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New Internet Regulation Proposed
bumgutts writes "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has suggested a mandatory website self-rating system. The system, very similar to one suggested under Clinton's administration, would require by law all commercial websites to place 'marks and notices' on each page containing 'sexually explicit' content, with penalty up to 5 years imprisonment." From the article: "A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive 'words or digital images' in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs. A third new crime appears to require that commercial Web sites not post sexually explicit material on their home page if it can be seen 'absent any further actions by the viewer.'"
It's not porn, it's art!
Kinda reminds me of this old one. ;)
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
How exactly are they trying to enforce this ?
I'd say that the sites that still want to expose erotical/sexual content, would just move 1 inch outside the US, probably Canada. So while all american sites and their revenues are hit bigtime (the search engines will definitely start to filter on this), the other countries get the profit.
Every tenth poster about Madonna or Catherina Zeta Jones or any other female celebrity is somewhat sexual content.
Since i'm not an american and i'm nowhere near US, it won't affect me, but it still seems enormously stupid idea. The motivation could be correct, but the implementation will suck.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
No its not just you. That does indeed seem like reasonable legislation. Porn on the net has gotten way out of control.
this is bad because it would make goatseing someone a prosecutable crime with serious consequences, for example if this were so i would of been prosecuted when i set my schools homepage as www.sch.on.nimp.org (dont click if your useing IE it'll fuck you up, heck fuck you, click it if you use IE, you deserve it, fuckers.)
While it sounds like a decent idea, I'm really all for the whole uncensored and unregulated internet. It's more interesting to me to see what people do with the total freedom granted to them. The more stuff like this that's get passed, the closer we move to real censorship. Okay, so I know I probably sound like I just put a fresh bit of tinfoil on this morning, but I really like my internet the way it is.
The Fark 'boobies' tag finally gets the nationwide recognition it deserves...
This guy's the limit!
You're going insane.
This won't work, unless it's an international standard. That's just never going to happen....
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
All you have to do is know one name, one word even, and any search anywhere will return adult material. Are they gonna put something in front of that? How about just typing in a url that goes to some detail page beyond the index page? Blocking all of that takes a trememdous amount of work... way harder than just "watch your kids" and "tell them about what's there". Any kid can go into a bookstore and see books with adult material in them, in fact you can go to any commercial big-box bookstore (barnes + noble, etc) and you'll see a slew of underage kids in the adult book area. We're just people, people!
stuff |
Note: I am a conservative, but I still don't like most of what Gonzales does.
A third new crime appears to require that commercial Web sites not post sexually explicit material on their home page if it can be seen 'absent any further actions by the viewer.
This one actually makes sense. I have young students that occasionally search for school-related things using Google. Some of the sites that come up are questionable at best. I apprecite those webmasters that have the decency to place a warning and no explicit material on their portal page. Even better are those that make you agree to view the content and set a cookie. That way no matter what page you enter to (since Google doesn't give preference on most searches to a home page as opposed to one deep in the site), the cookie is checked and you get the "agree/disagree" page no matter what.
However, it seems a bit unenforcable. I mean, what about websites overseas? What about websites overseas operated by American's? What about websites in the US operated by foreigners? I think that there are still too many unresolved questions about jurisdiction on the Internet. I would think that as a lawyer, Gonzales would understand that. This is something that depends on the goodwill of the webmasters, much like most other things on the 'net.
Can you please provide specific examples of how it has gotten out of control? Inquiring minds want to know, because, I for one, just don't see it and I think supported evidence just might change my mind.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
A firm definition of sexually explicit would need to be written in. If left open to interpretaion ISP's will be dropping sites a the first complaint for fear of injunctions.
Afterall the difference between kinky nad perverted is just that between using a feather and the whole bird to tickle...
Where EXACTLY in the Constitution of The United States is this authority delegated from The People or The States to The Damned Feds?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
It may seem like reasonable legislation but it does nothing to alleviate the problem. You might as well pass a law that states no more internet porn. It would have the same effect. Instead of good old American porn all we would have is crazy Japanese porn. Seriously how will this help, it would only effect American businesses. I am against any law that does not have a chance of stopping what it was written to stop. It just adds another pointless law to the books.
How are they going to enforce this outside the US?
It may be reasonable, it's also unconstitutional. From the article:
The definition of sexually explicit broadly covers depictions of everything from sexual intercourse and masturbation to "sadistic abuse" and close-ups of fully clothed genital regions.
A little broad, eh? So now we get some neopuritan in the FCC or whoever gets to control this deciding what constitutes "sexually explicit". And what constitues a commercial website? Most museums and non-profits may be safe, but what about newspapers? Magazines? This is prior restraint, and this is one of the reasons the First Amendment was passed.
What if your site has that famous picture of Ed Meese talking about his commission on pornography in front of the bare-breasted statue of Justice? Is it art? It is news? It is porn?
Gonzales seems way too obsessed with pornography. Someone should give him a subscription to Hustler online or something like that so he can, er, release a little pressure.
My sig is too lon
Somewhat agree with you on that portions are reasonable. Self rating of content would be nice but obviously some people are looking to capitalize on similar sounding names, keywords, etc... Try checking the site cheerlaeder.com (notice the typo in "leader"). My wife was a cheerleader coach for my daughters team (no, she never was a cheerleader but nobody else was stepping up) and started looking for online resources. While looking around the web, we accidently found this site. Fortunately my kids weren't around to see the site (that time or the subsequent times I "accidentally" typed the name :) ...j/k). The point I'm trying to make though is that while self rating sounds good, in some cases I doubt people would do a good job self rating, especially if they are willing to take advantage fo a typo. The other site that now comes to mind is whitehouse.com.
