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Pennsylvania Child Porn Act Overturned
Ghoser777 writes "According to MSNBC, a Pennsylvanian law that required ISPs to filter/block websites containing child porn has been overturned by a federal judge. Child porn is still illegal under U.S. federal law, but the judge found that 'there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment.'"
If you run an ISP, and are worried about some government agency forcing you to sacrifice your subscibers rights, heres a good place to start to learn about the latest battles. http://www.eff.org/minilinks/archives/cat_free_spe ech.php
A tough issue, of course, but this can be somewhat equated to the situation with p2p. Would we have the networks be responsible for copyright infringment, or the users themselves? Shouldn't we be policing the users instead of the ISPs?
Not quite on-topic, but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?
If so, I'd say it's for the best that this law's overturning might help reduce the loss of access to ideas, that may have been (inadvertantly) suppressed.
Good to see that Child porn is better than Gay marriage....
and i wonder which states
will create a similar law forcing isp's to filter out unknown crap as a result of this overturn getting press
as much as i hate tyranicall despots,
i so long for a time when one genius
made all the laws, and they made sense
Wow, this is certainly a step in the positive direction, in view of stuff like Patriot Act, and RIAA's ...
At least someone in that court room still remember that Americans possess this thing called rights. While decisions like this probably won't stand against the corporate giants, at least 1984 has been postponed yet further..
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Too bad the lawmakers never will. It's only a matter of time before the bill is rewritten in such a way that forces ISPs to use "expensive technology" to block kiddie porn.
It's also unfortunate that the same logic hasn't been applied elsewhere.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
What does freedom of speech have to do with watching CHILD PORN?
If doing WHATEVER wants to do, then RAPE and other bad things would also come under FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!!.
Freedom cannot be not unlimited FREEDOM.For our own good and that of others .
Freedom cannot be the cover for all bad things one wants to do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why does yahoo do this
I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
I'm not sayin', but I'm sayin'.
Secondly, I wonder if the law had passed if ISPs would have done anything about FreeNet.
My personal stance on the issue is manage it on a regional basis, if your country/state/city feels strongly enough about the issue they can ban the internet completely if it is voted on, and people not in the area are unaffected. As long as no legitimate content (eg "speech") is censored or blocked, there should be no problem with it. Hell, put a switch on every new PC saying "child pornography - ON/OFF" and let the consumers decide for themselves, instead of legislating it to high heaven.
Let's face it, these child pornogrophers are always going to be releasing their stuff, it is up to the people weather they want to watch it or something made by more mature people. Simple as that.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Perhaps we should target those responsible. Surely some of these child pornographers are in the States and we have jurisdiction over them.
Ignoring the problem and pretending it's not there is not going to fix it. Banning access to these sites does not remove the porn and help the kids; it simply blocks our access to it and let's the sick bastards keep doing what they do. I'd think most countries would have no problem arresting someone that did this kind of shit.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
What does freedom of speech have to do with child porn apart from technical implementation of filtering?
And how come judges start to think about technical implementations?
...& others who commit online crimes, like hackers, script kiddies, spammers, and child pornographers.
The only real solution (which is still a kind of band aid) is to track the bastards down and put them behind bars. Make examples of them.
Lets have real laws to get law enforcement off their asses, get the isps to track the spammers, hackers, and kiddie pronographers down and KILL THEM.
Did I say kill them? oops, I mean, imprison them.
Well, I guess the are gonna be happy. *OUCH* - ducks for cover.
I wonder if you could legally view child pornography if you classified it as part of the belief of a religion.
1.Child Porn images (not photos) were attempted to be made illegal by congress, but judges ruled that was making an idea illegal, which is unconstitutional; so all ancient(ie pre-photo) Hindu sex images are legal.
2.Whatever is in general practice CONTINUES to be allowed whether slavery when freedom for all is declared or cutting the foreskin off infants (the genital mutilation of OUR culture) when taking pictures of nude babies genitals is considered cause to call the police.
3. People created new religions declaring various drug use to be sacred, but the courts have only accepted old established (including American Indian) religious activities as privaleged (needing extra special reasons to be outlawed, not just legislative whim); thus some Indian tribes legally use otherwise illegal mushrooms, Christian drinking of wine-turned-into-blood is legal regardless of laws to the contrary (such as being under age), and so on.
4."[Herodotus recounts that] Darius once asked some Greeks what would induce them to devour the dead bodies of their parents, and when they answered in horror that nothing could make them do an act so atrocious, he had some men from India brought in whose custom it was to do this very thing. He asked [the men from India] how they could be persuaded to burn their dead instead of eating them. They cried out in abhorrence and begged him not to utter such abominable words. 'As Pindar says,' concludes Herodotus, 'custom is king.' Edith Hamilton, The Great Age of Greek Literature (http://www.cstone.net/~irksome/Z.htm)
There was a case a while back about some eurasian couple in the south west who immigrated from craplakastan, the father while at his sons karate match, was holding his daughter in his lap. Appearently, as is their cultural custom (it's a wide weird world) was patting her in the genital region. Naturally, some other assembled parents thought this odd, children services gets involved, and despite much anthropological testimony to the effect that there's nothing sexual about that custom, they lose their kids. Who, though they were muslim went to a foster family who took up raising them christian. I don't know if they ever got their kids back.
