At some point, everything cool begins to turn to poop. This is entropy, and there's very little to be done about it. Indeed, even messing with the agents of entropy is asking for trouble: witness the ocean, for example. Chaos is the way of the universe. We must, therefore, enjoy what order there is in the time that it exists, and then move on and look for bigger and better plateaus to carve out of the chaos.

No more chaotic place can be found than the Internet. Never before have so many people of disparate backgrounds and unlikely persuasions become authors. Indeed, at times, it becomes hard to agree with oneself how things should be organized, never mind the whole planet. When it was small, bands of people could set up tools like Yahoo and really classify by hand the majority of useful sites. As time went on, though, the sheer volume became inhumanely difficult to deal with. The sheer size made it impossible to catalog cleanly and as sites grew, they started falling out of nice, tight categories.

When AltaVista rose from this primordial soup, therefore, it was a great thing. Just as it was set up, the Internet would be cataloged more or less at random. Users could guide the randomness of collection by submitting sites, but the great engine did it's own thing more or less. A great many imitators would come and try to unthrone the mighty giant, but it's size and power made it the favorite of any hard-core data surfer.

This week I saw that there was a new family filter option, mercifully defaulting to the "off" option. I've always loved breaking filters and blocks, so I wanted to see exactly what this one would consider bad. This very site, for example, is aimed at a mature audience: this ain't no kids site by any stretch of the imagination. The profanity and debauchery serve a point though, certainly more so here than they do in real life (where I'm prone to both). This is how I am, and I feel that the site holds a pretty accurate mirror up to myself.

At first, I took it as something of a joke that of the 91 pages that AltaVista had in it's repository, only 34 were deemed suitable for general public consumption--a mere 27% of the content. What was left was awful slim pickings indeed. Henry suggested that perhaps I should try to work harder to reach a full 100%

It was a bit dissapointing to see AltaVista drop this in, especially when it was meant to filter out:

Ironically enough, the No! Canada pages, virulently hate-speechish from a robot point of view, sailed through juuuuuust fine. Even better, it has absolutely no scruples about sending you to one of it's partners who'd be more than willing to give you a little down-n-dirty on the side, like that one uncle that your parents don't like. It's one thing to be ineffectual in terms of blocking little eyes from seeing what they shouldn't (after all, you're not keeping them from it, just keeping them from finding it as easily). It's another altogether to send them there when you are supposed to be keeping them away from it: it's like holding an AA meeting in a liquor store. Just four or five clicks away over at the Mining Co, you can get some good hardcore action (without password protection).

Obviously, the best defense in keeping your kids away from seeing what you don't want them to see is to keep an eye on what they're doing. Get that computer out in the living room where it'd be pretty hard for him to be surfing any number of naughty sites without your approval. That surfing "protection" software isn't going to work any better than the myriad of other precautions you've tried to keep your little one out of trouble the "easy" way. Did putting the cookies on top of the fridge keep them out? I'm betting they didn't, and the equivalent of a stepladder ain't too hard to find...