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Congress Discovers Peer-to-Peer Porn
imipak writes: "The
BBC report that a Congressional Report on file sharing software has wheeled in that trusty old warhorse that always seems to turn up in government attempts to restrict freedom: children and pr0n. Apparently, "search for the word 'porn' on BearShare results in more than 25,000 entries, many of them video files." Who'd a'thunk it?" Don't miss the actual report, which makes for amusing reading, especially the carefully blotted-out screenshots.
seriously, these people need to calm down a bit. aside from maybe usenet, i doubt there is a free flow of illegal porn.. fuckign christ.... but god forbid they actually check the truth of the situation. sensational bullshit works so much better
So what if kids download some porn? Is little 12 year old Johnny gonna go out and start sleeping around with all the girls he can?
Odds are, if you did a study, you'd find that the amount of sex people get is inversely proportional to the amount of porn they download. That is, the people who download the most porn get the least sex.
So parents, if you want your kids to remain virgins till the age of 35, let them download all the porn they can!
And as long as the people in the film are willing adults, who gives a flying turd? :)
Whether or not your girlfriend likes it, you both should consider the ramifications of the creation and distribution of pornography on the role of women in society. I mean, I used to believe that too. Consenting. Adults. Who make more than I do. But, really, there are deeper issues. I won't lecture to you about them, but depending on how progressive you are you may want to read the gender-equality literature upon the matter. (I hesitate to call it feminist, because of the stigma attached to that word, but you get my point.). There's plenty of erotica out there that's far different from the mainstream pornography, and less reprehensible to support. Yes, this includes things in film media
More to the point, however, is that there's not a fucking thing wrong with letting any child see any kind of sexuality for which she or he asks. Period. The idea that you can have a child witness a killing, but not a bare breast, is, frankly, in my opinion fucking insane. There's no reason sex should be less taboo than violence. If anything, the word "kill" or "murder" or any movie in which there are sound effects while people are being hit (and in this list I include "power rangers") is in my opinion inappropriate for all people under the age of 21. If we enforced this, and let sexuality reign free, except insofar as it concerns violent or coercive scenarios (which preteen pornography necessarily includes, by virtue of the fact that a movie studio is the one paying for a child to have sex on videotape), then we should live in a much better world than is ours now. The fact that I disagree with some of the ideas this might spread is no reason to restrict it -- if it were up to me, people wouldn't watch religious shows, but religion I think should be as free as sexuality, although the former is far more damaging to society. The term holy war strikes no one as an oxymoron, and this is with good reason.
You can tell I'm very weird, and if you knew more you would think I'm even weirder (I think there's nothing wrong with killing a newborn even, although it's unpalatable, because she or he has no personality yet, while at the same time I lead a v**** [don't want this in search engines] life-style, eating or using no animal products. I refuse to patronage (is that the word?) movies that have violence, but I think any child should be allowed to watch any non-violent sexual act the child wishes to. At the same time, I refuse to support the pornographic industry because of its societal impacts. I spend a large percentage of my money on charities, and am keenly aware of the suffering throughout the world, but I hold no faith in any God. I am firmly Republican in ideals, insofar as I think the population are sheep and don't know what's in their own best interests [Clinton once mis-spoke that he could spend your money better than you can -- and you know what? I agree with him. We wouldn't have a space program if we were Democratic, nor any government funded cancer research. Half the population voted for Dubya. There's proof enough that we need to move toward a Republican state, rather than a Democratic one, which simply means that it's better to let intelligent persons select our policies than the average voter. I reiterate: the average voter voted Bush into office. Bush], but at the same time I support almost exclusively the Democratic party. I assure you that all of my positions are meticulously thought-out, infinitely self-consistent, and based on wide readings in many philosophies. Our world is not sensible always, but one can take positions sensible with her philosophies. This includes free sexuality, but not patroning pornography. Go figure.)
Anyway take from this what you will.
(AC disclaimer: I'll read replies on this, because it's under my thread.)
I don't give a damn about the children.
That's a swell argument that, other than letting you feel important, isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
parent: "I worried about my child seeing anal gangbangs."
you: "Fuck you."
parent: "Ok. Boyz, shut down the internet..."
washington: "Sure thing."
Unless you can convince people that what they perceive as a problem isn't a problem at all, you're going to lose.
I could see this as being a lead in for a charge against all P2P file shareing in the US. Or at least putting a negative spin on it to the US public in general.
I wonder if they are going to try and regulate Gnutella in anyway, of course it's next to impossible but I wonder if they could outlaw a computer protocal? Do you think it's impossible for them to make a computer protocal illegal?
Did you notice how many times they mentioned searching for "Britney Spears"? If my kid's searching for Britney, I sure HOPE it's for porn. If it's for the music, I've got a bigger problem on my hands!
The report deals with the topic of kiddy porn. This might be slightly off topic, but why is kiddy porn on the internet a bad thing? There is no proof that kiddy porn cases pedophiles to abuse children; in fact many think it helps them release their urges. Now, the real reason possesion of kiddy porn is (and should be) illegal is that it drives the demand for the porn peddlers to produce the stuff in the first place, which causes children to be abused. But does stealing kiddy porn through p2p systems drive up demand? According to the records companies, p2p LOWERS demand. The reason people still want the porn to be illegal is beacuse it disgusts them, plain and simple. That's no reason to make something illegal, though. Even I'd like to think I'm wrong here somewhere, please resond and point out the flaws in my logic.
Spice Girls - If You Wanna Be My Lover : you gotta get with my friends? If I'm reading that right, then they're proposing a gangbang.
:) ) - Hit Me Baby One More Time : on its surface, encourages violence towards females. Underneath, encourages females to gravitate towards men who've mistreated them in the past.
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle : No one who watches that video is thinking about Disney's Alladin.
Britney Spears (I probably spelled it wrong, but SHE DOES TOO
Forget the image files, at least you can take those at face value: it's either sex or it's not. If it is, it can be explained to the child in rational/biological terms. You should LISTEN to your child's MUSIC! That's where most of their twisted ideas are coming from!
The real Threed's
--Threed
It's a good reason for parents to watch what the hell their kids are doing if they don't want them finding such things.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Or, the ranting raving (almost ALWAYS American) lunatic ends up looking like an uptight fool that can't handle a little harmless sexual content and needs to resort to idle straw men arguements equating thong to throng... bah... silly puritantical unsupported nonsenses. The null hypothesis here is that sex is normal and that your argument (if you can call it that) is unsupported emotional clap trap. Prove your point that someone cruising sexual content is worthy of Ad Hominem retorts and you'll be making a point. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
You know, in many countries, sex is actually considered a wonderfully healthy thing that people should be attracted to. I know it might now be the case where you live, but many people know it to be the case. Sex is not a bad thing.
What is it with nitwits that think sex is bad/immoral/evil/dirty/demeaning? Did those folks ever stop to consider that sex is normal and that people should be interested in it if not down right modivated by sex? (Where did we all come from without sex?) Its the uptight puritanical nitwits that should be made fun of. Those people have serious problems that they need to see a therapist about, and because of their emotional and psychological problems, they choose to make themselves feel better by attacking others (as you have suggested, for SHAME sir!). Sex is part of the normal process of being alive. Bah... why bother trying to explain. If you honestly think sex is something bad, you need professional help anyway and there is no reasoning with you.
Python
Python
As far as I can tell, porn webmasters make money primarily through subscriptions and also perhaps through advertizing. If a search produces a page with an obviously pornographic title or set of keywords, even people who find it aren't going to go to it unless they were searching for porn, in which case they wouldn't be searching with "not porn"; they're certainly not going to buy a subscription. So there's no benefit to the porn site in being listed in non-porn searches. If porn was blocked even from people who were looking for it, it would make sense to not mark your porn site as porn, but that seems not to be the case.
Furthermore, having your porn site pop up when congressmen search for "britney spears" is almost certain not to help the industry in general or you in particular.
You can't trust people to rate their own content on merit or accuracy or things like that, but the providers have no sensible motive to lie about pornographic content.
This seems to indicate a major metadata problem with the system. If you're not looking for porn, you shouldn't find any, and it seems like people do. It shouldn't necessarily be *hard* to find porn, but it shouldn't be hard to not find it either, if you're trying to avoid.
Furthermore, people generally don't want to stick their porn in other people's faces; they want to let people get it, and may even care more about availablity than avoidability, but the only people who get anything out of unwilling parties seeing sex are flashers. So it follows that, so long as it is not blocked from people who should be able to see it, providers want porn marked as such, and consumers want to only get porn if they're looking for it.
Perhaps the standard clients should insert into the query "and not 'porn'" unless 'porn' is in the query, and porn should have that keyword.
I hate to break it to you, but the tech economy slide started to take place spring 2000, about the time that dubya announced his canidacy for president. This was when the NASDAQ "corrected" (which, of course, is a euphamistic term for "crashed") and the dot-coms started dying. It took about a year for the dot-com crash to make its way around to the rest of the market. Now that they aren't demanding Cisco routers and Sun servers quite as much as they used to, and everyone's got a great big inventory that they don't know what to do with, the big companies are tightening their belts. Unfortunatly for dubya-bashers, it has absolutly nothing to do with our current president, and instead the economy he inherited from the last one.
erm... you've fallen for the same fallacy that these US-congress-people have.
You may notice that these so-called "most popular" searches are a very small fraction of all searches. They're NOT the MOST POPULAR.
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Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I have a nice house and get jury summons just like every other property owner in the US. Now I will admit that there is a large population that is apparently 13 or so but there are alot of professional folks here too, even if we are cracked in the head for wasting our time :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
and stop depending on the government, the schools and anyone else you can find to do it for you. Sit with your child and talk about it, or do not allow them on the computer unsupervised, seems real simple to me. I have a logon and KIDS DESK running which prevents net access. My son DOES NOT have access to P2P software, he's not old enough to handle it yet. I can understand your concern as a parent, but IN NO WAY DO I AGREE WITH YOU...
