Slashback: Scramjet, Golden Ears, Preciousness

Slashback tonight with a followup on the Australian scramjet test, comparing audio formats with numbers (not just complaining about them), and questionably reasonable ways to sneak abuse-begging Internet laws in "for the children," (or plaintiffs, as the case may be). Read on.

Everything that rises must come down under. spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "The Australian trial of a scramjet engine has fizzed. 'The experiment at the Department of Defence's Woomera Prohibited Area, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, was not successful because the [United States-supplied] rocket experienced flight anomalies prior to the scramjet experiment,' an analysis of what went wrong says. Not to worry, another test is tentatively scheduled for next week, assuming researchers can work out what went wrong with this one on the way up."

Not to be confused with this previous scramjet test, also unsuccessful.

Ah, much better, I thought you were being unreasonable there for a minute. After Jamie drew attention to it in a Slashdot piece on Saturday, SafeSurf changed their legislative proposal. In Jamie's words, "Woo!"

That's not all he said, of course: "Please note that, now, they ONLY want to fine you thousands of dollars for failing to label anything you write that is harmful to an 8-year-old. What a relief! "The penalty for a first offense of failing to label or mislabeling material harmful to minors shall be limited to a fine of under five thousand dollars."

Bennett Haselton passed on this commentary as well:

"If you go to http://www.safesurf.com/online.htm in Netscape and "View Document Info", it shows it was last modified on October 29, 2001. (This function doesn't work in IE.)

The original OCPA is [at google]. SafeSurf apparently removed this paragraph from section 6:

Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.

and replaced it with:

Publishers may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by the data negligently published. The parents/plantiffs shall be given presumption, if the case involves graphic images, and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child, only that the material was severe enough to reasonably be considered to have needed a rating label to protect children.

and then added three new paragraphs listing more exemptions from this rule."

Can you hear that pea through the mattresses? For the audio objectivists, a good update to CmdrTaco's recent MP3 v. Ogg Vorbis inquiry: E1ven writes: "Everyone is always arguing about whether Vorbis sounds better than MP3, or vice versa. Here is your chance to see who is right! ff123 is doing a set of Blind Listening tests and could use your help. The more ears the better!"

Comments

innocent till _proven_ guilty?

[quick_dry_3]

The parents/plantiffs shall be given presumption, if the case involves graphic images, and do not have to prove that the content actually produced harm to their child

whats going on with the land of the free? we're always told about the fact that in the US you're innocent until proven guilty.

maybe in the economic downturn we can't afford to wait before you're guilty.

I must be missing something, because without proof of harm, the kids wouldn't even need to see it! make money via surfing the web, I guess the offers were true...

Re:innocent till _proven_ guilty?

[td]

This proposal is about civil disputes, in which the notion of guilt (a concept of criminal law) never arises. Liability and guilt are two different things as far as the law is concerned.

Re:innocent till _proven_ guilty?

[rcw-home]

If it was really "innocent till proven guilty" then why is the US bombing Afghanistan?

Ok, lemme spell it out for the slow people...

The "common law" western court system as we know it is national in scope. That means that sovereign nations each independantly employ justice systems as they see fit.

There is no such system that is international in scope. Instead, it works kind of like the playground in grade school. You make friends (allies), make agreements with them (treaties), if you're rich you can give them some lunch money (foreign aid), and if you're big/brave/foolish enough you can also bully people around (sanctions, war, etc). All these playground-like social conventions are called "international law".

It'll be this way until sovereignity breaks down and all nations succumb to a global empire that can enforce its own laws wherever it wants. Then you won't have war, you'll just have rebels and revolutionaries. Doesn't that sound like fun?

I'm all for the OCPA!

[aiken_d]

As long as they pass the PCGA (Protection of Children from Government Act) at the same time. Here's my proposed text for the PCGA:

Individual Senators and Representatives may be sued in civil court by any parent who feels their children were harmed by a law that the Congressman voted for. The parents shall be given presumption in all cases and do not have to prove that the law actually produced harm to their child, only that the law could reasonably be considered to have the potential to harm the child.

What do you think? Unanimous support in Congress?

Cheers
-b

Safesurf confused on technology, Constitution.

[billstewart]

OK, we've known for a while that Safesurf, like many of their competitors, is confused about what freedom of speech is about and what the Constitutional protections for it are about, and they've got random difficulties with English grammar and basic logic as well.
The Safesurf MAPS rant complains about them stealth-blocking websites that may contain important information, and people won't know they're being censored. But they've got the technology wrong: MAPS doesn't block websites - they provide tools that are normally used for blocking emails and furthermore, sites that implement MAPS tools properly normally provide bouncegrams telling people they block how and why their email was rejected, so they can fix their problems. The only way a company like Safesurf would be "censored" by a MAPS-using mailbox service would be if they sent out email to people - and since they'd find out they had a problem the first time they tried to send mail, they could put a notice on their website about it and tell people who want followup communications from them how to contact them.

Furthermore, Safesurf's web site violates Safesurf's proposed law creating (and mixing up) civil and criminal penalties and tort liability for mislabeling or failing to label web sites. Their original proposal was more aggressive than their current one, but it still doesn't require any actual harm to any actual child, as long as there are graphic images on the site (logos and decorations may not be harmful, but they're graphics, so we're covered there.) Plaintiffs can sue if the site doesn't provide appropriate ratings labels on material severe enough to be potentially harmful to children. Certainly, any proposal to throw people in jail for what they write on the net is pretty severe, and could cause harm to children who write things without labeling them if such a law were passed, and telling kids that people want to do that kind of harm to them just for what they write, even if there's no law passed, can also be pretty scary. www.safesurf.com's label says

"CONTENT='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.classify.org/safesurf/" l r (SS~~000 1))'"

which if you look it up on the explanatory web site doesn't have any indication of what the rating means. It does point to a site that tells you how to download a ".rat" file into your browser, and if you open up that file with a text editor instead of installing it, the file indicates something about "all ages", but doesn't indicate whether it's appropriate or inappropriate for all ages, so that a web browser could be set to do the appropriate thing with it, though it clearly implies that the really scary material complained about above should be appropriate for all ages....

"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-PICS-services" has more PICS explanations.

Update - their web page indicates that MAPS has now unblocked them.