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Cingular Filtering Porn From Wireless Web?
Atryn writes: "Cingular Wireless is reportedly blocking its customers from accessing 'objectionable material" via the Wireless Web.' The spokesman mentioned in the story disclaims knowledge of any blocking -- can any Cingular customers reading this confirm it?
No ifs, ands, or buts. Censorship is just a bad thing. If they have bandwidth problems, they can rate limit the users. That's an entirely different concept than limiting them based on the content of the traffic.
11*43+456^2
But this does pose an interesting question--what URL's are easily memorable, and are optimized for entry via telephone keypad as alpha?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
See, this here is what I don't understand about the state of the telecoms world.
Your statement:
See, my immediate and overriding thought is: I'm the CUSTOMER. I give you money, you give me bandwidth. How I use it is up to me. I've bought - BOUGHT - bandwidth from you, and now you're putting all these restrictions on me because you didn't do your sums correctly and you're making a loss from insufficient service provision.
The same applies in spades to all the cable modem, ADSL, and prepaid dialup plans we see getting post-hoc restrictions placed on them. To me, this looks like the service provider is an incompetent cretin that can't do their sums, work out how much capacity they've *bought*, how much they *need* to service their paying customers, and charge appropriately right off the bat.
Seriously, folks, is the corporate world so seriously screwed up that no-one is capable of this?
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Given the size of most cell phone displays perhaps they are doing a public service by blocking pr0n by saving people from unneeded eye strain. Ok, so I am reaching....
I'm just waiting for a voice over IP chat application on my cell phone. I think this will be the killer app for internet enabled cell phones. Imagine the convenience of being able to have a voice conversation on your internet enabled cell phone with another internet enabled cell phone user.
'Same speed C but faster'
Ham packet radio and even CB are subjected to the FCC's rather stringent requirements against profanity and obscenity. I remember this being a big deal when I daydreamed about setting up a packet-radio ISP link in the early 1990s -- even sort-of-innocuous newsfroups like rec.nude could get you into trouble. I'm not sure what's different now with 802.11b.
We're not talking about legality here. I know Cingular *can* do whatever it wants. But censorship is still a bad thing, and like any other bad thing and I don't have to be OK about it. It seems you're taking a very market oriented approach, and even though that's not always a suitable approach, I'll use it anyway and still make you look like a fool.
One requirement to have perfect competition and a perfectly efficient market (something you seem to be *assuming* exists) is that the consumers have perfect knowledge. According to theory in aperfectly efficient market, everyone must know everything there is to know about the product to ensure they are making an informed decision. That, coupled with the fact that theory assumes that everyone who takes place in the market is rational (not true, but lets assume it anyway), then we are simply complaining and creating a ruckus so that people know what cingular is doing.
Just as a side point, this is from the company whose ad campaign exclaims that we all have a right to free expression.
Don't even think of saying "redneck"... it's offensive.
I've seen the future, it's not free, open 802.11b, it's people using WAP phones playing games, paying 20 cents to get the high score on a round of a trivia game, ending up huge phone bills. Just think AOL before they went flat rate.
There's money in pay per click.
Press SEND to get high kharma (for only 20 cents)
--Mike--
Why is pr0n 'bad' for kids? When I was a kid, I looked at pr0n out of curiosity of what the big deal was. From puberty on, I looked at pr0n because of raging hormones. I wasn't sexually active as a teen, but sure looked at a lot of pr0n. It didn't turn me into Osama bin Laden.
I just don't understand why Americans get into such a snit over sex and pornography; and yes, it's mostly Americans. Most everywhere else in the world porn and sex aren't that big of a deal.
You can't really censor out pr0n; when I didn't get it from BBSes there was always my dad's magazine collection. It's just not worth the effort, except for stamping out child porn. I mean, really, can anyone demonstrate that pornography is bad for kids?
The reason the cable providers got their pooch screwed was based primarily on two flawed assumptions. One, that people would use the same total bandwidth that they used over 56K, only in shorter bursts. And secondly, that the market was infinite and exponential growth would continue indefinitely.
Of course, the average person was using more than their allocated amount of bandwidth, but due to a massive influx of users, new lines were being laid all the time, so there was always more bandwidth than was needed. Until they slowed down with the infrastructure development that is. Then the overbooking of bandwidth came back to bite them in the ass and left them with little choice, either raise the prices, or restrict the bandwidth.
From their point of view, restricting the bandwidth, especially upstream, made more sense. Of all of their customers 95% of them probably used the service as expected. A little email here, a little web surfing there. Download the occasional mp3 and keep it connected all the time. Its the remaining 5% that created all the problems. And we know who they are. The bandwidth caps and other restrictions probably didn't even affect most of the other 95%, so if they lost some customers, better the 5% that were more or less abusing the network rather than lose over 50% of their customers due to a price hike to afford 5% of the users.