But if it's kids, and there's a doubt, no protection for you, no matter what. If your "peers" don't understand it, they're not going to risk it.
First and foremost, I do not advocate kiddie porn in any way shape or form. But a law requiring ISPs to block such information is not the solution. It is all to typical of society today that we find a quick solution to a problem and ignore the underlying issue.
Blocking kiddie porn, will only result in people doing their best to bypass the blocking software. It becomes an ongoing battle.
Stopping people looking at kiddie porn will not stop their desires to get hold of it. Who knows how far people like this are prepared to go to get what they want.
We need to give these people help and education, not just drive them to other sources for their material.
If the software can identify the porn/sites to block the stuff, then surely people who look at it could be offered help. Tackle the problem at the source. Remove the kiddie porn and the problem doesn't go away, remove the desire for kiddie porn and you have solved the problem.
Yes I know this is advocating monitoring of what we look at but ultimately the ISPs know that already. But I believe it is a step towards a better solution than simply blocking.
For a second there I thought someone was making pr0n "for" children... I can imagine it now Jane likes finger painting tea parties with her dolls. ring 1800 SEXY and Jenny will play with your Megatron OOH crap gave them another idea..Im soo going to hell
Ah, but here's the rub:
Adults aren't really involved in creating the child porn now.
The VAST, VAST majority of child porn is now created by children, for children. Webcams are ubiquitous. Every twelve year old sending her boyfriend nudie pics or videochatting with him is creating child porn.
When you consider that the age lmit for "child" in the case of pornography is 18, that body of work is *staggering.*
Those pictures get out. Kids break up, they send them out as revenge, they forget to delete them when their parents sell the computer... whatever.
The whole question of how to stop child porn production is now *completely irrelevant.* There's no guy at the photo-developing booth catching it before it's made anymore.
Moreover, the "kids" who are taking naked picutres of themselves and sex partners probably keep those pictures. When you're 18 you're going to delete the photos of your first lay? I don't THINK SO.
The law and the mindset we currently have regarding this material is outdated. There's no way to stop the supply when the supply is the children themselves. We need new laws that make it illegal to pay a child to be in pornography, to force a child, whatever... but that recognize there are just too many pictures of 16-year old girls and too much demand to control it.
The most important thing to remember here is that it's not unreasonable for a man to be aroused by pictures of a 17-year old woman. A woman's breasts and hips are fully developed at that age... there's no magic switch that goes off at 18.
As long as 17-year old girls take pictures of themselves, 30-year old men will traffic in those pictures. That's not a reasonable definition of pedophilia.
Read the comments with Traci Lords in mind and most of the comments become nonsense.
"Child Porn" is NOT legally what most of you think it is. Some think its any nude of a child. It is not. Some think the child's genitals must be nude/visible to be legally porn - NOPE (not in the USA). Some think the child must look like a child - no again, look at a Traci Lords photo at age 17 (illegal in USA, I THINK legal in Germany).
"Who knows how far people like this are prepared to go to get what they want."
You don't find 17-year old girls attractive? Your entire post assumes we're talking about 9-year olds. Under U.S. law, that's not the case.
Exploitative pictures of actual children are certainly a bad thing.
Webcam videos a 17-year old girl sent to her boyfriend? Not inherently bad, though she'd probably feel betrayed.
Pictures of a teenage exhibitionist? Exhibitionism is on the rise. So what about that?
So, what if an ISP decides to continue Blocking it's subscribers access to Child Pornography? Granted, I would appreciate seeing them carry on that policy, I feel that anyone who wants to entertain themselves by watching Adolesants do Adult things should really Pack there bags and move somewhere else in the world where the Moral and Decency levels are lower. Although, if a Judge declare such an ACT to not be in favor of our given Rights, then, could an ISP land in hot water for continuing to Deny demented Perverts that access?
And really, who's freedom of speech is the judge trying to uphold here? The people hosting such content or the people trying to access?
No More Bush!
And how, exactly, would spending "the majority of child protection tax dollars" on running "sting" sites to bust visitors in the US prevent the exploitation of little latvian girls? More importantly, how would that protect little american girls and boys at all? It's nothing but a witch hunt and a complete waste of US tax dollars. You could lock up every pedophile in the US and the site operators would still be in business... their customers are all over the world.
It is there because animals on earth needs this.. when an animal do this... we wont call this pron.... we humans are also animals.
.. grand .. people used to kiss their grand childern(less than a year) on their genetals .. expressing the happnies.
.... Where we are doing mistake?
... any one of you, ever happend to speek to an Child porn producer? for that matter porn producer?
