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"I Would Strongly Advocate Full Disclosure"
"The internet is going to provide knowledge, information and freedom to people all over the world." - Sen. John McCain
The world-famous Geek Compound is located in Ottawa County, Michigan, not exactly known as a hotbed of controversy and intrigue. But for whatever reason, we are now one of the areas whose libraries are being targeted by would-be censors. Uncaring of a federal court decision declaring censorware in public libraries unconstitutional, the American Family Association and other "pro-family" groups have declared the area a battleground. A small library in a small nearby town has become the first in our fair state to install mandatory censorware on all its internet terminals. And now, the home of Slashdot itself, Holland, is being pressured to do the same at its public library.
Politics is of course a war of ideas, and in any war there is the inevitable arms race. Sen. McCain was possibly the first to bring the issue directly to the Congress, with his S.97 introduced a year ago. But Elizabeth Dole was the first to make the subject a campaign issue, as is illustrated by the pro-censorware pamphlet:
"...libraries should install computer software that blocks access to pornographic sites on the Internet...the measure also should apply to computers used by adults." - ABC NEWS, June 28, 1999
After Dole dropped out, the issue languished for a while until, in a campaign hard-pressed for issues of substance, it was revived. Steve Forbes is quoted:
"I proudly support AFA-Michigan and the citizens of Holland in seeking a reasonable, common sense standard to what children have the opportunity to view in a public library." - Dec. 20, 1999
And McCain's latest quote came while stumping in South Carolina:
"Every school and library should be required to buy filters...to keep out materials that are not suitable for children the same way in which the library board filters printed materials for the library." - Dec. 22, 1999
It's a no-lose issue for politicians. In the race to see who can come out more in favor of children, facts get left by the side of the road.
Here's the strange thing: this open forum meeting, which the AFA hoped would be about internet porn, ended up being about everything except internet porn. McCain spoke briefly, and only for a few minutes did he discuss blocking technology. In the lengthy question-and-answer period, there were only two questions about censorware. One of them was mine, and neither was in support of his position.
My question was about blocking software and openness. I stopped short of grabbing the mike and shouting "open-source the censors!" but that was the general idea.
One of the major concerns that free-speech advocates have about censorware is that its blacklists, or blocking lists, are hidden. The list of URLs and such that are actually blocked by their software is protected by copyright law and by encryption.
It's an end-run around the First Amendment. The government could never step into a library and censor information from the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry. Or GayDaze, a non-pornographic online soap opera about gay men and a lesbian. Or any of the thousands of unfairly blocked sites that have been uncovered.
The end-run is to allow an unaccountable third party to put these blocks in place - hidden - and then for the government to mandate their use.
I briefly set up this paradox for Sen. McCain and then asked: "Do you believe that software installed in public schools and libraries should be open to public scrutiny?"
I didn't set it up quite as well as I just have; I figured that since he was the sponsor of S.97, "a bill to require the installation and use by schools and libraries of a technology for filtering or blocking," he might quickly grasp my point. But he didn't appear to be familiar with the fact that the blacklists are encrypted, and answered a different question.
But when I rephrased the question, his answer was that he "would strongly advocate full disclosure."
If the Senator - or anyone else in a policymaking position - is reading this, I would follow that up by saying:
Great!
But the software we're talking about doesn't do this. There is only one commercial package on the market that has an open blacklist. It is not popular and is almost never given as a preferred option for libraries and schools. The software that the AFA wants to install in Holland's libraries has a carefully-encrypted blacklist.
It's only because of the (arguably illegal) efforts of muckrakers that we know anything at all about this software. The AFA, Filtering Facts, and other pro-censorware groups endorsed a product called X-Stop in August 1997. Family Friendly Libraries called it "technology that will block ALL porn sights and ONLY porn sights" [sic], and rejoiced that a technology had "achieved 100% success." But their encrypted blacklist was decrypted and exposed shortly thereafter. Unsurprisingly, the product did not live up to its marketing hyperbole. In October 1997, the endorsements shriveled and disappeared as quickly as they'd come.
The product was the same. Only our knowledge about it had changed.
McCain calls for "community standards" to be applied to each public library. But no censorware offers checkboxes for "rural Kansas" vs. "New York City" blocking. They are all one-size-fits-all. And because we can't look under the hood, nobody has any idea what size that is.
If we're going to use third parties to censor our public libraries, let's make sure they let us see what they're doing.
That's what I would have said to the Senator if I'd had a microphone of my own.
Finally, I have to say that I was impressed by the student in the balcony, a high-school student at my guess, who - after listening to the standard recap of Columbine and the standard attack on the media for giving the murderers Doom and the internet - stood up to state his case. He said that he looked at how the Columbine murderers were being described by the media and by McCain, and the description sounded a lot like himself. He played violent video games and spent time on the internet and he wasn't afraid to say so. That took guts.
McCain's plan for kids like this is twofold: first, to fund a study of "very intelligent people" to determine once and for all whether there is a link between media violence and real violence. And second, to protect parents' rights: "your parents need to know what you're doing on the internet," he told the high-school student, so that they could all sit down as a family and discuss whether it was appropriate.
I hope that kid knows about Peacefire.
Tonight, there will be a meeting on censorware at the Holland library which we hope will include both sides of this issue. Watch for a report tomorrow.
[An unfinished version of this story was accidentally posted Monday evening, and several Slashdot reader comments were lost. I apologize for the mistake. -Jamie]
Free speech means ABSOLUTE free speech. However, my rights end where yours begin. So, I guess censorship is good, when it is implemented properly. In other words it works, in theory. But then again, so does communism (in theory). So there ya go.
-mark
-mark
If your computer says LINUX, run...computers can't talk! [unless you have text-speech software]
Which brings to mind a quote from a SciFi
author who has to remain nameless in that I've
forgotten his, or her, name. To wit, Wizards
Rule #2: "The worst of harm may often result from the best of intentions".
This is a very level and concise view of the issues involved with mandatiry censorware, but I fear you are preaching to the converted. The people who really count in this are the politicians desperate for a soapbox and the tabloid newspapers looking for an emotive headline.
Here in the UK, it is only in the last year that newspaper articles have started to shift their empasis towards a pro-Internet view. Prior to that, newspapers like The Sun and Daily Mail as a great opportunity for shrill editorials about Internet porn, etc.
What's strange is that there seems to be a growing acceptance that the Interenet is a powerfull and unstoppable medium. Government acts aimed at controlling it's content are falling by the wayside due to the lack of controls that *could* be put in place.
Hopefully the stifling of Internet access in public places (schools, libraries, etc) will be the high-tide of net censorship. As computers become more and more ubiquitous in the home, and web access forms part of digital TV content, we'll see the pro-censorship lobby marginalised to the fringes of knee-jerk politics.
Chris Wareham
Well, I was hoping there would be someone left in the race with a chance of winning that I could vote for. Internet Censorship is a fairly small issue, but it's one that will be decided in the next four years, so it matters who gets in now. Given Bush's fascist attitudes on abortion and same sex marriage, and the ominous-sounding "faith based initiatives", I don't think I could go for him either.
Looks like I'll have to throw my vote away on whichever of the libertarians gets nominated.
How many years will it be before we have decent political candidates who know anything about technology? 10? 15? Obviously McCain has little knowledge of the issue. He can say anything he wants like "I advocate full disclosure", but that won't get me to approve of him. The republican line on this is well known, censorship with the excuse being that it is to protect children. He's not going to deviate from that, and don't trick yourself into thinking he might. I doubt that Bush will deviate much from the party line either. The Democrats haven't shown to be much better either. Clinton hasn't exactly tried to stop any of the freedom-choking bills related to the internet we've seen over the past several years.
There I'd draw the line. Being required to buy something is wrong. (Don't ask me about car insurance being mandatory, but not available from the State)
If government money is used to fund the service (like a library) then the government can set up guidelines that control policy. Of course this assumes that we (the voting public) control the government... (Heh. See above insurance knee-jerk.)
But 'computers used by adults' smells of Liz Dole sitting in my living room. Next thing we'll be required to do is wearing arm badges with our ethnic symbols on them.
What needs to be made clear to the people who think that they are in charge is that they are wrong. The sovereign entity in the United States is the Individual, not the State. Keep yer laws off my body, and keep yer policies out of my home.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
How can anyone copyright a list of URLs? I was under the impression that one could only copyright something that was the creative product of an author. Clearly the authors of filtering software did not "author" those URLs, so those blacklists shouldn't be copyrightable.
Unless they simply encrypted the blacklists and copyrighted/patented the algorithm. Is this a more accurate description?
Okay, okay, flamebait topic. But that's besides the point.
...
"It's for their own good - niggers wouldn't know what to do if they didn't have someone telling them what to do."
"Why do women need to vote? They'd only want more dresses and better soap."