And if the raise your own kids and be responsible argument is "NOT COMPELLING ENOUGH" then you should be sterilized and your kids given to an "ADULT" who can handle the responsibility.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
metatags and what the author uses as keywords. p0rn sites are notorius for using 400+ keywords on every subject from sysadmin to childcare just to get hits. What they need to do is crack down and force people to label the content as what it is, so you won't UNKNOWINGLY step into a scat site :) (pun intended)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Just did some research and, thats not the only way to get drawn but the county property records are heavily used. Apparently they also reference state ID's and drivers lic. records as well as census and state tax board data. But I find it odd that I never once got a summons until I bought my house.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
out of line. But I still stand on my belief that parents NEED to take responsibility for their childs upbringing. You are not too far off on your typing of me, though I was raised in a very religious surrounding. The point being there is ALWAYS a resource, If you're not an Libertarian UBER-parent then get help, from the local church, day care, the state, someone so your child is not just surfing unattended but has a goal and some supervision. This is by no means 100% but a good kid will do good given a chance and little structure.
As to morals by legislature it IS that way but only because "we the people" have become apathetic and uncaring for anything beyond the scope of our small little world.
Well, enough is enough, see you all in SF tomorrow at Free Dmitry rally.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Unfortunately, the next step is probably to force ISP:s to filter out peer-to-peer traffic. No way to connect = kill the P2P networks... And even if you're not directly affected (not living in the US, say), you still get a far smaller selection of stuff on the networks.
The logical next step for P2P networks is then to tunnel stuff through other services. Gnutella/HTML, anybody?
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Interesting point you raise.
What's your conclusion, then? If the repulsive and disgusting are the "dominant thoughts," then what does that say about the human psyche, or normal human behaviour?
Can they truly be eccentricities or fetishes, if they're the dominant, most popular search terms?
It's an interesting, if frightening, line of thought. My own conclusion is that the human race has always been hell-bent on self-destruction, but somehow continues to manage to dodge the bullet of evolution...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I am likely to agree with an argument based on civil liberties and free speech, but not one based on your fallacy.
In the search result appendix we see the following:
divx
porn
star trek voyage
sex
xxx
teen
saving private ryan
preteen
lolita
madonna
... :)
Well, I'll be damn if I can't count. I can clearly see how they would claim that sex, porn, xxx could be classified as search for porn. However, that makes it 3 not 6. Next, let's play devil's advocate, and give them the damn teen & preteen. We still come up with 5 not 6. Where is the 6th porn search? Star trek porn? I don't think so.
Bottom line, we need to read carefuly such documents. Those sneaky bastards
--- d'oh
(emphasis mine)
hoooo boy. what's that internet for again?
Would somehow like to explain how either of these two scenarios is going to cause permanent physical or psychological harm to that twelve-year-old?
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Years 0ld and still going strong, the law makers get to act on juistice and clean living and for the good of our children.......
t y. html
r es sman.php
http://hotwired.lycos.com/special/pornscare/mar
Mean while these law makers get to sit in DC and kill young girls
http://www.chandralevy.com/articles/intern-cong
Thumbs Up America..AOLnation and land of the sheeple.
-tom
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
The NSA must have been advising the consultants who wrote the report: the screen shot censorship blotches are a part of the screenshot bitmaps instead of being applied over the bitmaps via the PDF, like that spy informant report leaked on cryptome some months ago...
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--- This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine. ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
I don't know where they dug up those teenagers who are rallying against porn -- I saw a news report on TV with these kids and parents saying they want to stop all porn access in UT completely -- but they can rally all day.. my ISP isn't going to start using blocking software because the moment they do, I know they will go out of business.
All the reports about her only say that she's figured out that it is impossible to block porn over [the web|e-mail|].. that's all she's done. I could have told Utah that for a hell of a lot less than her salary.
Paula Houston is nothing but a figurehead to show parents that somebody is supposedly doing something.
Is with all the "teen", "preteen" and "lolita" shit on gnutella?
I mean, fuck, all this goddamn noise makes it hard to find good, wholesome, all-american, 21-25 year old pr0n chicks.
You know, chicks that have b00b1ez?
Aside from that, I almost shat myself when I saw the top 3 search expressions:
DiVX
Porn
(and of course)
Star Trek
Can you say NNNNNNEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDSSS?!
C-X C-X
You can guess what you want. I always vote. If neither of the major choices is at all palatable, then I vote for someone else. I just don't think that it matters.
Let me rephrase that. The candidate that I am most nearly in favor of almost always looses. One of the exceptions that I can think of changed affiliation soon after getting elected, so that's almost the same. Only when there has been an overwhelming popular feeling on some candidate, perceptible even without listening to the press, has this not been true.
Remember how everyone voted for Johnson, so that we wouldn't get into a war in Viet Nam? That was a nice educational experience. The classical example of just how much one can believe campaign promisses.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think the more pertinent statistic is that 99 out of 100 Senators don't search for anything online except porn.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
You overestimate the average parent. The competent ones already have a handle on what their kids are doing and aren't worried about the computer, any more than they're worried about their kid getting their hands on magazines they shouldn't. The majority of parents, though, don't want to have to actually work at raising their kids. They want somebody else to guarantee their kid never sees anything they wouldn't approve of. That way they won't have to go through the embarrassment of explaining to their kid why this kind of stuff is bad, and why they shouldn't be into Daddy's stash of it.
Be careful. Saying shit too much causes the Black Plague. Who knows what saying fuck too much would cause?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Peer 2 peer is new. Let time do, and the filter software will be able to prevent children to see such contents. gnutella clients (for example bearshare) have begun to implement such mechanisms.
Let time do, and the gnutella clients and filter software will create a standard towards filtering adult content out of the sight of children.
But the hammer method (prohibiting peer 2 peer) is definitely the wrong method.
I'll take the hunters view on this:
It's only alright to kill a newborn if you're going to eat it.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
Now, the US Congress comes out with this *NEW* report that equates P2P with pr0n. The average Joe Moron in America is not going to spend the time to do any serious validation of this claim. The will assume that if the US Gov't says it is bad... then it must be shut down. (Just like the EVIL NAPSTER where communists were giving away free music). This clearly indicates a manuever by the RIAA and the MPAA to influence legislation against P2P. They realize that they can't attack the source (us). But, they have figured out how to kill it just the same. Go after the ISPs! If you filter it at the ISP level then the end-users are fucked. What better way for the RIAA to shut down P2P? Lobby Congress! It's simple really:
RIAA Scumbag: "I'll give you $20,000 for your next election campaign"
Elected Official Scumbag: "OK. What do I have to do?"
RIAA Scumbag: "Pass laws that prohibit file sharing on the Internet."
Elected Official Scumbag: "How do I do that?"
RIAA Scumbag: "Come up with some report that proves how P2P is used for piracy, pornography, terrorism, drugs, and virus creation"
Elected Official Scumbag: "The public hates those things and would shut it down in a heartbeat!"
It's not as absurd as you might think.
The only flaw in your otherwise brilliant plan is that no one can agree on who the "regulators" are and what the limits of "regulation" are.
People in Europe regularly spend family vacations on beaches where everyone is naked. If you post pictures of your family trip to the sea shore will you be subject to "regulation"?
The Catholics (and other extreme conservatives) consider ANYTHING and EVERYTHING offensive! Do you let them regulate the children's Internet? Who gets to decide what is moral and what is not moral? Goat sex is immoral.... but, is sex education immoral? What about fine art that contains nudity? Where do you draw the line? And, more importantly.... WHO decides this sort of stuff?
If you want to try to regulate a children's Internet -- more power to you! The Catholics will excommunicate you. The Baptists will send you to hell, and the Mormons will try to save you. And, don't forget the Jehovah's Witnesses who will show up on your front porch to explain the evil of your ways to you.
We don't need a children's Internet. We need parents who are involved in their kid's lives. If you are a parent and your son is downloading goat porn on BearShare -- I would have to say that you are neglecting you responsibilities as a parent! Little Jonny doesn't go from "Game Zone" to hard-core-porn without a few warning signs. Stop expecting the government, or the public to raise your children for you! You are the parent! You produced offspring! Now do your job and raise them the way you feel they should be raised! Don't blame society for your kid's problems... point the finger at yourself for a change.
Check out Ad-Aware from LavaSoft if you want to remove the spyware that BearShare installs:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
According to legislative officials, a virus has been propagating through the house.gov network. The rare "BritneySpearsToplessMovie.avi.exe" worm was executed, causing massive slowdowns. It is however, unknown whether these slowdowns were caused by the BritneySpears virus, or the increased "research" of the Britney Spears P2P phenomenon.
So if porn is so wildly popular, any politician who opposes it must be pretty dumb. Forget soccer moms, the elderly, the Hispanic population .. the real critical demographic is the porn segment. Any senator who cuts off millions of registered voters from their Internet porn isn't going to be around come Election Day.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
______________________________
rooooar
...and Gnutella bandwidth usage doubles.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The .kids domain has come around and around and around. I seem to remember the last /. story said something about Congress wanting the domain. My roomie was saying that the IRC porn channel he was in earlier, the webmasters were discussing something along the lines of "Create the .kids domain. All business that want to cater to children register in the .kids domain. Do virtual hosts if you have to. Parents can then set up the browsers to only allow .kids."
Add in some proper parenting, and that might just work. The parent gets to decided when the child can see the "real world" Internet, but until that point, it would be reasonably sandboxed. Personally, nothing beats proper parenting, but that's just me.
-- Sapere aude.
The name is taken from a famous dildo in William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
:)
This is a book I've owned on a few different occasions, but people keep "borrowing"... grrr.
Hopefully through the wonders of karma (the non-Slashdot kind) a copy will find its way back to me sometime soon
deus does not exist but if he does
I like this band as much as the next guy, but can it really be number 29, or did somebody conveniently put this up there while browsing queries just to outrage people?
GnutellaMeter seems to record searches across the last 50 minutes... and given the way Gnutella works, not from all Gnutella clients, but from the subset that of queries that reach it.
For example, the #1 search there just now, with nearly 0.4%, was "neuroticfish no instruments". Maybe the person typing this search has a high speed link, and thus connects to many other peers...
deus does not exist but if he does
Rite or wrong?
deus does not exist but if he does
Konqueror showed me the PDF just fine. This is an out-of-the-box Mandrake 8.0 installation.
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E_NOSIG
Bwahahaha. A sexual reference?
Have you even looked at BearShare in your life? What is there to circumvent, it's a check-box on the client side?
Yes, obviously I haven't installed 2.2.6 (I have 2.2.5), but it doesn't change my statement "filters don't work". All major filters I've seen can easily be circumvented, and I don't see the point of a filter that calls itself family filter and can be easily turned off. This is just useful for adult users who want less false hits if they're searching for something other than pornography. But then the filter is badly-named.
