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Consumer Reports has come out with a useful evaluation of Internet filters for home use entitled "Filtering software: Better but still infallible" (June 2005). Here are some highlights:

Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) seems to be fighting an uphill battle with AB 682, a bill originally designed to prohibit the use of RFID in driver's licenses, student IDs, government health and benefit cards and public library cards. Now, instead of prohibiting the use of RFID, the bill mandates security measures that must be used when employing RFID on such documents.

I just discovered an excellent resource for everyone involved in website design, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines (2003).

Each chapter (available as a separate PDF) focuses on a component such as Design Process and Evaluation, Accessibility, The Homepage, Page Layout, Navigation, Content Organization, etc. There are 17 chapters.

I briefly reported on the ACLU Report Reader's Block: Internet Censorship in Rhode Island Public Libraries Ed: broken link removed 2011. Now I've read it more closely and have a bit more to say about it. Today I'll just comment on Section V of the report, Filter Settings.

American Libraries Online Ed: broken link removed 2011 alerts us to the newly released "Readers Block: Internet Censorship in Rhode Island Public Libraries Ed: broken link removed 2011," a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

I haven't read the 21 page report yet but the AL Online piece states that the report finds "some libraries block material beyond the minimum needed for CIPA compliance"....SURPRISE!

In his March 14, 2005 Alertbox article Lower-Literacy Users, Jakob Nielsen reports that the reading behaviors of lower-literacy users is different from higher-literacy users and offers up some suggestions for website designers.

I received an email from a library student, Jennifer Meharg, in the U.K. who found that libraries in her part of the world were not filtering according to their Internet Use Policy. She suggested her findings suggested my "half-empty" analysis was probably closer to the truth (see Filter Effectiveness - Who Cares?).