Let's re-phrase these a wee bit:
"It's for their own good - children don't know what's pornography is wrong unless someone tells them."
"Why should kids have a say? All they'd want is more candy and less homework."
Get the idea? Children today are treated as second-class citizens. Oh, sorry, wait, they arn't even treated like citizens. So what are they? Property, for the most part(at least in the eyes of the law). Look closely at the precedents: blacks, women, jews, and all the others. All were thought to be inferior, and as soon as they were given the chance, they proved everyone wrong(well, those that accept proof, anyways). You often hear about "that very mature child" and the fourteen year old that people think is twenty.
Let's look at the "very mature child" first. All the mature children I met are mature because they were given the chance. Mainly, that chance was adversity. They were given the chance to speak their minds, to take action.
Let's look at the second case: someone who, for some reason, is thought to be older. That would be me. When I was 15, I was getting into bars ID-free, while my 19 year old friends were getting checked. I was given the chance to behave like a 19 year old, and I did. It had nothing to do with ME, just the way people saw me. They expected me to control my drinking(which I did - for the most part). I have too many examples to write here, but trust me, they are there.
To everyone who wants to "protect" our children: there is a line that has been crossed. It was crossed when censorware became a library tool. We are no longer protecting are children - we are oppressing them. It won't be long now
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Unfortunately, Slashdot has become what it started out against. Unpopular opinions are often moderated and labeled flamebait. Though popular, but heated opinion gets moderated up, heh, crap.
Slashdot was for free software, now they've sold out to make a buck. Fine purchase you made there andover.net...
It's time for a new, truly unbiased news source, Slashdot's days are numbered, I'm afraid...
The plateau has been reached and is now falling. Also, I'd like to reiterate your point on how Slashdot's opinion is (wrongly) viewed as the majority's opinion. I fully agree with that.
I fully expect this to be labeled as flamebait or a troll...I wouldn't expect any less from the in fact, uber-biased Slashdot.
If Slashdot was truly for the people, they'd have addressed this issue by now. Unfortunately they're for andover.
philth
It'd be great if volunteer organisations could compile net-available databases of what they perceived as inadvisable sites, for whatever reasons.
Users could then have smart cards, for accessing public terminals, programmed with THEIR choice of which databases to use as filters.
This would meet the right-wing's objection of not wanting minors to access "age-inappropriate" material, whilst meeting medically SOUND reasons for wanting to screen out stuff (eg: epileptics from sites containing violently-flashing images), whilst ALSO meeting the anti-censorship's objections of not wanting outside agencies dictating who sees what.
By having a person choose who's (if any) filters they use, nobody is being censored. If you don't agree with one organisation's views, pick another.
At the same time, you avoid the perils of hijacked web pages, deliberately mis-spelled URLs, hijacked guest-books, inappropriate banner adverts, banner adverts linking to something other than what they say, cracked web-sites linking or redirecting to inappropriate material, etc, etc.
"So," you say, "the risks of those are very low, and the cost of what you're suggesting is high."
Rubbish! Volunteer organisations are just that. Volunteer. They cost nothing to anybody. Filtering software would take an afternoon to modify to use this type of scheme, and would cost the companies involved a pittance. Everyone and their pet goldfish has their pockets -stuffed- with more cards than a poker deck, so it's not like we're suffering from a mass shortage of places to store preferences.
"It's too complicated!" Uhhhh - you don't have any trouble using cards at the gas pumps, the supermarkets, the electronically-locked doors to your place of work, ATMs, PCMCIA devices, automated subway stations, et al. Why would this be any more complicated?
Truth is, nobody wants an answer to the argument. If they did, we'd already be using either the scheme above or something functionally similar. It's easy, it's cheap, it allows people to control what THEY see, it answers every single issue that either side in the Prawn debate has raised, PLUS genuine medical issues that nobody has even bothered thinking about, all in one very simple to implement package, with no one group controlling anything.
(Also, there's too much money to be made in those dubiously-located websites and ethically-questionable banner ads for any of the pro-prawn brigade to even dream of looking for a mutually-acceptable possibility. Besides, it does their case good if they can make the other side look like a bunch of rabid extremists. Actually hammering out something that would be -welcome- to the other side would damage their street cred and their macho egos.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What McCain and others have tapped into is the desire of reasonable people to protect their children from a potentially harmful environment (which isn't a bad thing). We can use that desire just as effectively as the politicians. Open Source Allows More Control, not less, over the environment. We can push that, emphasize that, and in the long run know that we've won twice. The desire of concerned parents is addressed and the legitimate needs (for uncensored information) of adults are protected.
We know this because we've guarenteed it ourselves. That's the way OSS is supposed to work, isn't it?
In April and May 1999 my wife and I were working with others on a study on controlling harmful and prohibited content on the Internet for the German Ministry of Commerce. The study favored Internet Content Rating and Selection as the premier method of content control, but during our work on the study we found that ICR&S systems have a lot of fundamental problems which stem from the nature of the media and which make it impossible to create a useful ICR&S system. The referenced text lists lists the problems inherent to any selection mechanism...
© Copyright 1999 Kristian Köhntopp
I disagree with this notion that most /.ers have. I do not want my kids (when I have them) to be able to view porn whenever they feel like it. Free speech is one thing, but it should be where appropriate. I don't agree with this "kids will see it anyway eventually" viewpoint. Kids are impressionable. Now, there is spam coming to my inbox that has links to porn sites. Free speech is fine, just keep your sewer waste out of my yard. I would like any of my future children to be able to research a paper on the internet without accidentally running across "Bambi's Red Hot Website." The internet is turning out to be more of a porn mill than scientific endavours that it was started for. If you want your free speech, let's start putting up porn billboards everywhere. Go out and hand out Hustler's to every child under 12 you see. If you really believe in this crap, and don't just want it so you can whack off to your porn, prove it.
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
They have X-Stop where I work and it's blocking is just plain weird. When first put in place it blocked things like news.com, the city of Chicago web site, and all of Ohio State university. It didn't block things like salon, attrition or HNN. Even though the 'reason' given for blocking the sites they did was because they were classified as being 'opinion' sites. Say what? We have since gotten many sites unblocked for our service, but what they block is just plain wierd.
Absolutely! Squid would do it, Junkbuster might be better suited, and a bit simpler.
Heck. I'd set up squid *anyway*, that way, you have a record of what's being done with your network (to a point, anyway) and the caching is oh so nice.
Obsenity is NOT protected under the first amendment. Why is it that most of slashdot disagree? It's been ruled by the Supreme Court that obsenity is not protected.
I Agree with McCain. Obsenity has no place in public schools in real-world media, so why should it be alowed to be accessed over the internet? Why shouldn't the same rules apply to the internet that do to paper-based media in a public library?
This isn't about free speach, stuff like this isn't protected. It's about keeping the same standards that already apply to libraries to the new medium of the internet. It's not censorship if it's censoring things that aren't protected under the 1st amendment.
The problem seems to be that the "black list" of software that is used is encrypted. Meaning that it's not the gov't that determins what is obsecene(as is the case now), it's private companies that make the software. These companies can pick and choose what can and can not be seen. They usually block access to sites that ARE protected under the 1st amendment, shuch as anti-censorship sites, etc.
Maybe a gov't body can be set up to determine what sites fall under a general obsenity law, and open the list to all the censorware companies. The list could be made publicly avalible, and be the list that determines what and what not can be seen in a public school or library. This way, only the non-protected obscene material, which isn't premitted in a public school/library now, isn't accessable.
I'm not for MORE laws, just the ones that already apply should be enforced.
It can be bypassed and it often filters things that would be needed and acceptable. Why not watch over your kids for a change? It's always going to work better than having some electronic nanny (which is all this filtering software really is anyhow.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
*That what we have here is a country of free speech, as long as the speech is 100% ratified and deemed pure first.*
I dont know about that.. you can say anything you want, as long as you dont threaten to blow up high schools, and as long as you can find a medium to express yourself in.. you can SAY it.. whether or not anyone will believe you, or carry your words, is another question.
*I suppose it would be a good idea to block porn in libraries, but where would it stop? It would just move on to internet cafes, and so on, until it started affecting home users. and would the block stop with porn? Sooner or later more subjects would be blocked, some of which genuinely help people with sexuality difficulties. *
#bzzzzzt# wrong.. my "cybercafe" is a privately run business, which I fund myself, and through the money from my patrons. A Library, much like a public terminal in the courthouse, is paid for by the tax money from your area.. which means, you are playing with government money at that point, and it becomes a "public" issue, rather than the above mentioned cafe, which is a private issue.