The latest version of BearShare has a family filter to hide "inappropriate content" (whatever that means; hopefully, it will block access to real Britney Spears videos as well ;-)). But it's probably easy to circumvent like all other filters...
Interesting fact from the PDF (page ii): The number of children using file sharing programs is unknown but believed to be high. Great! For a study on children's access to file sharing, couldn't they at least have tried to collect some data on this?
I never wanted to trade music online, but now I gotta get gnutella!
Haven't you ever heard the term 'sexual congress'??
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Well, you had me agreeing with you until the part about killing newborns and being a vegitarian, since I don't see how that could be "infinitely self-consistent." Certainly a newborn has more intelligence than veal and the same capacity for suffering. Of course, whether or not either the veal or the baby are sentient is up for grabs. Anyways, you have enough good opinions that, for future reference, you should maybe leave out all those irrelivant self-deprecating remarks that'll alienate your audience. Unless your goal was trolling, in which case you should focus on the irrelivant remarks and tone down the relevant ones.
Uh, I don't think so. Everyone bailed out of the market or got cleaned out when Bush's "successful" election put a big frosty chill on the economy.
Not that I like Clinton. That ass signed the DMCA. It had unanimous support in both the (republican controlled) house and senate, but he could have refused out of principle.
He didn't.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Hey why look only on the bad side?
This is a new market opportunity:
p2p filters.
New companies (or old companies with the wrong idea) could be formed around this idea.
The nice thing is it's completely voluntary, a client-side option (except for the kid, of course, who might want to see what this pr0n thing is all about)
Still, it'd be hard to implement without blocking legitimate sites....
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
< David Spade voice >
It's called punctuation. Look into it.
<
Secondly, looking at your comment, I count the word they 3 times. (4 if you meant to say they in the first sentence, instead of the)
The truly sad part about this discussion is that the majority of people informed on technological issues view the government that way. As some entity, totally separate from themselves, which they have no control over.
What you say has merit. The same excuses are used over and over to limit freedoms. It is not limited to technological matters, though. The phrase "Think of the children!" has been used throughout history as a way of reducing freedoms. The beauty of the US government system is that if enough people can be convinced that the argument is just BS, the people using it will have to stop. Or get tossed out of govt altogether.
All I am saying is that in the US the government still directly answers to the voters, at least once every two years. We need to not view these laws as things being made in a void, by people we have no control over. We need instead to actually put our money where are mouth is, so to speak, and actually vote.
I would guess that a large portion of /. readers did not vote in the last national election. (A large portion of those who were legally able to vote, I mean) The government continues to make laws targetted to please those who are middle income and above. More often than not, the laws are targetted at parents in that group. Why? Because that demographic has a very high voter turnout.
If we truly want anything to be done about this parade of misinformation spewing forth from Washinton, we need to vote every chance we get, for the most informed representative we can get.
I was using google! he he!
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
"Children in search of music on file-sharing programs are directed to pornographic files. Even if children innocently use these programs with the goal of obtaining music or video from their favorite artist, they can encounter pornography."
:)
Since when was "obtaining music or video" online considered "innocent" by the government? Check it out. It's on page four of the report.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
You know we've got some senators with too much time on their hands when all they do is search for Pr0n. Actually they're quite a bit luckier than most real employees because they don't have to explain why they have 3 copies of pamandtommy.avi on their computers and why the firewall is logging porn hits and strange ports opening and closing on specific computers. Just like the time when Billy Graham tried to bring a huge lawsuit against Larry Flynt...'I was doing serious research reading these filthy pornographic magazines!. 'Well Bill, uhh, why do you have paper tissues and lotion on your desk?'
Just admit it everyone: you like porn, and porn is good for you if taken in moderation. How many marriages has it saved? Bahahaha.
Here's the next /. poll:
How did you discover porno?
1. Daddy's secret stash
2. Found in an empty field
3. Adult 'bookstore'
4. Cowboyneal
Yes, that's pretty much the case. Any candidate that I would care to vote for is weeded out of the system by the monied interests long before I go to the polls. Someone else in this thread already provided the appropriate Bill Hicks quote.
Sometimes I wonder if the only "control" I'll end up with over the government is to decide whether to shoot it out and try and take as many mindless stormtroopers as I can with me when they come to drag me away for my various crimes against cultural conformity and corporate profits, or go for non-violent resistance and slowly starve myself in a hunger strike as I rot away in a jail cell somewhere. I hope it doesn't come to that...but I wouldn't bet against it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
Saying "the Nazis were socialists" is like saying "Rush Limbaugh is a communist".
Female Prison Rape in NY
Wake up man, it's made up bullshit!
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
I put a copy of the report of my outgoing gnutella directory. Its name is pornP2P.pdf
One hour later, the report has been downloaded 14 times. I wonder if those lusers knew what they were getting just by grabbing a random 1.7Mb pdf file with the word PORN in the title.
Its late, enough fucking with pornmeister's minds for the moment.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
>At the request of Rep. Waxman and Rep. Steve Largent
:)
:) Britney sucks.
Loosers
>the Special Investigations Division examined
A division to investigate special cases... like terrorism, homocide, bill gates etc... not pr0n
>a new and growing problem for parents throughout the United States:
We don't give a f*ck about anyone outside the US.
>Internet file-sharing programs
The internet _is_ a file bloody sharing program what do you want??
>that provide children easy and free access to thousands of explicit pornographic videos and other pornographic materials.
Like they couldn't get before?
>As Napster faces litigation,
We've just manage to screw napster and these c*nts come allong and spoil our day!!!
>Internet users are increasingly turning to alternative file-sharing programs such as Music City Morpheus, BearShare, and Aimster.
WHAT?! they have the nerve to use these things of the devil?!
>Pornographic files are widely available on these networks
Yeah! its great, i had to spend days looking for that sort of stuff, now i can find it in seconds!!
>and children can be unexpectedly inundated by files containing explicit content
If i type "Natalie Portman" i expect quality pics.
>for simple searches like "Britney Spears." Moreover,
What, you mean they searched for B.S and got B.S
>many popular parental filters do not block access to pornographic materials obtained through file-sharing programs.
Thats called cheap software, we get it all the time.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I just wish there was a way to support the freedoms I believe in without having to associate or be associated with these pervs.
...I don't particularly have much respect for the rights of those who solicit such material.
You can't have it both ways. You don't have to like what those people do, but you MUST respect their rights. You have to remember that its the weirdos and wackos and pervs [oh my!] that test the limits of the Constitution.
heheh..hehehe..hehehe...anyone else see their usernames in there? :)
long live porn!
Sharing files is kinda the whole idea of the internet, isn't it? (especially the WWW). I'm glad that Slashdot is kind enough to share their index.html, etc.
Get Elcomsoft to write PDF extensions for Konqueror
I ran this query on Alta Vista and got 20 hits. I doubt any of them had anything with do with Waxman getting laid however.
Ok, so we've established that Bush inherited a lousy economy from Clinton, but that's not relevant here. In answer to the original question, the government cannot successfully ban a protocol, but that doesn't mean that can't try. See the encryption battles of the last decade as an example. (And it's worth noting that Democrats were the major proponents of the unconstitutional encryption restrictions, while Republicans generally opposed them.)
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Try the Street Performer Protocol (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/ ). The author gets paid, the public gets what they want, no draconian copyright laws needed.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
If you think there is much of difference between the Republicrats and the Dempublicans, you are sadly mistaken.
file:
You have sent a message!
WTF? In this government study on the content of Gnutella files, look at the list of top matches:
divx
porn
star trek voyager
sex
xxx
teen
Ok, maybe I am assuming things wrong, but WHY would there be more searches for Voyager than sex? WTF is that?
There are many motives withing the fed to try and stop something of this nature.
- They can implement morals by restricting what the people can have access too.
- They can control content.
- They can please their customers....Im sorry did I say "customers", I meant to say they can please Big Business by shutting down anything that may potentially tap their revenue stream.
Im tired of the people calling the Slashdot Crowd a bunch of whiners when we don't get our way. We are people who diagree with popular opinion and we are people who respect and value our freedom. I think that it is such a phony argument to say that this whole file sharing witch hunt is about one group wanting to control files while the other group wants the freedom to "steal" them. It is about one group wanting to maintain control and another group wanting to take control back and give it to the people. It's just too bad that the people who matter in this situation are the ones who share the popular opinion that the people can't handle their freedom and must be protected from it.I'll shut up now, thank you.
--------
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
That said, I have to wonder if I can be part of a community whose most popular searches include "lolita", "preteen", "rape", and "incest".
Among many other possible responses to this comment I'm going to take the angle of statistical bias. Thing is, while searches for "abnormal" porn acts do make it into the top 20 list, they still add up to a very small percentage of all Gnutella searches, generally < 1%. The thing to remember here is that these search statistics are skewed because if you're looking for porn you tend to use one of a few generic search terms.
Just as a first approximation, I'd guess that 80% of porn searches go out under only about 20 search topics: a few very generic ones, like "porn" and "xxx"; about 10 or so specific fetishes or sex acts including the ones you're so concerned about, and another 5 or so for the very small number of porn stars who might be searched for by name. On the other hand, non-porn searches tend to be very specific: searches for a particular music band, or more likely for a particular song or movie. These searches are much more common on Gnutella, but because they are spread across thousands of different search topics they don't make it into the top 20 list.
Thing is, when you're looking for music or a movie, you know exactly what you want; when you're looking for porn, you're usually just looking for anything to get off. If people used search terms like "music" or "sound" or "movie", or even "guitar" or "rock and roll" or "drama", then those would move all the porn stuff out of the top 20. But because porn occupies a more generic role than most other entertainment, this is reflected in both how people search for it and how they name their porn files.
It is a fact that there is no way constructive logic an prove a negative. Thus, there is no way to 'prove that X is not harmful'.
... isn't damaging his/her attitudes ...'' can never be answered; what you want can not be proven.
Where X can be everything from seat belts to parts-per-trillion of arsenic in drinking water. The most that can be said is that it has no known negative effects. (but, a any imaginable number of potential effects.)
Such questions are asked to make a statement, to push forward a point of view. They cannot be answered.
