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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T and Comcast have convinced a federal judge to nullify an ordinance that was designed to bring more broadband competition to Nashville, Tennessee. The Nashville Metro Council last year passed a "One Touch Make Ready" rule that gives Google Fiber or other new ISPs faster access to utility poles. The ordinance lets a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself, instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires. AT&T and Comcast sued the metro government in U.S. District Court in Nashville, claiming that federal and local laws preempt the One Touch Make Ready rule. Judge Victoria Roberts agreed with AT&T and Comcast in a ruling issued Tuesday. Google Fiber is offering service in Nashville despite saying last year that it was waiting for access to thousands of utility poles. "We're reviewing [the] court ruling to understand its potential impact on our build in Nashville," a Google spokesperson said this week, according to The Tennessean. "We have made significant progress with new innovative deployment techniques in some areas of the city, but access to poles remains an important issue where underground deployment is not a possibility."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As the Nashville Metro Council prepares for a final vote to give Google Fiber faster access to utility poles, one council member is sponsoring an alternative plan that comes from ATT and Comcast. The council has tentatively approved a One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) ordinance that would let a single company -- Google Fiber in this case -- make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself. Ordinarily, Google Fiber must wait for incumbent providers like ATT and Comcast to send construction crews to move their own wires, requiring multiple visits and delaying Google Fiber's broadband deployment. The pro-Google Fiber ordinance was approved in a 32-7 preliminary vote, but one of the dissenters asked ATT and Comcast to put forth a competing proposal before a final vote is taken. The new proposal from council member Sheri Weiner "call[s] for Google, ATT, Comcast and Nashville Electric Service to create a system that improves the current process for making utility poles ready for new cables," The Tennessean reported last week. "Weiner said ATT and Comcast helped draft the resolution she proposes." Weiner told Ars that she asked ATT and Comcast to propose a resolution. "I told them that I would file a resolution if they had something that made sense and wasn't as drastic as OTMR," Weiner told Ars in an e-mail today, when we asked her what role ATT and Comcast played in drafting the resolution. Weiner said she is insisting on some changes to the resolution, but the proposal (full text) was submitted without those changes. When asked why she didn't put her suggested changes in the version of the resolution published on the council website, Weiner said, "I had them [ATT and Comcast] submit it for me as I was out of town all last week on business (my day job)." Weiner said an edited resolution will be considered by the council during its next meeting. Weiner's plan could stall the OTMR ordinance and -- though it might improve Google Fiber's current situation -- would not provide the quick access to poles sought by Google Fiber and most council members. However, Weiner said she is willing to support OTMR later on if her proposal doesn't result in significant improvements.

An anonymous reader writes "A Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation deputy director is threatening citizens with being listed as terrorists for giving official complaints. Sherwin Smith, deputy director of TDEC’s Division of Water Resources said: 'But you need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there's no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.' 'In terms of the comments made by a member of the Water Resources Division at the meeting, we are just receiving the information and looking into this on our end,' spokeswoman Meg Lockhart said. 'The department would like to fully assess what was said in the meeting. I am told that the meeting was far longer than the audio clip provided by SOCM and that Mr. Smith actually clarified his remarks. But again, we are looking into it.'"

Penurious Penguin writes "In 2011, en route to Baltimore, Tennessee mother Andrea Abbott was arrested after squabbling with the TSA over their pat-down and "naked" body-scan process. Initially Abbott had protested a pat-down of her 14 year-old daughter, though eventually backed off. When her own turn came, she refused both a pat-down and body-scan. This week, despite having no criminal record, Abbott was found guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced to one year of probation. A surveillance video of the affair shows what appears an agitated Abbott surrounded by various TSA agents, but seemingly contradicts the premise by which she was convicted. In the case against Abbott it was claimed that her behavior impeded the flow security-lines and lawful activity. Beyond Abbott's confession of issuing some verbal abuse, the video does not appear to display a significant blockage of traffic nor anything noticeably criminal."