*I'm a bit wary of McCain, simply because I am wary of all who display a military past with too much pride. "I obeyed orders, and killed people, and I didn't even know why!" seems to be a fine thing to these people. Military people rarely get out of the military way of thinking, and thinking that the public should learn things on a 'need-to-know' basis is insane.*
Now, see, Im looking another way.. he actually SERVED in the military, he actually DID HARD TIME for what he believed in. I guess Im a conservative libertarian, but I have a LOT of respect for this man, a lot more than I do for Clinton who draft dodged, Gore who claimed that he invented everything this side of sliced bread, Ventura, who has proven to be exactly the moron one would expect from an ex-wrestler, and Trump, who is used to buying his way to whatever he wants. At least McCain has an IDEA about what really working is, what serving (important word) a term of something means.. he may think kids dont deserve the "right" to see Veronica Moser at a library..; and I stand behind that 100%.. I dont want my child looking at anything at a library on a school mandated class trip that I wouldnt show him at home. (remember the trips to the library in town? what were the first books kids snuck off to find? hmmm?)
I just feel that *censorship* is getting thrown around a LOT.. but I would rather have the software written by someone who is writing it to PROTECT CHILDREN and not to get filthy rich, or take grants from company A to block sites featuring company B.. see my point?
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
What classes as XXX material? Who judges it? The user? the sender? the state/country of the sender/reciever? At what ages do you become an adult? 16/18/21? Who is prosecutable and by whom, under which countries laws? What would be classed as "obscene" in one place, would be trivial in another.
To go off on a completely different track, did you ever wonder why porn sites (or spammers) go to such lengths to try and get to you look at pages? In short, to increase "hits" and click through, because for each page load they get paid, regardless of the relevent of the user reading it.
This, I believe is what needs to be addressed, and it's irrelevent if it's spammers, selling porn, or printer ink. If you get paid per page loads, you attempt to maximise page loads. If you on the other hand, get paid by inquiries, or some other more valid metric, the emphasis changes completly.
If you educate the businesses that "click though/page views" is not a valid payment model, and move to say, inquiries, a lot of the problems will disappear as the reasons for "dragging" people to sites will reduce.
In summary, businesses think lots of "page loads" = lots of customers, so pay for lots of page loads, resulting in spamming, page grabs, etc.
Remove the pay per page load model, and I believe a lot of the lower problems will also be solved. Plus, it's easy to takcle the model, as it has *nothing* to do with porn, persay, it's just a business model to refute.
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
On one hand, libraries should not be a place where a kid can run to perform an end-run around their parents. I'm always advocating that it should be parents who decide what their children should and should not look at, not the government. Parallel to that, however, the government should not be unwittingly help kids get around their parents.
On the other hand, anyone over the age of 18 (and probably younger than that) ought to be able to look at/read/consider anything they damn well please -- it'd be unconstitutional to do otherwise.
Creating a balance is hard here. Do you have "adult" computers? Do you have someone watching the computer, switching the filters on/off remotely? Do you institute national retinal databases and have the machines keep track of who is using the system?
It is important to have control over what your kids are seeing/hearing. It is important to avoid censoring material for adults in an effort to protect children. I have no earthly idea how to strike a balance.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
First they (McCain included) billed the issue as one of "protecting children", that it was not a first ammendment issue. When the moderator asked about the adults who would also be using the library terminals, no one could give a good answer in legal terms, so they started resorting to moral imperatives about removing pornography from our society altogether. One of them (it was either Keyes or Bush, sorry I can't remember which) even declared loudly that his children did *not* have the right to freedom of speech until he said they did.
I think the views of the candidates that make it all the way out to the public through the media are often milder than what these candidates actually believe. In the press they always seem to find some legal justification for their views, but when you listen to them talk, it comes down to their personal, moral, and religious convictions and very little open-minded or logical reasoning.
And for some reason, they think that their convictions are more important, more RIGHT than those of the average adult, average child, or average would-be pornographer. With someone like that representing the country, we can only expect personal freedom to decrease.
Tipper Gore's 'leadership' in the PMRC (Parental Music Resource Center?) led to warning labels on music, which enabled legislation in Washington (state) to disallow selling of 'inappropriate' music to minors (overturned by the courts, thank goodness). (A good friend of mine refused to vote for Clinton's first term because of Tipper's involvement with the ticket)
It takes a lot of guts for a politician to take a pro-civil liberties stand on issues that are framed to 'protect our children'.
-
protect our children from exposure to rape, incest, genocide, murder - outlaw the bible.
-
McCain seems to be nothing more than a staunchly conservative Republican with fantastically backward-looking ideas. And for that, he will never have my vote.
Does he even know what he is talking about? I can assume the answer to that question just by the way he acts. "Oh, kids can see porn? Well, let's stop that right now. How do we stop it? Well, there is a computer program that stops it... Well then, we must simply require that all schools install this software on their computers. What? The software does not work as expected? Oh well, it looks good to the voters."
He seems to do things that must know are wrong, but does them just because they make him look more conservative. I guess Bush is trying to become more moderate so McCain is trying to be more conservative.
But the underlying hypocrisy of porn being the worst evil of them all, spouted by all conservatives as well as supposed "family" organizations, is one of the most disgusting facets of our culture. Let's consider a porn movie. Two adults having sex. Let's forget oral, anal, or any bizarre sex acts. Just two people having sex. Now, how can that be illegal when everybody does it?? And how can it be illegal when many of us look at what is being done in the movie and hope that one day our children will be lucky enough to partake in this activity? But still, despite all the hype that would lead one to think otherwise, we have movies, tv shows, and movies on tv that show people getting shot, beat up, drowned, whatever. An activity in which we hope none of us or our children ever partake. It's so hypocritical.
Violence in the media, Porn, these are just the buzzwords of today. The South Park movie was one of the best political statements I have ever seen. A movie can be shown on TV where a guy stands in the center of town and picks people off, one by one, with an uzi, and nobody cares. But I say Shit, piss, cocksucker, cunt, motherfucker, fuck, or tits, and I get a huge fine. Or I show an erect penis or a vagina, one of which at least 99.99999% of the world's population has, and I get a huge fine.
These taboos make no sense. And nobody wants to even consider attempting to change society's views towards these things. Rather, we should keep these horrible ideas (i.e. sex) bottled up, kept behind the closed doors of our bedrooms. Wouldn't want anybody to know what a vagina looks like, for god's sake.
Now, mass murder, that's another story. We can talk and show that ad nauseum. We'll pay violence lip service but really, we don't care about guns in movies. In fact, guns are good! We love guns! And all the money we get from the gunmakers! Yes, guns are nice! But violence, nonono, badbadbad. But guns, great! Sex? nononono. Except for my mistress here. And my stack of Hustlers. And my porno tape collection. And all my goods from adulttoys.com...
Ahh, hypocrisy. But who am I to talk.
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
I regret having had to yank it off the Slashdot front page, but I did so, in order that the full story could be posted today.
No censorship involved - if there was, you'd hear me yelling about it! Just good old-fashioned screwups and fubar.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Well, I tried to visit some of the links in this article, but instead I get things like:
Forbidden by rating check
You are not permitted to access the URL http://www.peacefire.org/ due to the policy of your organization.
If you have a legitimate business reason for accessing this site, please send e-mail to firewall.admin@.com or log a call with the help desk.
If you have questions about the browser blocker please check the FAQ at http://intralink/organizations/is/home/webnotfaq.
Requests are too numerous to respond to individually. Please give us a week to resolve the issue and try the site again.
Don'tcha love filtering? Of course, I'm not at a library, I'm at work...
-jerdenn
In the discussion following the Interview with the "censoreware" experts (or a similar discussion, I can't find the post anywhere now...), I suggested the creation of a open source project that would allow the following-
A 'censorware' project with a three aspect rating system-
a weighted average system, where registered users rate sights similar to the slashdot system, but instead of +/-. There would also be a categorical rating and likert scale of appropriateness for age groups. For sites that had highly dichotomous ratings (ie three ratings of adult only, two of appropriate for all ages) a flag for independant review would be in order...
a self rating system, in which the site maintainer is solicitied to categorize their web site.
a bot rating system, (the norm for censorware), which goes by 'dirty' words and whatnot.
also a directory system, in which anything in a particular directory branch can be blocked. This might be a great way to get more participation in DMOZ.org (The mozilla open directory project)
These of course can be combined, and have thresholds for the individual browser etc.
This information could be used not just for blocking, but to aid in logging by flagging potentially inappropriate material to the parents.
Some comments on the original post were- it takes a critical threshold of moderators to be effective and unbiased. A legitimate complaint, but the weighted system is likely to find equilibrium faster, and likely to find outliers/controversy quicker.
