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CIPA Before The Supreme Court
Jim Tyre pointed out the excellent collection of links on censorware.net to coverage of yesterday's oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court about the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), as promised by this story last month. There's also a link to the place where transcripts of the oral arguments will show up about three weeks from now.
Yep, gotta protect the Internet from those damn script kiddines ^H^H^H^H^H children :=)
The Children's Internet Protection Act should be called the SurfPatrol Benefit Act. 99% of the "filtering" software is so horribly mis-written and mis-configured that it might as well be a screen full of holes. True internet "protection" takes dilligence and supervision, not the purchase of some sham software. They aren't protecting anything but their own state-of-mind and the software companies that put out this over-priced drivel.
because its free speech
There you go, there's the "con" argument in a nutshell.
This type of legislation would be irrelevant if people werent such a bunch of douchebags.
The CIPA is a violation of the first amendment, no question about it. Despite its good intentions, it is only a starting point for things to grow and get bad for everyone.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
No matter what the cause, censoring information does absoultely nothing except shield people from the truth and reality. Not to mention, should I trust and leave censorship in the hands of others to deal with? It should be up to the parents (in this case) to figure out which content is good for their children. Since anything can be accessed on the internet easily no matter what, I think this is just a waste of money.
I've always been a strong believer that censoring children from the real world is retarded. Your typical American family would have their children grow up believing that there's nothing wrong with the world. That everything is minivan and soccer games. Children get censored from things like crime, war, sex, and violence. They grow up not understanding how to handle these sorts of things and only become a bigger part of the world's problems.
Whether it be censorship on the internet or parental censorship of a pr0n mag, I think censorship to "protect" our children is a bad idea. Hurts more than it helps.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Naw, that would make sense, better to have a third party to blame/sue when your child turns out to be a mass murderer/cult wacko.
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
This law is too easy to abuse under the current administration. Given the religious zeal of many of our nation's leaders at this point and the multiple outlandish abuses of the DMCA, one can only wonder what the next step is. Remember, some of the people in Congress on the cybertechnology committee (Santorum et. al) are very religiously-minded that might use this to give our nation's children access to only those sites they deem "appropriate". While it is wrong for people to be viewing pornography in plain sight of children, why should reasonable research suffer? And is it realistic to ask if the ruling body of the Web just register porn under its own domain or under a specific set of IP addresses that could be more readily screened out by public computers?
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Just because you have a "noble" cause doesn't make you a saint or in anyway correct.
If you want legislation to protect children then you people need to swallow your pride, fear, and anger and treat everyone fairly.
You have not done so.
Nobody owes you peace of mind. You are not entitled to it anymore than anyone else in this world. You have a responsibility to resist the temptation to use every sledgehammer approach you can think of to get what you want.
Extreme statements like, "Do everything possible to _____" might make great news media drama for morons who still get their news from television, but all it really does is make you look stupid, hostile, irresponsible to make even Ulysses S. Grant blush, and downright hatefully dangerous.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If anyone tries to stop me, I'll call the ACLU and sue the school district, the county it's in, the EFF, and YOU!
Is there a +1 flaimbait? Cause that's some damn good flaimbait.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
was kidnapped by a sexual predator he met over the Internet. The pervert lured him out by talking to him in chat rooms and making promises. Somehow he convinced him not to tell my parents or me anything; he said he was visiting the kid next door. The only reason he got away was that he forgot to bring his teddy bear. He phoned home to ask my father to bring it to a hotel, and that was when we knew something was going on and called the cops. The guy had a record, although he supposedly hadn't used the Internet the time before. My brother is lucky to be alive today.
I have to say that as much as I don't like the limitations on freedom, anything to protect children is a good thing. The people out there are evil and sophisticated and we have to do everything in our power to stop them.
What really needs to happen here is a better solution than censorware needs to be proposed. The public library in my city handles this issue by placing the publically accessible computers near a high-traffic area, facing the checkout counter.
Increased monitoring is a better solution because it would allow legitimate research to continue, and wouldn't allow a particular company to dictate what is allowed and what isn't. As we have seen, much of the censorware on the market is overly restrictive, and in my opinion, biased. They restrict anonymous browsing, and, who know what spyware could be embedded in their products.
IANAL... But I play one on
Kids will always be able to get to something that is available to their parents....
The best way to handle questionable content is for parents to take an active role in their kids' upbringing, and teach them how to handle material that they will unquestionably come across online.
is about as likely as making automobile superhighways safe for children. Unless you want to severely limit the traffic, it's not going to be "safe".