CelticWhisper writes "A Tennessee mother was arrested for refusing to allow TSA screening clerks to subject her child to a body scan or patdown. This comes in the wake of a promise by the TSA Administrator to make repeated attempts at non-physical screening of children, after which another video of a child patdown surfaced. This event may signify a tipping point in the public's willingness to tolerate invasive and inappropriate security procedures at airports."

prakslash writes "AP/The Tennessean reports that a Nashville entrepreneur, Shane Messer, has created an international treasure hunt game called 'Find Those Weapons: The Hunt for the Real WMD' by using actual public documents related to the American invasion of Iraq as clues. Messer's treasure for finding those imaginary weapons of mass destruction? A solid gold trophy, a bag of cash and a barrel of oil, according to the game's website." According to the rules, "If no one... claims the trophy by Election Day 2004.. [it] will be sent to George Bush."

stwrtpj writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting a breaking news item: Colorado Governor Owens has vetoed a super-DMCA-like bill similar to the one passed in Michigan." Felten has a comment on the Colorado bill. Tennessee is delaying their consideration of the bill. And Oregon's bill has died for now; see below for more.

babbage_ct writes "As has been reported on Slashdot before (see here, here, and here for just a few) the MPAA is pushing so-called Super-DMCA laws in states around the country. Well, score one for the good guys. Oregon's version, SB 655 is going to die. Turns out the sponsor was scammed by MPAA lobbyist. See the e-mail from legislative staff below.

From: "Staff SenCharlesStarr"
To:
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 5:17 PM
Subject: Status of SB 655

Status of SB 655:

SB 655 is slated to die in committee this session. It is no longer an immediate threat, however, there will be a study commission appointed over the interim. Sen. Minnis decided that the issue was too complex to resolve this session. I will attempt to inform you when the commission is formed so that you can have further input. Oregon truly dodged the bullet on this. Some states passed the MPAA model legislation before the IT community even knew it existed.

The email you sent to Sen. Starr (and I hope all of the committee members) helped to stop this dangerous legislation. Good job! In case you're wondering why Sen. Starr sponsored this bill in the first place, it was requested by the MPAA lobbyist (who really is a nice guy) but Sen. Starr was told that it was a simple bill to update copyright law in relation to digital media. Yes, and a whole lot more! As the full impact of the bill became clear, Sen. Starr withdrew his support, which contributed to the bill's "unfortunate demise."

If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.

Ken McDermott
Legislative Assistant
Senator Charles Starr
900 Court St NE S-312
Salem, OR 97301
staff.sencharlesstarr@state.or.us

jonerik writes "The Nashville Tennessean has this look at Nashville's United Record Pressing, one of the last vinyl record manufacturers left in the U.S. Although LPs and 12" and 7" singles make up a tiny portion of the American music market at this point, the article reports that United's business is booming, thanks to consolidation within Nashville's record pressing business community, steady orders for the jukebox market, techno, dance, reggae, and rap orders, and this year's 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. 'Elvis has been good to us. I can't complain,' says Cris Ashworth, the company's owner."

jonerik writes "The Nashville Tennessean has this look at Nashville's United Record Pressing, one of the last vinyl record manufacturers left in the U.S. Although LPs and 12" and 7" singles make up a tiny portion of the American music market at this point, the article reports that United's business is booming, thanks to consolidation within Nashville's record pressing business community, steady orders for the jukebox market, techno, dance, reggae, and rap orders, and this year's 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. 'Elvis has been good to us. I can't complain,' says Cris Ashworth, the company's owner."

An anonymous reader writes "An electric-powered Delorean that can supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge will be tested today beginning at 8am at the Nashville Superspeedway. They claim the vehicle uses 12 standard car batteries, so the invention appears to relate to recharging the batteries." I found a website offering current updates on the demonstration of this perpetual motion device: it appears they've suffered mechanical difficulties and cancelled the test.

Mynn writes "Tennesean.com is reporting that copyright.net is now operational." There's another story about copyright.net at siliconvalley.com. Supposedly they just banned 350,000 Napster users on the basis of title scans - obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song, that would take years. Sure, this may be a little overbroad - you'll run into situations like the one described here (in German - use a translator), where a webpage offering mp3 files was attacked, except that the *.mp3 files were just text files with the cryptic letters "*aetsch*" in them - but who cares, they're just Napster users, they probably did something bad, right?

Mynn writes "Tennesean.com is reporting that copyright.net is now operational." There's another story about copyright.net at siliconvalley.com. Supposedly they just banned 350,000 Napster users on the basis of title scans - obviously they didn't listen to one million mp3 files to make sure they were actually such-and-such a song, that would take years. Sure, this may be a little overbroad - you'll run into situations like the one described here (in German - use a translator), where a webpage offering mp3 files was attacked, except that the *.mp3 files were just text files with the cryptic letters "*aetsch*" in them - but who cares, they're just Napster users, they probably did something bad, right?

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).