 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.)
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>
>

Do you actually have any idea what a Big Mama is, or how much brute
computing power one of those has?

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]