There is no substitute for parental supervision. I'd tell parents:
You bought the computer for your child. You paid for the internet service. You brought the big scary electronic world into your house and set your child in front of it. It's not the government's job to make it safe for your kid.
Terrycloth Lobster
This is the thought running through the head of each of the male supreme court justices right now.
"Hmmm... How do I rule on this so that *I* can still view porn?"
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
No, there's too much of a movement to rob children of their childhoods entirely.
Life should be nothing but minivans and soccer games at this point. They're children, let them be children.
Some social worker showed up in my daughters 2nd grade class talking about homosexuality and how it should be accepted and all of that crap. It's all way above their heads and not something they need to be concerned about.
I agree with you to a point, but if you dont place limits, you wind up with kindergarten teachers indoctrinating children to their world views. I have no problem discussing anything with my kids when they ask. I do have a problem with some stranger forcing them into discussions that they dont need to have, or want to have.
The *parents* should be the ones who decide what a child is exposed to. And I think its unfair that we're dumping the weight of the world onto 7 year old shoulders. Let them just be kids. There'll plenty of time to learn about war, sex, violence, and so on.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Until the legal wrangling gets completed, the best filter on objectionable material is to place the terminals such that they are highly visible and in a busy area. That way anybody who insists on viewing pr0n and the like is basically creating a public disturbance...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Where I live we have EIPA, Everybody Internet Proection Act!
Khalid
"What you 'seek' is what you get!"
A couple years ago my kid came home from kindergarten asking what 'ho' and 'skank' means. It's disgusting that parents and teachers are so afraid to discipline their children that they allow them to behave like this.
I took it up with the teacher, and she started in on the whole "well its part of the culture they grow up in" liberal shmeal.
I'm against censorship on paper, but people push things too far.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
...but the damn censorware thinks it's a naughty place.
Children do not need 'protected' from pornography. Any twelve year old with a mind dirty enough to go searching for albino midget porn on google was already corrupt to begin with.
The simple fact is porn is only easy to come by when you look for it. Just like in the real world, any responsible parent/teacher should supervise their children regardless of whether they are watching TV, using the Internet or walking down the street.
It is common sense. We don't need new laws for the Internet, we need to educate judges on how to apply the old ones, because they work just fine.
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
Have kids. THEN tell me you want them exposed to all the harsh realities of life as soon as possible.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
what happens if we masturbate to the DOJ?
See also Bennett Haselton's comments on the hijacking and Jonathan Wallace's comments]
Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:41:18 -0400
From: Seth Finklestein
To: Seth Finklestein's InfoThought list
Subject: IT: Federal censorware law down! (and Seth Finkelstein's reports!)
I'm ecstatic that the court seems to have used my pioneering efforts in anticensorware work as one factor in its decision, in passages such as these:
Another technique that filtering companies use in order to deal with a structural feature of the Internet is blocking the root level URLs of so-called loophole Web sites. These are Web sites that provide access to a particular Web page, but display in the user's browser a URL that is different from the URL with which the particular page is usually associated. Because of this feature, they provide a loophole that can be used to get around filtering software, i.e., they display a URL that is different from the one that appears on the filtering company's control list. Loophole Web sites include caches of Web pages that have been removed from their original location, anonymizer sites, and translation sites.
Caches are archived copies that some search engines, such as Google, keep of the Web pages they index. The cached copy stored by Google will have a URL that is different from the original URL. Because Web sites often change rapidly, caches are the only way to access pages that have been taken down, revised, or have changed their URLs for some reason. For example, a magazine might place its current stories under a given URL, and replace them monthly with new stories. If a user wanted to find an article published six months ago, he or she would be unable to access it if not for Google's cached version.
Some sites on the Web serve as a proxy or intermediary between a user and another Web page. When using a proxy server, a user does not access the page from its original URL, but rather from the URL of the proxy server. One type of proxy service is an anonymizer. Users may access Web sites indirectly via an anonymizer when they do not want the Web site they are visiting to be able to determine the IP address from which they are accessing the site, or to leave cookies on their browser.(8) Some proxy servers can be used to attempt to translate Web page content from one language to another. Rather than directly accessing the original Web page in its original language, users can instead indirectly access the page via a proxy server offering translation features.
As noted above, filtering companies often block loophole sites, such as caches, anonymizers, and translation sites. The practice of blocking loophole sites necessarily results in a significant amount of overblocking, because the vast majority of the pages that are cached, for example, do not contain content that would match a filtering company's category definitions. Filters that do not block these loophole sites, however, may enable users to access any URL on the Web via the loophole site, thus resulting in substantial underblocking.
