Slashdot Mirror
Librarians To Sue Over Mandatory Censoring
JasonMaggini writes: "ZDNet reports the American Library Association is
planning to sue over the new federal law that is putting Web filters on public school and library computers. Great article title, too: 'Filter THIS!'"
Because historically Librarians have always held the torch for free information, no matter what it is. Also, didn't you ever see the "obsolete" twilight zone? Librarians are the scurge of the status quo in the future too!
These things censor a lot more than porn, as one of the previous Slashdot aticles on this showed. In one case it censored out the site of the company that made the software!! Sometimes you can't look up information on breast cancer because the word breast gets censored out.
I don't think that a 5 year old child should have access to a computer at all. I also don't think that it's a good use of my tax dollars to have computers in school. Schools need teachers, not computers. There is nothing that a kid needs to research on a computer that they can't get out of a book. It's bullshit to think that these kids need computers to research on the web. All the web is good for at that level is plagiarism. The school library should have books and if not then the parent should take their kids to a public library and check a book out for them. Of course too many parents are too self-involved to realize that its THEIR job to watch their kids. Or even to help educate them. Expecting software to take care of your 5 year old is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of....
The people who are most likely to think that libertarians are perverts are fascist dunderheads like yourself. Go find some totalitarian regime to live under, we like freedom here in America.
http://www.librarianse.cx/ :)
The work you are looking for is 'fuck'. /., fsck refers to fixing flaky *nix filesystems - certainly not the idea you wanted to convey.
Yes, it is often usually with sexual connotations, which is not the theme you were looking for; but, there's always a but on
There's nothing 'geeky-cool' about saying 'fsck' when you mean 'fuck'. Say what you mean, don't censor your own posts in a censorship debate.
BTW, how accurate a depiction of you is this:
age: early-to-mid-thirties
hair: brown, fuzzy
real name: mabel (maybe agnes)
height: 5ft 1in
talents: scone baking
notes: former Amish, now forsaken that path for the heady revelries of Mormonism and bake sales
???
>>Will they say it's the little kids right to masturbate in the library??
You think that's chewing gum on the underside of the tables?
Hmm, sounds like they should have somebody monitoring those 12 year olds. Why not use the only censorware that's 100% effective: the human brain? Just have someone walk by the computers every few minutes, or move the computers so the screens all face in the direction of a librarian's desk (they did this at my school's library and, while the they're-watching-you-over-your-shoulder feeling gets annoying, I haven't seen anybody downloading stuff they shouldn't be, so it seems to work well).
I knew I could sue an individual or a corporation, but didn't know about suing a law. Maybe it's just open season for suing. Can I sue this lawsuit? Or better yet, I should patent suing lawsuits and collect royalties on the idea.
Ha. A guy with the nick 'EMINEM' is offended at seeing naked women? Irony.
Seriously, I work in on of those great "public libraries" and it isn't the children I'm worried about. It is the over 18 crowd that come to the library to surf porn because their spouse/guardian/significant other might catch on at home. And seriously, I want an idiot filter. If you're stupid enough to visit the public library to surf porn and you're caught, I want the federal courts approval to tatoo "STUPID PORN SURFER" on their forehead. Plus the privledge to whack your head not once, but twice with a 2x4. Children need to know just how stupid the grown ups are. Oh, and for those of you sitting in the last back row of computers. We have a list of your names and 'PORN' written by them. Will never filter, I will develop a collection of web sites selected by the librarians for accentuating the printed collection. Thank you.
The Gov't offers a service, that service is that library. People speak softly in a library, why? Becuase the environment that is a library is one of study and research. Show me how looking at smut and porn at a public gov't funded library fits into this. You (being those against) say that they should be allowed to surf for such things for research or if it fits their fancy. Computers are common these days and access can be had for free so doing this 'research' at home is not an issue. What aout older librarys that don't even offer web-enabled systems, are they completely cutting off their people? Should they be taken to courth by the aclu for civil liberties violations? The same non-funds you speak of to upgrade and the same non-funds to install the machines in the first place.
It's stupid to sue and whine about this. Look for other avenues for constructive energies. I can pretty much assume about 60%+ of you have not visited a public library off-campus in at least a year. And if so, then what are you bitching about? Don't make a fight just so you can say you defended your unborn child, you don't even know their take on it.
I don't feel any of my rights as a public citizen will be taken away or violated, and yes I live in the states, if they install this software. I have access at home, at work, and friends houses.
If a child has to research porn and is under the age of 18, the school he is attending has issues that need to be addressed before you whine about him not being able to do that research at a public library.
Unfortunately, I think the best way to fight this is to point out how POORLY the filtering works. Paint it as a huge waste of money.
I'm not sure what would be unfortunate about this idea working. Life would be so much easier if using reason and logic against bad legislation (among other things) worked.
What is unfortunate is that pointing out why the filtering software doesn't work simply won't change anybody's minds in government. They think their constituents want them to "do something about all that filth on the Internet!", so they assume that means use filters. Other options probably never even came up.
(Gee, I wonder if Mattel has some lobbyists working the child protection committees...)
Zkb zdvwh brxu wlph zlwk EIL zkhq d olwwoh dqdobvlv jrhv d orqj zdbv? D vlqjoh-ohwwhu zrug pxvw eh "L" ru "D". Dq dsrvwursklchg vlqjoh-ohwwhu vxiila lv suredeob "v" ru "w". Hyhubwklqj hovh iroorzv qlfhob iurp wkdw...
If the ALA doesn't get a restraining order in time, I'm going to have to apply a filter toour adult users. Ok, since NO filter is 100% accurate, what qualifies?
Can I build a list of a few hundred sites, add in anything linked from persiankitty and call that our adult filter? (We already use an X-stop for children whose parents ask us to filter.)
Democrat delenda est
What's so hard to understand? Spam is wrong and porn is not.
--
That's ridiculous: it's nobody's business what I read. The exact opposite is the obvious solution: provide visual shields so that nobody can be offended by what is on my screen. Problem solved.
--
Read this as "Libertarians To Sue Over Mandatory Censoring?"
Fear my low SlashID! (bidding starts at $500)
Do not anger the worm.
Ah yes, that reminds me of the Apple ][s at in the high school library. (I was in HS in the early 80s.) Initially the machines were in a secluded area, allowing me and my friends to play zork on them to our heart's content. The librarians didn't like this so they moved them out into the open where the screens were easily visible.
After that I had to resort to writing countdown timers in applesoft that would continuously beep when they hit zero. Of course I was sure to disable control-reset. Then there was the time I downloaded a dingbats-like font to the library's Imagewriter. I actually got called into the principal's office for that one. The funny thing was, all you needed to do was turn the fucking thing off to fix it.
Indeed.
As for myself, I don't support censorship. The "back button problem" is not in itself an argument for censorship.
I do find it troubling, however, that purveyers of commercial porn on the net have no ethical problems with:
1) writing their sites to disable the back browser.
2) Using dictionaries to fool search engines.
3) Placing viruses on computers that redirect modem calls to a pay sex line somewhere in the Cayman Islands.
4) Placing a shitload of cookies on your computer, and advertising software that claims to "clean up" the cookies "so that wife/boss/husband won't know"
5) Generally abusing aesthetic discretion in the worst possible manner.
