- Bennett Haselton, 2/27/2001
BabelFish, named after a creature from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is a Web page translation service created in 1997 as an add-on to the Alta Vista search engine. In 1999, about 20% of Web sites were written in a language other than English; BabelFish can translate foreign-language pages into English or vice versa, and display the translated version to the user. ICANN recommends BabelFish for translating mailing list messages, in their paper on increasing "language diversity in the ICANN working process" (thanks to Wolfgang Bleh of Internet News for this information).
Numerous students have complained to Peacefire about being unable to access BabelFish from school. BabelFish is blocked by at least four of the most popular "censorware" programs, presumably because BabelFish appears to provide users with a way to view content that would otherwise be blocked (by entering the URL of a blocked page and having it "translated"). But when BabelFish is used to access a blocked page, BabelFish displays the page (a) with all the images still blocked, and (b) with the text translated into a foreign language. Most pages would hardly be considered "harmful to minors" after undergoing this transformation, so the decision to block BabelFish apparently overlooked this fact.
Cyber Patrol, which classifies sites in twelve categories ("full nudity", "partial nudity", "drugs", etc.), blocks babelfish.altavista.com in all twelve of them. Bess, which has more categories for blocked sites, does not block all of babelfish.altavista.com, but it does block the URL translation page in all categories. SmartFilter blocks BabelFish in all categories including "Sex", "Drugs", "Hate Speech", "Criminal Skills", etc. AOL Parental Controls at the "mature teen" setting uses Cyber Patrol's list of blocked sites, so it blocks BabelFish as well.
BabelFish can't be used to access images on blocked sites, because it
doesn't re-write image tags in the HTML of a page. If an IMG tag
on a page says:
<img src="http://www.penthouse.com/images/splash04/splash04_08.gif" border="0">
then after BabelFish translates the page, the IMG tag will still say:
<img src="http://www.penthouse.com/images/splash04/splash04_08.gif" border="0">
so as long as Penthouse.com is blocked, the image still won't get through. And
BabelFish's URL translation service fails with the error "501: Not Implemented"
if you ask it to "translate" an image URL.
BabelFish can only be used to access a page after translating it into a different language -- there is no "English to English" translation option. (Note: It turns out that the "Chinese to English" option lets you access English text with very few changes, but this was extremely unlikely to have been discovered by the blocking companies when they decided to block the site, since the companies generally do not spend that much time examining each site before deciding to block it. Any student resourceful enough to discover this trick would have usually found another way around the software anyway.)
Translated into a foreign language, the text usually loses what erotic nature it had, if any, before being awkwardly translated and served without accompanying images. This text appeared on the translated version of a porn site originally in French:
2 Videos Cat on line with SOUND: Discuss on line via your keyboard, look at and listen to them. You choose between 2 rooms. As they are Etudiantes or different, Jeunes, Belles and Rascals, You have access has a planning in order to allow you all to know girls and their DAYS and Hours of presence.
Ironically, in August 2000 Peacefire published a
method for circumventing blocking software
using Akamai's "caching servers". Blocked
pages can be loaded by accessing URL's of the form:
http://a6.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.peacefire.org/
A Web search for "akamaitech.net" revealed that most sites use that domain to
serve banner ads (although some large sites use it to serve their own images
as well).
Akamai is much more useful than BabelFish for accessing blocked sites, since it serves banned pages without removing the images and without translating the text into a foreign language. But when we published our method for using Akamai to access blocked sites, we suspected -- correctly, as it turned out -- that censorware companies would not block akamaitech.net because it was so widely used to serve banner ads.
BabelFish, on the other hand, is still blocked. This raises the question of which is more important: preserving students' access to a useful service like BabelFish, or preserving advertisers' ability to display banner ads to the students.
- Bennett Haselton, 2/27 /2001