This is an aspect which I've been trying to get into the censorware debate for ages. I'm overjoyed that the court heard, they got it, they listened, and it helped strike down Federal censorware law! These are the reports which seem to have made a difference in the above:
BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE: (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity) - a secret category of BESS (N2H2), and more about why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php
BESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images) - BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all image searching to be pornography.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php
SmartFilter's Greatest Evils - why censorware must blacklist privacy, anonymity, and language translatorse stevils.php
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/smartfilter/great
The Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive - The logic of censorware programs suppressing an enormous digital library.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php
-- Seth Finklestein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.comu its/19HACK.html
Anticensorware Investigations: http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
Seth Finklestein's Infothought list - http://sethf.com/infothought/
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circ
TROLL ALERT! I now seem to have attracted troll imposters. The real Seth Finklestein has uid#582901
Censoring doesn't help. Kids are smarter than you think.
What the real problem is, is that adults find really horrible things entertaining (World's Scariest Animal Attacks III) that are NOT like real life. (Or at least, I've never been attacked by anything more fierce than a mosquito) It's the media we need to protect the kids from, not real life.
Your real fear is that we're protecting them from their own emotions, and I fear that too.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
You don't have kids, do you?
Let me tell you something: kids aren't "little adults". Their brains are simply not developed to the point that yours and mine are. They're incapable of reasoning the same as a full grown human.
I think the *CHILD* is the one who should decide what they're exposed to, and the parent is the one who should suggest to the child what to do and what not to do, and WHY. Let them be children, I agree. But let them be children then, they're curious little weasels... prohibiting something is just going to make them more interested.
Libraries having been in the censorship business since their inception. Someone had to decide what scroll was worthy of shelf space. I think libraries should stop maintaining blacks lists and start maintaining white lists. They should us the same standards that they use to select books as they do to select websites.
There is no reason a person needs to see Blogger Joe's rants on popcorn at his local movie theater. If Blogger Joe wrote a newsletter and sent it to every public library should they add it to their stack? Probably not.
Rather than suggesting that parents be parents and set rules and limitations for their child, lets step aside and allow the child to run the show.
I've seen what that leads to. Some friends of the family had a daughter who was given EVERYTHING she wanted. Today, at 24, she refuses to hold down a job, is heavy into drug and alcohol abuse, and expects her father to provide for her and her 2 illegimate children. And heaven help him if she doesn't get it NOW!
Let children be children, yes, but let parents be parents! Parents are supposed to set limits on children. Bad shit happens when children are allowed to set the rules.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Not only does it keep children and people from surfing on "bad" sites, but it also keeps people from looking up other information. Would you like to surf for info on cancer or STD at such a machine? Might as well throw in a public service announcement.
And even if they didn't care, it's more than I'd like to know. For instance when I was abroad I was at this webcafe, and the line was basicly right behind the machines. Without looking at the screen in particular, I still saw the large "GayChat" logo in the corner of one of the screens. Not that I have anything against that, but I really don't feel the need to know anything about strangers sexlife.
Granted, I don't give a flying fuck because I can surf for that at home, but not everyone can that. But given that filters aren't perfect, I do understand that having a "human" filter is used. But it's certainly not perfect either.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...the state of the art. Isn't it part of the point of the Internet that you can be heard without having to persuade a librarian or publisher that you're worthy of reaching his/her patrons?
I venture that I don't need 90% (at least) of the books in any given library. Want to solve state budget crunches? Shrink libraries and staff to 10% of their size, and include only the "important" books.
What? You don't agree with my definition of "important"? Sucks to be you, I guess.
There you go, there's the "con" argument in a nutshell.
Wrong.
The "con" argument, in a nutshell, is that although child pr0n is illegal and undesirable, no filters are perfect and will completely block it out - rather, they're MORE likely to block out things that are not pr0n... i.e. the National Organization for Women's Breast Cancer site. Planned Parenthood's Condom use site. Perdue's Breasts 'n Thighs informational site. They're less likely to block out the billion pr0n usenet posts from anon.pinet.fi
Just as it has been said that our justice system is based on the premise that it is better to let 100 guilty men go free than imprison 1 innocent man, it is better to allow access to 100 pr0n sites than to censor a truly informational and useful site.