All of these problems can be eliminated through browser plugin. I, for one, would be most interested in a browser feature that accepts cookies only from named sites (e.g slashdot, nytimes, userfriendly, linuxvideo) and rejects the rest. Internet Explorer does this-- but only by rejecting cookies from all but trusted sites. This does cause a problem, because I really don't trust slashdot with my registry, etc, but certain other sites may need high level access to Windows.
(Netscape has similar issues...)
Damn it! I want fine grain control over my "browsing experience"
You can't always use the back button-- some adult sites (particularly the ones that try to fool search engines with dictionaries) fiddle with the "back" button, so that any "This is definately not what I'm looking for" reaction, is met with about 20 windows extolling their services. Some of the sites have Internet Explorer code that modifies the "home page" entry, so that upon returning, a user is greeted not with slashdot.org, but with a site extolling "Goat Sex, as brought to you by the Russian Mafia, in cooperation with UUNET."
"Sir, you've been hogging the color laser printer all day. We appreciate the revenue, but others are waiting"
I was visiting a friend who works in a primary school (grade school in US, I think - age 4 to 10) in France. Their library had books on the bottom shelf that had paintings and photos of nude men and women in them, and she didn't think that there was anything unusual about it.
All they need is to form a national filter list committee, and use Junkbuster, with some option for easily switching between filter lists. JB on Windows automatically detects the filter list file being written to, and reloads it. They could have a simple app that has lists for porn, hate speech, adverts, etc., that can combine the selected lists and write it to the block file. If it kicked in at logon and after X minutes of inactivity, it would reset back to the defaults and pop up a window informing the user, who can then turn it all off again. I haven't read the bill recently, and can't find it right away, but would this pass the requirements, or is an off switch not allowed? Could it be passworded, with codes issued to adults by staff?
I've also drafted a letter to Ralph Nader, explaining to him that he really was wasting his time crusading against the Corvair - I mean, they worked so poorly, why on earth did he get so worked up about them?
Thanks for pointing out the flaw in my logic.
---
Sure, you can argue all day long about infringing rights, etc, and a lot of people will just figure you want to see porn.
But show Joe Sixpack that he can't get any information on Superbowl XXX at his local library when this goes into effect, and you might get some grass roots support.
The evening news might pick stuff like that up - they won't give a rat's ass about cyber-rights.
Sad, but true, I think.
---
What a pathetic effort.
And by the way, public institutions (in the US) have the duty to uphold the US constitution. Including the bit about free speech.
Steve M
From the first amendment to the US constitution:
Congress shall make no law ... or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, ..."
Congress has passed a law that abridges speech and and the press.
You may not like goatse.cx but unless they are doing something illegal, they are protected.
Freedom of speech means nothing if it only applies to government approved speech. And by mandating filters the government is has stated that anything that is blocked is unapproved speech.
Steve M
And you continue to miss the point.
The governement (US) cannot put limits on how a message can be distributed. End of story. To pass such a law would be limiting the press.
As to your specific examples:
Computer shows disney.com and not goatse.cx - censorship? Yes it is censorship if there is a law that says you cannot show goatse.ex.
CNN shows Bill Clinton speak and not me - censorship? Not censorship as long as there is no law that bans CNN from showing you speaking.
As to your specific question:
The lack of coverage is not the issue. The law disallowing 'coverage' is the issue.
The constitution doesn't say congress shall pass no law ... except when it comes to the internet. It says congress shall pass no law. Period.
Steve M
It doesn't matter that you are running out of examples, as your examples are irrelevant. And you continue to miss the point.
As to Ice-T, there was no law that said his ablum could not be published. And it was censorship. But censorship in and of itself is not illegal. Federally mandated censorship is not allowed under the US constitution.
As to Andrew Dice Clay that fact that he has other outlets is again irrelevant to the issue at hand as there is no law preventing MTV from airing Dice Clay.
Censorship is not the issue. Federally mandated restrictions on speech is.
Here is the issue in bold (kinda like raising one's voice when speaking to foreigners):Manadated limits on speech or the press are not allowed under the US constitution.
Here is the first amendment to the US constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The law as passed limits the press. Regardless of whether it is censorship or not, it is forbidden by the US constitution.
Note that it doesn't say laws limiting speech can be passed as long as other outlets are available. Also note that is says nothing about the media of the speech. It is short and to the point. It simply says no law.
Ignoring for a moment that filtering software doesn't work, libraries are free to choose to install such software. And it may make sense to do so in the childrens section of the library.
And you probably would have the right to sue for a free speech violation in your library scenario. But you would probably run afoul of other laws for protection of minors.
So I'll ask you a question, which part of "Congress shall make no law ..." don't you understand?
Oh yeah, the reason the Spice channel isn't found between CBS and NBC is that it is a pay cable channel.
SteveM
The argument you're missing is that these filters aren't as smart as the humans that filter the book selection.
The online filters work as if you could get "Mein Kampf" in German because it only filters on English words and you couldn't get "Business @ the Speed of Thought" because the person writing the "book filter" didn't like Bill Gates. There was a report that at least one of the filters blocked liberal sites and none of the ultra-right-wing nuts' sites, and also prevented you from reading articles negative to their product, or belonging to people who had complained.
That is not a good thing. Do you really trust a third party to restrict your access to information? Should children also be prevented from buying sweets because they should eat vegetables instead? Or should they be allowed to learn that vegetables are better for you than sweets?
while the child learns why the rules exist.
A filter just does the "no" part, and does not answer the "why not" part. (Though the "why not" will usually be "because some arbitrary adult decided it for you".)
(perpetuates the myth that sex is a purely physical act, that sex is only about gratifying yourself, that sex outside the bounds of marriage is OK)
That's your political or religious agenda - others have different opinions on both porn and sex. Why should your opinion carry more weight than their?
So we have to filter.
No. What you fail to understand is that the filter does not know whether the person sitting in front of the computer is a child or adult. Children aren't allowed into violent movies either, so you will have to filter away violent content. And so on. And why should only children be protected? Blacks may not want to find white supremacist doggerel. White supremacist in turn may not want NAACP yadayada. Women abused on religious gounds may not want any pro-Christian content to appear. NAMBLA may be offended if you can read that sex with children is wrong.
Where do you stop?
(I won't even bother to stress the fact that the "children" are the users most likely to know how to bypass the filters in the first place.)
I would kill for moderation points right now.
But would this stop all the oh-so-EVIL pornographic stories stored as ascii text files?
Can you say flamebait?
This comment should be moderated into the toilet.
Dork.
comment directly in my journal
I'll ignore the anti-Semitic remark and agree with you by pointing out that Casanova was a librarian.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Because they want to protect freedom of speech. They didn't become librarians because they wanted to hit people with rulers. Librarians probably mostly love knowledge and freedom of thought. Not because they wanted to sit behind desks and peer over their half-rims.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Private entities may do whatever they please as far as censorship goes. The terms of the United States Constitution apply only to the United States government. If the government made it mandatory to block spam, that would be illegal censorship that should be stopped. If a company blocks spam on its own, that's their choice and that's ok. If I don't like it, I stop being their customer.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The interesting thing about posts like the above is this...it's no more trustworthy than Mike Sims' side of the story.
It's "he said, she said" at its best, and neither Sims' side nor the above sound like they're based entirely in reality. Each person indicates that they did *NOTHING* wrong and a set of events happened independently of them. BS. Something hadda have happened.