In India older
Any restrictions imposed on human expression... will take an another form/means to express it.
I don't know what is child pron... but i understands from the tone of slashdotters it is a worng thing
any insights:
slashdot
Why those kids happend to be part of porn?
You'll probably find that some of the biggest users of child porn are polititians and members of the judicial system.
Suppressing kiddie porn violates the first amendment. Banning political ads 60 days before an election protects American liberty.
It's gotta be something in the water.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
The humans looked fairly well rendered. Allow people to animate childporn, that should satisfy them and then there would be no need to violate real children.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Not exactly: the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England, but wanted nothing more than to set up an equally intolerant society of their own. Freedom of religion was never one of their proposed solutions, that was the exact opposite of what they were aiming for.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
And the people "consuming" this porn are NOT necessarily the people molesting children. The people actually molesting children are going to be trading their trophy shots in the underground, not visiting "mainstream" websites. My cousin ended up in jail for trying to fuck his daughter and he doesn't even know how to use a pc. Another cousin had her second husband imprisoned after she found out he had been repeatedly molesting her daughter (his stepdaughter). The jails are full of people who have molested children who aren't even pedophiles - they simply had the opportunity to fuck a little kid and got caught at it. Don't confuse child molestors with pedophiles.
Animated childporn is already legal in the USA according TO A SUPREME COURT RULING.
"And I believe they'd be doing it whether there was an audience or not. "
On the money. Others should read up a bit on the history of this porn. Before the access explosion, ped's had sites with tons of this crap. No advertising, no limits. It was jollies, and those jollies will continue even with complete success at removing said content.
Those who remember CandyMan's spamming should also remember that he created site after site just for the perversion of it, not money. Every time they closed one -- Bam! -- an email with him crowing about how he'd set up another. He only stopped when he was physically busted.
That's how.
(guy 1)"Not quite on-topic, but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?"
(guy 2)"Not exactly: the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England, but wanted nothing more than to set up an equally intolerant society of their own. Freedom of religion was never one of their proposed solutions, that was the exact opposite of what they were aiming for."
(Me}(to guy 2)"Yes, and people who'd been bothered for not accepting the local religion IN NEW ENGLAND (WHERE THE PILGRIMS AND DECENDENTS WERE) went to PENSYLVANIA to avoid persecution as stated by (guy 1).
In 1776 Pennsylvania was ALL about religious freedom. It is IRONIC that today it should be in the lead among the 50 states to be all about limiting freedom.
-- sheesh --
Any education-related grant application makes a huge effort to require schools and libraries to be "CIPA" (Children's Internet Protection Act) Compliant. There are certifications, forms, checkboxes, all manner of things to make sure you are using some sort of filtering. The problem is that the filtering requirements are a joke. Most S&L's put on some commercial package that filters by a small list of sites. I can, within 30 seconds, demonstrate how easy it is to get around things like this. Filtering does not work. But since filtering has been deemed "Good", the government shoves it down everybody's throat.
The article was poor reporting in terms of providing relevant information.
The state was forcing ISPs to block IP addresses, so hundreds or thousands of innocent sites were being blocked because they were virtual hosts on the same IP. The reporter should have mentioned that fact.
AFAIK the best thing a government could do to prevent child abuse would be to get a stack of servers and a fat pipe and archive all the porn they could get their hands on.
As long as sickos are sitting at home wanking over their keyboards, they aren't stalking kids on their way home from school. Of course it's a different matter if they're actually paying for it, but censorship just encourages people to hand over money by increasing the value of the material.
All this moral crap from politicians and the media is ignoring the actual problems of child abuse and making the world a more unpleasant and scary place for children, just because the politcians and journalists are themselves filled with hate and their cowardly minds filled with terror.
We should not be making parents afraid to let their kids go and play in the park and telling them to stay at home and watch TV. We certainly shouldn't be suppressing freedom of speech because that makes the world a much worse place for ALL children to grow up in.
As I'm sure numerous people have already said in this discussion, child porn will not go away by blocking web sites. I'm sure that real pedophiles (by that I mean people who are serious about getting this material and not some curious 15 year old kid who wants to know what it's about) get their child porn either by meeting people they know irl or get it over heavily encrypted connections. Would a ring leader (or whatever they call it) share child porn over a public connection using www? I find that VERY unlikely.
Child pronography and statutory rape law need serious reform. They are simply out of touch with reality. It's sick and should be illegal for a 40 year old man to molest a preteen. However, a good portion of the population looses their virginity long before the age of 18 in a safe and consentual manner. Sometimes they do it with someone who is not a minor, but that's illegal. Sometimes they take pictues....but adults for some reason aren't allowed to see these pictures. I wonder....what if I had, at age 15, taken pictures of me and a girl of the same age performing various lascivious acts. Could I be thrown in jail if at age 19 I obtain her permission and decide to post those pictures on the 'net? People mature at different rates; setting the arbritrary age of 18 as a legal threshold for sexual consent, voting, military service, or anything else is impersonal and basically creates discrimination by age.
some reading on the subject
How are ISPs supposed to actually block sites? Have teams of surfers constantly looking for them to add to the list or what? And what's a "site" a news group posting, a web page, individual emails, files shared over networks?
