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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.
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)
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.)
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.