Author: Benjamin Edelman

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Sites Blocked by ADL HateFilter with Jonathan Zittrain

Like numerous other Internet filtering programs, the Anti-Defamation League’s HateFilter attempts to prevent users from knowing which specific web sites are deemed off-limits. However, this research presents a method for efficiently determining which specific sites are blocked, and this site reports results. Numerous sites are blocked that no longer offer content meeting ADL’s definitions (if they ever did), including sites now offering other substantive content, sites that offer only error messages, and sites that no longer exist.

Continued: Sites Blocked by ADL HateFilter

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Intentionally Invalid Whois Data

Edelman, Benjamin G. “Intentionally Invalid Whois Data.” US House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, September 2003.

As the DNS is currently structured, registrants are under only an honor system to provide accurate Whois data. Meanwhile, it makes no economic sense for registrars to enforce Whois accuracy. The result is that in terms of accuracy, when compared with other compilations of public data (such as driver’s licenses and trademark registrations), the Whois database is substantially fiction. I suggest 1) a reduction in the lenience of opportunity to “cure” intentionally invalid data, 2) for registrants with multiple domain names with intentionally invalid data, forfeiture of all domains when any are to be cancelled, 3) statistically valid surveys of registrars’ Whois accuracy, with public reporting of each registrar’s accuracy, 4) public reporting of Whois accuracy complaints and their dispositions, and 5) financial and other penalties to registrars with poor Whois accuracy records.

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Compliance with UDRP Decisions: A Case Study of Joker.com

Compliance with UDRP Decisions: A Case Study of Joker.com. (June 2003)

After a URDP panel orders a domain name transferred from respondent to complainant, the respondent’s registrar is obliged to do so. However, practitioners report that this process sometimes proceeds unduly slowly, if at all. This research attempts to quantify the magnitude of the situation and to report specific domains not transferred to their UDRP complainants, UDRP decisions notwithstanding.

Research yields 23 domains registered by registrar Joker.com, successfully challenged in a UDRP proceeding (one as long as three years ago), yet at the time of publication still registered to their original registrants at Joker.com. At least some of these domains seem to have been renewed by their current registrants, subsequent to UDRP decisions ordering their transfer.

 

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Expert Declaration in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Company, LLC, et al. v. the Gator Corporation

I had the honor of preparing two expert declarations in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Company, LLC, et al. v. the Gator Corporation in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia. My clients were the plaintiffs in the case, including the Washington Post Newsweek Interactive Company, Gannett Satellite Information Network, Media West-GSI, the New York Times Company, the Boston Globe Newspaper Company, Dow Jones, Smartmoney, the Chicago Tribute Interactive, Condenet, American City Business Journals, Cleveland Live, and Knight Riddler Digital.

Soon after my declarations, the case settled, and Gator stopped covering my clients’ sites with its popup advertising and other ads.

My declarations and other case documents.

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Documentation of Gator Advertisements and Targeting

The Gator Corporation designs software to display advertisements on users’ computer screens, triggered in part by the specific web sites users visit. The author has developed an automated method of determining which specific advertisements Gator has associated with which web sites, data that may be helpful to web site operators, policy-makers, and others in assessing Gator’s practices. This article offers listings of more than eight thousand specific sites targeted by Gator as well as analysis of the advertisements shown. An interface is also available to let interested Internet users to test Gator’s advertisements on their own.

Documentation of Gator Advertisements and Targeting

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Benjamin Edelman v. N2H2, Inc.

I sought to research and document sites categorized and restricted by Internet blocking program N2H2. N2H2’s block site list is protected by technical measures including an encryption system, but I sought to write software that would nonetheless allow me to access, analyze, and report its contents. However, I feared that conducting this work might expose me to liability for violation of the N2H2 License, of the Copyright Act of 1976, and of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as well as for misappropriation of N2H2’s trade secrets. With representation by the ACLU, I therefore sought from federal court a declaratory judgement that I could conduct this research and publication without fear of liability.

Case details including litigation documents

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Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch

Google offers interested users a version of its search engine restricted by a service it calls SafeSearch, intended to omit references to sites with “pornography and explicit sexual content.” However, testing indicates that SafeSearch blocks at least tens of thousands of web pages without any sexually-explicit content, whether graphical or textual. Blocked results include sites operated by educational institutions, non-profits, news media, and national and local governments. Among searches on sensitive topics such as reproductive health, SafeSearch blocks results in a way that seems essentially random; it is difficult to construct a rational non-arbitrary basis for which pages are allowed and which are omitted. Full article.