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Supreme Court to Hear CIPA Case
Ruger writes "The Supreme Court of the United States will "decide if public libraries can be forced to install software blocking sexually explicit Web sites," according to this article from the Associated Press. US lawmakers have passed three laws to 'protect' children from Internet pornography, but the Court struck down the first and blocked the second from taking effect. 'A three-judge federal panel ruled the Children's Internet Protection Act violates the First Amendment because the filtering programs also block sites on politics, health, science and other non-pornographic topics.'" Our previous story on this ongoing case will bring you up to speed on the issues.
I agree that it's my duty to filter what my child sees. However the one place that should be a safe place to drop the kid off is the library. Do we really want to discourage children spending time at a place where they can learn?
Parents have little enough time - forcing them to spend what they have watching what their kids see at a place that should be a safe haven is going to discourage discovery and learning on the behalf of the kids.
I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.
How about a compromise solution? I'm sure anyone who is all for unfiltered access can certainly agree that there is content that is completely inappropriate for a child to view under any circumstances. So... how about setting up separate banks of computers in the library instead? One could be completely unfiltered, and accessible only to adults, and the other could be in the children's section, with filtered access, and hopefully a requirement that parents actively supervise their children's web-surfing.
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guess what? most filtering agents would now ban this slashdot page.
filters just don't work that well. I've seen a few spam blockers, but I wouldn't bet my life on them.
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Judging by your opinons i'd say you dont have children.
I have 4 children, and they each have Internet access.
OF course its using a squid proxy server, nat'ed and IPfiltered to block all ports. I have a deny list and an approved list of URLS they can goto. They also use a kid protected email client (web based) that filters out addresses, phone numbers and some key words.
When the kids are about 12 or so, Ill start to loosen the restrictions. I have v-chip on my tvs, and restrict some channels on thier profiles, and block anything above PG. (I had to block MSNBC also, it was for thier own good.)
I really dont want them seeing goatse.cx pics, but they see and hear enough from school as it is. We spend most of our time de-programming them from DARE and other Political Correctness garbage. I want too homeschool them, but both me and my wife work.
Oh yea, reason for having 4 kids, Your own lan party anytime you want. (-;
I worked in a library for about (2) years. We had completely unfiltered internet access. I can't recall a single time that we had a problem with pornography on the terminals. Granted ther may have been a few, but some people like to cause trouble. I have to believe that the majority of the population has enough common sense and decency to not view porn around kids.
There is one thing though that I dont understand about our society? Maybe someone can give me some insight? Why is sex and nudity looked down upon, while violence is generally ignored. Dont get me wrong, I love both of them equally, well more the former than the latter. Its just a little confusing. Take BMX XXX for example. Sony opted to cover all of the nipples, to censor the game. Yet in grand theft Auto Vice City, I can dig a chainsaw into a cops chest, and dance in the resulting pool of blood. Shouldnt there be a balance?
Wouldnt the images of http://www.rotten.com be more disturbing to a child than seeing some playful lesbians?
What happens when this legislation is upheld and libraries are forced to use filtering software and the porn STILL GETS THROUGH? Will the libraries then be held responsible? or maybe it should be the court's place to punish the software companies for supplying software that _breaks the law_.
The largest problem I see with the internet in libraries is the popup traps so many web pages use now. If i accidently turn up a pr0n site through my browsing will I be able to correct my mistake by clicking on the X before no one notices, or will my screen be filled with so many popups that the librarian will have to assist me?
Popup blockers would be a much better service to have installed on the library computers. Filterware is just technology that doesn't work.
It's a good guess, but you're mistaken. You can "automate" the human judgement process though neural nets, like AOL does. There are tricks to this that I can't reveal, but the basic jist of it is to let human beings train the 'net and then let the 'net go to town. You can get very good results with this method, which is, by the way, patented.
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Sorry, but that's just not the way it works. My wife works for the local city library and people are constantly looking at hard core porn there. Their solution? Bury the moniters in the desk so that only the person using the workstation can see the screen.
Libraries don't want to know what you are looking at. Most don't even keep any records of who uses them anymore. What they don't know they can't be compelled to tell the FBI under the Patriot Act.
School libraries might have different policies, but municipal public libraries, for the most part, are not interested in knowing what you do on their internet terminals.
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