I've seen some of these filters at work in libraries. Tried to get to a political site once, it was blocked. Went home, went to the site, they had a parody flag set up that used a swastika instead of stars, that made the website a "hate speech" site so the library filtered it. Nuts.
Adults aren't really involved in creating the child porn now.
So, so true. Also, insightful. Child porn laws are supposed to protect kids by creating penalties for those who abuse them, or would abuse them, or think about abusing them, or something like that. I'm not sure. But things have changed since the seventies. Image and video replication is infinitely easier (digital); production is trivial---fifteen-dollar webcam at Wal-Mart instead of a basement photo lab.
These 'wonderland' creeps that they found last year (was it last year?) that were involved with white slavery and such, that's what these laws are meant to prosecute. Not some guy searching for 'lolita' on eMule.
There needs to be some division, some distinction, between porn created by evil, abusive adults, and porn created by bored teenagers under no compulsion by anyone. Because there really, really is a difference. But how do you put it into law?
And also, in Australia, the age of Porn is sixteen, not eighteen as it is here in the US. Striking, that data which is perfectly legal, no cause for concern, in Australia, will cause one to be sent to the Being Raped to Death Big House here in America. We're both supposedly civilized nations here. Sheesh. If this isn't a moral absolute (like, say, killing someone---that's pretty much a moral absolute), it's kinda scary that we have such harsh penalties. Like drugs. Maybe weed will be legal in ten years. Nice consolation prize for someone who spent five of those years in jail on some stupid possession charge.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
(n/t)
More would agree with it if the RIAA hadn't blown all its goodwill suing the wrong people and being mean in general. You don't get a second chance when you're a giant bitch on top of being wrong on your first go.
How would you have liked to see the RIAA police their content? I agree they're a bunch of anachronistic assholes, but to me it seems their biggest screwup was not doing the research to realize (if they could somehow do so) that one of the people they sued was a kid. Other than that, it seems like they are going after (as much as possible) people who are sharing a lot of files.
Personally, I don't like the RIAA, but I find the MPAA to be much more disgusting. Then there's DirecTV's tactics (up until a few months ago) that basically assumed *anyone* buying a certain brand of smart-card reader was pirating their service, and sought $3000 to aviod going to court. They've since stopped that, but still.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
of that episode of South Park featuring NAMBLA.
"But dude, you HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN!"
Free speech is great, but c'mon.
You're a fucking idiot.
This isn't about child porn. This is about LEGITIMATE PAGES begind blocked.
Suppose someone's non-childporn related site was on that list, how you find out? You wouldn't. The site wouldn't even show up as "blocked because of child porn" or whatever, it simply wouldn't show up. With some well placed bribes, this system could cause IMMENSE damage.
You're thinking of the Puritans who settled in New England. PA was settled by William Penn and the Quakers who actually did practice what they preached, including freedom of religion. PA is still filled with Quakers who remain to be one of the most liberal and tolerant religious groups around.
every episode is like that. it's matt stone's view of how the world should be. like jerry springer's final thoughts. wish they would cut that part out and put in more chef time.
I think the significance of this ruling doesn't just ly in blocking kiddie porn. With a ruling that makes ISP's block access to kiddie porn, the gov't could force them to block sites that support legalizing pot, or pro-graffetti art sites... the list goes on.. The police already conduct investigations, track down and arrest persons who distribute illegal porn via the Internet and other sources and that is the best way to combat it.
In case anyone had forgotten, these are commercial sites and not those of individuals.
....
.....
Commercial speech is fair game for the guvmint which is why we don't have 10 year olds smoking Lucky Strikes or 12 year olds getting tanked on Red Bull in TV commercials in any government regulated medium which I would have to assume the internet is.
Several points as well, the creation of child pornography -- at least in this country involves the commission of a crime. Perhaps we need to make it easy for the victims of this crime --or someone on their behalf -- to sue the living shit out of the people who perpetrate the crime and also out of those people who distribute it. This would pretty much eliminate the amount of child porn out there. And if people who are victims of child porn were allowed to sue those who encourage it
OTOH, lets assume that child porn disappeared completely from the internet. When the perverts that view it can't get their rocks off by pictures of it might they then go out and be more apt to grab the kid next door or several doors down? If the lack of women in prison makes a hairy asshole attractive
Also, not from any scientific source that I can think of but most child molesters -- who you would have to assume that those who enjoy kiddie porn would at least be capable of being -- were molested as children. It is a vicious cycle.
But please don't make this a First Amendment free speech issue. In addition free speech is not absolute -- you can't yell fire in a crowded movie house -- or movie in a crowded firehouse to recycle an old joke. You can not slander or defame non-public individuals. And there are plenty more examples of situations where the guvmint is involved regulating free speech.