Jim
I've always thought the pictures spoke for themselves.
Maybe they should do the same thing with spam emails. That way our filters would work and those that didn't comply would be executed. OK OK 5 years in jail. On the other hand... Executed sounds better.
This is dumb. It'd make all the internet subject to dumb lawsuits like the ones created by the "sexually explicit" scenes in GTA San Andreas. Also, it'd be impossible to regulate since a lot of dumb porn sites are run by "web masters" that hide behind proxies, servers in other countries, and use free email accounts with bogus personal info.
Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of children.
With articles about sexual topics and offensive language, could Wikipedia be affected by such legislation? Could a suit be brought if someone vandalized Abraham Lincoln to contain offensive pictures or language? (which happens often)
During his speech, Gonzales also warned that Internet service providers must begin to retain records of their customers' activities to aid in future criminal prosecutions
Future criminal prosecutions, whenever the government deems it necessary for those who might cause problems for them. The implication is the government does not trust its own citizenry, and must have the ability to invade their privacy at any time in order to control or silence them.
What other ways can people be spied on by the government? Is this what we want, a paternalistic government and a paranoid society?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
What is with this disturbing attitude towards sex in the US? It's just sex people and nothing more. Violence is far worse than boobies and has a more profound effect on kids. Its insane that showing people getting killed and beaten is more acceptable than sex. Sounds like the US still hasn't excaped their puritan past and that's sad.
http://religiousfreaks.com/1) The US is not the world, so your laws can go hang.
2) Your views of what is sexually explicit are screwed up, so your rating system would be as well.
3) The real problem are the spammer and scammers stealing millions from the public. When I don't receive 100s of spams a day - then you can start getting worked up over boobies.
4) We don't trust you, we certainly don't trust you enough to let you do something this. Earn that trust back first.
Yesterday I was watching the news (amazing I know) and saw an old chinese woman protesting peacefully outside the whitehouse. She was the only one, but a police officer came and escorted here away. I'd say we are in the midst of the end of our freedoms anyways. All those soldiers that supposibly "died for our freedoms" are rolling in their graves right now because we don't have it anymore and they essentially died for nothing except to say that our way of government was the right one. Which is just what every government tries to do.
It'll work perfectly. The War on Porn is a guaranteed infinite war.
I can just picture the last person on earth's last words to another human: "I warned you about taking any more photo's of me from behind you pornorrist!"
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Why is it that every time we hear about some bored schmuck wanting to regulate the internet, it's always an American ? I really think someone should visit senate and explain to these people how they no longer have any say in these matters. They might have founded Arpanet way back, but today's network has little in common with the former military network. What's more pertinent though, is that if the US senators start crippling the internet, things will get moved beyond their juridsiction and the rest of the world will point and laugh at the foolish power-hungry senators.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I mean a quick butchers at Google gives 155,000 entries for "Offshore hosting" which kind of removes the teeth from this.
One of my sites features prominent images of "Tinky Winky getting it on with the Noo-Noo", "Tubby Custard Full Facials", "Over the Hills and Far Away, Hot Barely Legal Teletubbies Come to Play - With Each Other and Also With a Mysterious Large Cylindrical Object" etc. etc.
I hope that will not lead to legal misunderstandings which would put me in line for a stint of federally sponsored rectal enlargement.
The US still controls ICANN. All they'd have to do is say "you must follow these rules or your domain vanishes" and they can enforce it world-wide.
I had the same kind of feeling. Pretty reasonable guidelines. Big questions about enforcability esp. internationality, but I think a fairly balanced request of webmasters.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I kind of understand the comment about sites being misleading by including the words "Teletubbies" and "Barbie" in a site that is actually full of sexually explicit photographs...
But what of sites that feature sexually explicit photographs of Teletubbies and Barbie? It is deceptive in that case?
And why only commercial sites? What about Ken and Tinky-winky's all amateur web-cam -- totally free, totally K`inky?
Why, actually, yes. Since they pretty much agree that anyone in the above-mentioned groups should be executed.
this is bad because it would make goatseing someone a prosecutable crime with serious consequences
I hope not or the next time I fly to the US, I'll be pulled over at Customs and sent to Gitmo...
Trolling is a art,
This is just set up to appease the 'protect the children' crowd, because the US govt. would only try to gain authority over US domains.
If they even proposed getting involved with ICANN, this would bring back the 'which govt. owns the interweb' debacle.
How many more problems can the US of A handle at once?
Now what about MySpace pages and Photobucket pages that the images are uploaded by users. Will they have to check what's uploaded and put a label on it or will one be on it all the time? I bet if they see it now they'll yell TOS like Blizzard.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I'm putting a gold star on every webpage I own, whether it's porn or not. Let the king of denmark serve as an example.
You know, as much as I'm for protecting certain things that shouldn't be viewed by children, etc, I'm really getting tired of the regulation in the US. Everything is being regulated. People need to learn and be exposed to certain content that will allow them to grow. Nudity is a part of life. Sex is part of life.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
That page is a virus. Avast caught it and aborted it luckily.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should propose self-rating system not only for web sites, but for legal procedures, legal institutions.
Guantanamo, for example would be an interesting case: it's quite a pervert site - legally at least. Ignoring all the requests from different parties in the US and around the world, Mr. Gonzales does not seem to show much interest to "self-rate" it. Maybe applying the proposed five years prison term for failing to comply might work.
Closeups of fully clothed genital regions? WTF?
It sounds like this senator needs counselling if he thinks that's porn.
Why is it that every few months I hear someone clamor for a standard to do this, when there already is one, and it is already supported by 90% of the PCs on the planet?