By that same token, there is not and can be no proof that playing quake is safe, or even that reading is safe.
Whether or not it was done on purpose, your request ``So either present compelling evidence that ten-year-olds seeing
What can be proven is the opposite, that it is harmful. Take a bunch of kids and show them those images and see what they say and do.
Amusingly enough, I'd claim that there's far more evidence about the harmful effects of religion than porn. I know personally and have heard of many people who have had religion destroy their lives, from Heavens Gate, to destruction of their self esteem.
Given that there's no way to show that either of them is safe, IE, not harmful. Well, we have our culture curbing porn, but allowing religions, when the evidence shows that the reverse would be better.
I'll let you have the job of convincing suburbian parents that they have to look at the problem logically, not emotionally, and realize that some things can never be known for certain.
And how does congress fit into all this?
Two words: Gary Condit.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
If that's the motivation here, congress is behavior with uncharacteristic guile.
/. has been recommending all along? Put parents in charge of protecting their kids and not hide legislation and ineffective content filtering software? So shouldn't we be encouraging them when someone as dense as a US Congressman seems to "get it"?
Did you actually read through the report and Rep. Waxman's statement? There is no real focus on the legality of file sharing or copyright violations. If anything, the reports seem to have carefully avoided the subject because it would distract from their main point. Further I could find no recommendations for the use of legislation to control the technology, the usual congressional reaction to this sort of thing.
Instead they provided tips to parents on how to protect their children and pointed out the flaws in content filtering software. Isn't this the sort of thing
Granted, the whole thing could just be a small part of a vast plan to sweep in apocalyptic thought control to the Internet, carefully disguised as recommendations and information for parents, but I think that would be giving the US government too much credit.
That's not really a fair comparison. As the House report says, most web-based porn requires a credit card; while some adolescent males may search through those 8,120,000 sites for the few that are free, they are the committed ones: most will just give up and start complaining about how Congress restricts free speech, man.
The House report is more concerned with young people coming upon porn by accident. If I search for "xxx" or "porn" or "pr0n", chances are I'm actually looking for it. Some twelve year old girl looking for Britney Spears? Maybe the government should tell parents to just go out and buy her the CD so that she doesn't go online looking for the mp3.
~~~~~~
under-paid karma whore
While children do bounce back from a dizzying array of adversities, that hardly seems a good reason to be nonchalant about subjecting them to pornography. Or, alternatively, while some may not care that their child is exposed to porn, it is most certainly the right of other parents to be so concerned. Especially since, to use an earlier metaphor, this report says that there's porn in that there treehouse, and so maybe you don't want little Timmy to go play there...
~~~~~~
under-paid karma whore
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
What's next for banning? The pics you take of your girlfriend when you're both 16 or 17? "Racey" skirts and short-shorts?
Get this -- people, logical, rational people -- like porn, sex, even double anal penetration!. They like their `divx porn,` their `preteen saving private Ryan,` their `stays crunchy (even steely Dan, citizen steely)` -- and especially their `Rage against the Gina Wild`!
Although I don't see fuck anywhere, maybe these people are developing a secret code `f--k` and `a--l` that will be deployed against US Congress(too bad it was caught)?
What's next? Licences to use a p2p client? Do you yankees like living in Stalin's Russia? How about typewriter licences because people write (horrors) sex stories?
People will get exactly what they want by hook or by crook. Try what you might to marginalize it, I bet all the people is the US congress jerked off to Daddy's pinups in the 1940s!
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
That is pretty damned newsworthy.
But this is not that a person's security affects everyone else, as in the case of your licence. It's that peer to peer is essentially like life -- you filter on the client side, and don't get your panties in a knot about what other people do.
The point I was making is that the US government, because of their puritan background, seems to like the idea of dictating what may or may not happen between two consulting adults in a private bedroom, among other things.
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
well, that's sorta why I was poking fun - you'd think an official report would attempt to do more than just a few seconds worth of capture... however your mention of lester flatt makes me want to play "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and try to outrun some cops....
Wheeeee
I know it's out of the top ten that includes divx and porn sex and xxx.... but "stays crunchy even" are we worried about the cereal habits of our kids?
And "Steely Dan" beating "Rage Against The" ?? Wow, I never would have guessed...
Wheeeee
People in this division get to spend our tax dollars investigating various methods of getting porn off the internet. I think that I'm uniquely qualified for this job, where do I sign up?
the thing that is really interesting about this is that Porn makles more money in a Year than professional sports do and so the question needs to be more of "who exactly is it that is against porn?" cause its not me and its abviously not Joe Average, cause we both spend money to buy it. so there seems to be something amiss, don't you think?
Jon
Most popular search terms on the Gnutella network
...
Teen
Preteen
Lolita
Oh, they're thinking about the children, all right.
--
This is a serious problem. I mean, think of how much time and space it would take to download all of that! My hard drive and modem are cringing just thinking about it.
--
Our society is steeped in porn - maybe not hardcore, but it's there. Basically, if a kid goes ANYWHERE commercial, he's gonna be exposed to some level of porn. Porn doesn't necessarily have to be hardcore sex - it's simply imagery of any sort designed to sexually arouse the viewer to some extent. Racy billboards, magazine covers, all kinds of ads that use sex appeal - you can't escape it. Business has figured out that sex sells. They don't care about "the children" - they care about the almighty dollar (or mark, or yen, or whatever your currency is).
The gov't isn't trying to get rid of porn - they're trying to get re-elected. I'd bet money those senators (Or was it represenatives?) don't care about the porn being there - heck, how many do you think went home and did their own "research"? They care about looking good and getting re-elected.
The government is pretty much completely corrupt. As if that's a big suprise.
Take nothing at face value. If there's nothing in it for them, they don't care about it.
Three cheers for geeks who can stand up to the critters, be it passively or actively. You can't legislate the will of the people, and in the age of the internet, you can't control it, either. Maybe someday they'll see that.
From: Hilly Rosebud
To: Henry Waxman
cc: Steve Largent
Subj.: A Commendation For Your Efforts
I, Hilly Rosebud, president of the PIAA (Pornographic Industry Association of America) would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of all of our membership, to thank you for your diligence and leadership in this situation.
Our membership has been suffering a disturbing downturn in sales and revenues for the past five years in comparison to the amount of pornographic material currently possessed by the public. Currently, pornography in the United States is only an eight billion dollar per year industry. With recent studies of public possession, we now estimate that 80% to 90% of current distribution is though illegal means, either through peer-to-peer sharing on the internet, tape-duplication, treehouses, or other means.
Now, due to recent legislation and this investigation, the pornographic industry may finally be in a position to collect the revenues it is entitled to. Not only will elimination of peer-to-peer trading in pornography force consumers to pay for the right to view it, but the wisely written DMCA, which has just been given its first test of legal power, will allow our members to move to the new EBoink standard within one year. Printed or videotaped pornography will be eliminated, and all pornography will only be available in secure electronic formats, either on DVD discs, or paid for on the internet, locked to the machines it is downloaded on, and illegal to decrypt or remove the protections from. Extrapolating from the amount of our material that is circulating illegally, we expect that our revenues will increase by 500% to 1000%, from five to ten times their current amount.
Our membership will then earn from forty to eighty billion dollars in revenue annually. Pornography will become one of the largest industrial groups in the country, comparable in earnings to that of the construction sector.
We therefore take great pride in announcing that you have both shared in the annual awarding of this year's Pornographer Of The Year award. As well as being enshrined for eternity as a great contributor to the pornographic industry in the Pornography Hall Of Fame, invitations bearing your titles as Pornographer Of The Year have been sent out to you so that you may attend our award ceremony, at our annual convention in Las Vegas which will take place less than a month from now. Mr. Waxman's wife has already indicated that she has received his invitation in a telephone call to us, and it was touching how much she was like the typical lady winner of a contest the way she screamed and screamed.
We look forward to your continuing support of our industry in the future. With our profits increasing to five or ten times their current levels, our political contributions will be increased similarly to ensure that America is always a good place for pornographers to do business. Unfortunately, due to your party's statements on pornography, those millions will have to be directed to the Democrats and the Libertarians, but we thank you for your support regardless and will ensure that you are rewarded.
Sincerely,
Hilly Rosebud, President
Pornographic Industry Association Of America
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Children's Access To Pornography Through Peer-To-Peer Multi-Level-Infrastructure Information Sharing Locations (Treehouses)
Recent studies have shown that some unsure high percentage (but we know that it's high) of U.S. homes have trees in their backyards. With the decline of the "Drugstore Soda Fountain", young people trying to escape the authority of their parents are constructing said "treehouses" in their backyards. These "treehouses" unfortunately have no centralized controls in place.
Children, especially male children approaching adolescence, can be exposed the peer-to-peer sharing of pornographic materials in these "treehouses." Even a simple querying of the peers to see if they want to play the card games "Poker" or "Go Fish!" can result in the display of pornographic material.
As well, these "treehouses" operate in a subdomain space removed from parental control. Sophisticated access control measures such as "the Secret Knock" or "pulling up the ladder" or saying "Careful, your old man's approaching!" effectively allow unrestricted trading and viewing of uncensored pornographic material. Even a restrictive active filtering system such as the Tattle-Tale Sister will not stop peer-to-peer sharing in these domains as this system is restricted by the security controls in this subdomain. The pornographic material is also hidden from an outside search by an obfuscation system known as "the hidden box under the loose panel in the floor."
As a parent, and a grandparent, and a great-grandparent, and a complete old fart, I am deeply jealous that the young people of today may have access to things that they enjoy that I was denied. The "treehouse" was used for... er... intellectual conversation... when I was young, and for peer-pressuring colleagues into smoking cigarettes.
Parental Tips
- Don't permit "the hidden box under the floor panel"
- Enforce access of Tattle-Tale Sister to all subdomains
- Root access is not good enough. "Treehouses" are never built at the roots. Ladders should be permanently affixed.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
What did they think people were using the Internet for? Talking about church? HA!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Congressman quotes Report: "It gives our kids access to incredibly lewd, filthy... the worst imaginable type of graphic violence and sex that you can imagine,"
...puts tape into VCR, presses play... "As you can see, this is simply sick and disgusting! I mean really, Ahhh, what the!? Excuse me, I seem to have put the wrong tape in the VCR..."
"and here's an example of what they can expect to find."
He then quickly removes the private tape he made with his Intern the night before.
