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Pennsylvania Court Forces ISPs to Block Porn Sites
jkastner writes "Salon is reporting that Pennsylvania is forcing ISPs to block web sites that have child porn. While we can all agree that child porn is bad, this sort of approach starts us down a slipperly slope. If one site slips through, does that make the ISP liable? In addition, the court ordered blocking may prevent access to legitimate sites that are hosted on the same server."
It's wacky that courts can order companies to do things, and not suggest ways of doint it.
This wouldn't be news if the court had listed the sites it wants blocked. Let the court make the distinction between allowed and not allowed once, instead of making every single ISP make those choices.
Kind of like a court saying, "Hey, <INSERT POWER COMPANY HERE> you have to start using fusion power next year."
How do they block it without knowing what the sites are?
If they know where the sites are, why haven't they been shut down?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
What I'd like to know is how they expect the ISP's to know what sites do and don't have child pornography on them. I mean we've had software on the market for years to block regular porn, and look how effective that's been. This kind of thing is just not the realm of the judiciary, or even the legislature. PA's always been stupid on stuff like this, I believe there was some previous ruling/bill about blocking access to obscene material which cause standard porno boilerplate to add "if you live in PA" alongside "if you're a minor" in a number of cases. I'm not dissing pennsylvania, I live here, but the old adage about PA being Philly and pittsburgh with alabama in between is really quite true
Is a picture of a 2 year old in the bathtub on a family website 'child porn'? It IS a picture of a naked child. And some kiddie porn purveyors would salivate over it.
Yes, child porn is bad. So intensely bad that the website owners need to be hung up by their testicles, and then drawn and quartered.
But...let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the webhost can be identified, and the website known....why are we not going after the website owner/designer?
Don't just block it....put the ass in jail.
Pennslyvania needs to provide ISPs a list of websites it says contains child porn. It's not an ISP's job to determine what is and isn't child porn. It's only job should be to block it if the state deems something child porn. You can't just go off enabling filters that filter out key words like child porn, etc without disabling other legitimate websites. In fact, that article itself on ISP's filtering child porn would probably be marked as a child porn site and thus filtered.
Ah, nevermind I'll stop beating the horse.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Is it not possible to argue that child porn is a bad thing, socially unacceptable, with devastating consequences for innocent lives. Therefore if the constitution has some kind of loophole which permits child porn, perhaps there is something wrong with the constitution? Guys, lots of us are software engineers here. If the specification for your project is causing massive problems, consider getting the spec changed!
Don't get me wrong. The constitution was a wonderful thing back in the eighteenth century and a vast improvement not only on its predecessors but its sucessors too in many ways. I'm just baffled how so many folks in the USA act as though the constitution was handed on tablets of stone from Mount Sinai by Founding Fathers who were acting in some infallible capacity.
Not a troll, just curious. And yes, I live in a land with no constitution, cameras on every street corner, and elective dictatorship and bad dentistry blah blah blah. Before you tell me what's so bad about my world, please satisfy my curiosity about yours.
If PA is so intent on blocking child porn, why don't they fine the USPS for delivering porn?
This will get my lynched, no doubt, but... ..." but nobody has explained the logic behind their position, which is strange to see on slashdot.
Is there a good essay that examines just "what is wrong with child porn?"
I keep seeing posts like "Child porn is bad. So bad that
I understand perfectly well the problems inherent to the creation of child porn and the mental problems associated with the people interested in child porn, but wouldn't it be better to fix the problems, not the symptoms?
Or does it depend on context? What about high school yearbooks, where parents often send in "embarassing" naked-little-kid pictures? Isn't that child porn? What about parents who take pictures of their kids in the tub because the kid is doing something cute? That's also child porn...
And how does child porn relate to age of consent? In many states, the age of consent is 16, yet you can't take nude photos of someone under 18 (legally, anyway), even if they are begging you to. I've never quite understood this, either.
I suppose the lawmakers assume the typical person interested in naked 16-year-olds is a 45-year-old male, but what about other male 16-year-olds who always click the "Yes, I am over 18" button anyway?
Bah, OK. I tried to come up with some interesting questions, so I'm expecting some interesting answers (and probably many trolls, too).
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
sure you can control what goes out, force people to use your proxy filters. but once a valid request goes out... you've got traffic. so you setup a middleman proxy type server. now all my requests go to www.mysecretdomain.edu/site1, and that will feed you traffic from site 1. next thing to do is to setup the mysecretdomain to switch ip's frequently if needed.
i guess some one's got look like the dunce, might as well be a commonwealth and not a state.
why don't they create a pensylvania mail trafficing sytem to block porn from entering their state via snail mail?