Check out the ICRA which has been around since the late 90s. A standard which is already supported by Internet Explorer and most commercial internet filtering software.
Great, more morons who don't understand PICS. At least this is better than the .xxx domain.
We're going to start putting people in prison for this??
While I have no problem with regulation and imposing penalties, I'm not at all convinced that we should start sending people to prison over this.
"...would require by law all commercial websites to place 'marks and notices' on each page containing 'sexually explicit' content, with penalty up to 5 years imprisonment."
So all comercial sites will have to add pornographic marks and notices on each of their pages?? I don't want to be bombarded with porn each time I visit e-bay thank you very much! I'm sure that's meant to read "on each page that contains 'sexually explicit' content"!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
I'm gonna rate my website "Wacky"! Or maybe "Best Page In The Universe". Oh, wait, someone did that. OK. Wacky it is!
This actually sounds a pretty nice idea, theoritically. The idea of the "first page without boobies" is pretty simple yet not respected as of now. I can already imagine some kid going to crisler.com (ie: instead of christler) and falling on a pornsite. This is nonsense. The problem is, most people just don't care about this today.
http://www.soundclick.com/g1mike
They know a thing or two about regulation too.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
The definition of sexually explicit broadly covers depictions of everything from sexual intercourse and masturbation to "sadistic abuse" and close-ups of fully clothed genital regions.
HOW CAN A FULLY-CLOTHED ANYTHING BE SEXUALLY EXPLICIT? I know some law enforcement already has some messed up ideas about what types of pornography should be considered legal, and what types are too dirty and need to be outlawed. But this is one of the most ridiculous things i've ever heard.
Try checking the site cheerlaeder.com (notice the typo in "leader").
That's not a typo, they're just British.
This should get kicked by the SC like prior attempts to do the same...hopefully.
Is it just me going insane, or does that actually seem like reasonable legislation?
Both.
As parent, the thought of such a regulation gave me pause--I consider myself responsible, I want my 11-year-old to have access to the Internet, and I don't want to have to sit there with her ALL the time.
But then, I came to my senses and thought, "it IS my responsibility to monitor her Internet access." The silver lining to such a regulation proposal is that it has made me rethink of my parental priorities...
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
The UK has an amazing law which allows its citizens - (sorry, subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth II von Battenberg Saxe Coburg Gotha usw) to be rendered to the US at the request of the US authorities without their having to present any evidence that a crime has been committed. Imagine the fun of this one. I host a site in the UK without the flag, which is viewed by an American. As a result, the US Govt. decides to extradite me to the US as a result of an action beyond my control, i.e. the decision of a US ISP to permit relaying of an illegal website to a US citizen. And my heroic Government will do nothing to intervene. Of course, if the website is hosted in, say, France, the US authorities will simply have to interpret French legal expressions like "Merde alors".
Pining for the fjords
The law assumes an unhackable web server.
If this law made it to the books and someone got busted with it, all they'd have to do is claim they were hacked. And as soon as the next patch comes out covering some hole in your web server's system, that's your reasonable doubt. "Hackers must have used the XYZ exploit just patched last week to remove the tags."
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Does Goatse.cx count as porn? As I see it it's more sport and art than porn...
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
I'll have to insist that ALL Biblical content be under this rating too, since there's so much incest, sex, rape, and other violence. I really don't want my kids being exposed to that kind of shit!
Yes, the human body is a bad thing....
Jail is not good enough, let start chopping of fingers.
These laws would be seen as very good in a Taliban US state.
Osama has won...
This reminds me of the whole GTA:SA Hot Coffee mod. While a lot of other countries were concerned about the violence in this game (nevermind that it was recommended for mature audiences), the US politicians only went nuts when grainy, pixellated, soft-core cartoon sex was depicted in a hack.
I used to wonder how obsessed people must be over sex to get all worked up over this. Then I had a conversation with a Christian fundamentalist. Wow. The things they believe. They truly think they are doing God's work by imposing their will on the rest of us. And even more frightening, it's not just sex, but their whole perspective on everything which explains a lot about our foreign policy.
I hear that in Europe, their advertising has bare-breasted women. I don't see the Europeans running crazily through the streets and their societies falling apart. Yet when JJ flashed a boob at the SuperBowl, the US gov went nuts. Makes you wonder who has the more stable society...
So, how is a website deemed commercial? .com ?
Selling membership or products, ad supported, viewable by search engine,
What if I just want to post some lascivious pictures on the net for my own remote viewing pleasure?
I'm looking at some porn right now, I just tilt my head down and there it is, my pants cover my genitals, therefore they are fully clothed genital regions. I'm so dirty.
Can I bum a sig?
I've been using Freenet 0.7, and it's both fast and network-light now - pretty impressive. Looks like they made it just in time...
They want to regulate it but they don't want an XXX domain? I don't get it. They just need to make pr0n belong to an XXX domain.
I like the concept of coming up with a standard rating system where websites can set flags based on their content. It would make it easier for us (as parents, not the government) to regulate what our kids watch/view/read online.
I, however, want to see if voluntarily implemented and balk at government enforcement.
a) It would be impossible to enforce
b) There are better things we should be spending the money on. (like closing up the border from ILLEGALS)
c) Being a conservative, I believe in smaller Government, not bigger. I don't need somebody telling me how to raise my kids... that's the job of me and my wife, not a bureaucratic panel that we didn't vote into power.
"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
This from a guy who says that laws prohibiting torture "do not apply to the president" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Gonzales)
Is this not government sponsored Safe For Work website tagging legislation? In all seriousness, who wants to bet old Robbie was busted by a techie lookin at switch traffic while surfin for porn at work on your tax dollar? His solution: Explicit Clicks to Look At Boobies... for the entire world.
