Survey Shows Censorware Support

Bret writes: "According to the NY Times, a recent survey shows broad support for censorware in U.S. schools. Even scarier: "the survey did find that 74% of individuals said the government should ban online pornography altogether and 75% supported a government ban of online hate speech." Read all about it at http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/10/18/technology/18EDUCATION.html while you still can." This leaves me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Comments

The ignorance of the public..

[Weezul]

Th funniest thing about the whole censorware debate is that censorware is nearly useless for libraries and school. Think about it:

(1) A library or a school wants to catch the people DLing porn. How will installing easy to circumvent protections which mearly train the porn user to circumvent these protections help? Now, some censorware for libraries dose use an alarm, but the bad block rate means that about once a week some little girl is tramatized by screaming alarms and kicked out of the library for looking at a feminist website.

(2) No reasonable adult really carres about another adult viewing porn onlie. they mearly want to prevent people from leaving open netscape windows containing porn and to prevent kids from changing the background as a prank. No censorware dose anything to prevent these sort of mistakes and/or pranks.

What is the solution? Place the computers in a realitivly poblic place and have librarians walk past them periodically. If the problem persists then have a computer which only the librarians see do a slide show of the JPGs in the netscape cache directories. The librarians can go have a look at all the various computer users when they see porn flash past.

These systems are cheap, simple, discreate, adaptable, adhears to community standards, and will produce almost no bad blocks. Why do we not see the AFA spending many thousands of dollars advocating these sorts of more effective blocking procedures? Simple, the AFA & friends do not give a shit about porn. They are only interested in blocking access of young people to feminist, gay, AIDS, safe-sex, liberal web sites.

Questions to bias a Poll

[luckykaa]

I don't trust public opinion as reported in the newspapers.

This is just an example. Other people are much better at this than me. This is based on an idea from the BBC comedy series Yes, Prime Minister.

1. Do you feel that children should be subjected to pornography?
2. Do you feel that children are affected by hate speech?
3. Do you feel that schools have a responsibility to protect children?
4. Are you in favour of schools using pornography filtering software?

Or alternatively

1. Are you in favour of freedom of speech?
2. Do you feel that children should be allowed to learn without restriction?
3. Should we rely on buggy computer software to tell us what our rights are?
4. Are you in favour of Censorship software in schools?

Simply publish the last result. It says whatever you want it to say.

You can even bias it by asking one question. People will be more in favour of schools installing filtering software to protect children that installing censorship software to restrict access to the internet.

Re:Not ban it, just restrict access

[Sloppy]

I don't want my son or daughter to be able to surf for porn at the library or at school.

[snip]

I support this sort fo initiative.

I read the article, but I didn't see a single thing that suggests that there has recently been a technological breakthrough that will make it possible for a filter to restrict your child's access to things that you don't want them to see.

When they say filters, they are talking about things like Cybersitter, Net Nanny, etc. These things will still allow your child you view all the porn they want, and they will arbitrarily restrict your child from ??? things you don't even know.

You do not have, nor will you ever have, any way of influencing how such a filter works. How it works is not even documented, so you will never be able to check it. At least with Playboy Magazine, you can look at it once, decide it's not appropriate, and be fairly confident that banning Playboy makes sense. How can you do that with a millions of web pages?

Why do you support an initiative that will spend your tax money, while being guaranteed to not accomplish your objective, while at the same time having mysterious side-effects which you might not like (but also can't predict)?

---

Re:What happens when an unworkable law is passed?

[L-Train8]

The reasons why libraries are given contradictory mandates is that in a democracy with diverse constituents, there are frequently competing legislative priorities. We have the courts and the constitution to sort out which ones trump the other, though it can be a long and messy process. Hey, kinda like what we are seeing now.

As for PI, I don't know of any serious attempt to pass a law about this.

The biblical passage used to support the claim that pi==3.0 does not use a degree of accuracy that warrants that allegation. In 1 Kings 7:23, a circumference of a circular object (the basin in front of the Jerusalem Temple) is given as 30 cubits while the diameter is given as 10 cubits. Therefore, PI==3. But the bible does not give the measurements as 30.00000000000... and 10.000000000000..., so I'm not sure why this level of accuracy would be assumed. The bible does not say the basin is perfectly circular, either.

There is plenty of room for even hard core fundamentalists to find flaw with the argument, besides the obvious one about the observed value of PI.