That's the "con" argument. I'm not for child pr0n, but I'm even more not for censorship and you deciding what my child should be allowed to see. :)
-T
Sure, but I think our main problems stem from how we teach war, sex, and violence in schools. We don't cover all aspects of war. We barely cover the factual dates and events. We don't talk in depth about relationships and sex because that is a topic we are uncomfortable with, because of the censorship. Its taboo to talk to children about sex. So, instead, they discover it for themselves just as we all did.
How would you feel if your child was talking with their friends about homosexuality and decided they wanted to be gay? What reasons are there not to be? This is one topic that I think needs a lot more discussion, not less.
And censorship is always wrong, in any case. No amount of censorship hid the real world from me. But it did make me far less trusting towards most adults. Tradition is one thing, but attempting to force your system of beliefs on your kids is something completely different. It'll bite you in the ass one of these days. It bit my parents.
I think that the whole purpose of educating children is to prepare them to make good decisions and take control of their lives. Being an adult does not mean pain and suffering, there is no reason to try to slow down a child's intellectual and moral growth. The parents are supposed to be the driving force in the children's growth, exposing their child to new information when the kid is ready to accept it.
The problem of letting the parents have total control of their children's access to information is that not all parents are any good at parenting. In fact, many have no idea of what they are doing. A parent does not need to beat their children, or come back home drunk every night, to hinder a child's chances in life. Making sure that a girl has no sexual education by the time she is 14, for example, can easily ruin her life. Not teaching basic social skills, the dangers of drug abuse or just basic finances reduces the kid's chances of success in life. I belive that the schools have the obligation of helping the kid grow up, despite the parent's incompetence.
I'd rather make parents prove their ability to raise a child before having one, but since making babies is easy and entertaining, I don't think that'd ever work :). Thus, I think that having schools teach basic life information to children is a good thing as long as it is done without trying to push teh children's agenda to the children. IMO Religion and anything but basic politics should not be taught w/o the parent's consent.
If a person, regardless of his/her age, is happy just because of lack of knowledge, is that happiness really worth having? I'd rather be wiser and maybe become a little less happy than just be happy and ignorant.
Didn't I say guide the child? jesus, don't let them run around and do anything they want. That sort of thing is what happens when parents don't parent, they just provide.
I'm just saying to let the kid be curious. If they do something 'bad' then they should know that there are consiquences for that, and the consiquences should actually happen. Like loud kids in restaraunts. When the parents do tell them to be quiet (which is a rarity these days) there's VERY rarely consiquences communicated if they don't, and even then I've never seen them carried through.
But what do I know, I'm just a stinking liberal without any children...
Any twelve year old with a mind dirty enough to go searching for albino midget porn on google was already corrupt to begin with.
Either you've never surfed for porn or you're hiding something, because 90% of the porno websites I've visited usually offer various links for different tastes, including: Teen, Ebony, Gay, Anal, Japanese, Mature, Midget Fucking, Dog Fucking, etc. I don't know about you, but it's almost seems impossible to only surf tasteful porn without being bombarded with some seriously henious shit.
Fortunately, Most 10-12 year olds will probably laugh at people fucking dogs, but there will be some (I remember growing up with fucked up kids) who's interest might be piqued. Some of those kids will have grown up to be dog fuckers anyway, but would ALL of those kids have grown up to be dog fuckers if they hadn't been exposed to it at a vulnerable age? Obviously not...
Most kids are more impressionable the younger they get while other kids will always be inpressionable well into thier adult years. So far, we've been talking about 10-12 year olds. I remember being interested in sex when I was 5-6 (I knew what a dick and a cunt was...) So who's to say that 7-10 year olds AREN'T looking at porn (when they can get away with it). If they're surfing the same porn sites I'm surfing, I'm pretty sure they've been exposed to a lot. By the time a kid is 12, he knows that dog fucking is pretty fucked up. At 7-9, I'm not so sure.
A kid at that age will pretty much do any stupid thing if it interests them and they can get away with it.
So, Do you want to keep making stupid blanket statements?
OR
Are you willing to ask tough questions, investigate carefully, and accept the answers even if you don't like the answers?
Oh yeah, if I believe in censoring *my* kids, should I shut the fuck up, or does that just apply to gov't censorship?
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
The *parents* should be the ones who decide what a child is exposed to. And I think its unfair that we're dumping the weight of the world onto 7 year old shoulders. Let them just be kids. There'll plenty of time to learn about war, sex, violence, and so on.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The parents should be the ones who decide what a child is exposed to.
Not the government. Glad you're against CIPA, too.
;)
-T
Here. Remember, written for non-techies, and a while ago.