Americans rejoice! Click not in fear, for The Government shall save your job.
But honestly, how is this the work of a conservative? Larger government to further the criminal intent of not just Americans, but the entire world. The ideologues have control of Washington, and continue to take it too far. This smacks of overt government legislation.
Does anyone else miss the 'real' conservative values the Republican party was founded on? These neocons have got to go, for our country and the world.
You can subscribe to Slashdot; does that make slashdot a commercial site? Will Slashdot have to put up a "sexually explicit" warning just in case some geek posts a comment about his hot-and-bothered thoughts about Princess Leia or Natalie Portman covered with grits?
Slashdot'll be in a real bind -- either censor comments, or get filtered out of any work sites because of the "sexually explicit" label. Indeed, any blog that accepts user comments will face the same dilemma: either start censoring, or be censored by filtering software and employer policies.
How do you determine what's "sexually explicit"? Recently someone on Fark (also a site that has subscription membership) posted about getting his balls stuck in the slats of his chair. and Fark regularly features a photoshop of a squirrel with enormous testicles.
Are those posts and pictures sexually explicit? Ask your lawyer when you're faced with five years jail time for guessing wrong.
Metafilter.com requires a one-time fee to post; it has a popular section devoted to users' questions, many of which are of a sexual nature. Does a post asking about a relationship that's lost its "sexual spark", with details of the sex life, count as sexually explicit?
Will the site owner be willing to risk five years in jail to find out?
Gonzales also wants ISPs to keep records of what sites customers browse, so here's where I think this is going:
Of course, they'll start with uncontroversial prosecutions of people looking at kiddie porn, but they won't stop there: next it'll be anime and manga, then it'll be BDSM, they anything -- like gay porn -- that violates the "community standards" of the most narrow-minded Federal venue they can find. Expect a lot of the cases to be tried in Utah and Georgia and the ever-conservative western District of Pennsylvania.
Look guys, it requires the House of Representatives to pass this crap. If you're an American and you're old enough tot look at "sexually explicit" stuff, you're also old enough to vote. Check out the political party Gonzales is a part of, and vote for the other one in November. Or you'll have only yourself to blame when any but the most vanilla sites disappear from the Internet.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"Our" legislators never cease to amaze me. Is my shitty blog a "commercial website?" If so, if I do a Paxil Diary type of thing (I used to keep a K-5 diary about my inability to get laid), how would I mark it? Would I have to mark the whole site, or just pages where I say "fuck?" Will it be marked as pr0n if I say "shit" or "Goddamnit"?
Will someone on, say, Geocities be covered, since Geocities is a commercial venture? If so, when someone posts pics of their ass on a scanner, who goes to jail, the guy who posts the pics as a hobby, or the comercial entity that owns the URL?
The way this sounds, I could take the Google ads off my blog (making it no longer "commercial"... and would I actually have to make money?) and post hardore bestiality, rape-and-snuff flicks, etc?
And... have none of these morons noticed that our... sorry, THEIR laws don't affect The Register or any other site not in the US? I mean, as long as Orlowski or someone doesn't post the close ups of the lesbians getting it on in the black helicopter, or Janet Reno doing it with a Dalek?
What the fuck... would this post need the mark?
How about we just pass a law making it illegal for US youths under 18 to use the internet? Nah, makes too much sense.
It seems Americans are still highly ashamed of sex.
I think that the signing of web sites, and correction of the words they use is fine, but to make it a crime that gets you in jail is ridiculous.
The sex industry shouldn't be illegal, as shouldn't be light drugs.
The taxes could be stupidly high, but it would be something!
A step in the right direction...
And you get a few countries that lack the expertise to get their own internet running but do have a sizeable military force. Destroying, at least temporarily, the online businesses and government functions of an entire country. That would escalate beyond "strong condemnations" and "sanctions" very quickly. And then things would get interesting.
a mandatory website self-rating system. The system, very similar to one suggested under Clinton's administration, would require by law all commercial websites
..." will come down the pike a couple years after this has passed.
Self rating yet mandatory? Is it me or is there an inherent contradiction in this? This is just a law to get "a foot in the door" so the government can have more excuses to eventually control the net as a whole. "Self regulation has been proven to fail, we MUST apply this NEW more restrictive law
Bastids.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
In his press release, Mr. Gonzales brought up the statistic that "one in five children has been solicited online".
To which my wife and I looked at each other and went "Uh - really. One in five."
And then I started to wonder. Was this children solicited by adults? How are we defining children? Is this just a sampling of MySpace users, assuming that all solicitees are children, and all soliciters are adults? Are we including two teenagers including lovey-dovey emails to each other, or kids hanging out in Pokemon chat rooms getting hit on my a pedophile?
I'd like to see the numbers, because I've been in lots of forums, have recieved emails from adults and teens about things I've written (like a "Xenosaga Backtracking" article), and I haven't seen a random person pop up in one of these forums "Hey, that's a nice Pikachu - now I'd like to see you naked!"
Granted, maybe I'm naive - but I have the feeling that "one in five" is either inflated, or including things that most people would never consider solicitation (again, such as minors hitting on minors).
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I wonder if this will impact google cache or google images searches.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Come on.. 5 years imprisonment for posting a picture of a nude girl or a couple having 'intercourse'!? I've heard of killers getting less of a sentence in prison! That penalty is just ludicrous for the 'crime'. Make the tax payer shell out more money to cover more prisons to house the 'criminals' who make a business off of pornogrophy if they dont comply with marking or rating their pages. Brilliant!
