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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.
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?
No, it doesn't, because people misunderstand what it is that they want to prevent from happening.
Prohibitionist thinking runs something like this: "Alcohol abuse is bad. If we ban drinking, there will be less drinking. Therefore there will be less alcohol abuse." True, true, and false.
For all x, prohibition of x just about eliminates responsible use of x - and the social structures that support that responsible use - and does jack shit to prevent abuse of x - and leads to economic and social structures that support that abuse. (For example, we're still dealing with the social after-effects of the way Prohibition brought alcohol use home.)
Then, outside of the effects of x abuse, come the violent effects of the black market in x, and the abuse of police power in the effort to stomp out that black market.
It takes a very twisted defintion to consider these results as "working".
Considering the duration of a crack high vs. that of a good drunk, as well as their completely different effects on the central nervous system, you're comparing pharmacological apples and oranges.
A more relevant question is: is one more likely to be shot in a gun battle between crack dealers or liquor store owners?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
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.
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
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. --
____________________
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
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
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!!
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.
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!
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!