It's cool that you opt to believe the above, Seth, but since you'd already left...how do YOU know what happened?
-Jer
Umm...those aren't exactly the facts I was referring to...I was more referring to the back-story. The "why" (or lack thereof) behind it, etc. Again, I'm not taking a personal shot at any of you, I'm just saying that there's a great deal of "he said, she said" involved, and I tend not to put a great deal of faith in any side's representation of a situation when they have a stake in it.
Obviously the site is down. Obviously it's owned by Mr. Sims. It stands to reason that he took it down. The entire rest of the narrative lacks definitive content or evidences of any sort. Sorry, I'm just cynical I guess...
-Jer
> For instance, if a page has "sheit" on it (like many posts on /.) it would place ---- instead and let the page go through.
That reminds me of one of the winners of DFN's Foil the Filters contest, a former science teacher's website with a filtered forum. When postings starting showing up spelling "class" as "cl***", he removed the filtering software and hasn't used it since.
The winner of the contest was Carroll High School's library, whose censorware blocked the high school's own website for using the word "high".
--
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of s***ch, or the right of the people peaceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the government for a redress of grievances.
That will probably eliminate a lot of porn. Whether it's the right way to do it, though, depends on why someone wants to eliminate porn.
If we're eliminating porn because we want to stop people (who want porn) from getting porn, then your idea works. Likewise, the idea also works if we're eliminating porn in order to conserve bandwidth.
If we're eliminating porn because we want to stop people (who don't want to accidently see porn) from accidently seeing it, then that idea doesn't work. In that case, it seems like we want the monitors facing away from public areas.
Perhaps the anti-porn people need to be clearer about their purpose and agenda, so that we can better serve them. *evil grin*
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's Libertarians, not Librarians.
They've *always* had an anti-censoring stance.
:)
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Holy cow! You're right! Damn the internet, damn those butterflies!
der dee der.
Basically, the argument is that computer time at a public library is a finite resource that costs the taxpayer money, in the form of hardware and 'Net access. Therefore, time on those computers used for activities that "appeal to the prurient interest" (or whatever obscenity litmus test you want to apply) prevent other users from accessing "legitimate" sites (IE those that are assumed to be in line with the political and sociological views of the taxpayers).
I don't subscribe to that argument, but there it is. I think an unfiltered internet is far less dangerous to society than giving the keys to a private corporate entity would be.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
rotten.com's standard response to those who complain about children accessing their site is exactly that: "The net is not a babysitter".
If parents want a machine to raise their children, they should use the old friend television. It's all nice and sanitized for their protection.
Pqv qpna fkf K tgcf kv, K'o tgrnakpi vq kv. Ycu c hwp nkvvng uetkrv vq ytkvg. Kv lwuv vtkgf tqvP htqo 1 vq 26...
:)
K ujqwnf jcxg ytkvvgp kv vq urnkv vjg uvtkpi kpvq c yqtf nkuv, tqvcvg vjgo, vjgp fq c itgr cickpuv c fkevkqpcta nqqmkpi hqt ocvejgu. Kv rtqdcdna yqwnf jcxg hqwpf vjg rnckpvgzv cwvqocvkecnna.
Symmetrical encryption is much nicer to use.
Sv hmh csy nywx qiww yt mr csyv vitiexmrk sj xli gctliv? Jiww yt! :)
Don't forget how it hurts people looking for information that's very recent. I don't know about most people, but I find it hard to look through all the magazines and newspapers at my nearest library mainly because there's way too much to look through and most of the recent ones aren't even there half the time. My nearest library is also a pretty big one, too, so what about those people who live near libraries that aren't as big and don't have as many resources except one computer with internet access? There are books on subjects people might be looking for, but most of them are probably outdated by now except for the encyclopedias.
If you can't see the peacefire web site, try turning off of your filters. Most filtering programs have the site classified as everything from porn, to nazi's, to military, to gambling.
Probably a combination of negative reviews, saying how trivial it is to defeat some of this software also there is actually some profanity on there. But the profanity is in copies of emails sent sent from the staff of a filtering software company to unhappy customers. (The most likely point being are the kind of people who use this sort of language exactly "moral guardians".)
I'll stand by my prior remarks. There is a rich history of first amendment law dealing with book-burning and library censorship. Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982) (removal of "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy" books unconstitutional).
This is not to say that the points you made are meritless, only that they do not prove the point you suggest they prove.
1. Whether libraries may constitutionally use filtering software. . .
As to the first issue, I think they legally can.
Case law suggests otherwise. Mainstream Loudoun, et. al. v. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Public Libraries, No. CV 97-2049, (E.D. Va. 2000).
Forgive me for feeding a troll, but these two inanities are so trivially put down, I figured it was worth the bandwidth.
The simple fact is that public institutions have a right, nay, a duty to censor material. Do you want your 5 year old child to be able to see goatse.cx at school? I wouldn't. A public institution should confirm to public tastes and decencies. Anything else would be scandalous.
Bunk. In fact, it is settled law that it is unconstitutional for a public library to censor material. The only subtle issue in the cases is what types of conduct constitutes censorship.
Its not as though they are censoring useful information anyway. Everything they censor is useless porn. The only people who want to see that stuff are libertarians and perverts, who are both the same in many respects anyway.
Bunk. Thanks to the affirmative efforts of folks like Seth Finkelstein, it is also well-established that much substantive information is routinely censored by commercial filtering programs.
Or they can switch the thing to text, no pictures. Most folks can't read over shoulders that quickly I've found.
Sneering at something is an admission to failure. You are claiming superior talent or insight
The United States Supreme Court! Oh...wait.....um..
I can just see it now: amipornornot.com
>ICAAN could have made our lives alot easier by giving us a .sex or .xxx TLD. We could have neatly cubbyholed all of the porn.
not really. maybe the USian porn. You'll still have porn on most country TLDs, and no US law can do anything about it. and then there's ofcourse the definition of porn.. nudity? hardly.. intercourse? what about sex ed? remember.. you probably had pussy on your head when you were born..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
>So where else can a kid go these days to get some porn? The library.
until the kids discover cache-surfing
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Sure, but if the gov't has it's way, you'll have fewer and fewer ways of getting non-filtered material. The next step is to force ISPs that cater to the public to install filtering software. Then what will you do?
What they claim is that there are two internet's. There is the dangerous bad internet full of child porn and drugs, and there is the good internet that's all care bears and disney. And it is their product that makes the difference.
In fact, they cannot sell their product unless they can convince the public that they can offer the second internet to children.
The rest of us know that there is only one internet and there is no way to seperate out the 'safe subset'. Parents don't like hearing those words, they don't want to believe that there's only one internet, and it's an unsafe internet. Filtering companies want parents to believe that the choice exists.
Maybe if we offer alternatives (like my other post) to parents, they will stop believing the fiction of a 'safe internet', and look for alternatives that are reasonable.
Despite what filtering companies want us to believe, One does not have to believe in filtering to believe that parents should have choices for their children.
If filtering actually worked, I wouldn't mind it. If filtering banned what a majority of people called smut. But allowed anything that was gray to go through, then I wouldn't mind it so much.