Were talking about the unregulated Internet here. I could see if the Internet was split up into mini-internets in order for this kind of law to make even the least bit of sense. Granted I understand where it's coming from, but giving the ticket to the whole as opposed to the real troublemakers???
Rather than do such a law, they should rather startup a porn misguidance committee or something and have that 'task force' go after the one's that legitemately masquerade as something else. But still you will run into the crux of what happens when you discover all the bad guys have just moved their servers overseas? Your still back at the same square one, albeit the whole industry won't be hampered by such a sorely underthought law.
This penalty shouldn't even be punishable by a prison sentence it should be a fine at the most.
--
Sounds to me like a great idea for getting porn to just migrate out of the country and have american US dollars go overseas and water down it's value. Granted I don't have a porn subscription and I'm not pro-porn bla bla bla. But this law is a little retarded in my opinion but it meets the criteria for a great law to be passed:
1. Must cost an immense ammount of money to implement
2. Must hurt the whole targeted body - in this case the porn industry
3. Must affect the tax payer - in the cost of jailing these new 'criminals'
4. Must oppress the public in some way further delluting their rights.
5. Must not serve it's purpose - too many loopholes and simple ways to get around this law
If you sit down and think about it, the Internet in it's current state is pretty darn well off for us the people regulating it. Heck it even provides new business avenues for profits by the tools that could potentially detect these illegal sites etc..
This bill will only help advance new methods for the bad guys out there to get around it, it's the proper bill to instigate not just a whole new range of methods to still get porn to your front door, but also who knows what else since it would be the first real regulation on the Internet and I'm sure it would open the flood gates for more.
Atleast the way it is right now, we have less of a tax burden, a free internet, and a profitable commercial industry based on just catching the bad guys of the Internet. I think this bill needs plenty of revisions and criticism to make it into something even worth considering passing first.
While looking around the web, we accidently found this site.
So every commercial site (is slashdot commercial? They sell subscriptions) should have to go to enormous expense to label it pages or risk five years of jail time -- because you and your wife make typos?
My god, do you and your wife ever make the mistake of buying the wrong toothpaste at the grocery? Perhaps we ought to abolish the Free Market and go to a Soviet system of allowing only one brand of toothpaste, to protect your family.
While we're at it, do you and the wife ever have a little too much to drink? Perhaps we ought to bring back Prohibition to save you from your hangovers.
Part of being a free citizen means not asking the government to hold your hand to prevent you from making stupid mistakes. By all means, if you feel you can't handle the consequences of typos, get rid of your Internet service. But don't ask the rest of America to go to great trouble and expense just because you can't type.
Incidentally, what lasting harm did seeing this porno site do to you, that its owners should risk five years in prison? You still seem to be around, your wife and kids are still alive -- did your marriage break up or you dog die because of this typo?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
A second new crime... A third new crime...
Am I the only one who is disgusted by the wording? What, are prisons not full enough yet?
I guess when there are not enough criminals, we just have to make new crimes...
And then the rest of the world splits off a new internet, and it hurts everyone (especially anyone who wants to go to those Amsterdam porn sites).
All I know is that if I saw that cheerleader squad, I'd pay quite a bit of attention to their pom-poms.
This is prior restraint, and this is one of the reasons the First Amendment was passed.
We have 9/11. This is one of the reasons the First Amendment, along with the Fourth, is being repealed. Such hypocrisy from the gov't(what else could we expect?), lecturing China about freedom of speech while trying to pull this off.
What?
...that someone is looking after my morals for me! Good heavens, I couldn't possibly manage it myself.
Athy, athier, athiest.
Seriousely, I cannot even remember the last time I stumbled across porn when I wasnt looking for it.
People used to say this was sooo common like 5 years ago, yet it never ever happened to me. Maybe their kids were looking for porn and then got caught so they claimed they just "stumbled" upon it.
Remember, porn companies want subscribers, not kids wasting bandwidth.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
I think goatse linkers should get the chair.
The theory sounds wonderful. I'm sure most of us would welcome this new, cleaner, streak free, web with open arms. However, think about it, how can you enforce a "law" throughout an world where the internet is anarchic at best, and chaos at worst.
They can pass as many ammendments and laws as they like, it still won't stop the Russians "mis-labeling" their sites. The Chinese will still send me e-mails offering spam servers, and bad things will keep happening.
If they pass this law, a few people will be punished, the vast majority will not, lots of taxpayers money will be wasted on enforcing a law to save face, and eventually the US will lose credibility for introducing a law they have no hope of fairly enforcing.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Is this what we want, a paternalistic government and a paranoid society?
We'll find out in November.
What?
What do you call sexualy explicit? Perhasps people jerk of when seeing a picture of Condoleeza Rice Hell, we have all seen the pictures of the boy jerking of to a video game and then there is Wilma Flinstone. Rahhhh!
What is even scarier is that both parties come up with the same idea. So far the idea of 'voting makes a difference' and 'democracy works'. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Free speech and freedom are not thing you get, you have to work for them. It seems that the American public has voted and opted for the Roman solution of "bread and games" or McD and WWE. At least the Romans had real food and real games.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
And even that won't work either. It's inherently flawed.
It seems I just posted about this very topic, and it's still entirely relevant. Rather than copy-and-paste, here's the link.
Or MARTIN LUTHER!!!!!
This ain't Christ pulling this mormon shit. It's all the fucking protestants. The ones who smoke and drink and fuck hookers in the closet, wipe their dick off with a paper towel, then walk back out to the party and tell all the sinners why their lifes are immoral.
Martin Luther was actually a pretty decent old chap, but there were a lot of cocksuckers in the establishment. Cocksuckers like Joseph Smith Jr. Oliver Cromwell, too.