You really think so? There are about ten million teenage women with computer access in the U.S., give or take five million. Say conservatively that one in one hundred of those teenagers takes a naked picture of herself or chats nude on a webcam at some point in her minority.
If each of those girls only ever takes one nude picture of herself, that's 100,000 pictures. I'd say this estimate is insanely low. Teenagers like to experiment.
Surely you don't believe there are 100 BILLION pictures of illegal sex acts with very young girls out there? 100,000 * 1,000,0000 is 100 billion.
Even allowing for your hyperbole, my feeling is that teenage girls who send their boyfriend's sexy pictures outnumber pedophilic adults. Frankly, if there were enough pedophilic adults to outnumber horny teenagers in any local population, we'd have to give up on the whole issue and this legislation wouldn't exist.
As for suggesting those girls wouldn't be "posing in a lascivious manner", I wonder if you've ever had a girlfriend.
The articles you're reading, if they're even real, are like the articles on marijuana, comic books, video games, and the rest of these invisible menaces. Lying for the greater good, they call it.
Parents should be forbiden to vote as long as they kids can't. For the same reason: lack of rational though.
You are absolutely correct, unfortunately, the sickos who really want/need baby-porn seem to be flocking to this thread to revel in their victory. You and I will be modded down so the NAMBLA crowd can discuss their "right" to abuse themselves to images of children.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
No you are incorrect, in my case at least, I don't want to be tracked because its *none's* dammed business what I'm doing.. None, Zero, Zilch.
The ISP does NOT need to know what I'm accessing, the government does NOT need to know where I'm driving.. or where I had lunch yesterday.
It has nothing to do with 'getting away' with "little things", as you put it. It has to do with tracking citizens doing legal activities, and a violation of the rights guaranteed to me by the 4th amendment...
That being said, I I'm really doing something wrong, then a court order is all that is needed to track me for the sake of collecting evidence an active case, which I DO support.. But only then, not 'just because'.. or for a 'crime sweep' sort of concept.
And do address your last statement, no I wouldn't want my next car to be tracked by the state because it was stolen and trashed.. Perhaps, if *I* am the *only* one that can track it, and no one else can, i might consider it.. My car, my business..
Same goes for the ISP, they don't need to know content of the emails.. Monitoring bandwidth usage is acceptable as its part of good network management, but it stops there and does not go into tracking of content.. nope.. no sir.
As a side note what liberties our fore-fathers faught and died for that you willingly trade in for a bit of percieved 'safety', you dont desrve to have in the first place..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Funny how so many of you feel the need to defend this. Is there a reason? Funny how you are all getting modded up if you are for child porn.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
So then the government winds up with the average citizen PGP encrypting everything and their little Carnivore system is as useful as a clicking Zip-Drive. The sooner the better if you ask me.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I have yet to ever see a "legitimate" page that contains any pictures of little girls. The fact so many of you seem to support this really sickens me.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
*whew*, right michael? You're always posting about child porn rights.
Good thing blocking a horrible exploitative act of children was overturned because someone somewhere thinks it will block their Free Speech! We sure dodged a bullet, michael.
holy shit- mod this guy up if you have any mod points!
thats the most inteelligent post I've seen on slashdot in over a year.
great post, screwman
The article doesn't go into a lot of technical details, but if you read it and you're not stupid, you should be able to figure it out. Do you even know what virtual hosts are? A web hosting company will put hundreds or even thousands of their customers on a single web server, sharing a single IP address.
Under this law, if one of those thousands of web sites is identified as illegal (without a trial or due process, mind you) by the government, then all the other thousands of sites that share the web server get blocked as well. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals, small businesses, non-profit organizations, charities, community groups, clubs, etc., who suddenly learn that nobody in the state (including themselves) can visit their web site anymore because of the actions of a single other customer of their web hosting company.
Do you really think that's fair?
The ISPs can only filter by IP address and destination port, not by the site at that IP that a web request is actually destined for, because their routers only look at the TCP/IP header, not inside the HTTP request. Looking inside the HTTP request could potentially allow the ISP to block sites on a domain-name basis rather than an IP basis, but it's illegal under current privacy laws (without the customer's consent), it would require additional very expensive equipment that would put most ISPs out of business, and it would slow down web access considerably every everybody
This probably varies by area, but even in areas that up the speed limit, people still consider whatever it is to be too low, and go at least 15-20 over on highways. Almost all highways in Texas are now speed limit 70, and most in Arizona and New Mexico are 75, and people typically go 80-90. You could raise them to 85, but then people would go 95-100. So part of the reason for keeping them lower is so that the "real" speed people go will be reasonable.
