Bayesian kids content filtering in Python?

[Paul Paterson]

"John J. Lee" <jjl at pobox.com> wrote in message
news:<87n0dsqqhd.fsf at pobox.com>...
> if somebody (children, employees, and other people not to be trusted ;-)
> is actually trying to work around your barriers, there are always
> likely to be false negatives: sites of a flavour that you've never
> seen before that you'd wish would trigger your defences, but won't.

I agree - this kind of technology would work best as a filter rather, than a
barrier, where you are trying to reduce the number of negative experiences
rather than try to block delibrate attempts to circumvent it.

> If the filter has never even seen that *kind* of page before, it can't be
> expected to work. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the
> case at hand), there are many kinds of pages that people want to
> censor, and you're not going to block them all. It may work well most
> of the time, but is that enough? What's needed here, perhaps, is an
> open effort to train on categories of things that people would like to
> block.

But who would volunteer to visit all those kinds of sites ;)

> That might be enough, since I suppose *most* things you're
> trying to block, in the case of kids, are not actually targetted at
> them, so arms races are not likely to develop.

Agreed. In fact, there may be an alternative use where you have it watch
your daily surfing habits and then combine it with a web spider to go out
and find other site/articles which you might like to read. For this kind of
application, false positives and negatives would not be as serious.

Too many interesting things to try, not enough time!

Paul