When are they going to learn... it's DEMOCRACY, not HYPOCRACY!
$0.02 (CDN)
The House report is more concerned with young people coming upon porn by accident. If I search for "xxx" or "porn" or "pr0n", chances are I'm actually looking for it.
Why then did they take the time to mention that porn, sex, xxx etc were the top n hits? It seems they are wanting to block even those people who know what they are doing from getting pr0n.
Some twelve year old girl looking for Britney Spears? Maybe the government should tell parents to just go out and buy her the CD so that she doesn't go online looking for the mp3.
Of course, anyone searching for Britney Spears is already brain damaged (retarded/special/whatever is politically correct these days) enough, that one more porn movie can't possibly do more damage to them :-)
TimC.
So I guess we now know that sex-craved, late-night TV watchers are using the Internet. Wow - I sure wouldn't be able to come to this conclusion without the government's help.
I wonder how many tax dollars were spend to find this out? Hmmmmm...
-----
...it would be too much to ask that Congress police itself before policing us. It wouldn't be all that ironic if some lusty congresscritter video taped itself using a staff member, and then converted the video to mpeg, and then shared it via peer-2-peer network, finally landing smack in the report to Congress.
-Sometimes I outdo myself, but usually, I find I do exactly what I would have done given identical circumstances.
Okay, look, I grew up with my father and my uncle's porno mags around. Now, I'm not saying I'm an absolutely normal person. No geek really considers themselves "normal." But, did porn ruin my life? No, of course not. Porn is something that most sexually active men find "appealing."
I had a really interesting conversation with my aunt tonight. We were talking about what was wrong with children today. Funny, but porn didn't figure into that conversation. What did is that parents these days seem to refuse to take responsability for the actions of their children. That, really, is the main problem. It's not T.V., it's not the music, and it's not porn. It's that parents seem to think that they aren't responsible for their children shooting people or even for the simple things such as going to school.
I remember watching a thing on T.V. about how in L.A., they were putting parents on "trial" for their children being delinquent in school. One woman was told she had to go to school for 2 weeks with her child. Her response: "I wasn't the one skipping school. I don't see how this is my fault."
The fact is, none of this stuff that people make a big deal about is important. What is important is that people aren't taking responsibility for their children. Why isn't anyone making a big deal about this. This is a major problem and nobody seems to be addressing it, and really, honestly, I don't know how one goes about fixing something that is so ingrained in our sociology and psychology.
You see, I grew up in a really close family. The people who "care" for me include my mother, my step-mother, my father, my cousins, my uncles, my aunts. That's a community. Many of my friends don't know who their first cousins are. There's something wrong with that, in my opinion.
I also had the advantage of living for a few years in Mexico, where raising a child isn't a single person's responsibility, but a community responsibility. Everyone was involved.
Let's fix this problem, and stop wasting our time with stupid crap like porn and heavy metal music, rap, movies, and all this other shit that doesn't make a difference. Let's concentrate on what really matters: Taking responsibility for the children we raise.
If I sound like a Republican or a conservative, sorry. I'm neither. I just recognize where the problem is. I don't know the answer. There isn't an easy one, I'm sure, otherwise, someone would have implemented it.
But I could be wrong. Maybe porn is the devil's work.
Read the report yourself because it is funny, but here is brief coverage in the Washington Post.
:)
And for P2P pleasure...
Gnutella clients...
http://www.bearshare.com/
http://www.limewire.com/
Not based on Gnutella protocol...
http://www.aimster.com/
http://www.edonkey2000.com/
Or just go to CNET's downloads and select from many P2P flavors
Man read all the way through that report and it is hilarious once you get to the second appendex. Thanks Representatives Waxman and Largent. This is the funniest thign ever produced by the US government.
The story is on the main page of the NYTimes website... http://www.NYTimes.com/2001/07/28/technology/28SW
Taken from the Times article...
Mr. Largent said in his letter to the attorney general. He also wrote: "The Lord has blessed us both immensely, and I am willing to stand with you in any way you feel necessary to begin eliminating this scourge from our nation's soul. I believe that Jesus asks no less of us."
There you have it... Gnutella makes Jesus cry.
____________________
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
When I run bearshare, the file ranked highest on my hit-list is almost always the "Crazytown - Lollipop Porn" mp3. I wonder if that would be considered "inappropriate content"...
---
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Ha, ha, ha, ha...Those pictures are absolutely hilarious
1. Young Lolita ---- in the --- by huge ---- 78M
1. Young Lolita hugged in the bus station by huge father before she leaves for college ? 78M
Yup, I didn't see any porn in those pictures at all
IMNSHO - any adult who verbally beats the shit out of some lowlife who is cruising pr0n in a public library ought to be a hero who quickly gathers a cheering throng (that's throng you prevert). As long as everyone turns their head and puts on their "unholier-than-thou" non-confrontational face, the censure tools will fail, and the pols will feel obligated to try to use laws instead.
And I know we all want to be PC and multi-culturally sensitive about these behaviors, but if we don't establish and enforce (through tools like shame) standards that apply to all we will eventually drift into a sort of dark, balkanized, all's fair world that will make Bladerunner look like a Disney-does-Norman-Rockwell matinee.
I think I'm going to quit my job tomorrow and become an investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform's Special Investigations Division. That way, I can get paid to download and watch porn all day. Not only would I have to verify that it was in fact pornography, but I'd have to be sure to watch enough of it to properly classify it as beastiality, rape, incest or preteen.
24-hour surveillance is never possible with kids (especially since they'll probably be far more competent on the computer than their parents)
I am sorry, but I am tired of hearing this one. What excuse do you have for letting your children be more technically proficient than you? This is effectively the same a saying, "I am an incompetent parent. I have given my children dangerous tools I do not understand. Please parent for me."
Just wonderful... Now we'll have BOTH the government and the RIAA screaming at ISP's to block traffic from file sharing programs. Many ISP's like Earthlink and Verizon have been good about ignoring the RIAA's pathetic demands, but it's MUCH harder to ignore a cease-and-desist order from the FCC. Goverment officals have more friends with guns on their side than the IP laywers do...
And how does congress fit into all this?
It's government's role to screw people. They don't want the competition.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
"People will put up with any deprivation of liberty as long as it is done in the name of being good for the children"
Goering
Nationalist Socialist Worker's Party
Funny how it is always the socialists that are the worst enemies of freedom.
I have Mozilla set to use xpdf to open pdf files. I'd be suprised if Konqueror couldn't do something similar.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''I don't want them to try. Prohibition 3: the Idiots Take Over the World.
Americans swallowed copyright police; swallowing ultimate censorship to Save Johnny from Porn will be even easier. The problem is, since we are now the only world power left, we will drag the rest of the planet into our pious, fatuous madness.
I started reading this report expecting a Napster-esque sensationalist attack on P2P sharing aimed at putting normally near-comatose congresspeople on the edge of their seats. However, I was pleasently surprised.
:o)
To be honest, yes there's a not-so-subtle bias in play in this document. Well, gee, what do you expect? BUT on the other hand, it makes some good points. I particularly appreciated the britney spears example, because I've babysitted a few young children who are computer saavy, and I can imagine them running into just that sort of thing by mistake down the line.
Now, while I respect its findings, I'm sure I'll disagree with the government's solution. But in the meantime, don't piss on the messenger, wait to see what congress does to P2P as a result and piss on that instead.
-S
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I'm all for the government getting involved in peer-to-peer pr0n!
I feel it is my right as a citizen of the US to have my pirated net porn delivered in a fast and reliable manner. Every time I use BearShare to snag a 50 or 100 meg pr0n video, it takes at least 5 or 10 tries, and often at slower speeds than my connection should be getting.
I hope you're listening, Senators and Representatives! I demand that you improve the quality and accessibility of my free internet pr0n!!
From the article: "Pornographic files are widely available on these networks and children can be unexpectedly inundated by files containing explicit content for simple searches like 'Britney Spears.'"
Hahahahahahahaha..... ummm and her normal productions aren't sexual or "explicit" at all are they? Hit me one more time indeed...
...laid off since dubya took office what they think the US government is capable of.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
WTF! Is the house selling advertising space in its reports?
In a sense, I feel good about this - what people do over an encrypted channel is not government's business. However it's a bit hard to think about a model to replace copyright (except on software I think the open source model has already proven itself very viable - whether the current model or some future one, I don't know). However I'm still not sure about channels which are public by their very nature - yes, freedom of speech is good, but it surely shouldn't extend to everything, like planning to assassinate a president or a king, or publicly recruiting people to participate in such a plot?
But as Napster continues to face litigation from the music industry for copyright infringement, computer users are searching for alternatives and increasingly turning to a new wave of file-sharing programs. Most of these new programs have more features than Napster because they can share any type of files, including video files. [Emphasis added]
Makes me wonder if MPAA has something to do with this. Though I very well know that porn is distributed as mpegs and such as well, I would think pictures would be the dominant media. So it seems a bit odd that they mention video files, and that's in the very first page of the report after cover and TOC.
It goes on discussing porn videos after that, however. Are these really so common in the Net after all?
Copyright is just that. Even your courts view copyright as a balance struck between the First Admendment and the interests of authors. Still it seems to me that the Amendment doesn't allow for such a balance. I mean, what part of the wording "Congress shall make no law" is that hard to understand?
I guess it didn't enter into Rep. Waxman's mind that free access to porn has been going on for a while....
I guess he's never heard of Usenet....
:)
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Bah, everyone who's talking about freedom of speech and education (yes, I know you were joking, I'm not THAT dense) is missing the point. Porn is FUN. I like it. My girlfriend likes it. And as long as the people in the film are willing adults, who gives a flying turd?
:)
I don't care if some porn star starts my girlfriend's engine as long as I get to drive the car.
Did any one notice that Suicidal Tendencies was in just a few paces behind Metallica on their list of top searches? After all these years ST is still up there and with out the aid of media controversy and platinum releases. Remind me when I start a band to get a name that will assure media mediocrity and fan loyalty.
Its gotta be ST. It will always be ST.
Ascii artist &
You obviously have never had a child of your own. They develop personality long before you ever meet them.
My daughter (she's 2 now) fell in love with Guns n' Roses music when she was about 5-6 months along. She'd jump and kick and when she got further along, you could actually watch my wife's stomach and see her dancing around.