Of course, I personally would support speed limits circa 80 mph rigidly enforced. Once people got used to "the speed limit really is the limit", and the limit was reasonable, it might get rid of some of those problems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
(reposted from another thread that was trying to make the same point)
The article doesn't go into a lot of technical details, but if you read it and you're not stupid, you should be able to figure it out. Do you even know what virtual hosts are? A web hosting company will put hundreds or even thousands of their customers on a single web server, sharing a single IP address.
Under this law, if one of those thousands of web sites is identified as illegal (without a trial or due process, mind you) by the government, then all the other thousands of sites that share the web server get blocked as well. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals, small businesses, non-profit organizations, charities, community groups, clubs, etc., who suddenly learn that nobody in the state (including themselves) can visit their web site anymore because of the actions of a single other customer of their web hosting company.
Do you really think that's fair?
The ISPs can only filter by IP address and destination port, not by the site at that IP that a web request is actually destined for, because their routers only look at the TCP/IP header, not inside the HTTP request. Looking inside the HTTP request could potentially allow the ISP to block sites on a domain-name basis rather than an IP basis, but it's illegal under current privacy laws (without the customer's consent), it would require additional very expensive equipment that would put most ISPs out of business, and it would slow down web access considerably every everybody
I am quite aware of what a virtual host is, but I am also aware that an ISP can shut down ANY of their sites without locking out the rest of the sites on the IP. What we have here is a case of ISP's using baseball bats to combat something they could have used a pea-shooter to cure. The law doesn't state that the IP must be blocked, just the site. The ISP's were doing it this way to create trouble and not comply with the law. It's spirit vs. letter. I am also aware that a few too many people on this site are addressing the child-porn issue, not the IP/rights issue, which really creeps me out. It seems like /. has an underground population of pediphiles I was unaware of. Read the replies dude.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
How about the government get out of the business of telling me what is and what isn't obscene? Now, I am no fanboy of child pornography and find it utterly disgusting, but why should the government be in the business of censoring the world for me?
If you're a parent, buy a good proxy and filter the stuff for your kids on your own. Everyone has different views of what should and shuoldn't be censored. Move its implementation down to the lowest level, the consumer level.
To pre-empt (sp?) the certain objection that not everyone can set things like Dan's Guardian and other web filters, I say this: If you're a parent and don't want your children seeing topic X, you better fuckin' teach yuorself how to use these tools. You're a human, afterall.. the smartest being on the planet. I think you can handle it!
One last thing.. I don't understand why people care what others do in the privacy of their own home. IF I want to look at child pornography at home, I should be allowed. I am not infringing on anyone else's rights when I do so. If I were to look at child pornography in a public library, I could possibly be infringing on those rights. So don't bring your offensive behavior out into public and everyone is happy!
What is your penile percentile?
You're an ISP. A packet comes in from a customer bound for an IP address that's listed on the blacklist as hosting a child pornography site. However, it hosts 1000 other sites as well. Your routers only look at the packet header. How do you determine what site it's bound for? Remember: you do not have the legal authority or the equipment or the time to look into the packet's payload, only the TCP/IP header. With these restrictions in place, tell me how you'd do this. If you think it's possible, it's time to put up or shut up.
Yes, it is illegal in the US to distribute, view, ... child pornography (I my issues with this, but different thread..). But who made the ISPs law enforcement? I have an idea! Let's make the top-level DNS machines block it all. Ooo.. stop it at the Internet's backbone! That will, for sure, eliminate this horrible disease!
Blah.. Don't be so emotional. 99%+ of the world disagrees with child pornography including myself. Be rational, be proactive and quit pushing yuor morals onto someone else.
What is your penile percentile?
That would be like using religion as a basis to justify murder, even mass murder which of course could NEVER, EVER....
Never mind. Example withdrawn.
(reposted from another thread that was trying to make the same point)
The article doesn't go into a lot of technical details, but if you read it and you're not stupid, you should be able to figure it out. Do you even know what virtual hosts are? A web hosting company will put hundreds or even thousands of their customers on a single web server, sharing a single IP address.
Under this law, if one of those thousands of web sites is identified as illegal (without a trial or due process, mind you) by the government, then all the other thousands of sites that share the web server get blocked as well. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals, small businesses, non-profit organizations, charities, community groups, clubs, etc., who suddenly learn that nobody in the state (including themselves) can visit their web site anymore because of the actions of a single other customer of their web hosting company.
Do you really think that's fair?
The ISPs can only filter by IP address and destination port, not by the site at that IP that a web request is actually destined for, because their routers only look at the TCP/IP header, not inside the HTTP request. Looking inside the HTTP request could potentially allow the ISP to block sites on a domain-name basis rather than an IP basis, but it's illegal under current privacy laws (without the customer's consent), it would require additional very expensive equipment that would put most ISPs out of business, and it would slow down web access considerably every everybody.
After reading Teahouse's comments in this story, I'm going to have to issue an Orange-level Troll Alert.
"the pilgrims fled when the Puritans came to power in England,"
And they went to Massachusetts, not Pennsylvania. Wrong commonwealth. As others have already pointed out, Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers.