Stuff which is obviously smut with no value. (pictures, stories, etc) doesn't have a place in libraries.. But, say, an educational site on masturbation (with pictures) is not something I'd call smut and should be allowed to go through. Now, some people feel that anything touching on sex should be blocked, and they would use filtering as an excuse for these excessive blocks.
The problem is that the filtering is ineffective. Automatic filtering cannot and does not make the above distinction. Human-based filtering suffers from a lack of manpower (of about 5 orders of magnitude). Thus, there is no way to do the ideal. There's no way to even approach the ideal.
As peacefire showed, a noticable fraction of the yahoo porn listings were let through by these 'filters'. Similarily, every few seconds, a child is blocked from a legitimate site.
So, in independent tests, filtering let's half of the outright porn through, and bans a lot of legitimate material.. To me, this is like indiscriminate shooting. Let's go into a bad neighborhood and shoot people at random. We might hit some guilty people by chance, but we'll hurt a lot of innocents.
If you can't see the peacefire web site, try turning off of your filters. Most filtering programs have the site classified as everything from porn, to nazi's, to military, to gambling.
If an only if you can show me filtering that does it's job, will I ever accept it. Blocking 90% of the million porn sites leaves 100,000 left; why bother? Using filtering as a way to censor knowledge from your children is bad. (Masturbation, alternate religions) And no filtering program must be allowed to block any educational site, whether that site deals with sexuality, learning about hate-groups, military strategy, guns. For the gains, 100,000 porn sites instead of a whole million, the cost is too much.
Since such a program cannot and does not exist, the most the libraries can do is to put the responsibility on the parent. No one under 18 is allowed internet access. A parent can permit access by their children and can choose among the options:
1. No access allowed.
2. Access allowed only if with an adult. Parent can later review visited websites.
3. Access allowed, parent has the ability to review visited websites. (With an optional time-limit for number of hours)
4. Access allowed, parent does not have the ability to review visited websites. (with an optional time-limit for number of hours)
All access is full access. If a child is with a parent, they get access through their parent's card. No one is allowed to sit in front of the computers without a card. (So a stranger cannot offer a a child access unsupervised.) The parent gets the flexibility for what level of monitoring, if any, their children get. It's also open; the child knows whether or not what they visit will be reviewed by their parents.
Heh.. With some GUI-ified TCL scripts and a squid proxy, this kind of system would be pretty trivial to set up.
Someone should make a public web anonymizer that would mangle (reverse, rot-13, whatever random) the domainname...
:)
I really like that idea, but the vast majority of web anonymizers out there are blocked by these censorware programs. I've tried The Internet Anonymizer as well as a few more selected scripts. They're blocked by BESS, which is the system here at Pomona. I've been thinking about setting up a private anonymizer that I could put on my box just for me, but it seems like a fairly futile point. Anyway, to sum things up, we need anonymizers to enter in anonymizer URLs.
Interestingly enough, the censorware program at my school [Pomona High School in Arvada, Colorado] blocks URLs in the address bar. Therefore, if the url shows up anywhere in the bar, as in
/ +slashdot&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:slashdot.org
the censorware proxy blocks it. Luckily, however, it doesn't block the ip address converting system proudly displayed in this season's issue of 2600. >:) Keep freedom of speech in schools alive. Please.
IANL, but I know that someone from the city or state level government can not sue someone from the federal government. I say this because a little awhile ago the army recruitors (sp?) in my city racked up a lot of money in parking fines, so my city government tryed to sue the army. That was the excuse that the government gave us.
Although, the ALA might be just an independant organization, so I'm not sure. Anyone know more on this then I do and care to comment?
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
I don't feel any of my rights as a public citizen will be taken away or violated
NEW LAW. Anybody with internet access in the United States MUST install this goverment approved filter. Only "politically correct" (govt. approved) websites will be allowed to be viewed.
I'm sorry that you feel just because you have access at home that you won't be censored at home (remeber that excellent piece of egislation CDA & CDAII). I'm sorry, but nobody in the government is my friend.
You can be replaced by a very small shell script.
fsck has been around in that usage for a while, just like the older pr0n/pron and a myriad of other mutations. Back in the day, certain message boards, chat forums and online services refused to pass words of the sort, sort of a lameness filter for the seven dirty words. AOL, Compuserve, Merit, (The Well?), etc, all tried variations on the theme. So porn became pr0n, fucks became fux, sex became s3x, reducio ad absurdum. In the same spirit, `nix geeks picked up fuck == fsck. So just deal.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Filtering software is a solution that doesn't work to a problem that doesn't exist.
I think we should just have a huge government database, freely accessible to all, that contains and catalogues all the porn on the internet. That way we can go there and check to see if what we're seeing on the internet is porn or not. Then we'd have a government approved seal stating that "This Image is Pornography." That way I could browse the database and know how to identify porn when I unwittingly stumble across it while surfing. I can arm myself in advance, lest I be taken unawares. I imagine I would check this database every day, just to see if any new porn has gotten on to the net, so I would be prepared with the most up-to-date information.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
At my highschool we have a filter. The thing that I like about it is that it tries to clean up the pages. For instance, if a page has "sheit" on it (like many posts on /.) it would place ---- instead and let the page go through. And it has blocked nasty pages (we teens are very nasty) that I even don't like. More times than not the proxy has not got in the way of research. If I couldn't do it from school, then I'll do it from home. As long as there is a way of getting non-filtered material.
The American Library Association is a professional organization, akin to IEEE. My parents are both librarians, and they usually send money to the ALA (they'll be sending more since I sent them the link to this article) and they particpate heavily in the state-level library association. There are also county level library associations. The strength of these organizations often determines how good library service is in a given area, especially with things like interlibrary loan.
Here then is a potential work-around: write our own.
Previous discussions here on /. have established that it would be difficult to create an effective open-source block list, because of the difficulty of trusting people who submit to the list; not to mention all of the usual problems inherent in censorware: regional differences in mores, overblocking, underblocking, etc.
So we ship it with an ineffective block list, say a token list of a dozen or so sites, and give the people who operate the software (e.g. librarians)the ability to edit block list. No competing censorware companies can point out that it underblocks, because their own products are guilty of the same thing.
... *librarians* are getting angry
Not pierced up tattooed crusties, or crazy religious sorts, or extremist politicians, but your honest little quiet respectable (pick your stereotype) community librarians.
Great angle. The media loves contradictions, it's a good punch line. The people who are supposed to be quiet and sweet getting riled up. The point is these people are the holders of knowledge in the country, you may have your own personal opinion about an individual one but I think the general perception is one of respect for a group of people who do their best to share information. I believe librarians are seen as 'respectable pillars of the community' etc and to hold the provision of information freely above their own political views.
I think if the public see that *these* people are getting upset, then something must be really wrong. I reckon Joe SixPack will sit up and listen. With all due respect I reckon he'll listen a lot more to the village librarian getting upset about his kids not being able to do their homework, than people he thinks of as irritating kids or mad scientists getting upset and trying to give him a technical description of why a paricular piece of software doesn't function efficiently...
Sad but true that these venerable institutions have to help kids through adolescence because the internet has reduced the number of hard copies to be stolen and hidden and found by mothers so that she can ground you. It's too bad that libraries have to have computers at all.....but if they have them then they have to have the right to be free. The biggest failure here is of the parents.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Seriously. It was filtered as ASCII art. I uploaded a copy onto my Crosswinds account. http://www.crosswinds.net/~kreeblah/slashCII.html
I don't think this is a big issue. If the site is giving primarily textual information rather than lots of big pictures, it is much harder to glance at the screen as you're passing by and figure out any of what's on it. Porn sites stick out pretty well.
