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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.
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.
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.
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
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
...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.
My little sister was almost kidnapped by a guy offering her candy. My little sister knew not to talk to strangers. Too bad he was gone before my dad got the rifle.
But look I can still get lollipops any day of the week.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
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
If you're a parent, your kid's probably caught you having sex. It hasn't warped them. But you can imagine the problems your kid would have after seeing a killing.
Which brings up the whole point of parental responsability - parents today are too lazy, self-centered, or unaware, and let their kids see over 7,000 violent acts (including rape, murder, etc.) on Tv and at the movies, before they are 18.
So, the real solution would be for parents to sit down with their kids and watch the same shows they watch, surf the net with them, and discuss what they (the kids) see.
A more logical (and effective) choice than CIPA would be to unplug the television.
I don't know why the parent was modded as a troll. His opinion is a perfectly valid one. However, I don't see how censorware could have prevented this from happening. What could have would be for the parents to be aware of a few things.
1. what software is installed on the computer. Chat clients can be configured to log sessions to disk. The parents could then have read the logs and realized what type of situation the child was getting themselves in.
2. what the children are doing on the computer. Placeing computer equipment in a public place in the house, instead of having a "computer room" allows parents to monitor what their children are doing on the computer. Some people think that kids need their own computer. This can be done, but the way a friend of mine handles it is to not allow external access from the kids computer. If the children need to do research, they can do it on the one computer in the house that can go on the internet, and save their research on a shared drive.
3. communication. Parents need to warn their children about what issues they may encounter on the web. What parent waits until their kid touches a hot stove before telling them it can burn them? So why wait until they get into a potentially dangerous situation before warning them of the dangers they can encounter on the net?
These are the things I plan on doing as my children get old enough to begin using the internet. I would like to see what other ideas people have.
IANAL... But I play one on
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
Child porn is not free speech. The child cannot make 'adult' descisions about sexual acts (at least they shouldn't have to). 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.
Child porn is not free speech because it violates the rights of the child.
The Anti-Blog
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.
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.
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
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.