Of the 11 cases argued in February, only one is undecided and only Chief Justice Rehnquist has not written a majority opinion. The case, United States v. American Library Association, raises the First Amendment question of whether the government can require public libraries to install antipornography filters restricting Internet access.

If Chief Justice Rehnquist is in fact writing the majority opinion, there is little doubt that the court will uphold the law, the Children's Internet Protection Act. On the other hand, he is one of the court's fastest writers, raising the question of why the decision in what is now the term's oldest undecided case is taking so long. One possibility is that there are many separate opinions, both concurring and dissenting. Perhaps he started out writing a majority opinion but lost the majority along the way.

The article notes that while this decision and others are expected next week, delays do happen, so it might be the week after... or possibly later. Hope this helps.

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German researcher Maximillian Dornseif has published a report on the features and flaws in the German government's attempts to censor overseas "hate" sites from their users. Barely half of providers are complying with the government's order, but those that are, have often blocked far more than they intended, due to configuration errors.

The 32-page report is at: http://md.hudora.de/publications/200306-gi-blocking/200306-gi-blocking.pdf

And he doesn't mention this in the report, but you can go to Peacefire.org for instructions on how to set up a "circumventor" to defeat virtually all Web-based blocking :)

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(We're trusting Chris on this one. The extent to which 8e6 stands behind their products is seen by their online database review process: paste in a URL, give an email address and they'll "get back to you." Eventually. Once any problems are fixed. We didn't bother waiting.)

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No one who knows anything about censorware will be surprised by this. Robots make very poor decisions about what to block. Much of this is the same old story: massive overblocking collateral damage; funny blocking of sites like "Hardcore Visual Basic Programming"; absurd blocking of sites like Bible.org; and so on.

In some ways, it's worse for this to happen on a search engine than in a censorware package. While turning off SafeSearch is easy, I bet few people think to. And when Google hides sites, it's much more subtle.

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N2H2 moved to dismiss Edelman's Complaint, arguing primarily that Edelman lacked what is called "standing" to bring the action, because there was no actual case or controversy (justiciable dispute) between N2H2 and Edelman. In October 2002, Edelman (represented by the ACLU) filed his Opposition to N2H2's motion, and then, as sometimes happens in federal court, the case just sat for awhile.

Until March 31, when oral argument on the Motion to Dismiss finally occurred. Seth Finkelstein, a veteran censorware fighter attended the hearing, and has posted his dismissal hearing report.

If Seth is correct, the hearing did not go well for Edelman. The Court was concerned whether Edelman had standing to bring the action, and stated that "What he [Edelman] really wants to do is destroy the efficacy of their [N2H2's] product." The Court indicated that it was inclined to dismiss the case, but that it would reserve judgment until it studied the papers further.

Declaratory Judgment cases are hard to win in Federal Court, even under the best of circumstances. We hope that the Judge changes his mind, but we suspect that the fight will go on even if that isn't the case.

Update 04/09: The court now has issued its decision in the case, dismissing it on the ground that Edelman lacks standing to pursue the action.

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Humpback whales, the asexual reproduction of mushrooms and House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

These are dangerous topics that children, or adults for that matter, should not be learning about.

This statement sounds ridiculous, but that is effectively the message being sent by the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandates filters being placed on internet-linked computers at public schools and libraries to protect children from indecent material.

However, "indecent" is defined by the mere presence of a wide range of keywords and phrases, including "breast," "pussy," "under18" and cum." While these terms may be frequently used in XXX porn sites, they are also used in different contexts in serious news stories, job training sites and government web pages – for example to refer to someone who has graduated magna cum laude. Given the wide net cast by the key word-based internet filters, they end up denying youth and adults access to sites dealing with public health, biology and zoology, academics and more.

Interesting article, worth reading.

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Because offical court transcripts do not identify what Justices are asking which questions, there is a utility in comparing the official transcript to the unoffical transcript prepared by Skip Auld, a Virginia librarian who prepared it from his notes after attending the hearng.

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A decision is expected by the end of June. Generally, the Supreme Court posts transcripts of oral arguments here about three weeks after the argument, so look for it around the end of March.

Update: 03/06 21:37 GMT by J MC: Also Slate weighs in with a blow-by-blow account.

Update 03/09: Skip Auld, a librarian in Virgina, who attended the argument, has prepared an unofficial transcript of the argument. Seth Finkelstein has made it available here.

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More than 87% of active domain names are found to share their IP addresses (i.e. their web servers) with one or more additional domains, and more than two third of active domain names share their addresses with fifty or more additional domains. While this IP sharing is typically transparent to ordinary users, it causes complications for those who seek to filter the Internet, restrict users' ability to access certain controversial content on the basis of the IP address used to host that content. With so many sites sharing IP addresses, IP-based filtering efforts are bound to produce "overblocking" -- accidental and often unanticipated denial of access to web sites that abide by the stated filtering rules.

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