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You jest, but there have been cases where the teen gets charged under the child pornography laws for making it. There are some states that try to address this, but there are still quite a number of them that still prosecutes under child porn laws.

Just want to say that i do think that anyone that abuses a child in that manner should be castrated with a rusty fork, or at at least be chemically castrated.

But... We have strange things all over today, not only for photographs of actual abuse..
For actual child-abuse images i'm still for keeping those illegal, even with my reasoning below because of what they may do later in life to the abused.

To start with we have laws related to a teenage-couples sexting.. Not sure if that could be classified as abuse, but up to 15 years in prison(?!). Not sure who that is supposed to protect.
https://www.teenvogue.com/stor...
Taking a picture of yourself, as a teenager, and sending to someone else voluntarily could land you in jail?! Sure it might not be good for you, but neither is jail in that age.
A breakdown of the laws in different states: https://www.netnanny.com/blog/...

This one gives a quite good overview of how the laws looks in different countries.... For *cartoons*!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Laws are going towards "anything that can be interpreted as X" being flagged as illegal.

I don't object to their goal of reducing the amount of child-abuse, but they go with "this feels like a good idea", not basing it on any actual proof that it will reduce child-abuse.. Studies shows that the laws actually increases the risk of child-abuse.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

I know that this is a sensitive topic, and for parents of abused children i cannot even imagine the grief caused by allowing the images of their abused child to not be illegal. And for the abused children i cannot even grasp of how you feel.

So yea, i don't even know what i wanted to say with this post... But the laws do not seem to make it safer for kids, but they might actually increase the risk of child-abuse.

To make a long story short... Laws should not be created based on feelings but based on actual facts and studies that shows the law will be effective, or at least not have the opposite effect of it's intention. Today they are based on "this feels like a good thing to do" without any actual backing facts.

I want laws that work, not laws just because they sound good.

>> Women make up only 11 percent of the cyber security workforce

So what? Thats called FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. Everything shows that's actually by their choice, partly because women are just not mentally as suited as men are to doing jobs like programming.
https://www.netnanny.com/learn...

If you're gonna get up in arms about numeric gender equality, you should be more bothered about why only 9% of nurses are men. Yeah thought not.
http://www.beckershospitalrevi...

ISPs in the US do the same thing as this company. The difference is really that it's harder to do this for Religion than it is to "save the children" in the US. Same thing in reality, both add additional controls and content filtering.

Net Nanny and Cyber Sitter

I know it's hard for people that have been around a while to remember, but back in the day we had AOL and Prodigy which were the same exact thing also. Content was filtered based on their rules. Most of us now days don't use this tier of service, but you still could if you wanted and paid for it.

The commercial market for net censorship is tiny. Most of the people making noise about this want the net censored for other people, not themselves. You can't sell a commercial product on that basis.

There's NetNanny, which is generally considered to be mediocre at its job, but does enough to make some parents happy. Smart kids can usually bypass it. The next step up is a Christian ISP, where filtering takes place at the ISP end. There are a few of those, but they're really tiny.

Interestingly, there is a market in "Kosher mobile phones". They're basic voice-only phones preloaded with a religious-artwork theme, sold to the ultra-Orthodox market. A similar product is offered for the comparable branches of Islam.

You (not you, they) can always install Net Nanny, I'm sure it'll block those nasty websites.

I for one prefer to browse the interwebs freely, even if it means getting exposed to disturbing stuff.

It goes like this...

FAQ:

How do I block pornography?

You see? That is informing AND directing, ALL IN ONE LINE!!!

And yes, they do conform to a moral standard. The filtering provided by the ISP and managed by the ISP must block the sites that one person deems objectionable. That makes it seem that they are enforcing morality, even if not their own.

Yeah, the one person managing it is THE END USER. The ACLU tries to make it seem like they are enforcing morality, truth is they aren't enforcing anything, however morality has always been enforced in our society. You are not allowed to run down the street naked. You're not allowed to view child pornography. So even if it WAS enforced, I don't see how it's unconstitutional, especially when you consider the level of filth the internet has reached.

See Net Nanny Also Norton Internet Security for your anti-virus and anti-spam. There are more products to "protect" your family. It should be a personal decision, not one for the government, at any level.

Well all i can say is bugger off if parents wasnt to use such software they can go and buy it for there computers the idear of making a nation wide thing is just plain stupid. This election is bringing up some of the wierdest idears in a long time. Hell this along with the labor Medicare Gold idear was probley thought up at the local pub the night before when they were all offf there faces. If you want to stop your kids looking up stuff they shoulden't try http://www.netnanny.com/ and shelf this idear before you look even more stupid

The world is a different place now. Television and media are different. There isn't just 4 channels on TV that everyone in the country watches, there are thousands of possible cable channels, all with different content. And when you pay extra to have cable, can you relaly complain about it's content?