I agree that people should not expect the library to "babysit" their kids. That's why I'm not concerned about preventing people from accessing any site. This primarily catches people who believe they have a right to use a public resource (library computers) for accessing porn, and do so.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
The library in the town my family lives in has an internet policy something like this:
Kids under 12 must be accompanied by a parent/guardian or relative over 18.
Kids 12-18 must either be accompanied or have a form on file signed by a parent/guardian stating that the parent understands that there may be material on the internet that they do not approve of, and that the child has permission to use the internet alone.
Everyone 18+ must have a signed form on file stating that they understand that viewing of pornography is against library policy, punishable by revoking of internet privileges.
Having a policy like this (and enforcing it) has pretty much killed any talk of filtering there.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
Libraries have dictionaries in them. In such dictionaries, you'll see lots of "objectionable" or "controversial" words. The public internet is much closer to the idea of a dictionary than it is to dirty magazines.
-Legion
Well, tough shit. I don't want my tax money going to fund military maneuvers out of the country, but that's part of living in a democracy.
That said, I somewhat agree with you...I don't like my tax dollars going towards much of what they call art these days either, but anything that turns Giuliani purple is A-OK in my book.
-Legion
-Legion
Sadly, the human brain is hardly 100% censorware. The results vary greatly from brain to brain..
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
OK, it is entirely possible that that is some pop culture reference that I am totally missing.
But if it isn't... that is, methinks, a mean and borderline offensive thing to say. I know the head librarian at my high school is a brilliant man; somewhat gruff, but intelligent and helpful. The staff also includes women of varying ethnicity and gender. And none of them are mean.
I'm going to pretend I didn't read the "Jewish" bit.
Like I said... I could be entirely missing the hypothetical pop culture referential humor here, in which case you may as well ignore me. Which you might do anyway.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
i think they should sue to their hearts' content. maybe it will get to the supreme court, and they'll strike it down as an overreaching of congressional power. congress has NO right to meddle in the affairs of public schools or libraries unless those libraries are receiving federal funds...
maybe then we'd see some backlash against other federal intrusions. i won't mention them due to the possibility of being accused of trolling, but it won't take much imagination.
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
Well, too bad they will probably have to filter this article judging by some of our past slashdot stories!
Go librarians go!
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
Goes to show, not all librarians are mean, red-headed Jewish women who insult innocent high school students.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
The federal government should not be able to tag on conditions to providing essential funding. It's like if you paid me to write you some software and I took your money then said I wasn't going to write it for you unless you quit smoking.
Really, it's just plain theft and extortion.
Rich
You make a good point, and I partly agree with it. Two objections though:
1) This is all about public schools ***and*** libraries. NOT public schools' libraries. I'm much more worried about censoring public libraries.
2) The federal government shouldn't be bothering with this, except to limit what grounds libraries _can't_ censor on.
I don't see a problem with libraries--and definitely school libraries--deciding not to pick some stuff up, but the government shouldn't be the ones to tell them what to carry or not.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Prior to the advent of the Internet, there really wasn't any way that a library, public or not, could censor. They choose to carry materials, or not, and they have broad discretion in making those choices. You can't, for example, sue your local library because they've chosen not to carry Playboy (or any other publication you might want).
Similarly, contrary to the ALA's annual statements in connection with Banned Books Week, removing a book from circulation at a library is not in any way the same as banning that book--but this is somewhat of a tangent.
There are really two distinct issues here:
As to the first issue, I think they legally can. I've heard some fairly strong arguments on both sides, but I expect that the analogy of a selection policy would hold up. Libraries indisputably have the right to create a policy for selecting materials to purchase for the library, and this is probably close enough.
As to the second issue, it's a bit tougher. In general, the federal government can give money away with lots of strings attached, even if those strings are things they couldn't otherwise enforce. Remember the 55 MPH speed limits? Further, nobody has a constitutional right to government-provided Internet access. There's not even any direct application of the First Amendment, as that amendment does not mention a right to read whatever you want. However, the Supreme Court may well consider that right to be implied by the freedom of the press, and that, I think, is the ALA's only real hope here.
if the main argument of anti-censorware people is that "breast cancer" sites would be blocked, why not let the librarian know, and they will take that particular site off the "bad" list (i'm assuming any programmer worth more than 1 lira would add an "allowed explicitly" site list to their product)?
Again, as i said above, i don't think censorware right now is the good answer to the problem... it's merely the only cost-effective one.
If you people don't like how it works, write your own, that is better AND free ;)))
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
That is the whole point of the issue. I - and zillion other people like me - have no beef with "advanced", "politically incorrect", etc... art, speach, whatever. The beef is, we don't want it to be paid for by our tax dollars.
For example, the now-infamous NYC fight between Rudy Guliani and the museum wasn't over the museum's right to display the stupid painting (and kill me if I consider that piece of s**t - pun intended - art), like all the librul noismakers made it sound. It was over the fact that said painting was displayed with PUBLIC FUNDS. They wanna do it in private museum - sure, i have no problem with that (other than wondering about sanity of the artist, critics and viewers). But I don't want my tax money used for it. This has NOTHING to do with First Amendement which deals with laws restricting speach - merely with not having to pay for it. Ditto NEA issue.
Arts should be like science - if you want to fund whatever you want, you either make it worth the money and submit a proposal to NSF, or seek private funding.
-DVK
P.S. Now let's see how far down this gets moderated in the name of freedom of speech ;)
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
Public libraries should not be dissemninating advertising at taxpayer expense, right?
I mean come on, which are you going to fear more, filtering software that gives you a nice, pretty "That page is unviewable" message, or a pissed off teacher yelling "Billy! What are you looking at! Go to the principal's office..."?
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
Besides filters not working.
Govt has no right in censorship of its people. The US Govt should not have the authority to deem what material is appropriate for it's people. That is one of the freedoms here in the United States. We do not live in China where the govt dictates our lives. If a legal adult is at a library looking at inappropriate material or reading "questionable" materials, that is his/her choice... the Govt has no rule on what is appropriate or not for it's legal adult citizens.
Ever need an online dictionary?
This is funny and true but most of the porn on the net is very different from the porn I found in my dads stash. The overall "Obscenity" (sp?) level of the sites is far higher. Playboy, for instance wouldn't likely run pictures of some chick letting 5 guys shoot loads all over her. Don't know whether that's good, bad or indifferent but it's my take....
ICAAN could have made our lives alot easier by giving us a .sex or .xxx TLD. We could have neatly cubbyholed all of the porn. Whether or not you block it is another story altogether.
Forgive my rambling but this is one of the most divisive and difficult issues that I've considered in awhile. First of all, I'm disapointed in those that place the blame on parents for "not supervising their children 24x7". I'm a parent and I'd like to think that at some point before my daughter turns 30, dropping her off at the library to do some research, reading or studying wouldn't be a moral outrage.