Expose them to whatever they want. But don't let them fuck around. Give them freedom of religion, freedom to love, associate, and smoke whatever they want. But if they don't get straight A's, if I have to pick them up at the police station, if they invite their friends over who get drunk and break shit, then they're in deep trouble.
Ahhh, facist parenting at its best.
That only works until they turn into a teenager. Then you have a problem on your hands far worse than any child that watches the news, trusts you, etc. If you're lucky they won't break the law just in spite of you.
Bad things also happen when parents are not responsible guardians and guiding friends. When you are the "parent" in a position of authority, where your children are told to be seen and not heard, you lose a bond between you that could prevent almost all the problems we encounter with teens and young adults acting irresponsibly.
Or at least that's my opinion. But YMMV.
..At least we don't as some see it.
I can't yell 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre, because it'd likely do harm.
Why should people be able to download porn (which is, AFAIK, restricted by age in most states) in a public place, such as a library?
Frankly, I'm all for filtering such things. If you want to wank it, buy your own computer, or start a Library of Porn. (Hmm, new Slashdot measurement? LoP?)
The problem, of course, is that filtering software blows chunks. First of all, it will never be able to block all of the porn all of the time. Second, it's an easy matter for some nutjob on the extreme left, right or even center, to add a bunch of sites that he or she doesn't find acceptable to the list - pages about Republicans, Democrats, the Green Party, et cetera. Now *that* damages the idea of free speech.
The idea of free speech, as set down in the Constitution, means I can't have a certain acquaintance of mine placed up against a wall and shot every time he spews idiocy such as "Bush is evil! Oil oil oil! Waaaaaaah!" Okay, sure, sometimes I'd really like to see him shipped to Siberia.. But I think we can all generally agree on the fact that people aren't shipped to Siberia for not referring to elected officials as 'our beloved leader!' is a *good* thing.
And that's what 'Freedom of Speech' means. The right to have dissenting opinions. It doesn't mean you can say whatever the hell you want, whenever you want. It doesn't mean you have a divine-given right to browse porn in a library.
It means the country won't turn into a Nazi Germany. A Soviet Union. A North Korea. An Iraq.
Filtering systems being installed in libraries, while at first glance, a noble idea - are simply a dangerous thing lurking under the surface. It'd be far too easy to block access to dissenting opinions due to the general craptitude of filtering software.
As I see it, one reason for setting limits for you children is to teach them about what is right/wrong, appropriate or not, and so on.
The fundamental problem with censorware (if we set aside unintentional or arbitrary blocking of sites as an implementation detail that might someday be fixed), is that it does not teach anything. When a parent catches their kid surfing for pr0n, they tell them to stop and (ideally) tell them _why_ it's wrong.
When censorware blocks a site, it doesn't say why, so from a curious kid's point of view it's just an obstacle to be circumvented.
Or, since the link to the CIPA text points to this very page, everybody has.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
You're incorrect because you're applying the wrong standard. While the Court has struck down (correctly) several laws which place restrictions on Internet sites which provide material "harmful to children" as restrictions on speech, in this case the issue is tied into government funding of libraries. The speech is not restricted at all, it is receipt of the speech using hardware, software and bandwidth paid for with tax dollars that is restricted. The First Amendment does not require government to provide financial support or access to speech, it merely requires that government not place content-based restrictions on speech.
In short, while the speech is allowed on the Internet, the government is not required to use tax dollars to provide you with a way to get it. (This analysis would be different if the government was the only way to access the Internet, but thankfully that's not true, at least in the U.S.)
that has nothing to do with this thread. This thread has to do with reasons for civilians to want the CIPA to be struck down. IMHO if libraries are censored in any way, that is a violation of my freedoms. If I were to put up a site which was filitered by the government in libraries, the government WOULD in fact be restricting my free speech by stifling my ability to get that information through to people accessing the internet in libraries. Any way you slice it, censorship is still a first amendment violation.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Enjoy!
I'm afraid I disagree. The government is simply not funding your access to a particular segment of your potential audience. They're not censoring your speech.
Now, if the situation was one where the act singled out speech that was narrowly addressed to library patrons (e.g., criticism of libraries or something), the Court would be very suspicious because then the act would be preventing the speech from reaching all or nearly all of its intended audience, which looks a lot more like censorship.
Children != Adults, and should be protected from both physical and mental harm. Kids are scared of the monster under the bed for cripes sake, let alone showing them something like the footage of an execution. Those things disturb and cause a certain amount of harm to most sane adults.