In my opinion, I can understand keeping things relatively tame on regular network television (the channels that anyone can plug a TV into a wall and get for free). But on cable anything should go, and regarding internet censorship, it is ridiculous when there is so many filtering resources available to parents, and their lack of computer knowledge is seen as a threat to their children.

Things like CyberSitter and Net Nanny can restrict your child access to offensive or harmful content, and you can also limit your browser to only go to bookmarked sites. And it does not have ot be an annoyance to you, somply create a Windows profile for your child with a password that you and the child know, and when the child loggs in as themselves, have the browser and internet setting applied as desired. So simple, am I wrong?

• Score: -24 to -10: Ghost. Ghost players attack (post comments) with a -1 threshold, making them unable to hit any target except those who choose to be hit. Ghost players are limited to two attacks per day, and the label 'Terrible' is placed next to their name.
  
• Score: -9 to -1: Zombie. Zombie players attack with a threshold of Zero, making only their subject lines visible and reducing the effectiveness of their attacks. Zombie players, like ghost players, can only attack twice per day, and the label 'Bad' is placed next to their name.
  
• Score: Zero: Dying player. In this transitional state, a player appears to be a normal player, but the label 'Neutral' is placed by their name to signal that they are close to death.
  
• Score: 1-12: Journeyman. A journeyman player can attack ten times a day with a score of one. The label 'Positive' is placed by their name.
  
• Score: 12-25: Adventurer. An Adventurer attacks with the same effectiveness as a journeyman, but has the label 'Good' placed by their name.
  
• Score: 26-50: Sword Saint. A sword saint can devastate his opponents in combat, attacking with a bonus of +2 and flaming them up to twenty-five times per day. Sword Saint players have a distinct advantage, but they are not invincible.
  

• Score: -24 to -10: Ghost. Ghost players attack (post comments) with a -1 threshold, making them unable to hit any target except those who choose to be hit. Ghost players are limited to two attacks per day, and the label 'Terrible' is placed next to their name.
  
• Score: -9 to -1: Zombie. Zombie players attack with a threshold of Zero, making only their subject lines visible and reducing the effectiveness of their attacks. Zombie players, like ghost players, can only attack twice per day, and the label 'Bad' is placed next to their name.
  
• Score: Zero: Dying player. In this transitional state, a player appears to be a normal player, but the label 'Neutral' is placed by their name to signal that they are close to death.
  
• Score: 1-12: Journeyman. A journeyman player can attack ten times a day with a score of one. The label 'Positive' is placed by their name.
  
• Score: 12-25: Adventurer. An Adventurer attacks with the same effectiveness as a journeyman, but has the label 'Good' placed by their name.
  
• Score: 26-50: Sword Saint. A sword saint can devastate his opponents in combat, attacking with a bonus of +2 and flaming them up to twenty-five times per day. Sword Saint players have a distinct advantage, but they are not invincible.
  

It's a shame that so much of our children's web access is unsupervised though; nothing takes the place of mindful parenting!

Why is stopping my children going in to strip clubs not considered censorship, and in fact the correct thing to do, but blocking adult web sites and getting upset about pornographic spam viewed as being bad?

Read the bill that the article links to. The bill doesn't just apply to $2000 machines, but to ``each personal computer sold.''

I've bought a number of $50 machine in my life; three of them (a couple P120s and a 486) are in critical positions in my home network, and have been for more months than I can count. Net Nanny retails for $39.95, not $2.

Why should the price for such computers double for me, an unmarried bachelor of legal age with no kids? Why should I pay for software which I personally not only would never use, but find odious (considering that it's my personal opinion that censorware is one of the worst ways to ``protect'' your children and, yes, you're welcome to have a differing opinion)?

Why should, say, Motorola, which has a very large presence in the Texas state capial, pay for censorware with every computer they buy when their corporate firewall already does such filtering? (I know this from teaching Internet classes for Motorola to Motorolans.)

But wait, there's more! ``Software provided in compliance with Subsection (a) must be compatible with any operating system that is provided by the seller to the purchaser of the personal computer at the time of purchase.'' I'm not aware of any censorware available for Linux, Solaris, BeOS, *BSD, AIX, IRIX, etc. A nice little byproduct of the bill will be to make illegal the sales of computers with those operating systems.

But wait, there's even still more! ``If an operating system is not provided by the seller of the personal computer, the software required under Subsection (a) must be compatible with at least one operating system that may be installed to operate on the computer.'' I can't even buy a Mac SE/30 without an operating system because I'll be installing NetBSD on it, unless there's censorware that'll run on MacOS 7.2

The bill has no provision for computers outside the mainstream. None whatsoever.

