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!'"
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.
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.
--
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"
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
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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."
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
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?
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.
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...
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.
God bless the Google cache.
--aiee
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have wrestled with this problem in my mind a lot and I am glad that ICANN did not provide a .sex or .xxx TLD. Censorship should not be easy, acceptable, or effective and TLDs should be approved because they make it easier to access information, not suppress it.
P.S. I do think that ICANN's choices for new TLDs are incomprehensible. Are museums and cooperatives so numerous on the net that they really need their own TLDs?
What is a moral outrage is the contention by some parents that an entire portion of the public should have their access to the Internet be limited because those parents want to prevent their children from accessing porn. Legislated filtering will not just affect children. Many low-income people have no access to the Internet other than their local public library. Many students doing work for school rely on public library computers for research. And what gets blocked by these filters is everything from information about the holocaust to articles about prostate cancer.
Seems like the older folk (not terribly old either, maybe 35+) likely don't understand just how pervasive the Internet seems to have become.
Well, sonny, I'm on the late side of 39 and have six computers networked together in my house (even have one in a bathroom). I am very aware of how entrenched the Internet is and that is all the more reason that we have to give free and unfiltered access to every U.S. citizen, whether an impoverished inner-city resident at a public library or a six-figure software engineer in the suburbs.
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." - ????
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??
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