There is no single religion that British colonizers of what are now US states practiced when they came over. Puritans in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland... and then there were the colonies that were started without the pretext of religion, like Georgia.
"but I seem to recall that Pa. is the place to which people who'd been bothered for not accepting their local religion went to avoid persecution...?"
That was a Long Time Ago, and Pennsylvania (like the rest of the nation) has long since been overrun by the apathetic masses.
This is why the US needs a new frontier, as a safety valve for proponents of new/different ideas can go off and form their own, new states instead of having to take over an existing state.
Come on dustin,
...
you still havent responded to my post on your other thread.
I offer again
Do you have any kids? I'd love to pay you to let me 'look after' them for an afternoon.
-----------
and by the way, by posting your point of view here, you are contradicting your last line, how about YOU stop trying to push YOUR morals onto us.
No! It's suppressing anything (such as kiddie porn) in such a poorly thought out way that ends up resulting in massive collateral damage in the form of depriving many of their right to free speech ... that violates the first amendment. It's one thing to decide whether something is, or is not, protected by the first amendment. It's something entirely different to impose a means of enforcement that has major serious side effects. Imagine if, because some unidentified person in your neighborhood robbed a bank, that the police decided to round up everyone in the whole neighborhood and put them all in jail, just to make sure they got the right guy.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The ISP routing the packet only knows what IP address it's going to and what port's it's going to. The TCP/IP header that routing decisions are based on does not tell anything about what's to be done with the packet once it reaches the destination IP. The information about what website the request is bound for is contained inside the HTTP request, not in the TCP/IP header. That information is part of the payload of the packet, not part of the header. You can't make route/drop decisions based on the payload of a packet without using special high-end routers with special capabilities to look inside the payloads of the packets they route and make decisions based on the contents. That would be slow, expensive, and illegal for a consumer ISP to do without the customer's express consent.
There is one fatal flaw in your logic - there actually are no child porn websites. That's why it's impossible to shut down these sites - they do not exist. :)
You may think I am nuts, but I am not. The legislators who force this kind of crap on us, ISPs that are willing to oblige and filtering companies that make money on wholesale blocking - they all know that child porn websites just don't exist and that it would be trivial to close them if they were.
What they prefer is to propagate myths about child porn, to scare people with tales of victimised kids and to persuade the public that censorship is an effective solution. In fact, this is not a solution at all.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
There is no such thing as "protecting" children from porn - or anything else. Any such attempt is itself harm to children.
There is no "harm" done to anyone (including people who are already freaks) - including children - from viewing porn or anything else.
Any "harm" is self-inflicted.
It's all ruminant evacuation.
Any parents who buy into this crap are themselves doing harm to their children by not properly training them to deal with human reality.
This "children are supposed to be innocent" bullshit started with moronic Christians and has nothing to do with human evolution or human history or practically any human culture.
NONE of these laws are useful for anything but enabling freak cops and statists to bust people to enhance their psychotic need to push people around to demonstrate to themselves that they're better than other people.
Humans. Morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Overturning this law doesn't legalize child pornography. Child pornography is already covered by federal and state laws. This law merely attempted to criminalize ISPs for letting their customers do something that they really had no power to prevent. Why not go after the people creating and distributing it instead? This was a bad law and it's good that it got overturned.
Having ISPs filter packets based on their contents would've make too much of a performance hit, but it would require replacing all the normal routers with advanced routers with application-level support. It'd also be illegal, because if you're paying someone to route packets for you, they're not allowed to examine the contents of those packets (only the headers) without your consent.
And I thought Americans only shoved their ideas down people from other countries...
I never realized it happened where they lived too...
Naked photographs of children are not child pornography, and therefore they are not illegal. Child pornography is sexually explicit photographs of children.
Nudism is not sexually explicit.
Yeah you are right about that but we need to clearly define the law. What exactly is a child and can we realistically enforce the over 18 limit? Most adults consider under 13 a child, most adults won't give webcams to children, but teenagers will buy their own webcams and might have a job.
So this situation is a situation of irresponsible parents and stupid teenagers. Child porn and Teen porn should be treated differently. You cannot really stop teen porn but theres no excuse for child porn.
Trying to stop teenagers from being stupid is like trying to stop them from drinking and doing drugs, its a lost cause. You are right we do need to fix the laws because the laws arent designed for the digital age.
Right now we are arguing about whats illegal and what isnt. If we can't even figure out all the details of the law then obviously the law needs to be updated.
How is child porn defined? Nudity? What?
What age is a child a child and how exactly do we enforce it if teeangers have sex and produce their own porn? I don't think our laws even considered this stuff.
Here is what we should do, we should ask our doctors and scientists to tell us an age that a child is physically an adult and mentally mature enough. Myself I'd say around 16, but the law says 18, in some situations its 13, but to most people its clear that someone under 13 is a child, it gets fuzzy as they get older.
You could be right with all these teenagers and their cams, maybe its not child porn if they themselves took the pictures, so what are we supposed to do about that? Theres nothing we can do.