Another comment was- many words have dual interpretation hence a bot can mistake an innocent post for something 'naughty' and miss content that the censor would like censored. While true, weighting a site to the degree of trigger words is much less likely to get a false positive, which can be counterbalanced by one of the other methods. Similarly, a false negative can be avoided by only allowing sites that have been rated by an alternative method. Perhaps a system similar to metamoderation, the sites could be flagged if it has had fewer than say eight ratings, it could then be sent to those who have expressed an interest in the topic for which it has been preliminary rated. If the moderator were say in charge of a DMOZ directory related to the topic, then they could get a heavier weighting.
If there is sufficient interest, I might be willing to lead such a project...
LetterRip
Tom M.
fstmm@NOSPAM.yahoo.com
First, fear seems to one of the most effective tools in politics. The trouble is, it can backfire. Get your constituents fearfull and the campaign gets a boost. But if they are critical of your fearmongering, the campaign takes a hit.
The key is to give politicians the stick for using the net as a fear tactic.
This is where jamie's speach to the converted comes in. Its great to register your complaint to politicians and in open forumns where one may find supporters. However, an argument based on emotion and the message "you guys suck" won't reach the ears of our intended audience. Well thought out pieces such as this provides the arguments, and the thought process, we as a community should focus on.
We want to make internet censorship too dangerous to touch. Let politicians find other subjects to use as a cheap boost for their campaign.
That's easy enough to implement, when all it involves is taking a dozen 8"x8" piece of plastic and placing them in well-defined magazine rack locations.
What people clearly don't understand is that Attempts to prevent the use of packet-switched communications networks such as the Internet to transmit information that could possibly offend are technically doomed to failure, because it's all just packets.
The best that has been done thus far is that the seriously offensive stuff sits behind barriers that require a credit card validation to open up.
Your suggestion of determining what sites fall under a "general obscenity law" doesn't work, as the general result of such laws is not simply to "filter" such things, but rather to establish that the police ought to go over and outright close the site down.
What you're looking for is some sort of "in between;" stuff that is permitted "viewing" for adults, but forbidden for children. And that is decidedly not something that is well-defined.
One of the more interesting situations I have been in was a "debate" over this; a district attorney with experience in the matter in the Ontario jurisdiction discussed censorship in the context of a church youth group.
There were a surprising variety of opinions on the matter, and what was more surprising still was that even in the context of a group that you might expect to focus on it blindly (and there were a few people like that), it was quite clear that there could be no clear legislation to agree on.
Consider some examples of situations with varying levels of permissiveness/ambiguity:
- You and I might agree that "extreme"/"hard core" publications like Hustler or Penthouse "leap over the line," and have often gotten censored and censured as a result of running afoul of obscenity laws.
- Playboy and other clearly "soft core" publications may be "clearly" inappropriate for youngsters, but considering them to be obscenity is far less clear.
- What of things that are merely "suggestive," such as swimsuit catalogues, the Victoria's Secret catalogue, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition and such?
- What of the "nearly naked Africans" that appear in National Geographic?
- What treatment should a medical anatomy text get?
- What about an issue of a medical journal, Deviant Psychology, specifically dealing with the treatment of individuals with addictions to dramatically obscene materials, that has to excerpt from such in order to help doctors treat patients?
- What about a documentary about pornography? There have been controversies over the documentary Not A Love Story.
The problem is that there's not adequate law to deal with the problem, and this nicely predates the Internet.Does it differ if purchased by a doctor, or by a hormonally-challenged teenager?
What if the teenager, despite hormonal challenges, truly is planning to study medicine?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Why did I do this? Because my parents were of this "american family values" slant that says the naked human body is a nasty sinful thing. Well, I don't think so. The *real* problem is that parents don't know how to share with their kids any healthy attitudes about sex and nature. This "unnatural" attitude about the human body and sex is what makes kids curious in the first place. If nudity and discussion of sex were more a part of normal everyday life, porn would loose much of it's appeal.
Come on now. I know what you have under those clothes your wearing. Why is it such a "nasty" mystery? We accept other things that are much less natural *so* easily. An Example: Shortly after my first son was born, my sister invited us over to her place for dinner. While we were waiting in the living room for dinner to get done, my wife started breast-feeding my son. My sister went balistic. She started shooing her 3 sons out of the room and made my wife very uncomfortable and embarrassed. However that same evening, one of my sisters son was playing with a toy rifle and pointing it at my wife and son and pretending to shoot them. No fuss was made at all. Man! Talk about twisted values!!! I'll take my kids playing with porn over playing with guns anyday!
Criminalize spam and telemarketing!
We have X-stop at my orkplace as well. One of the worst parts of URL filtering is that every now and then a GUID in a dynamically generated URL recreation group, founded at a May Day garden contains some string that the filter doesn't like.
Also, I've heard one problem that a lot of SCA folks have run into. The SCA, or Society for Creative Anachronism, is a medeival party sometime in the late 60's (can't remember what year). The SCA often uses "Anno Societatis" dates originating from said garden party, often written as roman numerals. In the late 90's, SCA members started having problems with filtering software blocking many new SCA web sites. Didn't take long for someone to figure out that blocking software didn't like the SCA dates (when this problem started showing up in A.S. XXX) in the URL.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
If I buy a bottle of powder that says it will kill my cat's fleas, and it does -- and makes her hair fall out -- I'd sue the crooks who sold it. I'd win, too, provided that I presented convincing evidence that 1)the powder was indeed the cause of the feline defoliation and 2)that this side effect had not been disclosed.
Why don't the same laws apply if you buy a box that says it contains software that will block pornsites, and it does -- and blocks politically-incorrect sites?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
What we SHOULD be doing is allowing the PARENT to decide what to expose their child to and how they should learn these values. Give the parent the option to parent. If we give children *rights* of all things, how are they going to be able to do that? It would become against the law, against the civil rights of the child, to forbid them from doing something the parent doesn't want them to do. How can this be a good thing? Do you think you know how to parent my child better than I? Does the government?
With respects to the heart of this particular issue, censorware in public libraries, I thought McCain's quote hit it close enough:While I don't think schools should be required to buy censorware, I think it should be permitted for them to screen out online material in EXACTLY the same fashion they screen out printed material. Libraries don't tend to carry back-issues of Playboy and Hustler. Is this censorship? If you have a problem with how your local library is restricting access to information, TAKE IT UP WITH YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY BOARD, for they should be the ultimate authority as to what's allowed in their libraries and what isn't. This should be as much a community decision as possible. (That also means I'm pretty much against using off-the-shelf filtering software as it exists today.)
Counter to what people are proposing, I *do* believe items being blocked should be listed somehow. In addition, I would like the parent to be able to say, "My child is mature enough to be allowed access to these materials," similar to "child" versus "adult" library cards.
Further, even if these suggestions aren't adopted, you're still quite capable of getting a cheap-ass Internet connection at home and allowing your kid to browse porn all day and all night if you wanted. If you think your child is mature enough (or that's just the way you want to parent them), that's your perogative, but I most certainly do not want my kids having access to overly sexual material (or whatever else that's questionable in my eyes) in a public library without my explicit consent.
And they will have that consent, when I feel they're mature enough to handle it.
> 1.) The kids would require login/passwords. That
..AFTER you have proved that information
> means that little Joey Slashdot would be able to
> give young Jerry Falwell, Jr. his password,
> allowing Junior access to the sites that daddy
> doesn't want him to see.
The library is not "Daddy". If "Daddy" doesn't
want Little Jerry to see things he dislikes, he
should accompany him to the library.
You seem to be operating on the premise that
merely viewing porn is harmful to children. Please
PROVE this point and then we can talk about
implimenting protection.
Seriously, how many kids by age 12 or so have
never seen any porn. I was like 10 when I found
my fathers Playboy collection. How is this any
"worst"?
> 2.) The minimal blocklist has to be just that:
> MINIMAL
Ok
itself (like porn) can be harmful. I will go for
this. There should be a required contract. The
company compiling the block list should be
liable for any unfairly blocked sites. They
should pay a fine opf $1 million per day that
a site is unfairly blocked, retroactive from the
day it was placed on the list to the day it was
removed.
That should "enforce minimalism".
> 3.) This would be pretty tough to implement,
> especially if implemented at the proxy level.
Hopefully thats where it will be implimented.
I know I will be happy to help write a web
based CGI anti-proxy page. (permute all the URLS
into arguments for the CGI with an XOR key...
blind the URL in both directions..should be easy)
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Why not watch over your kids for a change?
I'm taking this to mean "Why not try and be a better parent for your kids?" This is precisely why filtering software IS needed. A trip to the library should not have to be a supervised thing. I send my kids to the library because I know the printed material isn't going to have smut in it.
GIVE ME THE OPTION TO PARENT MY OWN CHILDREN. I should be able to make the determination ON MY OWN as to whether or not my kids are mature enough to have access to sexually explicit material (among other things). Do not take away my abilities to parent just because YOU think EVERYONE is mature enough to handle that type of material in our public libraries.