Duuno, this seems like a clear first amendment issue but there are so many places where porn just isn't allowed for reasons that amount to the "greater good" that I don't see how we can get around having some sort of filter - the slippery slope if you will. Another thing that strikes me about this issue is the age of the combatants and how their ages affect their viewpoint. Seems like the older folk (not terribly old either, maybe 35+) likely don't understand just how pervasive the Internet seems to have become. The final solution is probably a ways off, the filtering tech just doesn't seem to be there.
Not that I agree or disagree with you but this is precisely what makes this issue so tough. The constitution defends (as long as Janet Reno isn't pissed at you) the rights of everyone regardless of whether they are in the minority or not. The problem here occurs at one of these strange crossroads that the internet has created: most everyone agrees that censorship is bad and most everyone agrees that having 10 year olds watch some girl or guy shove a 12" dildo into their ass is also bad.....
Except that you'll also hear people complaining about things like the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List because it's going way too far. I'd say that the overall opinion on the matter was very strongly leaning toward the "blocking whole blocks is evil" side, not the "it's OK" side.
Ultimately, though, you're missing an important point. Spam blocking is about me controlling what I see by filtering out unwanted messages. Filtering is about other people controlling what I see by deciding which content is OK. MAPS RBL got blasted because its policy changed from the desirable (letting me block messages from known spammers) to the undesirable (blocking messages for the political reason that their originator was associated, however distantly, with spammers). If you can't see the difference, you're blind.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
This just isn't as good an argument as it sounds at first. The big problem is that by restricting public funds to art that doesn't offend anyone, you inherently reduce it to the most boring, insipid of the lot. A substantial role of art is to provoke thought and controversy, so by preventing funding of controversial art you eviscerate the purpose of funding it in the first place.
But if you truly follow the NSF/NIH model, you're not going to prevent funding of offensive art. Why? Because NSF and NIH fund projects based heavily on peer review, and depend on the informed opinions of top people in the field about what areas of science are most worth investingating. If you translate that into the NEA, you'll wind up with funding for art projects being doled out on the advice of other top notch artists, most of whom won't share your opinion about the undesirability of controversial artworks.
Just so this doesn't seem completely academic, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC is a great example of what I'm talking about. The Memorial Wall was the winner as judged by a panel of artists, but the politicians didn't like it because it inherently presents the decisions about the war in a negative light. They wanted to kill the proposal in favor of a conventional monument with a statue of a group of Nam era soldiers that wasn't going to offend anyone, but wound up compromising by building both. Today, everyone knows about the Wall, and it's one of the most popular monuments to visit in DC and just about nobody knows or cares about the other half. If you base your decisions on the principle of not offending anyone, you're going to get the half that's ignored, not the half that's considered the greatest war monument in the world.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
At a guess, I'd say that's made up of LIBRARIANS
I notice that your email address is @americanwicca.com, so I am going to gamble that you are wiccan or at least interested in & supportive of wicca...
Do you believe that people should be able to look up sites like americanwicca.com using public computers? I assure you that most censorship solutions will try to block everything to do with wicca...
This has NOTHING to do with First Amendement which deals with laws restricting speach - merely with not having to pay for it. Ditto NEA issue.
Intriguing. Try this on for size. The parts of the Internet you object to are free with the rest of the internet (Note that I am not saying that Internet access is free, only that the "bad" parts come free as an extra bonus to the "good" parts that yo apparently ARE willing to pay for. Internet porn does not cost anymore than the rest of the Internet). Censorware on the otherhand does incur an additional cost above and beyond that of standard Internet access. So you are in effect not paying for the "bad" stuff on the Internet, but you will be paying to stop it. This lead me to the conclution that either your arguemnet is flawed (you are NOT paying for it) or you are argueing that ALL Internet access should be taken out of the public libraries (At which point you will not be paying for any content, "bad" or "good".)
I also feel compelled to point out that art is intrinsically not like science. It is the Antithesis of science. Science is the purest form of objective work, art the purest form of subjective work. Most of what we as human do blends the two in some way. If art were treated like science it would loose it's value as art.
Finally, let me say that I, no more than you, believe that anyone should be able to veiw whatever they want on a public terminal. I simply don't beleive that censorware is a viable judge for what is appropriate. I am personally a fan of the librarian as the judge, since he or she is the person who must answer to the community. if the librarian allows children to view sites that the community would deem inappropriate, it's their butt on the line. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather with the "Irrate parents will get you ass fired" rule. Make sure terminals are set up to allow the librarian to monitor use. Some stuff will get through, but probably no more or no less thab gets through filtering software, and the chance of things like Breast Cancer Awareness sites being blocked is reduced to nill.
In closing, allow me to point out that I would really like it if this site developed a spell checker.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
By some metrics, you are probably the second best troll on slashdot (after Jon Katz, who wins on every metric).
It disapoints me, though, that your posts are never particularly useful or insightful in themselves -- rather, they are only inciteful, useful only as a means of promoting discussion.
So, my question to you is this, Mr. New Lover's Arrival: does it bother you that you are not interesting yourself, except for in your ability to spur interesting people to disagree with you?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
The simple solution is to refuse the federal money. It is naive to think libraries can take all that E-Rate money with out any strings attached. Congress is refusing to provide the E-Rate subsidy to institutions without filters. By refusing the subsidy they aren't depriving anyone of their rights.
There is no right to free unfiltered Internet access. There is not even a right to free or subsidized, but filtered Internet.
attached.
I'd have to agree that kids will be kids and will certainly take advantage of poorly monitored libraries. While I'm certainly not a fan of censorship I don't think I want my kids completely unprotected.
From what I understand the biggest problem with censorware is the fact that it's all copyrighted as IP and the minute some kid finds a way around it and publishes it or discovers the secret "ban" list bans x political party and grandma's family photo album. Not to mention how uneffective it is. Why not compromise and work on an open source censor ware. At least this way admins could modify the criteria and now what they are filtering etc. Also watch groups can make sure it's not going to far and filtering useful data. Perhaps it could even utilize a rating system so people of X amount of age can have more access to profanity or children could get parental consent and what not based on a login or simular.
I think we all realize that the best resoultion to this is to have enough workers in the library to keep an eye out for abuse of internet privilages by children but it's hardly applicable. When is the last time you remember your legislator dumping money into the library system for more employees by selling the governors fleet of jets? Certainly not here in the Great state of MS...
Also the other advantage is the fact it would be free... save us some tax dollars and maybe snub censor ware companies all together.
you apparently don't have children. I know kids will find it and what not, but i'm certainly not going to endorse it.
Other people have brought up my my main objections to filtering: filters suck, blocks sites about VD, impotence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I really haven't seen my point directly stated, so here it is...
So what if people see porn. If an adult wants to walk into his local public library and see porn, good for them. SO WHAT??? The public library in my area is set up so the content of the monitors is very private, and seeing someone else's screen is quite hard. You can only see it if you try.
But what about my youngster? Well, the best method for encouraging/stopping your kid from seeing or liking porn is talking to them. If you say, "Little Timmy, in real life we don't do it like this, or with animals, et cetera...", you can basically stop the child from reacting to porn in a proactive way. Porn, in many ways, is like a violent video game, if they understand what's involved, they won't be "scared for life."
Just my .02.
My email is real.
Don't you mean 'republic' instead of 'democracy'?
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Which filtered out all the requests to www.sussex.edu ;-)
Maybe theyll have to take Tarzan of the shelves. again too, back in the day it was removed from the shelves of LA public libraries because Tarzan was "living in sin" with Jane....
