They used the proxy for several manipulations of the other students view of the web. Using a word exchange routine they exchanged names of politicians, parties and so on. "Art" was exchanged for "rubbish", "political party" for "robbers". Every twentieth web access was redirected to a advertisement page at "InterAd.gov". People had to answer a short consumer survey and watch advertisement before they where allowed to continue surfing. All pages of the Merz Akademie, including student's homepages, where shown with pop-up advertisement.
After using a searchengine surfers where shown an additional frame with a form to complain about inappropriate content. The only way to get rid of this frame was to send a complaint. Pages of webmail services where changed to include a box form the "Global Penpal Association"; this box suggested a penpal selected based on your "personal configurations and surfing habits".
The result of their experiment: nobody complained. Even when the students where told what was going on, many of them didn't change their proxy settings back to unfiltered Internet.
What bothered me a bit about the presentation was the absence of ethical considerations in it. They where doing experiments on non consenting humans which comes which a bunch of difficult ethical problems. Interesting stuff nevertheless.
23:58 |
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<< First Conference on Internet censorship | Conference round-up >>
disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif
Monday, 16. September 2002