Additionally (and perhaps counter to some people's filtering recommendations), I WANT the ability to be able to say, "My child is mature enough to have access to these materials," and be able to disable filtering for them. Unfortunately this seems a bit difficult to handle logistically, so I'm content with letting my kids use my own dialup connection for that sort of thing.
The idea that all information should be required to be made equally available to all people of all ages is not good. By forcing me to accept that, you are taking away my ability to parent my own child, and that is unacceptable. I will give my kids permission to have access to this kind of material when *I* feel they are mature enough to handle it. You have no right to make that determination for me.
About a year ago in North Carolina, a county library tried to move copies of playboys to censor them from children. In order to do this the tax payers had to vote on it. In each similiar case of censorship in public libraries I have seen it comes to a referendum of specific items. Since books are just a delivery tool for information (text and pictures mostly) and websites are also tools for information (text and pictures mostly again) it seems to me that in order to properly implement censorship of the internet requires a vote by the tax payers on each site to be banned. In order for that to work there must be full disclosure.
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
they have to "BUY" the censorware..
WTF??? what about open source projects like squid?? and all the rest that work 900% better than the $3,589.00 program they purchased for our network?
There's the key... they will have to BUY it.. further showing us that the politicians are in the pockets of yuet another lobby..
Last decade it was the tobbaco companies, this decade? Government is owned by software companies.
(USA: the best government money can buy!)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First of all, whose money is being spent? If it is money that has been generated by the library, then did this same money used to be used for paying salaries, buying books, maintaining magazine subscriptions, or organizing public literacy programs. If it is money that has been given to them by local or federal goverment, then that is my money that is being spent on something that I don't approve of at all, is also being thrown away on products that have been show to not work and is taking away from all of the items noted above.
I have a real problem with this whole 'get rid of the pornography' issue. I believe it's generally agreed upon that Playboy magazine is not pornography. All it shows is naked airbrushed women ... there is never a sexual act shown in any of the pictorals. So would http://www.playboy.com be blocked? How about sites that put up erotic stories? Is that pornography? If I read about some male putting his member inside some female, am I being exposed to mind-bending words that will make me sodomize the family cat and obsessively call the neighbor's daughter just to breath hard on the phone ... I think not.
There seems to be a lot of sabre rattling about how pornography does all these evil things to young and adult minds. I just don't buy it. Porn sites are the most profitable sites on the internet. Hundreds of millions of god-fearing Americans either frequent or have frequented pornography-containing internet sites, bars, or magazines. And there are obviously not hundreds of millions of sex-crazed mind-warped individuals out there.
And why is this a Presidental issue? Is it the President's job to field this quagmire of insecurity? I don't think so, it's the job of the house and the senate ... but how many people who will fervently not vote for a particular presidental candidate simply because of his/her stance on pornography have also written their representatives in congress eloquently expressing their views and the reasons behind them. Damn few I'd say.
This is the same kind of nonsense that has been used to get people in an uproar for the past 20 years, and sooner or later it will quit working. I just hope that happens before some ultimately damaging legislation is allowed to pass.
But perhaps that's why I'm in favor or the Reform party. http://www.reformparty.org
Sean
RFC2119
If you don't want all personal liberties to be ultimately destroyed by divide-and-conquer attack, you should not give aid and comfort to the dividers and conquerors.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That's fine with me. My problem is with people who want to control what my kids (when I have them) are able to see. Who are you to decide what my kids should and should not see? Who are you to decide what I should and should not see?
I agree, parents need the ability to parent their child and make decisions as to what materials they are mature enough to handle and what materials they are not. That means we need some mechanism in place (filtering software) to allow the parents to exercise those decisions.
A visit to the library should not have to be a supervised thing. My kids should be able to visit the library whenever they like, but until they're mature or responsible enough to handle the availability of content I don't want them to see, I don't want them to have access to it.
At the same time (and this does run counter to proposed filtering legislation/guidelines), I want the ability to GIVE my child access to materials he wouldn't ordinarily be allowed to see. Think of it as an "adult" library card. Another poster mentioned a card carrying filtering preferences. All good ideas.
I do agree with you that a requirement for filtering software is a bad thing. This should CERTAINLY be a local community decision, not a state one, and not a national one.
Realistically we can't expect kids to monitor themselves. Some teenage boy sees "All Naked - All The Time" ad, odds are he's going to have a look. Libraries and other public access places are institutes we encourage students and minors to go to. To grant them access to places where they can see pornography, and then condemn them when they explore, seems a little hypocritical.
I noticed on peacefire that they give menthods for disabling the censorship software. This I think is stupid, depending on where the software is installed. I think that a place like schools and libraries should be locked down for this. Sure there are adults that should be able to access this, but provision should be made for them. I doubt the majority of the people using library systems for net access are surfing for smut. Put a couple of PC's in a controlled area where age can be verified. If people dont' like this, tough...Protecting kids from porn in public places is more important than giving access to people wanting to search for porn, be it a legit reason or not.
When it comes to college and work access, things get a little more complicated. There are various courses at college which *require* research into sexual matters. However, *VERY* few of them will require that to be on "horny young teens" or "live lesbian videos". Sadly, there's no real way to distinguish between the two without actively viewing the content. That's just impractical. At college level, I think they should block out vulgarity, while leaving sexual content. True, some vulgar sites will get through, but that's the price for freedom of speech. As for companies, if you are using their systems, you play by their rules. They pay for the lines, the computers and the access. Therefor, they get to dicate what you view. Similarly, if you *hate* classical music, what right does a guest have to come into your home and monopolize your system to listen to the Classical masterpieces, without your permission? You wouldn't allow that, but you still want to use work systems to allow you to view what you want? I don't think so.
We have to take resposibility for what we want others to see. Yes, you have a right to view *anything* you want to. I'm not denying that. I'll even fight for it. However, you do not have the right to make that material available to others.
Censorship is a good and necessary thing. It just needs to be handled better. I do agree that the "blacklist" should be open. If I install the software, I want to be able to modify what gets banned and what doesn't. The censors do not have *that* right. I'm an adult. Treat me like one.
First of all, I think we do need some kind of filtering software on public computers. As much as I lobby for a free internet, without censorship, I also don't think showing Jimmy the 5 year old the beastiality site is a good idea. There is a reason Hustler and other "adult" magazines aren't available to everyone in the public library. Hustler may have great articles, but there is enough in it that is objectionable that it is not offered. If they could offer only the Hustler articles, without the pictures, off-color jokes, etc, I would be all for it being available. This is what the filtering software is attempting to do, offer the quality content suitable to everyone without offering the objectionable material. This isn't about just keeping kids off the sights, because anyone walking behind the person sitting at the computer can also check it out and see what's happeneing. If you move the computer to a room by itself, then yes, adults could view porn, but this isn't a very pratical answer, since many library are only one room to begin with.
Second, there has been a lot of talk about giving children the oppurtunity to act as adults, something else I agree with. But there has to be limits placed on that as well. A lot of people when given the oppurtunity to act as responisible adults do so, but unfortunately, just as many choose not to. Look at the number of people who drink and drive. They have the opportunity to act responsibly, and choose not to. Look at the kids from Columbine. They had a lot of freedom (as witnessed by the fact their parents didn't know what was going on). They chose everything but to act responsibly. We should treat kids above their age, but within reason. Giving them free reign to explore everything on the seedier side of the Internet is NOT within reason.
Lastly, I agree that the software is not perfect, but until it is, there aren't too many other options. Going to the library and looking at whatever you want on the internet is not a right, it's a privilge. We can't let everyone have everything, but I also don't think we can take it away completely, because it's so useful. The logical option is to give as much as we can until the software catches up with everything else. If there are eight million sights filtered, maybe 100,000 will be filtered by accident. But given the choice between filter those sights accidentally and giving anyone the right to view anything, I'll take the accidental filtering for a while.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
As some posters have pointed out, filtering software is never 100% accurate. All that is needed to stop this censorware craze is for a library to install the software (as it seems one has already done), and a kid (I'm sure there would be pleanty of volenteers) to try to research something, say breast cancer (maybe one of her friend's mothers has it). She gets blocked, and either sues the maker of the software for false advertising (claiming to do one thing, doing something else), or the library for restricting legitimate material (there was a court case that said that unless the library has a good reason, or it is considered obscene by the standards of the community, it is illegal for a publically funded library to restrict access to material based on content).
A small national media blitz, and voila, censorware disappears from the library.
(O.K., I admit, there a lots of flaws with this one. But, given that censorware is already being installed, this seems like another tactic that could be used in addition to the current ones.)
(And yes, I agree, opening the blocking list to public scrutiny and review would alievate most of the problems. It would certainly reduce false postitives, but would prob not reduce false negitives)
-Nick
If we organized, could we get ~50 million votes for our candidate? Not that we should elect Rob, but maybe it is time for a tech party.