So it looks like your bottom line is, damaging children mentally makes them better people. I think most people should have a problem with that view.
egad, man. what country are you from? There are people who have no other internet access. picking and choosing what speech they can recieve is different from censoring what they say.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Thank you for the anecdotal evidence. It will go nicely with the straw man.
;)
:)
Just because you're giving the child some autonomy doesn't mean they get everything handed to them on a platter. Quite the contrary. It's possible to be a permissive parent, meanwhile instilling the value of hard work, owning up to social responsibility, etc, by doing things like simply not buying very many toys, etc. Work out an allowance program that allows the kid to be able to afford the "normal" amount of stuff, but expect them to participate in the household chores to earn that share of the household revenues. They *can* add value in the home, so why shouldn't they?
But those same kids might well be allowed to decide what they want to watch on TV... of course they might have to earn the right to watch mom & dad's TV at all. If they want to watch what mom & dad want, they can get that for free. But if they want unrestricted viewing perhaps they can be assessed a fee.
Ugh. I hate it when I sound like a libertarian.
In any cases, the trick is finding the sweet spot where the kid can break the rules without serious harm, but where the kid can also learn to take risks and set his or her own level. Protecting kids from stuff that scares parents but has not been demonstrated to actually harm children is premature optimization... and you know what they say about that.
I do not have a signature
This means the kiddies would only be able to look at sites that didn't look bad from over your shoulder. Someone could write a porn site that looks like amazon, except all the book cover pics are porn pics. Little porn pics, of course. Or, full size pics of midgets.
Now that I think about it, the same could be done to camoflauge embarrasing but legit sites -- people reading up on veneral disease or mental illness could go to "makemelooklikeamazon.com", type in their url, and have it disguised.
You're right and it's unfortunate that some people can't afford the luxuries most slashdot readers take for granted, but the first amendment doesn't require the government to provide people with access to TVs or radios either.
In the end, libraries are a discretionary service provided with taxpayer funds and the Constitution and courts give pretty broad deference to the legislative arm of government to decide spending issues. I'm not saying it always a good thing (it certainly would be nice if the courts could strike down pork barrel spending -- "Your honor, why are you striking down my important study on the mysterious number of socks lost every year in dryers?" "Because its stupid. Next case."), but its pretty much the way it is.
That is not the issue. the issue is, provide unfiltered internet, or no internet at all. Your arguement makes no sense whatsoever.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I think you're wrong. In this case, the government is actively spending money (mandating the purchase of filtering software) to cut off access to particular segments of your potential audience. This is definitely called censorship.
So you're saying the equivalent of:
"Provide subscriptions to all the magazines published anywhere, or don't provide any magazines at all in the periodicals section."
And before someone argues that photoshopping images to make it is okay. I argue that its not, what if that image with that person's face on it gets out. That person's rights were still violated if he or she is stigmatised for the image even though it wasn't really them.
By that notion, something like a Final Fantasy-style kiddie porn movie would not be illegal as no actual child was involved. The usual arguments quoted is: KP promotes more KP, or that the burden of proof is too heavy (prove that this is *not* a photoshopped picture).
By the way, here it's illegal to give the appearance of being underaged. This goes both by having people above legal age play younger, drawings, photoshop cut-togethers, whatever. Probably means something like Lolita (the remake, with the older stand-in) is illegal here, if you follow the letter of the law.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That is exactly how I feel. This is why.
You can't sue public school districts. Also, this should be modded as funny, but I don't have any points.
no...i'm saying either sell the magazine with all its pages or dont sell it at all.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I agree completely that kids should learn right and wrong from their parents instead of teachers, since what is taught by teachers will generally be what is 'politically correct' rather than what is true (as per your example).
Tim
I doubt very much that anyone has ever decided to be gay. Experiment maybe, but it would be like deciding you like tomatoes - either you do or you don't. The idea that being exposed to the idea of honosexuality could in any way make any sort of permanent change in a person is ludicrous.
Anarchists never rule
Here's something new for you to learn:
Not all magazines are published in one volume.
Not subscribing to a magazine doesn't mean a little man uses a razor blade to cut that section out of 'Universal Magazine' before it's delivered to the library.
You obvioulsy have no children. I consider my self an open minded person, but I censor lots of things when it comes to my kids. Violent movies, pornography, movies and books with adult themes that they wouldn't understand. I also don't let them play on the highway - no matter how much they think it would be an enriching experience.
