Details of Clayton's Talk at Berkman

Richard Clayton, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, discussed his paper "Failures in a Hybrid Content Blocking System" in front of a capacity crowd at the Berkman Center yesterday.  His paper examines the CleanFeed  system implemented by British Telecom to block child pornography.  The Berkman Center, as part of the OpenNet Initiative, researches filtering efforts.  Clayton demonstrates that, far from effectively blocking child porn, the CleanFeed system is vulnerable to a series of attacks and circumvention steps, and even creates the risk that someone could use the system to discover how to locate this content.  To learn more about filtering and the world online, check out ongoing discussions with John Palfrey, Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, and David Weinberger.

Clayton's slide show is available here. An audio recording of the discussion is available here.