I think a "tech party" might be a little too limited in scope. But I do think that Slashdotters could have a lot of influence--not necessarily with politicians directly, but with the people they deal with everyday--based on their ability to understand issues and communicate with others about them.
Coming up with a common candidate that most of us support would be helpful. When election time rolls around and people in RL want to talk about candidates, it would be nice if all of us had something to say that would help "our" candidate.
I'm not talking about Slashdot picking an "official Slashdot candidate." I'd rather see the readers moderate up the best explanations of which candidate would help our combined causes the most. Also, the best answers to opposing views would be nice as well. A couple articles a month on Slashdot that specifically debate candidates would be really nice IMHO.
The fact is, I can debate the relative merits of different technologies all day long and never run out of breath. But when it comes to politics I run out of steam rather quickly. I learn more everytime I read people's arguments here on Slashdot, which helps to an extent.
The key here is this: if we (readers of Slashdot) work together to find the candidates we agree on and learn how to formulate our best arguments, we can then educate others. I'm not implying that everyone here needs to be more well-rounded when it comes to politics...just that I'm not the only one here that might be lacking.
If we could all debate politics as cleary, and with as much fervor as we debate technology, we would make a difference.
numb
PS: Some issues that will influence my vote:
EFF and NORML
If we organized, could we get ~50 million votes for our candidate? Not that we should elect Rob, but maybe it is time for a tech party.
I think a "tech party" might be a little too limited in scope. But I do think that Slashdotters could have a lot of influence--not necessarily with politicians directly, but with the people they deal with everyday--based on their ability to understand issues and communicate with others about them.
Coming up with a common candidate that most of us support would be helpful. When election time rolls around and people in RL want to talk about candidates, it would be nice if all of us had something to say that would help "our" candidate.
I'm not talking about Slashdot picking an "official Slashdot candidate." I'd rather see the readers moderate up the best explanations of which candidate would help our combined causes the most. Also, the best answers to opposing views would be nice as well. A couple articles a month on Slashdot that specifically debate candidates would be really nice IMHO.
The fact is, I can debate the relative merits of different technologies all day long and never run out of breath. But when it comes to politics I run out of steam rather quickly. I learn more everytime I read people's arguments here on Slashdot, which helps to an extent.
The key here is this: if we (readers of Slashdot) work together to find the candidates we agree on and learn how to formulate our best arguments, we can then educate others. I'm not implying that everyone here needs to be more well-rounded when it comes to politics...just that I'm not the only one here that might be lacking.
If we could all debate politics as cleary, and with as much fervor as we debate technology, we would make a difference.
numb
PS: Some issues that influence my vote:
EFF and NORML
If we organized, could we get ~50 million votes for our candidate? Not that we should elect Rob, but maybe it is time for a tech party.
I think a "tech party" might be a little too limited in scope. But I do think that Slashdotters could have a lot of influence--not necessarily with politicians directly, but with the people they deal with everyday--based on their ability to understand issues and communicate with others about them.
Coming up with a common candidate that most of us support would be helpful. When election time rolls around and people in RL want to talk about candidates, it would be nice if all of us had something to say that would help "our" candidate.
I'm not talking about Slashdot picking an "official Slashdot candidate." I'd rather see the readers moderate up the best explanations of which candidate would help our combined causes the most. Also, the best answers to opposing views would be nice as well. A couple articles a month on Slashdot that specifically debate candidates would be really nice IMHO.
The fact is, I can debate the relative merits of different technologies all day long and never run out of breath. But when it comes to politics I run out of steam rather quickly. I learn more everytime I read people's arguments here on Slashdot, which helps to an extent.
The key here is this: if we (readers of Slashdot) work together to find the candidates we agree on and learn how to formulate our best arguments, we can then educate others. I'm not implying that everyone here needs to be more well-rounded when it comes to politics...just that I'm not the only one here that might be lacking.
If we could all debate politics as cleary, and with as much fervor as we debate technology, we would make a difference.
numb
PS: Some issues that influence my vote:
EFF and NORML
1 at a time...
What classes as XXX material?
Mainly I'm talking about hardcore porn, i.e. penetration, oral sex, bestiality, cum-splattered faces, ya'know HARDCORE PORN. I don't think we need to marginalize anything that is R-rated, not in the least, but I think it becomes more clear what is "porn" the farther you go.
Who judges it?
You do. If you find pr0n outside it's expected place submit the URL to the pr0npatr0l (perhaps a division of Internic or a seperate entity) who then check it against an open defintion of standards (displayed on a web page) and then decides on a course of action, leading up to a forced TLD name change if necessary.
The state/country of the sender/reciever?
Yes each country will have to deal with this on its own. Policing the Internet as a global medium is destined to failure, from the massive amounts of resource it would involve, the opaque slippery nature of determined pr0nmasters, and even localized moral and belief systems. There will always be a fringe (just as there is now), but the idea is to move the fringe far enough away from the mainstream as to keep accidental exposure at a minimun.
At what ages do you become an adult? 16/18/21?
This is immaterial, I'm arguing for a strategic change, not a tactical one. Under the current system you already have to lie if you are under age, changing this wouldn't matter.
Who is prosecutable and by whom, under which countries laws?
again, it must be done on a country by country basis. It won't be perfect, but improvement is the goal.
This begs the question of a definition of 'XXX material'. Keep in mind that you need a definition that would be acceptable world wide.
Not for this idea we don't
And how would you prosecute? Do you apply the same laws to people in Iran, New Guinea, Tanzania, Burma, Alabama and Cuba? How to manage to get extradition treaties in place?
All you need to get are the names, e-mails of their registrars and the political will to make law. No plan for controlling the Internet is going to work all the way, nor would I want it to. But something needs to be done to silence the "sky is falling so hide the kids" freaks, and this would do it. I'm not even talking about limiting pr0n or controlling access to it, I'm just saying that putting it all into some type of "Red Light Top Level Domain" would help to appease what I see as rational complaints from a different perspective. Locally (by country) it is decided what should belong there. Yes, you will have countries and servers in those countries outside normal channels, but the hope is for improvement not perfection.
and finally
Remove the pay per page load model, and I believe a lot of the lower problems will also be solved. Plus, it's easy to takcle the model, as it has *nothing* to do with porn, persay, it's just a business model to refute.
This model was developed BY the pr0n industry as they were trying and defining viable business models. I don't see another one other than direct kickbacks, which still relies on massive traffic to make a few bucks.
(I responded to more than one post here, in the interests of confusion)
+&x
Now, I don't agree with most censorware. But I DO think that children should be supervised when doing all sorts of things, including using the Internet.
Children absorb lots of stuff. Look at how we can see this: children with parents who are racist tend to be racist. Children tought to steal things or to lie tend to think it's OK later on in life. Social norms are leanrned from your surroundings.
And, frankly, as much as I want uncensored speech on the internet, there are lots of sites that I wouldn't want small children watching. I don't think that a young child should watch videos of women being raped like it's a good thing, or a funny thing. I don't think that they should watch 40-year-old men and 9-year-old girls doing naughty things. But there are definitely things that are caught up in over-conservative filters that I think my children should have access to.
I think that the best solution is just what John McCain said -- that the Parents should know what their children are doing. If my son wants to learn fencing, that's great. If he wants to learn how to shoot a gun, that's fine, too. If he wants to kill people, that's bad. And knowing that sort of thing is something that you can know if you spend enough time with your children and have communication with them.
But how can you supervise your children while they are at school? How can a librarian or a teacher look at 40 computers at the same time? I think that censorware provides a useful purpose in these situations -- although it should certainly be easy for a teacher to bypass the product in situations where it has nabbed a site that is important for education.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Now, I don't agree with most censorware. But I DO think that children should be supervised when doing all sorts of things, including using the Internet.
Children absorb lots of stuff. Look at how we can see this: children with parents who are racist tend to be racist. Children tought to steal things or to lie tend to think it's OK later on in life. Social norms are leanrned from your surroundings.
And, frankly, as much as I want uncensored speech on the internet, there are lots of sites that I wouldn't want small children watching. I don't think that a young child should watch videos of women being raped like it's a good thing, or a funny thing. I don't think that they should watch 40-year-old men and 9-year-old girls doing naughty things. But there are definitely things that are caught up in over-conservative filters that I think my children should have access to.
I think that the best solution is just what John McCain said -- that the Parents should know what their children are doing. If my son wants to learn fencing, that's great. If he wants to learn how to shoot a gun, that's fine, too. If he wants to kill people, that's bad. And knowing that sort of thing is something that you can know if you spend enough time with your children and have communication with them.
But how can you supervise your children while they are at school? How can a librarian or a teacher look at 40 computers at the same time? I think that censorware provides a useful purpose in these situations -- although it should certainly be easy for a teacher to bypass the product in situations where it has nabbed a site that is important for education.
