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.