So, it is incorrect to blame Christ. In this case, it's Martin Luther that is at fault. However, in the specific case of Orin Hatch or Gonzalez, it's Joseph Smith Jr. that you should be cussing.
While I can sympathize with your general dislike of Gonzales, I specifically dislike having an attorney general who has written a brief favoring the use of torture. As an American, I am embarrassed by this and will continue to put forth best efforts to make him unemployed.
problem is as we all sit here and wait for it to be fixed it will be too late.
:(
surely is too late already
Does this mean for underwear manufacturer's websites? Is fruitoftheloom.com now considered a porn site?
I'm tired of my liberties evaporating because what I might do, say, see, or hear might offend little children's fragile eyes and ears. As a poster here once said, "won't someone please think of the children" is the Bill of Right's root password.
So let's beat the Feds by thinking of the children here too. Let's implement quality rating systems for websites, just like we do for TV, video games, and movies. Then, let's educate parents on how to use the V-chips in their TVs and the filtering software on their computers. We'll let the parents have a powerful, reliable filter so that they can decide what they and their children see and hear.
Then, get the FCC and the rest of government the heck out of my way, and let me see and hear "obscenity" on the damned television and library computers if I want to. Give me small government here, whose job is to make sure that I have enough reliable information in order to make an informed decision for myself and my family, and not legislate morality. And then let the market run its course.
Of course, I don't think that this is likely. We'd likely get the worst of both worlds here - the FCC legislating what is/is not "obscenity", COPPA, AND a mandatory ratings system for websites. But a man can dream, can't he?
We already have rating systems that are in use and allow for self-rating. If there was demand for a search engine that only returned rated pages, I'm sure Google or someone would have set one up.
In fact, why don't the government simply pay someone to set up a search engine that only returns filtered pages? Sure, it's a waste of tax dollars, but if they're so sure it's needed, better that than some ill thought out piece of unnecessary legislation.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
In Other Words, they're going to make the ICRA a federal program and absolute requirement in all web design?
Incidentally, what lasting harm did seeing this porno site do to you, that its owners should risk five years in prison?
No, but they both suffer from clinical depression now that they know how boring their sex life is and how small his penis is.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
> a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs
However, if the site featured Barbie dolls having sex with Teletubbies, then popping up in searches for Barbie dolls and Teletubbies would be perfectly appropriate.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Like so much of the spew that the current US Regime continues to produce, this is clearly another case of "distract them while we slip it to them". I am actually surprised that out of the 40-some-odd posts I've read here about this resurrection of Tipper's late abortive attempt at protecting the Internet from Children, only one of them has even mentioned the real thrust of this legislation - which unsurprisingly has nothing at all to with pr0n or protection of netizens from it.
This is wrong on a number of levels, and Gonzales' attempt to exploit minors as "victims" of the Internet and its alleged pr0n is just that: Another Republicrat attempt to exploit children as a means of manipulating their parents.
Furthermore, fuck Gonzales and his repeated and ongoing assertions that use of the Internet is de facto evidence of some "criminal activity". He is at the heart of what is arguably the most criminal Regime ever to control the US - the crimes of his mentors in this administration start with treason and continue down thru spousal abuse and criminal malfeasance. How can it not be obvious that this pathetic smokescreen is simply backing for his attempts to force ISPs to aid in government efforts to regulate and control political Speech?
A headline has been running for several days now concerning Yahoo's apparent liability in the imprisonment of a Chinese national for political speech in China. How much longer before we see reports that ATT, Google, Yahoo, or MSN have supplied information leading to the political imprisonment of US citizens? Careful, that's a trick question - if that Chinese fellow had been in the US, he would have been labelled a terrorist, and there would have been no reports, since there is no longer any requirement that the govt announce the fact once they have imprisoned a citizen for this new class of "crimes"....
"You might be gang-related...""The Internet is made of cats."
The hypocricy of these people never ceases to amaze. They are gung ho for small goverment and no regulation when it comes to pollution, extraction, destruction, corruption raping the land and raping the worker but Jesus Forfend there should be SEX anywhere. Then its CRIMINAL!!! Asshats.
At the edge of every disaster stands a clever fellow who points. Virginia Wolfe
Do a google image search for barbie. No problem, no sex. Now turn off SafeSearch filtering. Page 5 is when you start seeing fairly explicit sexual content. I guess no more adult entertainers can be named barbie from now on. What a stupid proposal Mr. Gonzales.
So every commercial site (is slashdot commercial? They sell subscriptions) should have to go to enormous expense to label it pages or risk five years of jail time
Didn't say that. Just trying to illustrate that not all sites may act in good faith in self ratings.
Part of being a free citizen means not asking the government to hold your hand to prevent you from making stupid mistakes. Making a typo on a website is a simple mistake that anyone can make that anyone can make. I'm not asking the government to prevent me from making a simple mistake. What wouldn't be bad would be for companies not to exploit these simple mistakes.
Incidentally, what lasting harm did seeing this porno site do to you, that its owners should risk five years in prison?
From my original post: Somewhat agree with you on that portions are reasonable.
Nowhere did I say that I agree that five years in prison is reasonable. I agreed with portions but didn't specify every possible detail that I agree or disagree with. As a parent, I think self rating of sites would act much like the film/TV rating systems. I can then choose what to allow my children to see based on their ability to process the information. My son who is 12 probably has seen some things that other parents would not prefer to let their 12 year olds see while I'm sure he's also not seen some things other parents have let their 12 years olds see. The ability to make these decisions will either require that I watch every single moment that my kids (daughter is 9 by the way) are on the Internet or that I use software to assist, which will require some ability to either self rate content or use provider ratings.