And I certainly think that John McCain is closer to knowing what is right than many other current political figures
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
(I don't work for them, it just seemed relevant to this debate.)
_________________________
don't forget they didn't live as long either. 'Course that would change depending on how "past" these past societies are.
Personally I reached sentient thought at the age of 10. I know this 'cause that's when I knew what it meant.
+&x
This is straight out of an Andrea Dworkin book. Can you provide hard data for any of it? Ed Meese couldn't, and he spent years trying. If you can show me how pornography plays a "direct role" in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, I'll give you a dollar.
The average child molester has "nearly always" been "influenced" by pornography? Fine, I'll let that stand. But I'd say that the average person in the United States has been "influenced" by pornography--what percentage of the population hasn't seen a Playboy or a stag film?
I'm actually all for blocking software, although not installing it in libraries; parents can't always be by their kids, and if they've got a strong objection to letting their children see naked people and don't trust them to do the right thing, filterware is a legit solution. But when you start blocking out things in a public library--including, inevitably, innocent sites (and, in the case of some of the filterware, sites like Peacefire that have political stances antithetical to those of NetNanny and the like)--I want a better rationale than a bunch of presuppositions about what porn does to society. Until then, I'm sticking with the consensus of research. [See, as a brief Google search tells me, Padgett et al's "Pornography, erotica, and attitudes toward women: The effects of repeated exposure" (Journal of Sex Research, Nov 1989) and Langevin et al's "Pornography and sexual offences" (Annals of Sex Research, 1988), for just two examples.]
I'd say that violence, specifically sexualized violence, in the general media is much more of a factor, but no library in the world is going to (or should) take "The Collector" or "Rising Sun" off their shelves.
--
I didn't know what a meme was, so I asked five friends. They didn't know what a meme was, so they asked five friends.
Self-Censorship: If children have no expectation of privacy at the library's web terminals, it would go a long way toward limiting their viewing of porn, without directly raising First Amanedment issues.
Until the craze for URL-filtering burns itself out (I'm not holding my breath), it might be possible to make the filtering less monolithic and arbitrary. What Republican would publicly oppose free-market competition? Let the filtering lists compete!
Let the hard core guys maintain their own list and cull out everything that would dilute their category. The list would be downloadable from their trade association, to save their customers' time.
Let the mainstream skin purveyors keep the kinkier stuff off their own list. And Playboy could make sure that consumer merchandise is always closely associated with images of bare titties, to keep the economic ball rolling.
The need to maintain the Christian Coalition list would give lots of smug prigs the cover they need to justify their own porn viewing. I really shouldn't criticize these people, because, after all, it was to appease them that President Bush installed the only serious porn conoisseur we have on the Surpreme Court: Clarence Thomas, who Bush called "the most qualified person in the country".
The American Public Health Association could make sure that information sites on their list remained accessible.
The American Civil Liberties Union could have a free-speech list of sites erroneously included by the censors in their porn lists. The constant attempt by the right-wingers to conflate birth control, freedom, etc. with Evil Sex would be easy to expose by daily comparing the lists.
You get the idea. People with a stake in differest aspects of the "problem" would have an incentive to avoid category error in their own lists.
Comparing the lists would easily disclose the abuses of classification. Then the American Library Association, in their wisdom and experience, could decide how to use the lists in a constitutionally acceptable manner. Individuals could download their preferreed list for filtering at home.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
- The government could buy a censor-ware company or its product and open-source it.
- The government could hold a competition, say with the American Library Association as the judging body, and award a prize for the best filter (which is then open-sourced).
- The government could fund an open-source development effort.
There are a ton of issues around those things, though. Can you imagine what the ruckus would be if someone cracked the library computers and messed with people's smart cards? Better add Counterpane Systems to the list of judges. And the ACLU, and the American Psychological Association, and....--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Children today are treated as second-class citizens. Oh, sorry, wait, they arn't even treated like citizens. So what are they? Property, for the most part(at least in the eyes of the law).
I must accept this as truth, but isn't it wrong? Kids are not treated as citizens because we don't believe they can make a decision on their own. Yet in reguards to the internet, we leave it up to them to make many decisions, such as which links to click or which sites to visit.
If we really want to "protect" kids why don't we pay someone else to watch them 24 / 7. We can pay to have our car or our home watched like that, why not our kids. Afterall, our kids are our most important piece of property.
Its absurd, the lack of responsibility parents have today. Most expect the government to provide services for everything from health care, schools, and laws to "protection" but we constantly complain that our kids are not safe. That they can be exposed to the real world too easily. How easy? Even our grandparents can get access to this unadulterated information within minutes with software like AOL that's shipped to everyone's front door.
And what about us adults? Why should we only protect the kids? I have a computer in my living room that is on the net 24/7. That means anyone could accidentally sit down and be flooded with tons of unadulterated information, such as porn, that could hurt them.
There are two ways around this problem. We can either try to "protect" everyone. Govern the information that every person is allowed to view, hear and think. I think there have been books written about this... or at the very least burned. OR We could try to accept the world the way it is and accept responsibility for ourselves and our children. And keep information and society free.
I don't have kids. I'm just a kid myself, 22, but I'm on my own, learning a few things about the world, mostly bad. But I have thought long and hard about having kids and how I'd raise them. I'd first start by making sure I had enough money to support them and myself and a job that would allow me to be with them. I would pay attention to my children, putting myself in their place, teach them about the world we live in and try to ecourage them to learn and think for themselves. This means we have to teach them about the birds and the bees a little earlier, and even those sections that our parents left out about the birds and the birds or the bees and the bees. These are topics we are scared to discuss with our children, but reguardless of what we do they will find out someday... what makes you think they haven't already? But at least my kids would grow up knowing what life is really like. Not whatever fantasy world the average US citizen thinks they still live in with apple pie and the buffalo and the little house on the prairy. Come on people, wake up.
I think parents around the world need to grow up and start acting like parents (that word should be synonymous to teacher).
That's why he's Big Media's darling. "Campaign Finance Reform" == "Big Media gets effective monopoly on political discussion".
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That comment about Jews wasn't bigotry or "hate speech", it was sarcasm.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
> So would the two systems, used in conjunction
> with each other, qualify as a social, legal,
> technical, or philosophical hack?
There is a huge problem here.
first philosophical:
The library is an agent of the government. I
believe strongly that the governments job is to
protect individual rights, as such it must NEVER
make any stance on "Decency". It is the job
of parents, not the government to raise children.
Lest we start banning the Bible (afterall, as an
atheist, I would consider it a corrupting
influence on my children) and a host of other
books.
Secondly, it begins a slippery slope. It will
quickly become a battle of proxier vs fundie
They will fight, new proxies going up and getting
blocks. Soon it will be "We need a law to stop
thse proxies" afterall, the only reason to setup
a proxie is to "Hurt children".
Sorry...it just wont work.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The ACPL already had a policy that stated that children should be under responsible adult supervision. This includes their use of the internet terminals. Handy posters next to every terminal reiterated this fact.
As a member of the American Library Association, the ACPL had a responsibility to prevent any kind of censorship of library resources. See the ALA Code of ethics at http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/ethics.html it's right up there in item II.
Remember, the ALA has a long history of fighting censorship. They were even the chief plaintiff in opposing the Communications Decency Act.
And if you work for a public library, there are some ALA prepared resources including a Q&A about why the ALA opposed filtering software at http://www.ala.org/pio/cyber/cando.html
As the other fellow suggested, Squid would provide a nice way to audit what comes in. IJB also provides a nice regexp based blocker (based on URLs, not content). You could homebrew an IJB list that blocks common "XXX" domains, as well as advert blocking. IPchains provides a nice way to completely blocking some machines (I use it as a responce to port scanning, among other things). I'm not sure if there are proxies that filter based on textual content (I think image content would be the hardest, and would likely require Lisp ;)), but Freshmeat might have one listed.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Well, I do believe in censorship. There are some things which are not appropriate for some people. I believe rather strongly in kids being protected from things like porn and vulgarity.
Irrelevant.
Whether you "believe" in censorship or not, your right to exercise it is carefully controlled by the Constitution, even when it comes to other people's kids.
As such, you have the right of enforcement of your pro-censorship beliefs over a select few groups of people: Yourself, your children, people who work for you (while on company time, i.e., your time), children in a school you administer (in loco parentis) and other dependents in your home.
As a citizen, with regard to the people outside that group I mentioned, it doesn't matter what you think is right when it comes to this discussion, except that that decision is left to a majority of the people in your community, and IS STILL subject to the rights of individuals, even children. Even in this plutocracy we call America, it has been demonstrated countless times that when your cultural beliefs come up against my constitutional rights, my rights will prevail.