Yes, they probably should have assumed that this abuse would have taken place. And it would have made even more sense from their point of view to simply track down and kick off the worst abusers.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Please take this into account for testing. So far, looking over the web, I've found no supporting evidence for the story.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
News for you: The customer is not always right, and Cingular's customers don't own the network. Cingular does (or it leases the network, nitpick, nitpck). Cingular does have the right to filter "objectionable material," and you, if you don't like that, have a right to do business with another company.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
Now compare this old business-week article
And this USA today article:
What may have happened is that the sources tried to get to porn sites, didn't work, and then concluded that those sites were being banned in specific. But it could be a general compatibility problem affecting many sites.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Just send it all to me.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
All right, now this is getting slightly off topic, but possibly still just slightly, so: in response. Let me preface this by saying this is anecdotal personal experience.
In my early teen years I used to be all about the porn, "raging hormones" and whatnot. Then I came to the realization that looking at porn affected my view of women. No, it didn't completely desensitize me to their feelings and needs, but I did think about them in a purely sexual context more often when I was regularly looking at porn. Now that I consciously avoid pr0n the amount of time that i spend thinking about women in a sexual context has greatly decreased.
I'm not saying that the viewing of pornography is necessarily bad, but especially at the very impressionable stages in a young boy's life (or girl's life, although girls seem to have less of a propensity for pornography), viewing pornography could cause a boy to view the opposite sex more as objects, and less as equal humans.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
It's easier to use with one hand than your Workstation?
Or to sneak a quick peek in the weekly team status meeting?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This analogy clearly fails. Your's is a logical fallacy known as a bait-and-switch.
The original question was: "Does my use of cel phones to look at porn over the web harm anyone else?" You tried to compare this to hosting loud parties in your apartment -- a completely different scenario. If I hold loud parties in my apartment, it degrades the apartment-dwelling experience for my neighbors. The people upstairs can't sleep at night with the noise, the people downstairs have beer cans thrown on their porch, and its all just a big mess.
What data I download, however, regardless of its (im)moral content, is irrelevant. Whether I download email containing the four byte string "CAKE" or the four byte string "F***", the load on the network has been the same. If I'm a businessman who downloads some eighty-odd messages to my cel phone every two hours, that's 30 Kb of data. 30,000 bytes.
If I'm a guy who likes looking at nude pictures once in a while, a 30,000 byte GIF image is still 30,000 bytes. The load on the network has been the same.
ISPs have no right to regulate the content trafficking its network based on "moral" or any other perceived "value." The information in the bytes is irrelevant to the performance of the network.
To further pick at your argument, you state that "those who watch porn are less likely to pay the bills." If they don't pay the bills, they get disconnected. Simple as that. How does blocking porn from their network improve the financial value to the ISP? I fail to see the connection.
On a tangent, as long as I'm in the comment box. If the network does claim some "moral value" to the content on its network, and polices incoming data, I'd say that this would leave them in a dangerous legal quandry. Do/did Al Quaida operatives use Verizon cel phones in the USA? Just because it's not porn doesn't make it moral. If they are going to start denying packets based on their moral value, they'd better examine their ability to feasably do so, before they find themselves in some sort of lawsuit regarding discrimination, IMO.
(#include<std/disclaimer.h>, IANAL, etc.)
Later, Marketing discovers that their estimates and assumptions were off, but Engineering's already ordered the hardware so they've made their investment and can't go back. Management asks Marketing to raise the price to cut demand, and Marketing says "We're at the bend in the curve: If we charge a tiny bit more we'll lose so many customers that the whole thing will be a total failure."
So Management does the next best thing to raising rates for everyone: They change the TOC (limit bandwidth) enough to drive off the few high-cost customers while keeping the vast majority of customers, whose bandwidth is well within their capacity. Predictable, really.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
>You LEASE access to the ISP's equipment
Back in the "bad old days" you leased the phone from Bell. You still lease phone lines from the phone company.
Did/does Bell block you from phoning 900 numbers?
Did/does Bell block you from phoning _any_ numbers?
If Bell did block you from certain phone numbers, was it because you were breaking the law in some way?
If not, did you sue?
Now you see where we're heading with this.
Heck, does the airline say how you have to sit in their seats on the plane?
Does the bus driver tell you not to stand up on your leased seat on the bus?
Does a nightclub owner tell you how to dance?
Apart from safety/legal restrictions, no. If there's any other restrictions (like no torn jeans at a club) you are politely informed prior to entering the club that it isn't acceptable.
>If you don't like it, get another ISP, but ultimately that's the way it works.
Normally when you are discriminated against due to your thoughts clashing with those of another without prior warning or them having a good solid legal reason to stop you from accesing/doing certain things, the lessor may be on the hook for a lawsuit.
Depends where you are and how severely they decide to restrict you.
EG: If you leased an apartment and decide to bring a leather sofa in it and the landlord stopped you, it had either better be in the lease agreements (specifically) or be a fire hazard, because otherwise its expected you can put furniture in an apartment.
Now, if you decided to bring a box of bongs in the apartment the landlord would have good reason to stop you.
Since most pornography is legal in the USA I don't see how the phone/cable company has a right to censor unless they wrote "We will censor anything we want, such as pornography, at any time" into your agreement.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
"If you don't like the agreement, find another provider. It's their bandwidth."