--aiee
God bless the Google cache.
--aiee
It's amazing that Slashdot posters agree that porn should not be censored from public libraries, yet censoring entire network blocks in the name of "eliminating spam" is ok.
I propose that in accordance to Slashdot logic we ban all library ip's at the backbone router level to stop spam and other forms of network abuse. I see no reason to subsidize via taxation the porn habits of perverts or the internet purchases of consumers.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you want to make sure kids aren't seeing dirty pictures, make them use lynx. Ditch the GUI entirely. People may whine that now the web is hard to use, but this is, after all, just an extreme version of what filters are already doing. Removing content from the web.
1) The people who should be advocates for library users (library boards and staff) lack spines;
2) The poor, who depend on libraries for their web access, don't contribute to political campaigns.
Case in point: Memphis/Shelby County Public Library resisted installing filters for years(well, at least a couple), until a local archconservative anti-pr0n crusader, your stereotypical suburban soccer mom basically, was elected to the county commission. Somehow, she ended up on a budget committee, and threatened to cut the county's contribution to the library system by 25%--some $4M--if they didn't install filters, which they wasted no time whatsoever doing. Never mind that the library has otherwise successfully resisted responsibility(or, more to the point, liability) for babysitting children, including allowing the little varmints access to Playboy and The Joy of Sex. Never mind Peacefire. Never mind that this latter-day Comstock represents a district where most households have their own computers(and do you think that Dick and Jane are even slowed down by the filter that Mommy put on the family PC? Doubt it!), whereas most of the people actually affected by this decision live in the inner city. Point is, libraries are a big, slow-moving target for social conservative politicians looking for an easy score, which is to say, all of them.
The thing that gets me is that so many of these people, who are otherwise more than enthusiastic about homeschooling and free exercise of their religion and so on, are so insistent on the public library being responsible for enforcing morality. They just don't get it that the only filter that works is what they teach their kids regarding right and wrong--no, not what they tell their kids, but what they can make their kids believe.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Can anyone explain to me how porn in libraries cost taxpayers money? It cost taxpayers nothing. What I don't want to my taxpayer dollars wasted on censorware.
you don't have to endorse it. you just have to prepare them for it, and find a way to teach them to reach conclusions that you as a parent find palatable.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
When I was in school we had someone who would creep around the stacks, presumably late at night, defecating in books in a seemingly indiscriminate pattern. Still, I've never found sticky pages in a library book...
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
you are giving the Nazi's a bad name!
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
...a whole Bewulf cluster of these?
Keeping
I just thought I'd point out the Digital Freedom Network's Foil the Filters contest. Many fine examples of censorship gone wrong. DFN contest
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Case law suggests otherwise
aside from direct case law, if free library internet access is paid for by taxpayers, don't those same taxpayers have the right to an unfiltered service?
what I'd LOVE to see as a solution to this is a few brave ISPs out there giving free internet access to their local library, in return for an unfiltered service to the public. that would be outside federal US law I think...
Er... apologies to moderators for the extra +1 on the above post... Not knowing what it does, I forgot to click on it... =(
However.. I will add one more thing... your example of schoolkids and teachers works well, as I, too had imagined. However, what about libraries? Policing that is troublesome, and enforcing punishment even more difficult.
Heh, sorry you didn't catch my sarcastic tone, but you basically wrote out the exact point I was driving at. IMHO, I've never trusted a programmed filter.
Maybe next time I should just come out and say it, considering you got higher moderation points... (sniff)
For now, the filters simply don't work. Some sites fool children to go to adult sites by inserting words like "Pokemon", while as stated in the article, health articles with the word "sex" in it are filtered.
At least in school, the computer lab "teacher" can somewhat look over the kids' shoulders, but that sure leaves libraries in a bind. Hate to say it, but we really don't have much else of a choice but to go back to trusting humans.
I'd have to agree that kids will be kids and will certainly take advantage of poorly monitored libraries. While I'm certainly not a fan of censorship I don't think I want my kids completely unprotected.
Try this new-fangled thing called education. You can try to ward children from untoward and unpleasant influences and hide from them things that make us uncomfortable like sex, violence, and whatnot... but the world will show it to them sometime when our gaurd falls. The only TRUE defence is education, raising your children to be strong, sensible, and to know right from wrong. If you street-proof your children, that goes a lot further (as does regular participation in the life of your child, rather than letting the child meander through life unsupervised and unattended) than any step to "protect the innocent" ever will.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
The existing laws against public indecency should surely suffice.
unless they're surfing for pr0n while they're supposed to be working...
# debian/rules
Dude, I get porn from the library... the library rocks.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
At school, no.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
Why? Does government funding have bad sectors or i-nodes or something?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
You haven't tried much wiccan-friendly censorware, have you?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
I believe that is the purest form of trolling. He is merely striving for perfection. Can you blame him?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
Explore a dictionary.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
Bootable CDROM
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
I really did not want to think about you not thinking about that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
TEE-HEE!
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
So, walk a block the pubic, err, public library. Pubic, err, public schools are usually a black hole of information anyways.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
I actually renamed fsck to fuck.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
YOUR LIBRARY rocks... but I've already stated as much.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
Man, your library sucks. At my library, we have a limit of 8 pages of porn.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
But how do you find out the site's IP address? Our clueless sysadmin has disabled DOS, what with it being a giant security hole and all.
:\ I wish I could though; proxy.uen.net seems to be using AOL as its service provider.
At any rate, the Akamai trick is useful for viewing a single web page only, and even then, it takes much longer to load.
Changing the proxy settings won't work at my school, unfortunately
Filtering software sucks. A teacher at my middle school accually was trying to get cyberpatrol removed because it filtered out so many useful sites.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
I have two children and I wholeheartedly agree with Tomin8tor. Education is the key. Children need to be prepared for the world and not simply shielded from it.
Defecation occurs.
Playboy is a gateway form of porn. Once you've started there, you move on to more and more explicit forms of porn and eventually you find yourself being beaten with a leather whip by a women in black leather named Jade while you're shackled to a ceiling fixture... oh the humanity!
Defecation occurs.
In a public school library you cannot find magazines like Playboy, Elle, or Martha Stuart's Living. Nor is a Kama Sutra available on the shelves or even by request. You won't find any pictographic history books of the Holocaust in the children's area. Looking for details on making beer or building a still? You strike out once again in the school library.
All this is fine with me. Filtering is a good thing with regards to children. It may be okay to say "Shit, fuck, pour hot grits down my pants" on Slashdot. Sometimes you actually get mod'd down for saying that. In the classroom you're sure to get detention.
You might get expelled for for bringing naked pictures of Natalie Portman or other pornographic (insert your own definition of that here) materials to class and showing them to your friends. Why? Because it's disruptive to the learning environment. Besides, why should our tax dollars be used to deliver potentially offensive/disruptive/abusive/racist/etc content when there are so many other things of educational value to have access to.
yea to the librarians and the aclu! it is so absurd to think that the government should come in to public libraries and dictate what content is provided. the biggest problem that i see (other than censorship) is that the rules are there but the funding to install the hardware/software is not provided. anyone who has been in a government job knows that the top may create rules, but they are so far away from those who actually have to carry them out. we'll see what happens under the new leadership of the country. will this get worse with a conservative that isnt the sharpest knife in the drawer?
good point. However it doesnt resolve the issue of where private funding usually comes from and who it is usually given to. Unfortunately it is usually given to those neighborhoods that are "better off" anyway. Neighborhoods of color and/or poor ones usually do not get consistant private funding. Many people will be left out with this kind of strategy.