To this day, one of her favorite songs is 'Paradise City'.
You can't say that's not personality.
All I could get to was the damned summary. For some reason, Konqueror won't display PDFs...sigh.
As for file sharing...sigh. I think this means yet ANOTHER law banning yet ANOTHER activity that most children will not do unless their parents allowed them to in the first place.
*Puts on his magic prediction hat*
A new law in about 2 years, similar in nature to COPA, but specifically targetting file sharing utilities, the users, their ISPs, and the authors with big fat huge fines. No prison time though, congress doesn't want to look heartless, they just want more of your money.
mrgoat
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
It is good to know that at least the UK is keeping track of American politics. Apparently our own press is too tired of doing it.
I giess they have never heard of newsgroups.
--- http://homepage.mac.com/gregjsmith
See what I mean? (http://imagehost.hypermart.net/images/bswh.jpg)
These aren't the domininant thoughts in society -- they're the dominant searches on Gnutella! Christ's balls on a biscuit, man, what part didn't you understand?
Slowly, now.
Mainstream tastes are served via mainstream channels.
Fringe tastes are served via fringe channels.
Gnutella is a fringe channel.
Nobody needs to bother with Gnutella when they're looking for pictures of sailboats or flowers, they can find them with Altavista.
Hope that makes things clearer for you.
All (or most) of the searches go to all (or most) of the participating nodes. So you can make a pretty good guess at what the top searches are.
That said, I have to wonder if I can be part of a community whose most popular searches include "lolita", "preteen", "rape", and "incest".
These are most definitely not the values I subscribe to. Furthermore, I don't particularly have much respect for the rights of those who solicit such material.
So call me an asshole, mod me down, whatever. I just wish there was a way to support the freedoms I believe in without having to associate or be associated with these pervs.
Intelligence: Finding an error in a Knuth text.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The message I hear in many /. discussions on porn is sort of "It's the parent's responsibility, it must never be censored! Let the child deal with it!". While I do not disagree with much of this, there are many things to consider when you have an *actual* flesh-and-blood child (which most of you, I gather, do not).
.kids thing sounds great, in a perfect world. But we ain't in one, especially the gringos' one. It would be cool if I could setup a filter with only .kids allowed through it and be pretty comfortable until the kid is, let's say, eleven, but it just ain't gonna happen. I don't trust them (whomever "them" is this week) enough. As always, it ends up on "who watches the watchers?".
I myself have recently spawned, and I am having some philosophical considerations about this issue...
My first reaction was (and still kind of is) 'Anything goes! let them go nuts! I'll teach them enough for them to realize the difference'. I was very free when I was a kid, I had access to a lot of stuff that for my times was pretty rough at an early age, and I came up OK, didn't I? I mean, I am now a respected professional yadda-yadda-yadda-you-know-what-I-mean.
On the other hand, thruth be told, the most 'shocking' stuff I had access then was pretty different to what's out there now. I am almost 30 now, as a reference, and some of my big 'sins' were watching 'Caligula' (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0080491) when I was about 14 y.o., browsing through playboy (and, if I was lucky, Hustler), downloading some gifs (or similar) 50x100 pixel pics of Samantha Fox and XuXa. That's only covering 'sex', one of the areas of concern, let's not even begin about violence, gore, racism, nazism, politics, censorship (for crying out loud!), guns-and-ammo, and a dozen other categories to be aware of in the discussion.
Nowadays, my child would be able to right now (not to say in the three more years it'll take him to learn to read, type and click), to download a five-minute mpeg clip of a dog fucking a girl, a lady sucking a horse's dick, a guy roasting and eating the corpse of a baby (thanks rotten.com), goatse.cx, fecaljapan.com (or whatever that stream of shit is called), simulated snuff and rape films (maybe even not simulated - haven't looked that hard), escort services for his area code, and so on and on and on... All that without even a creditcard (not that it would be too hard for him to figure *that* part out when the time comes).
I trust I will teach him right. I will be supervising him, I know he's smart (already), and I don't want the US government to tell me how to raise him (moreso since I'm not American nor live in the US). I am not really against him downloading Pamela Anderson and whats-his-face video and jerking his brains off when he's 13, but I'm not really confortable with the penis-piercings and eunuch pages (not unix, eunuchs!) at http://www.bmezine.com/extreme/free/index.html, just to name one of many.
So, what to do? Nobody said that parenting was easy! They don't come with an 800 support number (I know, I've checked!) and the user manual is pretty sketchy (sorta "if (poo) change_diaper();"). I guess I'll rough it and try to stay on top of it.
But, to the point of the article, the
As it was said before: "Kids! An hour of joy, twenty years of misery". Oh well...
Wolfe.
(Disclaimer - I posted something like this to an old discussion, and was pretty much the last message of the thread, so I don't think anyone read it, maybe this time it can spark a conversation).
--
If you want to live in a country ruled by religion, move to Iran.
The stupidity of these republicans is so damn funny. They think that CyberPatrol and Net Nanny will somehow magically filter alien programs such as BearShare. These idiots feel powerless, with good reason. There is nearly nothing they could do. If Mattel were to release CyberPatrol for Gnutella, wouldn't that violate the DMCA, because they reverse engineered the specific client? Unless the Gnutella client authors cooperate, the filter corporations can can do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING without violating the laws that they created themselves. The only thing they could possibly do is create their own gnutella client, but how does that prevent children from installing their own? This entire matter is just another example of how open standards really do crush censorship.
---
Can you imagine a MOSIX cluster of these?
Can you imagine a MOSIX cluster of these?
Damn censors!!!
Yeah, like they've ever worried about blocking legitimate site for the web!
www.peacefire.org
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The internet is eVil
The only thing left to do is to follow the Taliban example and ban the internet, computers, computer disks, skateboards, lipstick, catalogues, women, animals,spatulas,sporks,sone knives, bearskins....
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
You'd need an AI that was better than the collective judgement of the Supreme Court for the last forty years. All jokes aside it just ain't gonna happen
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Every time a new restriction to our rights is planned the drag out: Porn Terrorism Crackers Drugs This time, it has to be porn. The real target is people sharing files, period. But rather than get into a discussion about what (used to) constitute fair use they need a demon. If it plays on one of the four fears above they have a good excuse for doing whatever they want. It didn't work so well with encryption (even though they invoked all four). Saying "It would hurt Sony's business model" isn't quite sexy enough. So it has to be one of the Four. Look for more restrictions on file sharing period sometime soon
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
With some sort of ssh-type login subscription control and encrypted pipes, usenet servers could very well serve for distributing files on a veeeery wide basis. It's been a while since I've touched INN or CNEWS, so I don't know if that sort of thing has been worked into the old favorite protocols, but some like Sendmail are starting to move towards providing for closed encrypted networks. Of course, this could be used for both good and bad, so it's probably going to cause a ruckus and some people dopey enough to let someone not deeply in their web of trust access to whatever information (files? music? movies? pics?) is stored there are likely to make it short-lived.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Do you really think that's it? If they come up with a bunch of reports, that's perfectly okay but they'll take action, that's for sure.
Unlike the music industry, The pornographic industry didn't sue any of those file sharing programs. Now we know who's better.
I opened up the page with the report fully expecting to read another congressional report about how The Internet/Rap/Movies/TV is Corrupting Our Children. I had expected to find a diatribe about how government regulation was necessary to control the new "scourge of our children".
Boy, was I surprised at what I found instead.
This report is completely factually correct.
While most Slashdot readers probably know precisely how the P2P filesharing scene has changed over the past year, the fact is that most people outside our little clique don't have a clue about this stuff. All this report does is take the knowledge that we already have about these technologies and translate it into a form accessible to non-techies. And it does that extremely well by basically setting out the facts that every parent should probably know about file sharing software before allowing their kid to go online.
In summary, the report says:
(a) Since Napster's demise, new filesharing technologies have taken its place.
(b) Most of these new technologies are decentralized, unlike Napster.
(c) The technologies are not limited to music files.
(d) Porn is one of the top items searched for and is highly available on the systems.
(e) Parental control software is not incredibly effective for these new P2P systems.
(f) Because of the logistics of these systems, don't expect legislation to solve problems for parents; the parents should be more proactive.
While all the above seems obvious to us, if you were a parent who felt overwhelmed by your kid's computer knowledge, wouldn't you minimally want to have this information? Most of the posters here take the libertarian point of view that government should stay out of the regulation business. Making parents aware of their own responsibility to be aware of their children's internet activities seems the best way to deal with this.
Well, that was my funny for the day. Who'da guessed it: people want to share porn and, hey, they succeed. Damn, these Congress Critters ain't so dumb after all.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
"teen sex","Rape","Beastiality"...
Seems as though Congress was looking over the shoulder of Gary Condit...
E.K.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
using Limewire, Bearshare, Napster, Google, IRC, ask.com, his local library, the library of congress and the encyclopedia Britannica
to do a search on "Henry Waxman" + "laid" yielded
0 documents found.
TK
Searched the web for porn.
Results 1 - 10 of about 8,120,000. Search took 0.10 seconds.
*shrug*
stuff
search for 'pron' on google and you get about 8,100,000 results.
stuff
You have to own property to sit on a jury? That sounds like colonial times, maybe ?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
In A.D. 2101 War was beginning. Jobs: What happen ? Schiller: Somebody set up us the PC clone. Wozniak: We get signal. Jobs: What ! Wozniak: Main cinema display turn on. Jobs: It's You !! Gates: How are you gentlemen !! Gates: All your marketshare are belong to us. Gates: You are on the way to bankruptcy. Jobs: What you say !! Gates: Your OS have no chance to survive make your time. Gates: HA HA HA HA ....
Jobs: Take off every 'G4' !!
Jobs: You know what you doing.
Jobs: Move 'G4'.
Jobs: For great overpricing.
Mother of 13 year-old script kiddie discovers his porn collection hidden in C:\WINDOWS\31337\P1X. Seriously, this is like someone's parents (or spouse) finding their porn. What is the government going to do, slap our wrists and check under our mattresses all the time?
You've got the wright idea.
I've never done this before, and I hope it is not counter-productive, but could a moderator please mod up post #69? It raises many of the concerns parents (and thus legislators) reasonably have, and which many on Slashdot either don't think of or, worse, conveniently ignore.
