Microsoft Patents Web Moderator Robots
October 29th, 2008This is a real time Ministry of Truth tool that can change content as it’s moving over the web.
Filters are great, as long as individuals are in control of them. For example, I don’t want to ever see any stories that contain the words McCain, Obama, Biden or Palin on Reddit. These stories waste my time. I use filtering software that prevents that useless stuff from even appearing on my screen.
The danger is that these types of tools could be implemented at the service provider level. Oh no no no. Not good. The Aussies are getting a taste of this now.
This Microsoft tool, rather than blocking material outright, sanitizes it midstream.
Via: Times Online:
The problem with the internet, as we all know, is that it gives free rein to loonies. Once upon a time, green inkers would rant away on writing paper, seal their 30-page global conspiracy theory into a recycled envelope and post it to a newspaper, which would drop it harmlessly into a wastepaper basket. Now they infiltrate chat rooms, scrawl anonymous abuse in web discussions and even have their own video blogs.
Sometimes this is entertaining; sometimes it can be offensive. So Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for technology designed to automatically detect and remove “undesired words or phrases” from all manner of digital communications, ranging from YouTube broadcasts to internet chat and songs.
The patent describes a system that listens out for phonemes (word fragments) likely to be part of a swearword. If it thinks it hears a forbidden phrase, the software either fades out the offending syllables or simply replaces the rude word with a similar-sounding but clean alternative lifted from earlier speech without a second’s delay.
With Microsoft’s software put in place by parents, children could listen to the most explicit rap music and hear nothing stronger than “gosh darn mother flippers”. Theoretically, the software could monitor thousands of digital TV broadcasts, radio stations and web chats simultaneously.
That’s all to the good, as long as the targets are “trolls” (internet slang for people whose aim is to disrupt the web community). There’s a danger, though, that it could go too far. Who’s to say that an overzealous Microsoft employee might not accidentally on purpose blacklist the names of rivals such as Apple and Linux?
Worse, there are governments around the world that would probably go further still, suppressing dissent not with guns and clubs but by preventing people from even discussing concepts such as “protest” or “freedom”. And that, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a freaking scary idea.
Originally directed to the PMRC
how apropos.
Lyrics are in the info
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OJBPnMJbuw
Here it is given The NWO treatment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufT2CN-JpS8
They also had a song called foreclosure of a dream.
Metalhead nostradamii?
sheesh