By all means, if you feel you can't handle the consequences of typos
Not sure if another response below was accurate in the British spelling but what purpose would a person have for intentionally mispelling a website if they wanted to get legitimate viewers? At some age, processing the returned information from a typo-website is easily managed. Obviously there are reasons why certain subjects are brought up as a child ages and is capable of handling the information in an appropriate fashion. Would you care to explain say "sex with animals" to a 9 year old if a typo site was close to barbie.com for example? Some people/companies are going to be ethical in their business conduct while others won't. The only way to ensure that in some cases is regulation which may result in fines or imprisonment. Is five years appropriate in this case, probably not. Would moving them to an appropriate website name make more sense? Maybe. I'm not trying to argue what the appropriate punishment would be...too many things to consider plus I have work that needs to be done before the end of the day here. Self rating though seems a good idea, otherwise the government may be forced to start rating sites and I don't think anyone would want that to happen.
should have to go to enormous expense to label it pages
Oh, I would expect that most sites probably have header/footer files that could easily include a rating tag. I am not sure where the enormous expense comes in, especially for commercial websites.
By your attitude, I would guess that you are a single male with no children so providing parents some ability to monitor their kids activities is probably not something you worry about. A self rating of content wouldn't be a big burden on sites and would allow parents to be parents. I believe there are controls in place now to keep minors from getting uncontrolled access to alcohol and age appropriate materials in stores and most people don't complain too much about them. Without self ratings, I would fear imposed ratings.
Jim
Can anyone please tell me what's wrong with restricting content like "Free mpeg sample! Download"? ANYONE can download them. Yes, including minors. This material should be hidden from everyone young enough to not have a credit card (call them minors or leechers, whatever you please).
I applaud this regulation effort. And let me add: About friggin' time.
...that you can't have everything fit a movie G, PG, PG-13, R, etc. fucking model.
The Internet is, plain and simply, not a place for small children to venture unsupervised.
How about instead of fucking with the nature of the beast, we limit exposure instead?
Oh, no, that would require parenting, and who wants to do that?
I don't need a rating system on the Internet, I'll decide what I want to see. Porn sites are usually willing to present themselves to filter companies anyway, they aren't trying to show your children porno any more than you are, they can't make money off a 5 year old...
Just another way of trying to make the Internet like everything else, and I hope it fails miserably.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
... why are we so uptight about nudity in this country?
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
I wonder if I'll be able to view my family's web site after I put on a rating for the genealogy information. It shows in there that people are making babies all over the country.
I was inspired to write my congresscritters and other elected officials about a news report yesterday about Mr. Gonzales and his latest push against kiddie pr0n. I sent the following:
i ndex.html) stating that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is "sending to Congress a legislative package that includes greater penalties and improved cooperation from Internet service providers".
_ porn.html). Shouldn't Attorney General Gonzales be making his best effort to ensure that the laws that are already on the books are being enforced, as opposed to attempting to enact new laws that will - as has been seen and documented with the PATRIOT Act, and the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) - surely be twisted beyond their originally declared scope to further weaken our civil liberties and rights as free citizens?
5 38), in addition to the uproar over the President's use of illegal wiretaps (http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/17/bush.nsa/i ndex.html) the last thing that is needed is further opportunities to allow excessive monitoring of our civilian activities by government officials, especially under the transparent disguise of "thinking of the children".
---
CNN has posted an article on their web site this evening (http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/20/gonzales.porn/
The United States Department of Justice has already clearly spelled out that trafficking in child pornography on the Internet is a Federal offense (http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/citizensguide
In light of recent news reports that AT&T has willingly supported the NSA in efforts to *illegally* monitor telephone and Internet traffic of it's customer base (http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_04.php#004
I'm no fan of kiddie porn or it's consumers, but there's no need for this new legislation. There are already laws on the books, laws that have been tested and proven to be effective against criminals, as well as secure from abuse by those who would seek to limit our freedoms. Use THOSE laws. Keep the LAW-BREAKERS in fear, not the honest citizens.
---
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Me, being one who loves his freedom, can't do anything but hate this shit.
Besides, porn exists everywhere - why? Because people want it. If its not available on the internet, or it gets difficult to find on the internet, we'll just go back to buying magazines and videos from the adult store - like we used to do.
The internet just made it easier.
I blame it all on religion. There's always this underlying thing with sex and porn being "bad". Quit being such assholes and let the ones who wanna jerk off to porn do that, and quit forcing your conservative moral onto the ones who don't share it.
This isn't about protecting anyone, it's about control.
And for cryin' out loud, if you don't want your kids jerking off to porn, rip the TP cable out. Could I make it anymore simple?
Remember, the 1st amendment isn't really for you, it's only for content that white middle class American Christians care about. But that's ok, because you all silently agreed when religious hate speech, child porn and racist speech was restricted, and that's ok because it's _bad_ free expression. Well done Americans, be proud of yourselves!
- Art
- Forumers that have nothing to do with the administrators of a site but post nude pics in their forums
- Torrents
- Anatomy/ Medical sites
?Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I'm not *quite* a First Amendment absolutist (which part of "Congress shall make no law abridging [...] the freedom of speech" don't you understand?), but it is really, really hard to write a good law to accomplish what censors want to do.
Proposals like this amount to little more than political grandstanding. Legislators and their staffs know perfectly well what the courts have ruled on restrictions on speech. The problems caused by various forms of "offensive speech" are real (ask any parent), but government is severely limited in what it can do about it by the First Amendment:
The fact that it "merely" proposes labeling won't save it. Because of the stiff penalties, it would encourage self-censorship -- which is often the most damaging kind. The threat of prosecution under a vague law amounts to a restriction on speech.