Thank you.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Peer-to-peer porn? I always thought that when porn was peer-to-peer, it was called "intercourse".
And how does congress fit into all this?
Hmmmm...
Kill, Tux, kill!
Or something like that. Methinks they just need another banner to rally behind to keep themselves in the headlines. After all,
Won't someone please think of the children?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
It's a slippery slope kind of thing. You see, the more porn you [view|read], the more accustomed you get to it. The buzz wears off, so you have to find stuff that's further out there. It keeps going, and you wind up that more traditional sexual methods become less appealing. Then what you need to get aroused becomes more and more extreme, and can really screw with your relationships.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
A disclaimer I should have mentioned in my previous post:
I'm 20, and I'm opposed to porn and pre-marital sex.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Armored breeding colonies. That's the only way. Children will then be apportioned to the willing populous by lottery.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
good points. some ones i disagree with, but well made. i dont think that age limits are reasonable. they are a result of complainers. people who find something they dont like, and blame blame blame. someone dosnt like their child seeing porn? well, instead of stopping their child to see porn, they stop (or try to) stop everyone's child from seeing porn. same with violence. and, if you notice, they normally do it after some tear jerker story that is nearly impossible to stand against. little tim commited suicide, and in his note said a song told him too. little tim was fucked up. my point is that a very large number of freedoms are being taken away from us because of our acceptance of sad storys, and our eagerness to simply shut the gates on life and live behind rules to protect us. shit happens. sorry. im not a woman, so i cant tell you if pron, or media, does to me, but i can tell you what it does to my image/idea/concieved role of women, with me representing a person in society. nothing. i dont have expectations of women, or men. okay...thats stretching it. i used to. i got my current ideas of the sexes (and much else) from media of some kind, and from observation. but now, i dont have expectations for women. or for men. i have expectations for people. i do use what ive observed about women to make judgements. i believe in judgeing people. juege everyone you meet. i do. hundreds of times. not using available information on a person is illogical, unless your information is proved wrong. so i use these sterotypes on women, me too. and blacks. and jews. and (insert minority.) and (insert majority.) i use what i can get. i, however, hold little to no stock in predjudice. and every judgement i make, on anyone, i hold open. i never (rarely) close the book. and i am a result of society. i came to this...idea...whatever it is...from the society in which porn...does whatever it does to women, in your opinion. and fuck books. either reguritate the idea (fuck spelling, as well), like the rest of us, or dont, but dont throw around "the books say." or "i read." if you agree with it, then its enough yours to repeat. im not going into your political views. democrats and republicans, are, from what ive ever seen in my life, both stupid. s-t-u-p-i-d. and you didnt just help my idea for either. moving towards a democratic state? huh? no one "moved" anywhere. if anything, it was a shiver. bush didnt sweep the thing. he squeaked by. but gore didnt win, either. maybe we just want a real president. (tell you the truth, i wanted mccain, and thats just 'cus he seemed to be human, and to actually care.) anyways, i think ive probially flamed you here, and im sorry. i also thing that i didnt articulate my ideas nearly well enoguh, but im tired. and...i really respect your opinion. you put your points across well (untill the last paragraph.) and i agree with you on most of it. anyways...im sleeping, now.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
oh yeah. "better to let intelligent persons select our policies than the average voter" if bush is, as you say, a more intelligent person...then i weep for humanity.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
Searched the web for porn. Results 1 - 10 of about 22,500,000. Search took 0.07 seconds.
Paula Houston, who was elected the porn czar of Utah, seems to be on a moral crusade to restrict pr0n from minors. Granted, that's her job, but she tramples on the rights of others in the process. Surprisingly enough, I haven't seen any filters in my local library yet, but it's just a matter of time.
What can you expect from a state that has students rallying against porno and a porn czar who seems to imply that ISPs should be more responsible for porn?
Did anyone else notice how often they emphasised the fact that Peer to Peer services offered porn without charge? Man, I must have read the words without charge like five or six different times! It really is amazing to them that anybody would give porn away for free, isn't it? I guess most people in the government grew up in an age where anything that had the slightest demand had a patent and a dollar sign slapped on it immediatly.
Maybe i'm just clutching at straws, but I see this as a major cultural difference between us and them.
-- juju
noticed in the AIMster screenshot, they show the taskbar. this is probably kinda offtopic but I wouldn't have seen it if not for this article.
I can clearly make out WP and Netscape and RealPlayer icons. no Office, no IE, no WiMP.
evidence that maybe DOJ is trying to kick the M$ habit.
still, it's obviously a Win32 screen.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
What you need are results that a good Texan president can sympathise with:
1. Guns
2. Cow tipping
3. Sex
4. Line dancing
5. haw do ah spel [....]?
6. Drunken Lolitas*
*Well, every concerned father should care about where his daughters are.
Granted, there wasn't anything in it that I didn't already know, but overall, the report was well written and acurate.
/.'ers here who are ranting over this report. I didn't see one mention of legislation or voluntary restrictions being needed -- only useful information for those parents out there who are pretty clueless about computers/Internet. Honestly, all the report did was provide information to parents who have no idea that their censorware was useless. Overall, I think that's a good thing.
I have to say that I'm a bit surprised at the vast majority of the
Nice to see that "Saving Private Ryan" and "Star Trek Voyager" get the same reverance that pr0n does.
Now...it would be an interesting list if they showed combinations, like:
"Star Trek Voyager" + "XXX" + "Alienchickwiththebigboobsandfunnyfacetattoo"
SENATORS READ PORNO MAGAZINES!
They must be distributing it to our children! They are corrupting our society! They have ruiuned our economies! Think of the children! The CHILDREN, for Christ's sake! They read porn, so they must have brought DRUGS, and HACKING, and FREE THINKING into our society!
We must BAN all senators!
The schools aren't doing a great job (at least here in the US) so why not let the children learn from the internet.
1) They'll learn about anatomy, and will do better in class in their older years.
2) They'll learn geometry, by trying to figure out what kind of body parts can fit into the goats' ear.
3) They'll learn organizational skills, by creating a collection of celbrity porn, indexed by type of celebrity, last name, and real or fake.
and it just goes on....
i knew it, the government just doesn't want us to learn. Let's go on strike!
Is the SirCam virus P2P since it sends your files to everyone on your Outlook address book?
Heh heh
Kallahar
Great idea! SOAP over HTTP 1.1 Now P2P == Web as far as legality/blockablity is concerned. /me runs over to emacs and starts coding.
My other car is first.
Children doesn't need p2p to access porn. It is all over the place. Did you do a google search on "porn"; it returns 8,120,000 results, more than any p2p software can return. It is the responsibility of the parents to educate their children and restrict their childrens' use of computers.
I don't know if any of you young-uns remember, but back in '86 one of Reagan's minions produced the "Meese Commission Report", an attempt to prove a link between porn and criminal behavior. Basically, a sop to the Christian Right. It was widely derided, and elegantly spoofed (ever wonder how the porn video company "Ed Meese Productions" got its name?)
See http://www.solomonsrefuge.com/MeeseLinks.htm
Looks like these congresscritters are recycling old hot-buttons for their dumber constituents. It used to be that the US government would invoke patriotism to do their most un-American things--now the catch-phrase is "protect the children".
Remain calm! All is well!
Boss: "Sam I need you to find all the porn you can using p2p programs" Sam: "Excuse me?" Boss: "Find me some good preteen porn and Britney Spears giving a blow job, put them on a CD-R, than put them on my desk.......oh yea right up a report on it and give it to Senate" Sam: "What ever you say boss"
Bet the Congress asses typed theire smart litle words at work, while looking at an desktop walpaper with goatse(.e)x
This is my sig. Other people have one too,but this is mine.
I have seen senate ips in my log for months, most of it is animal porn, but hey they must have just gotten bored. So what do they do? Try and get rid of it! Once those beastiality lovers get it they want to hide it all away! But you will never get my horse! never@!
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
But, I realy want to know what the hell the goverment thinks my games, my music and my p0rn is doing to me...
It's all "ehh..porn is bad...violence in movies is gonna corupt our youth" but they dont seem to say WHY it's bad. porn may conflict with some peoples belifs, but not mine. I guess my problem is i presume most people have the common sence i have to know that what you see on TV or the 'net aint real
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
I'm pretty sure those are just 30 random requests grabbed from the search monitor, not actually the most popular 30 of the day.
Why the heck is this article in the "Internet" category? If this doesn't deserve to be labeled "humor", nothing does.
This
Holy ----! Britney Spears takes it up the ---!
What do you get when you search for 'Cmdr Taco'?
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Man, I haver *got* to stop submitting stories to Slashdot just before crashing for fourteen hours... I swear, the next time I wake up and find I've missed the opportunity to spam my own story,.. I'll, I'll.. *thwack*!!
--
I don't see why not; after all, in the UK, you need a license to be a computer security administrator (which, IMHO, would include all single-user Linux boxen where you choose to run Bastille or set up iptables...). No, I'm not making it up. Couldn't get Slashdot to post the story though - goodness knows why, it seemed pretty damn newsworthy to me...
--
What part of "the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it" don't you understand?
;-)
The study takes issue at the fact that you can download these for free, and start using them. thus bypassing any parental contorls. Here's an idea, don't give your kid root access!!!
Oh wait, most parents probably had the kids install the blocking software for them.
Children that go into Hastings for the latest Mad magazine walk by and see Hustler, Playboy, Oui and countless other magazines. And, when children are looking for a twix bar at the checkout counter of a grocery store they see the headlines on Cosmo and Red Book about how to drive men wild in bed, or what 7 positions are available that your mom didn't know.
Porn, at whatever level you want to call it porn, is available everywhere. As far as children being exposed to it...parents should be more involved in their kids' lives. My younger brother would always flip on some porn site when a new kid would come over, but minutes later they were off playing games or learning cool things from the Internet. And, aren't file sharing programs for music illegal anyway now?
Searches for "Christina Aguilera" and "Madonna" also produced extensive pornographic content.
First, Madonna is pornographic. Second, Christina Aguilera is kiddie porno. Finally, I did a search for 'Compaq Storage maximum number disks' on a search engine, and the first hit was a 404, the second was a 404, the third was a porn site.
Get a life! Congress needs to realize the Internet is global, and in Europe a lot of what we see as porn is normal television or beach viewage. In the Middle East, a lot of what we see as normal casual business wear for women is restricted pornography. We cannot please everyone, and we cannot restrict anyone.