This is bad legislation. Frankly, Texas needs to be putting its resources into other areas (perhaps cleaning up after W's environmental mess) than keeping kids from seeing bad pictures.

b&

So if distributing "harmful matter" (what Jello Biafra was accused of) is criminal, or if distribiting DeCSS or other "infringing speech" is criminal, AND if creating a link to such a site is equivalent to the "crime" itself, what will become of search engines?

So, soon all the search engines will universally adopt the list of banned sites from BESS, Netnanny, etc., and then the net will be truly safe for children! Nothing controversial, no illegal speech, no forbidden speech, and we will all be using our cable modems to download live streams of Barney and Teletubbies...

QUICK! Grab all the Bill Hicks .mp3's .ra's and .rm's you can while it's still legal to give you this link!! http://www.sacredcowproductions.com/hicks/videos/i ndex.html (be sure to check out the "Positive Drug Story", it's a Hicks classic.)

Seriously though, there are probably 100+ filters or filtered ISPs on the market. You can get a reasonable list from GetNetWise. But no one has a service that lets you test against multiple products. The COPA Commission recommended that a neutral independent testing authority be created to test these products; if such a thing is ever created, /.ers should let them know that URL testing is a feature we'd like to see.

It isn't too hard to check some of the big ones. SurfControl, which sells CyberPatrol and SurfWatch, and several corporate-oriented products, has links to two test-your-site pages from h ere .

NetNanny provides a list of filtered sites when you buy the program, that is human-readable, so you could buy it and look at it.

N2H2 has such a large share of the school, library & reseller market, and provides a free-download home product, that they are also worth a specific test, even though there isn't a URL test page available.

Liza

For details of this "new" biometric savior check out the following:

http://www.netnanny.com/Downloa ds/PDF/BioPassword.pdf

The authorized user develops an "electronic signature" by typing his ID and/or Password on the keyboard several times. When the user subsequently enters his ID and/or Password to access the computer, BioPassword compares the typing dynamics to the "electronic signature" on record. If the pattern matches, the user is accepted. If someone other than the authorized user attempts to access the computer using the authorized user's ID and password, he will be rejected, as his typing pattern does not match the "electronic signature" of the authorized user.

Although they do not delve into the intricacies of their recognition algorithm, I would bet you have to go through a more extensive traning to finely tune this system. If it is only to be trained with a 6 to 12 character password, can you imagine how many false positives this security scheme would create? If would almost have to be a pass phrase rather than password, because the timing of your average touch typist differs greatly from typing a random password, and "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree." Another issue, when I first change to a new randomly generated password, I can't type it worth shit, but after a few days, it rolls off my fingers as fast (or faster) than regular text. This simple truism would wreak havoc on this system.

As already mentioned, this system is crackable. Whether through X11 or BO sniffing, keystrokes and timing can be recorded, stored remotely and played back ad infinitum. They might have some fancy keystroke velocity juxtipostion ratio involved that allows them to deal with lag in the net traffic, but this will only insure that cracked keystroke files played back from various locations would still work.

While reading Cryptonomicon references are made to the "fist" attributed to a given morse code operator sending encrypted messages out. At one point in the book, this "fist" is accurately forged by a musician IIRC to send false messages to the Germans after the Allies had cracked Enigma.

More disconcerting to me is the investent that NetNanny has in this technology...

In 1989, NNS acquired all rights, patents, trademarks, and copyrights associated with BioPassword ® , an access system utilizing the biometrics of "keystroke dynamics" - the manner and rhythm in which each individual types. The technology was originally developed by SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) between 1979 and 1985 in an effort to create a computer-based security access and identification procedure that would present greater protection than keys, cards, passwords or codes. From 1985 through 1988, SRI and a privately funded company jointly continued development of a prototype utilizing the technology called BioPassword ® . An estimated $US 6 million had been invested through 1989 to develop this keystroke dynamics technology when NNS acquired it.

And the FUD they will spread attempting to ensure their system is adopted...

In recent years, media reports about data-wrecking viruses like SATAN have certainly raised the profile of computer security and data losses from both outside and within organizations. Sales of firewalls - combinations of hardware and software that act as a barrier between companies' internal network and the Internet - have increased. These can provide a measure of protection against outside intruders but not from within, by companies' employees for example.

Sounds like business as usual to me.

On most of the softwares' web sites, you have some sort of "test" section where you can enter an URL and check if it's blocked or not. For example...

SurfWatch's "Test a site" page

CyberPatrol's "CyberNOT Search Engine"

CyberNanny's "Check a site" page

WebSense's "site look up" page

SmartFilter's SmartFilterWhere (this one's pretty nasty as it asks you for some personal info (name, phone, etc.) but I'm not sure if it's absolutely required to fill out those fields).

By the way, I only checked the blocking software mentionned on this peacefire page so if there are others, you're on your own. :-) Oh yeah, and I didn't find any test page for N2H2's Bess.

Greg