TN Senate bill wants ALL copyrighted works off University networks

In a shameless display of pandering to the RIAA and MPAA, the Tennessee State Senate is scheduled to vote March 5 on SB3974, which is quite possibly the stupidest piece of state legislation since the Indiana Pi Bill. The bill requires that universities receiving state funding

Thoroughly analyze its computer network, including its local area and internal networks, to determine whether it is being used to transmit copyrighted works

And

Certify to the Tennessee higher education commission that an analysis under this subdivision indicates that the institution's network, including its local area and internal networks, is not being used to transmit copyrighted works

If taken literally, this bill would require universities to pretty much shut down their networks.

Students and staff couldn't apply Microsoft Windows Updates to their computers. Those patches are copyrighted works.

Students and staff couldn't use legitimate music services like iTunes, because those songs you download are all copyrighted works.

And the only web sites you could visit from the university network would be government web sites, since almost all other content on the web is copyrighted.

How Pakistan shut down YouTube

Ars Technica has a good explanation of how Pakistan managed to render YouTube unreachable for several hours on Sunday.

Filtering Stupidity on the Internet

The StupidFilter project aims to create an open-source Bayesian filter to "detect rampant stupidity in written English." This filter could be used on internet comment boards to eliminate comments that have little or no meaningful content. For examples of the sort of thing they're looking to eliminate, you can view a random entries from their stupidity database, collected from comments on YouTube.

A few questions and answers from their FAQ:

Isn't filtering stupidity elitist?

Yes. Yes, it is. That's sort of the whole point.

So what do you plan to filter?

The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.

Won't people just try to defeat the filter, the way spammers try to get around spam filtering?

We certainly hope they will -- that implies they're no longer generating text statistically likely to be stupid. It's true that an obvious attack on the StupidFilter would be to salt a short, stupid comment with a long excerpt copy-pasted from, say, Project Gutenberg, but we think it's reasonable to count on the laziness of the stupidest commenters not to do this.

Aren't you just trying to eliminate comments and discourse that you consider to be stupid?

As much as that might be nice, no. The StupidFilter does not understand, in a meaningful sense, the text that it parses, and our graders select comments that are formally stupid -- that is, their diction, not their content, marks them as stupid. It is not our intent to eliminate debate or disagreement, but rather to programmatically enforce a certain quality of expression. Put another way: The StupidFilter will cheerfully approve an eloquent, properly-capitalized defense of mandatory, state-subsidized rocket-launcher ownership for all schoolchildren.