A public library is a free resource that government provides to all its citizens, and by law, must be respectful of everyone's rights. You do not have a right to command the library to parent your children for you. That job is yours, and yours alone. The library will not prevent you from accompanying your children to the library, or from being over their shoulder every time they browse, or from not sending your children to the library at all. It's not like a net connection isn't within your children's reach at home, where you could most closely monitor them. The library won't interfere with you if you want to filter, or proxy, your children's Internet connection at home.
Where your pro-censorship argument runs into trouble (and resistance) is that you assume that letting you be the public's censor (or part of the public censorship effort) is equivalent to "treating you like an adult," which I take your meaning to be 'giving you the rights you are due as an adult citizen of the US.'
Your rights as an adult citizen of the US are protected without forcing libraries to filter content; it's just that you don't have (and never had) the rights you think you do.
Even if you limit your argument to children, there are two groups: children under your jurisdiction (i.e., yours, which you have full parental control over, IF you decide to use it), and children that aren't. Children that aren't under your jurisdiction are afforded their constitutional rights, such as access to the public library. Their parents may or may not do any of the things I just outlined to control their children's intake of information, but within the law, that's their right, not yours.
When you impose rights you don't have, often you deprive other people of the civil rights that they DO have. Be careful when you do so - it's prosecutable under Federal Law to do so knowingly. At least this country, for all its faults, still has that going for it.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Well, there's at least one political party that we *know* won't be legislating censorship anytime soon, the Libertarian Party
They're for personal freedom on every issue - which is nessisary for a truely free society.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
LOL! I agree entirely. Of the three, I don't think that RMS really wants to be president - he has more important things to do - that leaves only ESR and Weird Al
But really, instead of righting in "ESR" on the ballot sheet, vote instead for ESR's political party, the Libertarians
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Many people seem to be unaware that there does exist an Open Source censoring proxy program called Active Guardian.
It's not finished, and it apparently only currently compiles on Slackware 3.4, but it exists, and it needs improving.
It's website is at:
http://www.activeguardian.com/
Note that I am by no means condoning the use of this or any other program to interfere with the free exchange of data, but if it's going to happen anyway, it might as well be done with Free Software so that I can modify it to function in a less opressive way for use in my community.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I, for one, am grateful that I never saw an erotic depiction or photo image of a breast or vagina before I turned 18. I am the most well adjusted and pious individual as a direct result.
Where's the tower, where's the gun, where's the tower, where's the gun!
P.S. I love getting tagged as flamebait whilst exercising creative expression under a topic such as this. Makes me grateful for eventual meta-moderation, dontchaknow.
Linux r00lz! yeah!
Rob happens to like the idea of free speech. Toward that end, he has avoided deleting posts as much as possible (though I'm sure some AC here can contradict me here with some unverifiable anecdote). I take as my evidence the sheer quantity of crap strewn about these comment pages. I know if I were Rob, I would be tempted to delete some of the lame troll posts that are clogging his database. But he doesn't, 'cause I can sit here and read them until I lose most of my faith in humanity.
In fact, I've spent the last month reading Slashdot at -1, and I can say that it has been a depressing experience. When moderation first appeared, I set my threshold at 2, then 1. Things were fairly normal. I wondered what things were like at -1 and I finally decided to take a look. My month-long sample has not convinced me that moderation is evil. A few decent AC posts got left in the dust, and few good posts got taken down. But a whole hoard of juvenile graffiti and basic idiocy got labeled as such.
But guess what:
Yes, despite the fact that Andover owns Slashdot, you can still read every bit of text that someone felt was worthy of posting (including this rant). The moderators may be too stupid to pull out the comments you like to read, but they are still there. The rest of us are willing to sacrifice a few good posts to have time to read the many good posts the moderators do catch.And finally: please stop repeating the hackneyed complaint about Rob having sold out to The Man. It's just as annoying as every other bit of "Slashdot wisdom" that gets repeated so many times that people forget it orignated from someone's rear end. Rob is human. Rob is lazy. Rob did not receive a brain transplant when Andover bought Slashdot. If you believe Slashdot isn't catering to your (and others who agree with you) need, blame it on Rob being too stupid or too lazy to implement a system that works. Those reasons are a lot more plausible than: "Andover did it!" That's about as dumb as claiming that Doom makes kids shoot each other.
The world is not so simple.
[In defense of Rob's intelligence: USENET, IRC, and Slashdot seem to have shown in three different environments that online discussion tends to degenerate when enough people are put in one place. Two people can have a conversation, a couple hundred can share ideas, but tens of thousands seem to just turn things into a squabbling mess. Solving this problem is hard, and I don't think Rob is an imbecile for not having solved it yet.]
Western society, such as it is, no longer knows what to do with children, as a whole. Too many generations have grown up with the "generation gap" caused by a breakdown of the natural family structure. And before you get all thingy, I'm not talking about single parents or gay couples, I'm referring to the multigenerational family where generations interact far more than they do now. The (compulsary) school structure is horribly artificial and it all too easily breaks the parent-child relationship, meaning that the child never learns how to be a parent.
Meanwhile we have such sillyness as parents being responsible for childrens illegal activities, while being unable to punish them in any physical way (for some children there are few other forms of punishment that they understand, or are even close to appropriate). However, the state sees no problem in locking up young offenders, once they get to am arbitrary age.
Even though I was brought up in a very modern family (single, computer literate, mother) I was regularly looked after by my grandmother when my mother was busy with work. Similarly, my mother made time to be part of my education - answering questions and explaining things. It was easier for me because my mother is/was extremely bright and was able to help me with my maths homework, but it's the way it needs to be if we want to end up with responsible adults capable of subsequently informing their children and guiding their development. Note: I never heard the answer "because" to any question - this makes a huge difference.
(Whether this is a consequence or not I don't know, but I typically find most porn particularly unappealing, boring even, and I'm not after a sex-centric relationship with the opposite sex, more a relationship that is a combination of friend, partner & lover.)
Meanwhile, we should probably stop looking at filtering porn and start fixing the problems in a society so sick that it needs so much of it...
This avoids the whole issue of automatic censorware, which (as another poster rightly points out) uses key-words as a basis. Key-words are, frankly, a pathetic way to filter content. (That's why I'm not impressed by the people claiming systems such as Echelon use it. Nobody in their right minds would use something so hopeless!)
By keeping the human element in the process of selection, you avoid both overkill -and- leakage by using stupid key-words. "Grep" will -never- be a substitute for the human mind, for complex ethical issues. Nor is it designed for that purpose.
On the other hand, volunteer groups are filled with human minds which are specifically tuned to complex ethical issues, and are very much there for precicely this kind of purpose.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It seems I am dweeling on this more personal
;) )
seprate sissue stuff this morning.
> The first of it being at a young age. I can
> tell you that porn is very addictive and porn
> does not exactly blend with my
> personal beliefs. This leaves me with a personal
> conflict that would not be nearly as bad I feel
> if I had never been shown porn in the first
> place. Thus according to my beliefs seeing a
> naked human body is a very dangerous thing
Yes, it is. I agree with you that ideas as
such can be dangerous on a personal level. I
watched the movie "Apocalypse Now" tonight, which
leaves me with alot of thoughts and conflicts on
a very personal level.
Just about any subject touches someone somewhere
at a personal level, and can cause conflict. This
is, however, par for the course. It would be
impossible to sheild yourself from these dangerous
ideas, without first acknowledging them as
dangerous, and thus causing the internal conflict
that you attempted to avoid.
What right have you to pre-emtivly decided that an
idea of any type (be it sexual or otherwise)
should be barred from others to "protect them".
Part of being human is meeting new ideas and
comming to terms with them.
I understand how "addictive" porn can be. Just
like any of a thousand things. I understand how
upon seeing porn on a screen, you may find it
hard to concentrate on what you are doing and easy
to concentrate on it. Many people have this
situation. (I, myself, think of the brain
as a huge set of regular expressions, constantly
matching patterns... it fits in nicely with
thinking about attention and focusing).
However, we all have a brain, and we all have to
deal with the quirks of our own. It is kind of
silly to expect the rest of the world to conform
to your version of reality.
In essense you are saying "please take it away
because I enjoy it too much and I feel bad about
enjoying it", at least that is what I am taking
away from your statments.
In any case, I supose I am very much a believer
in the idea that "there are no rules unless you
chose to make them." (which is suposed to be a
quote but for the life of me I can't find it now
and knowing the source would ruin its credibility
anyway...anyone who knows the quote would know
why thats true
As such I can certainly understand why you might
want to make rules...rules like sexuality and fun
in general is somehow wrong. If thats your trip,
enjoy it, if not then enjoy whatever it is. Just
please don't try to make others play by your
rules. We all have our own games and our own
rules to play with.
"Tis an ill wind that blows no minds"
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"