With children under 13 however we should just make it so they can't use a computer without censoring the computer and monitoring their activity. Someone under 13 is clearly a child mentally and physically and theres no debate on this. 16 is so close to 18 that a person who looks at a 16 year old could easily be fooled into thinking they are 18 and this is where things get fuzzy. If the person can't figure out the persons age by looking at them and the 16 year old distributes her own pictures and pretends to be 18 theres nothing we can do.
The age which says child does not always match up with the physical age or mental age of the person involved. Currently all he child porn laws are to stop pedophiles, but the majority of us arent peodphiles and the majority of child porn is most likely teen porn.
If what you say is true and most child porn is created in eastern europe and I actually agree with that statement because their laws their arent as strict, the solution create strict laws against the creation of childporn, such as 10 years in prison for each child they abuse, this would be a start.
The distribution once its created is impossible to stop so you can only stop its creation.
Like I would trust anything written by MSNBC. Microsoft is nothing more than a large collection of liars anyway.
I don't see any links here to CDT's information on the case. All of our information on the lawsuit is posted at http://www.cdt.org/speech/pennwebblock/. Disclaimer: I was involved in the case, and testified before the Court.
Yes, but how long should they carry the logs. In good circumstances a DDOS attack or heavy spammage would be detected by a weekly log. I'm getting that they (the feds) wanted logs kept around a fair bit longer though.
This is official US definition.
Child pornography (summarized definition): sexually explicit visual depictions of minors.
Sexually explicit (full definition): actual or simulated sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.
If it's not on the above list, it's not sexually explicit, and thus it's not child pornography.
...Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you want people to take what you say seriously, have the balls to take the heat - and post without the AC on.
Most of the major web servers today (including Apache and IIS) support virtual hosts (or vhosts), and the majority of smaller websites today share a web server with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of other sites through the use of virtual hosting. This is especially true for static-only websites (no CGI, database access, etc) that don't require much in the way of system resources. All they need are disk space and bandwidth.
/index.html rather than domain1.com/index.html, you'll get the default site rather than one of the vhosted sites.
Say that domain1.com and domain2.com are hosted on the same web server, with the same IP address. You type http://domain1.com/index.html in your web browser. The web browser looks up the IP address (the same IP it would've gotten if it'd looked up domain2, but that doesn't matter), wraps up your HTTP request inside a TCP/IP header, and sends it off. When the web server gets the packet, it discards the TCP/IP header and looks at the HTTP request, which tells it what file you want: http://domain1.com/index.html. Now it knows what domain you're trying to access, so it checks its virtual host configration to see where the files of domain1.com are located on disc, and it grabs the index.html from that directory and sends it back to you. If you request a document from a domain that isn't defined, or if you request a document from the IP address itself rather than from a domain name, or if you're using a very old web browser that just asks for
This is easy to demonstrate with an example: look up the IPs of timecube.com and abovegod.com. Same IP, but different sites. They're both hosted on the same server, and the IP address of both is 207.150.192.12. But if you try to visit 207.150.192.12 with your web browser, you'll get the web server's default page -- in this case, an error message.
1. [wild inaccurate claims about kiddie porn]
2. [rational post debunking a lot of crap]
3. "How did you get to know so much about it? (read: You must be one of them)"
The reality of it is that most slashdotters would dance circles around trivial filters such as this. The difference is just that non-computer savvy people can't. It is like mp3 trading in the pre-Napster era. Mass blocking of legitimate web sites won't change that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you are that oversenstiv you oaf, you should be allowed to moderate!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That statement does NOT mean they are the same thing. Look up "situational offenders" - and then look up the APA definition of a pedophile.
Here, I'll do half the work for you:
A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger).
B. The person has acted on these urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.
C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.
Now, hit google with a request for interviews with sexual offenders and you will find a very significant portion of the known sexual offenders (and keep in mind this really only represents a fraction of all sexual offenders) are not pedophiles at all even tho they may have molested one or more children.
I didn't say the two lines never crossed - I said they are often parallel and sometimes even divergent traits (ex: there are many pedophiles who are not situational and would never molest a child and may even defend that child from others). You cannot assume a=p anymore than you can assume a!p
Shouldn't we be policing the users instead of the ISPs?
I agree completely. Except that the 'we' should be the parents of the one(s) affected. Comparatively, television has the same effect (not as exploitive), but the same. I, as a father, have held these beliefs for some time. While not ever a believer in a baby-sitting T.V, and one who always made a point in watching with my child, I still found enough inappropriate material on network shows...that's where I came in (the parent) to stop it.
Well, to be perfectly honest, if you don't live here you don't deserve to vote here..
Nor do I have a right to help decide who runs your country...
That said, Bush isn't who you should be concerned about, its the UN and the WTO.. they aren't elected so they answer to no one...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In general affirmative action laws are written to help blacks, hispanics, and native americans but not asians.