There are two problems with this. First, most people with Cingular have signed some sort of contract. They don't have the option to leave, unless they pay some big fine, for something that wasn't in the contract when they signed. Second, the users pay for the bandwidth. If the phones run at 14.4 K, Cingular should have provisioned for users using 14.4 K. You can use up just as much bandwidth at amazon.com as you can at xxx.com over a 14.4 connection.
Finally, you all have forgotten the most important issue. If a company like Cingular starts censoring what people can see over their phones using bandwidth that they bought and people let it happen, it opens the door for other types of censorship. This is just like opening the can of worms (not like it hasn't been opened before but....)
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
MaxPower (2263)
"I got it from a hair dryer."
Cell phone signals, like broadcast television and radio, travels through a medium owned by the public and that, to me, limits what they can censor (and it is censorship.) Unlike the phone line, it isn't really coming to the requestor over wires, but through a public medium. Yes, the questionable content does come to their equipment before it can be transmitted, but, by the time they know it as questionable it has already touched their equipment. If they choose not to send it back to the requestor, it is like a 'bleeped' television spot only on a private telephone call. I don't believe a telephone company has the right to that kind of control. There is a reason the Bells can't do it and I don't think a cell phone is that much different.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
Because you can have the joy of searching for monochrome porn like this:
6628255544433#766677786266#6688333 (natalie portman nude)
...it's almost as stupid as AOL instant messenger on wireless web.
This isn't sensorship. It's merely an agreement....
This isn't sodomy. It's merely an agreement....
If you substitute "USA Today' site" for "porn site", you'll find out damned fast from their lawyers that it IS censorship.
My quip about pr0n not turning me into Osama bin Laden was simply a comment that looking at pr0n as a kid doesn't turn that kid into a maladjusted adult.
Quite the contrary, sex education that promotes responsible sex - both gay and straight - without moralising about it results in healthy, well-adjusted adults. It reduces unwanted pregnancy and transmission of STDs. Compare the percentages of Dutch kids having unwanted pregnancies versus American kids, infection rates, and so on. The policies of "protecting kids" does just the opposite, yet admitting it undermines the entire "moral" underpinnings of education. It's simply insane.
You may be sick of hearing it, but Americans are prudes. Horrific violence on television and in cinema is quite acceptable, while curse words and nakedness are taboo. When's the last time you've seen a cock on TV or film, even rated "R". Breasts are fine on pay channels, but other "naughty bits" are left to "adult" channels. In America, apparently only adults are allowed to have sex or exposure to sexuality.
Now, totally OT, but picking up on the tangent:
The reason many other countries are pissed off at America because of its foreign policy, not because of strip clubs and pr0n. America is like a spoiled schoolyard bully and its "allies" his gang. Most other kids are relieved that America just steals them blind and doesn't beat the crap out of them. As the Japanese are fond of saying "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down", thus the reluctance of most countries to tell America to piss off.
Why must entertainment have redeeming social qualities? Does "The Terminator" have redeeming social qualities? Entertainment comes in many different forms; if you don't find pornography entertaining, don't watch it. But don't interfere with the right of others to do so.
The objection to pornography on the grounds that it objectifies people as sexual objects is ridiculous. People lust after other people, regardless of whether or not they're acting in a skin flick. Whether you see other people selfishly as only objects of sexual desire says more about a person's lack of character than it does of the pornography industry. I'm quite able to have non-sexual interactions with other people - that consists of most of my interaction with other people. Can I have a strong non-sexual relationship with someone I'm attracted to? Sure. Can I have a strong relationship with someone I'm NOT sexually attracted to. Yup.
As to the question of why I'd look at pictures of sex when I can have sex - well, I wouldn't. When I can have sex, I have sex. When I can't have sex, I don't have sex. I think that's true of most people.
Regarding a partner. First, you assume I'm straight, and yes it's a correct assumption. No, I'm not married and have no desire to get married; I don't believe in the institution of marriage.
Yes, I've had loving, intimate relationships that have lasted longer than most marriages. Nor do I believe that intimate relationships must necessarily be sexually monogamous; that depends on how you and your partner feel about it.
Do I find my girlfriend sexy and think she's great? Sure. Just because I look at pornography or have sex with other women doesn't mean that I don't love her and find her satisfying. Just because you love steak doesn't mean that you won't eat chicken. Sex is an appetite. By the same standard, I don't get bent out of shape when she looks at pornography or has sex with other people.
Obviously, I don't subscribe to the puritanical view of sex that you describe. I just don't find pornography self-degradating or degradating of others. The reason that women are viewed as objects aren't because people lust after them after seeing pornography; it's because Western culture has historically treated them as property at worst and second-class citizens at best.
As to the right to do stuff: yes, it's my right to view porn. And yes, just because I can do something doesn't mean that I should. For example, just because I have unfiltered internet access at work and CAN view porn at work doesn't mean that I should view porn at work. I don't. Of course, that's not what you meant. But I can't think of another context where I'd find it wrong to look at porn.