This seems like money wasted by the federal government if they think filtering is going to help. I can get around the filter at school by using the IP address or GOD FORBID changing the proxy settings. These are just the simple ways. The thing is moral issues aside you are not going to solve anything. Granted not everyone knows how to do this but all it takes is one person to teach a lot of people how to do something. You would be surprised how much technologicaly inept people can learn to do if they want to (as they would in some cases)
Right... do you know how reliable filter software is? To the extent of my knowledge, there is no solution available that simply censors "useless porn". Most of the censor software I've seen will not censor all porn (i.e., there are things that will slip by), and will censor useful information. Many companies that produce censor software won't even allow access to the list of sights they ban, or how they work. Will I still be able to look up information on how to prevent getting STDs, or correspond with support groups.
I do think that what children view should monitored, but not by software. Real living people should step in to raise children.
libraries need the money for upkeep. Much like how the government raised the legal drinking age to 21, restricting road funds to states that didnt comply. For years, lousiana didnt comply because they made enough money from gambling. However, most states did because they need the money.
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Bottom line is that most parents don't like the idea of their kid having access to hardcore porn around the block at the local library. Yes, we all know that filtering software doesn't work perfectly, but it works a heck of a lot better than using no filtering software at all. Given the two alternatives: accidently blocking some health-related sites and blocking most of the porn or not accidently blocking anything and allowing all porn most parents will choose the former.
If you truly are disturbed because the filtering software filters geniuine topics such as health web sites and the like then go out and create a filter solution that will work, don't just sit around and complain and expect something to happen because of it.
If you are disturbed by libraries censoring porn because you believe that you have the constitutional right to access porn using tax-payer funded equipment then I'm sorry but you are in the minority.
If you think you know librarians (you little smarty pants) check out the (body) Modified Librarian's page at http://www.bmeworld.com/gailcat/
or any of the Anarchist Librarian sites (ask your librarian for help if you can't find them).
The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was his name wasn't really Henry Porter...
You heard me right.
I am definitely for government addressing inequities in resource distribution, opportunity, and the restrictions of democratic rights. I am not for a government using its federal funds to control workplace activity to the point where the first amendment is either broached completely, or the interpretation of the first amendment is put into the hands of commercial surf-protection software concerns.
The only hope here is resistance by anyone who has a principled stand on freedom of speech, i.e. the people. The librarians here are of course an example of such resistance. They are using the judicial system to challenge a (constitutionally) unfair regulatory infringement on their civil rights.
However, the government will eventually push this far enough that it is better to seek funding from alternative sources. Eventually, the government will not be a viable source of funding for the best artists and social programs- the ones that are decidedly politically incorrect.
This can lead to a degradation of those agencies that receive such funding, but I hope that private and charitable sources can step in, without restricting the freedoms of those who they presume to help.
Goat sex free since 2001
Well, now look what porn has gone and done!
Here is what I think. These computers that are receiving the filterings are at the libraries. So, if you are looking for something on the computer, and it brings up a "questionable material" page...then go check out a book in the library on the subject...shut up! I know this really sucks...but hey, your at the LIBRARY. Usually when I am at the library I read actual books, not go online and burn my eye's out worse than they are already.
Did I mention this really sucks? Some of the reasons this sucks; some libraries won't have the material the internet does. Some people don't have computers at their disposal, hence the library (free information) has them. Whatever book your looking for could be checked out. And filtering, censoring just plain sucks. If someone wants to look at a particular subject matter or material, I think that person has a right to read/see/research whatever he/she is looking for.
If I have missed anything...please list more suckiness below. Who is this really hurting? Who is this really helping? I think this is going to prove malicious to the human mind. Whenever you censor or "prohibit" things, people tend to get upset. And usually tend to rebel in some sort of way. I hope the sys admins at libraries are ready for an assault on the censory systems, and even the network. I totally disagree with this plan.
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????
While current law prevents most public institutions from engaging in censorship, does it mandate that schools and libraries provide kids the tools with which to engage in perversion when their parents have entrusted them to said institutions? No. If the law forbids such filtering (yes I know its quality is rather dubious) then just "unplug" those institutions.
In a school without a computer for the students use, REAL education might take place. Home use of the net is commonplace and even without it kids
have learned to read and write.
The Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, but does not guarantee that you be provided an audience or a medium at taxpayer expense. In otherwords the government can't censor what is on the net, but it also doesn't have to make the net available in a public place, at all.
The government which governs least, governs best!
Fear the government that fears your gun!
I agree with you-why put down more rules when all it makes people do is try to go around them? MY LIBRARY needs it but I think that the descision should be on the LOCAL level not national...ok that's all...
lol I thought that this name was unique and un /. esque!
I go to the library to get books...not to get on the net...I have my own pc..BUT some ppl say that kids go to the library to work on school and 'cause they are to poor to have a pc...well not at MY library...I went in there today and there were kids printing off the 4 page limit of porn(after that the sweet old lady at the fron desk charges $.05 per page) These kids are 12 and 13! They dont need to go to the LIBRARY to get porn! I doubt that the parents would give the nod for such activites...and I doubt that the people on /. that get porn GET IT FROM THE LIBRARY! I am offended when I see nude women on all the screens at the library, What's next? Will they say it's the little kids right to masturbate in the library??
they don't do their job. they are around 25% effective at keeping out "the bad stuff" -- never mind the fact that they dismiss many sites that are educational, artistic, or otherwise beneficial to humanity. i put the above in quotes because it information can't be bad, only people can (hey, i just made that up! i should make a tshirt!
that is a good question, one that brings to mind equal protection under the law. Only those who's last recourse is the public or school library are hurt by this law, which can be shown to be the poor and minorities. Given that w is in office because a mojority of the supreme court hid behind the equal protection clause of the constitution, maybe they should be hit with that repeatedly for the next four years.
but poor illiterate uneducated folks, white or minority, can still shoot guns. which is pretty scary to those of us in the master race/master class who know a little about history.
what will it be? power comes from the barrel of a gun, or the pen is mightier than the sword? Sure i'm being extreme. but who knows what will finally fuck things up.
When I was still in high school a few years ago, my school implemented a filter to block internet sites they found objectionable. No one really minded until it started affecting research in the library. For one of my classes I had to look up something (I don't remember what it was now), but the best sites were blocked for some strange reason. I asked the librarian if there was a way of turning the filter off for those sites, and he said the filter was controlled by the board of education. Being as stubborn as I am, I wouldn't accept their "This site has been blocked" message, and was determined to find a way past it. The result? I discovered that by going to altavista.com's web page translator, typing the URL of the site in, and telling it to translate from another language to English, the site would load perfectly (although a little slowly) because it was being re-directed through a site which was not blocked. So in conclusion, filtering does not prevent students from accessing sites they shouldnt, it only prevents students with low technical skills from accessing information they need for reports.
Please also note that I believe filtering the internet in public schools is an attempt to restrict freedom of speech, especially when "contraverisal" topics such as abortion are filtered to "protect the students". That was the reasoning behind the filtering at my school.
~Ken