Children are happier, and grow up more confident if their parents set firm, fair rules and limits. Does this mean I pretend that sex and violence doesn't exist? No. The evening news, books, the birth of a cousin, all can prompt kids to ask questions that I answer with information appropriate to their age.
Anarchists never rule
As for the parent child bond - being a parent is much more important than being a "friend". If you as a parent act in a way to promote trust and respect your children will come to you for help.
Anarchists never rule
The best evidence I have indicates that "being gay" is not a decision. It's not proof, but I haven't heard any evidence for the other side that even makes a plausible case.
That said, it appears to be possible to torture people sufficiently to, at least temporarily, override their (appearantly) built-in preferences. In either direction...(check out the conditioning that the Spartan Hoplites went through).
But simple images won't determine things. Ideas may be contagious, but not to that degree. (Even low-level brain-washing doesn't change the sexual orientation, though, as I indicated earlier, more "rigorous" brain-washing procedures can do so. With a fair amount of success for at least a short period of time...if there was a follow-up study, then I'm not aware of it. The original study was about conditioning prisoners in, I believe, California.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Done properly, it sticks. Children need rules. The rules need to be enforced. But if you are arbitrary about things, then you will be perceived as unjust, with the results that you have predicted.
... in that case one falls back on analogies, with the additional explanation that this is "just an way of thinking about it, but the real answer is more complicated". Be prepared, because you will occasionally be asked for the real reason anyway, and you should not skip here. Saying "I think that this part works this way" is far better than asserting a lie. Lying to your children is something that is really best avoided. If you don't know the answer, tell them that you are making a "best guess". Things will turn out much better later if you are known to be trustworthy.
OTOH, rules enforced, but not brutally enforced, and explained in a reasonable manner will be respected. (Usually. Children are different from each other.) And if the rules are respected, then the teenager will argue against them rather than just flout them. This can be exhausting, and occasionally enlightening. But it doesn't result in the dire consequences that you are dreading.
The important thing is that the children must respect the rules, but this sure doesn't mean that they must live in fear of parental abuse. Respect means respect. Fear means fear. They aren't the same concept at all. One can both fear and respect something, e.g., nuclear radiation. One can fear something without respect, e.g. an abusive authority figure. And one can respect without fear, e.g., an elegant mathematical proof. The rules should be respected with the fear that is traceable to an understanding of logical consequences. If you tell a child to not stick his hand in a fire, the rule can be respected because of the undesireability of the logical consequences.
Now it's true that when children are young, it can be difficult to explain the reasons
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
that was perhaps the dumbest, most disjointed fucking thing i have heard in days. The internet is a network. Think of it as a book. You are a librarian and you purchase that book. You put it in your library. Now, someone wants to come in and cut pages from your book. How does this make sense? The internet is in essence a large, dynamic, electronic book. Perhaps not as permanent, and perhaps not as limited in subject as a physical book, but in this context (i.e. browsing the web) the book metaphor works. Having a law requiring the librarian to remove pages from that book before children can see it will not benefit your library or your patrons. Sure, some people may object to material in books. That happens every day. This is no different from such a book. If you don't want your kids to potentially stumble across hot naked coeds, then don't leave them alone in the library to use the internet.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
By your arguments its obvious that you dont even comprehend the concept of censorship. Kindly shut up and learn to provide your opinions when you know what the fuck you are talking about.
Censorship is when the government says something can not be published. At all.
It's not when a magazine stand, or a library's periodical department, decides not to carry a particular magazine. Websites are like magazines.
The Internet is NOT an organic whole.
And you need your mama to wash out your mouth, pottymouth boy.
The Internet is not an organic whole. It is a big collection of Networks, with a vast array of kinds of information available on it. Some of it is valueable, some of it is a crock.
It is not a large seamless single book. It's scary as hell that people want to pretend that is the case.
And i think its scary as hell that ignorants such as yourself support the censoring of it. so i guess that makes us even. I support the right to be able to download plans for bombs under the second amendment, the right to download information (with or without nudity or sexual content) under the first. between those there isnt really that much to argue about...first and second amendments seem to have anti-censorship stuff down pat. No matter what roundabout ass backwards way they do it, it is still government censorship, and is in my and many others' opinions a violation of our civil rights.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
No, not at all. You can censorship parts, not necesarily only "wholes". When the government mandates a blocking to a website, it is efectively censoring that particular website. Again, you dont need to censor a whole for it to be considered censorship.
BTW, I stopped being a little kid a long time ago, and adults like us can speak and swear when we want, if you didnt know. Why dont you go to your mama and cry in her shoulders if swearing bothers you so much?