Click here or here.
I can't wait until they say 's--t' on television. I mean, now that 'shit' is okay.
By the way, is that pronounced f-dash-dash-k, or f-double dash-k, or f-bar-bar-k, .... I mean, fuck!
Click here or here.
Limewire lets you watch the stream of search terms as people search for things. Just watch it for a few minutes and it becomes obvious that peer to peer is mainly used for porn.
I've never used BearShare but I bet it's the same.
Honestly. Give the Congress and government some credit. How on earth do you think that they could come to such bland statments about a nation's children without a COMPLETE LACK OF FACTS?!?! C'MON!!! You can't make the unreal, uneducated, and biased decisions we've come to expect from them with a big stinking pile of data in front of you. It just isn't kosher to look things up in the US Congress, or any other end of the legislative branch of this country. AND BY GOD, LET"S LET THAT TRADITION STAND.
Make sure you have ghostscript and ghostview installed, and there is some package to allow pdf viewing in X11, I can't remember which. I use Slackware, and I was having problems, until I realized I didn't install all the required programs. Make sure you have all the packages for your distro, and Konqi should do it, it opened the pdf for me.
C Pungent
It's interesting to decide who now becomes responsible for the content. People unilaterally agree that Napster's downfall was its central nature; the corporation, as an individual in the US, could be brought to court.
With a lot of the new(er) trading schema, i.e. Gnutella, there is no central corporation. Legally, you're dealing with multitudes of _real_ individuals (as in singular human beings). The question this leads to, of course, is who will we lay the blame on when `inappropriate' content is found by those who, arguably, should not be exposed to it?
-k.
Now I am sure it's out there but the way your hear the government and other anti-porn groups talk you can't type in a URL with out hitting child porn or bestiality web site. I remember once I was surfing somewhere and ran across a file called "16 year old old blah blah blah.avi" or something like that. Ok was curious if it was as prevelent as they say so I had to look, sure she might have been 16 in 1985. Have they really downloaded it to look and see if they were in compliance with truth in advertising laws? Parental filters work fine. The best filter is the parent. Don't give you kid internet access at his/her pc. Only have net access at a pc that is in like the living room and watch the child while they are using it. After all most parents wouldn't let their child play with a chain saw, don't let them play on the net unmonitored...
From the report summary:
"children can be unexpectedly inundated by files containing explicit content for simple searches like "Britney Spears.""
I thought that was just her persona - you don't have to go to some esoteric file share utility to get explicit Spears content - just turn on your TV.
Do you remember these fine words from the Supreme Court's ruling on the CDA
"As we have explained, the Government may not "reduc[e] the adult population . . . to . . . only what is fit for children." Denver, 518 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 29) (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Sable, 492 U. S., at 128). [n.40] "[R]egardless of the strength of the government's interest" in protecting children, "[t]he level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox." Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products Corp., 463 U.S. 60, 74-75 (1983)."
By the way, despite the shock of discovering that there are people on the net who find no offense in pornographic materials, and that they might use transport protocols other than http, the vast majority of traffic is still via the web. You may have found a shocking large list of related files searching for Britney Spears on Bearshare, but type "britney spears nude" in google and you get 88,900 hits.
By learning the technology, you could focus your self-righteous umbrage at a more appropriate target, such as Bob Dole, who's prime time, broadcast television conflation of Ms. Spears and Viagra reaches far more children than www.bsnude.com ever will.
-David Gessel
...but did anybody else find humour in the report's surprise discovery that you got porn if you searched for madonna?
If you look at the Top 30 Most Popular Queries on the Gnutella Network, "suicidal tendencies" is listed at number 29.
I like this band as much as the next guy, but can it really be number 29, or did somebody conveniently put this up there while browsing queries just to outrage people?
Betcha they didnt know it was a band.
Dumbass congress bounty hunters...
...
Or is there a massive Suicidal Tendencies comeback I hadnt heard of?
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
I'd like to see them try to police the gnutella network. Our government just seems to love engaging in exercises in futilty(i.e. the drug war), so such an attempt wouldn't surpirse me in the least.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing for Dummies
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
---------
Senatorial aid: Senator! There's a computer program that lets kids share music illegally!
Senator: Humm, must shut it down...
Year 2001
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Senatorial aid: Senator! Since we shut down Napster all the kids are using new programs that not only share music illegally, but pr0n too!
Senator: D'oh! Screwed ourselves again.
---------
Me: Will they ever learn?
I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, oh, wait...
This must be obvious, since everyone and their mother knows the answer but me, but why is pr0n bad? What is wrong with seeing people having sex with each other? What is wrong with seeing naked people?
And why, as a matter of comparison, is seeing someone disemboweled, shot, beheaded, or impaled on the big screen less objectionable?
--
fifth sigma, inc.
... A recent report has revealed that children could steal porn mags from newsagencys. Many community groups are horified and are urging the government to shut down all newsagencys, magazine companys, printing presses, and are enforcing the destruction of all photocopy machines, since they may allow children to copy porn.
Other groups are pushing to stop the production of all illicit content in movies. Mrs Jones from SimTown commented that "I let my son burrow a video from the video store, and it contained NUDITY!... I shouldnt have to worry about monitoring what my children watch... why should I have to check to make sure the video isnt X rated?... I plan on suing the RIAA for allowing my son to see what a naked female looks like!"
Porn is an IP business, and freely distributing their material will (in theory) put them out of business. This is "good."
So... what do they do now? Eliminate Gnutella and save the porn industry, or leave it be and let kids download German scheissen videoes?
Actually, now that I mention it, there's an awful lot of free porn on the internet, and yet they're still making money to some extent. Perhaps this can be used to show that arguments by the MPAA and RIAA are full of holes?
Look at the bright side, Congress may no nothing about peer to peer networks, be clueless about open source, but when it comes to sex, they have quite a collection of experts, on both sides of the aisle. It's about time they put all that collective experience chasing interns, cheating on their spouses and getting a little on the side to good use.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
...That most of the "kiddie pr0n" was actually faked files for that whole ZeroPaid.com wall of shame site.
Americans could not be more self absorbed if they were made of equal parts water and paper towel. -Dennis Miller
slashdot a government server looking for articles about porn. "Senator, we need more bandwidth." "What? Why?" "Too many people are looking to us for porn."
Looking at BearShare's homepage, the 2.2.6 release adds a new "Family Filter" that hides "innappropriate content."
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Senator Kennedy has secured high-speed internet access in his office to "research" this phenomenon in greater depth...
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com
This is great for getting pr0n , so I hear ;)
check out my Linux / PHP / Apache Powered Robotic Streaming WebcamThe REAL reason Congressman Waxman is concerned about porn on P2P file-sharing:
*Searching BearShare:* Porn
(matches show up)
*Thinks:* "Goatse.Cx.jpg, eh? I wonder what this image is."
*Clicks*
Section title from the report: "UNINTENDED EXPOSURE TO PORNOGRAPHY"
Unintended exposure? No one is being unintentionally exposed to porn... no one is forcing them to download the porn that they find mixed in with their Britney Spears songs... And anyway, anyone who is running that search is either a girl looking for her songs (and won't dl the porn unless she's lesbian) or it's a guy who is doing the search with the intention of finding the porn (cause no respectable guy would want her songs right?). So therefore there's never really unintentional exposure.
You know, this study they did is probably going to cause the pr0n downloads to increase because kids will see it and be like oh, I didn't know I could do that, that's a great idea!
The "evidence" they've used for their report is simply taken from one day's listing on gnutellameter.com - certainly not a very scientific approach. Looking at that site more carefully could easily lead to the opposite conclusions of those in their report.
If you visit the Gnutellameter site you'll find the top search terms to be an incredibly small fraction of total searches. Today's number one search term is "neuroticfish no instruments" with a "fraction" of 0.3975%. "Porn" is number 4 with a fraction of only 0.1760%. The terms towards the bottom of the top 30 have fractions of less than 0.08%. The real story is that people are searching for a wide range of specific searches, not generic ones like "porn" and that one or more people conducting even a relatively small number of searches for a particular item on any one day could skewer the results. This would include Senate "researchers" searching for porn related terms on the same day they use the top 30 data.
Even if they didn't try to skewer the data by their own searches, it would be fairly easy to do so, and at any rate they selectively choose data from a day that would support their hypothesis. If they had picked a day with an obscure set of terms as one of the top 5 searches it would have been more obvious how bad (and selective) their data and suggested conclusions really are.
From a quick look at gnutellameters' numbers, it seems (surprisingly to me) that P2P might actually be less porn ridden than the rest of the net (and certainly no worse than newsgroups), and that porn searches (at least generic ones - "porn", "sex", "pics" etc.) may be less common using P2P vs. many search engines.
This seems to be another powerful person lashing out at something they don't understand and using bad and misleading data to back them up.
My first post - please be kind.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
I have reason to believe that a surprising number of the human population -- including members of our congress -- has engaged or plans to engage in sexual activities.
Yes, I know this comes as a shock to you, too. But studies have shown, shockingly, that approximately 100% of polled parents who did not adopt have engaged in sexual activities. How can we trust the children to these sex-craved heathens?
Additionally, almost the entire responding sample over the age of 20 replied that they had engaged in sex at one time or another.
Statistics do not lie..*snickers*..*straightens face* Furthermore, studies have indicated that many houses with multiple children are headed by couples who continued to engage in such profane sexual behavior even after the birth of their first child -- sometimes even while their children were presently in the home!
Unsurprisingly, this has had a horrifying effect on the innocence of our children. More than two thirds of those over the age of 10 correctly identified sex as the means by which one starts a pregnancy. Many of the parents of children over the age of 13 said that they had seen signs that their children had been committing masturbation. Only a handful (less than ten) of the 100,000 parents stated that they would consider chastity belts to help keep their children from performing such horrific sexually deviant behavior, and to assist the development of a well-adjusted mind.
It has also been revealed that children are not shielded from the sight of blood -- Many polled stated that they would allow their children to remove band-aids and view cuts and bloodied bandages, as well as attend barbeques. Some particularly sinful couples would allow their older children to hunt -- exposing them to guns, violence, and blood in one big sinfest!
How can we as a society continue if we continue to engage in this horrific behavior? We must be ever-vigilant to protect our children from the facts of life!