Yes, and again, even if you order the tiniest, most useless part of the net blocked, it is still censorship. Get that into your head already.
I dont know what you are actually thinking. Linux ISO's huh? This is the most obscure thing that I have personally ever heard. I'm pretty sure that about 1% of the bandwidth EVER used on this campus is for linux ISO's. I am a linux advocate but this statment was made by a complete moron. Again, have you ever heard of P2P file sharing programs? I bet that cornell doesn't block these ports which allows for such an excess of usage. This is the worst article ever published on this site...hands down. You should feel privaledged to be the person to bring up the topic. Some people amaze me.
What can happen, on the other hand, is that your children who already have gay feelings, or have friends with those feelings, can discover that there is a society here that is accepting of their differences and that they don't need to be ashamed of having the sexuality that they do- once they are old enough to actually be sexual, that is. There is so much anti-gay propoganda being thrown around that children are exposed to, from the media, their churches, schools, other parents, etc that we shrug off as "part of life". How many 2nd graders do you know that don't know the word "faggot" and that it's a bad word? Do they know why it's a bad word? Do they know who it hurts? Certainly you're teaching them why "n*gger" is a bad word, right?
When the side of kindness of heart and acceptance of diversity side has their say, everyone gets up in arms! It's OK for everyone to spew messages of hate at our kids but it's not OK to teach them that it's OK be be gay- or that it's OK to care for their friends that are?
It's critical that we teach our kids acceptance and kindness at a young age- if we don't then they'll accept hatred as a way of life and it will be ingrained in them their entire life. I've seen it happen too many times with kids who are naturally kind-hearted. I won't let it happen with my family or any that I have any influence over.
"Silence == Death." Think about that. Will it be your sweet kid who turns out to be involved in a gay-bashing death in 15 years, because you refused to enforce the fact that everyone deserves a happy, healthy life? Certainly not mine, because I won't Censor them from knowing about all of the different wonderful types of people in the world.
Peace.
Well said.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Sorry, I'd not explained clearly. I believe that parents should set firm consiquences, rather than prohibitations. The parent (imo of course) should also present the child with why playing on the highway is a poor idea. Then let the child make a decision (which also imo is lacking severely in modern America, the simple ability to make a good decision based on fact) wether the consiquence of their action is worth the action.
Obviously with much younger children (3-8 or so) do not allow them even the choice to play in the street (but explain why), but do give them the choice over... something else [cannot think of example] that won't terribly effect them, but allow them to make decisions with visible consiquences.
Well, your kids are free, except when they are directly under your control. So as soon as they are out of your sight all those rules and responsiblities are only as good as their trust in you.
;)
What I am talking about is more related to their lives after they turn 18. Children are almost never educated about the real world we toss them into when they turn 18, yet we expect them to be responsible, etc.
When I was 16 I had my own car, made my own meals, drove myself to school. I had a parent around the house 2 days a week. A cupboard full of alcohol and a room full of marijuana. I completed highschool, taking AP courses with a 3.1x GPA or some shit. I smoked with my friends only after those AP tests and only a couple times a week or during the summer. And right after highschool I got a job and started my career in the tech sector.
Now I have no faith in capitalism, the US gov't or its people or most parents. But that's probably because of the weed.
What am I saying? I don't know. Freedom and education is better than law?
People have sex. They have had sex for the past billion years, and children have always been exposed to it. Before modern civilization it was common to have sex very young (12 or so) and there were no puritan/christian/hypocritical taboos. What is wrong with sex???? What is shameful about it???? Protect someone from seeing scenes of sex? I really don't get it. Let the children see it, and do it. And there may be less rapes and less sexually frustrated adults 20 years from now. First thing I do if I have children is sign them up for all the major porn sites :) At least they know there's something good about college.
Most full grown humans seem incapable of reason.
I think that kids, are not "little adults" but are capable of reasoning. you just have to know the kids to know where they are developmentaly, and tailor the way things are dealt with so they via the reasoning they can do understand what you were trying to get across properly.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
The problem with this analogy is that magazines are paper. They take up space. They use resources simply in existing.
Not only that, but it's fairly easier to filter them out, if you were so inclined. I still think filtering is wrong, but that's becuase I had no internet acess but that at school for some time, and trying to get past such fun categories as "Non-Traditional Religions", "Political Groups", "Drugs", "Advocacy Groups", "Sex" (Not pornography, "Sex"), "Hacking" (it actually calls it that), or "Illegal/Questionable"..
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