It is a content-specific regulation of speech, and therefore courts will apply a very strict standard when testing whether it violates the First Amendment. Commercial speech receives less protection than artistic or political speech, but there will be a fight defining which web sites are covered by the law.
What about Benetton ads? They are commercial, political, and artistic at the same time! (Even if you don't like them)
It needs to carefully define what is prohibited, otherwise it will challenged because nobody can tell what they are required to do. The word "obscenity" has a legal definition, in terms of local community standards (problematic on the internet), but words like "pornographic", "sexually explicit", or "harmful to minors" are not legal terms, and the law would have to define them. The most important question will be "who decides." Local communities (and juries) have a lot more leeway than the federal government - which is strictly forbidden to regulate speech.
Of course, the proposal will probably get some votes, and embarrass members of Congress who vote against it. That is the purpose of the proposal.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
The Bible. It purports to tell the history of the world since its creation and everything you need to know about the origins and fate of the entire universe--as well as scads of handy tips for diet and dress--in less space than a Harry Potter installment, yet, from that we have the Catholic church. Where precisely in the original document did we lay out that horrendously complicated, money-suckign bureaucracy?
Granted, maybe I'm naive - but I have the feeling that "one in five" is either inflated, or including things that most people would never consider solicitation (again, such as minors hitting on minors).
How about minors hitting on adults? I had a conversation the other day with a mother of two teenage boys who found out that they were pretending to be adults and responding to personals ads put up by adult women.
(Why didn't they have the Web when I was a kid?)
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
There are already laws on the books, laws that have been tested and proven to be effective against criminals, as well as secure from abuse by those who would seek to limit our freedoms. Use THOSE laws.
Well said, I wish people would actually enforce the current laws before making new overlapping ones.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Imagine you have a study of solicitations per 100 children. Those 100 children report 20 solicitations. That's 1 in 5 right?
Wrong. Why? Because that could be 1 child that frequents certain sites of ill-repute and getting 20 solicitations. That's 1 in 100, not the aforementioned 1 in 5. While I don't think it's that low, I don't think it's that high.
Odd how a story about porn reveals the perverse nature of statistics.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Next, force all women in the USA to wear burkas. Then forcibly convert everyone to Islamo-puritan style-Christianity. Then wonder where all your freedoms of dress, speech, and religion went.
Sex, and depictions of sex, is not the enemy. Religion is the enemy. More wars have been started by religions than any other single cause; and yet it can be taught to anyone, anytime, of any age. Sacrifices on stone altars, bloody crucifixes, and prayers to a bloody god of sacrifice and vengence are not.
Fuckin' ay!
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
"That page is a virus. Avast caught it and aborted it luckily." no shit sherlock i gave a warning. someone mod -10 bluetarded.
Scary isn't it. We'll track everything you do so that when we get around to outlawing it, we'll be able to go back and prosecute you for it.
They're turning ISPs into an intelligence/surveilance branch of the government. And that's just scary!!
The American government scares the crap outta me nowadays.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
OK, well here's the thing. The internet is a dynamic medium. You can rate a book, it doesn't really change. You can rate a magazine, same thing. You can rate a photograph, or a painting....
You could possibly place an overall rating on a domain.
You cannot realistically rate individual pages. Forums, blogs, etc all have dynamic content. It can change every day, every hour, every minute. Given that, there's no overall tag saying if it's "appropriate" (and who decides what the definition of this is, anyhow) at any given moment.
Without even pondering lengthy over the subject, there are SO many legal issues with this one that it makes one wonder who came up with junk like this?
First of all, the 'net is international. What do you want to do? Shut foreign sites out because they could have untagged porn? Welcome to China, Mr. Bush.
Yes, it could happen that the law jumps borders. But remember, kids, there are countries that have more serious problems than the question whether li'l Jonny sees boobies. As long as li'l Jonny uses dad's credit card to get them, I guess the authorities in Generistan will not bother shutting down the porn site. They'll "warn" it and in two or three years they'll take a look if the provider complied (or maybe if he closed down and opened under a different name, then they might "warn" him again).
Hey, it's money for the country!
Besides, did it ever occur to you that different countries would see different content differently? What is PG there could be R here. Or (more likely) the other way 'round. Frontal nudity? Could be PG.
It somehow hurts when people who don't know jack about something hold legal power over it. Could you at the very least PLEASE at least let your kids check the law if it holds at least a drop of water?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's next: "P3P" Platform for Pornography Preferences? I can't wait to go to jail for posting a dirty joke on my web site.
Parents: please take some responsibility in parently your children. (Pumping your kid full of Ritalin and hoping for the best != parenting, BTW).
(Frankly, I wish there was a mechanism to keep people under 18 off my web site. It would save me a lot of frustration dealing with inane emails and blog posts, as well as kids hotlinking my images for their myspace accounts and other forums.)
All it takes is parents watching their children and teaching them safe surfing habits. Any child too young to understand how to safely navigate the internet has no business using the internet unsupervised. Rather than all these censorship laws, violent video game laws, and other controlling legislation, we should just have good parenting legislation passed. It would take care of most of our problems.
Censorship is limitation on content. This proposal does not limit content, nor does it pose an unreasonable burden on the viewer or the website.
Requiring a MetaTag does not rise to censorship, because it does not limit content. It's truth in advertising. It's also is trivial to implement. Requiring a home page with a enter button (that would set a cookie or session to signify acceptance for the rest of the site) also does not limit content. It too is trivial to implement. It would also probably withstand challange in court since it is no more restrictive than the brown paper cover over a magazine, which is already required in many places.
If this proposal limited content or imposed an onerous burden, then I too would call it censorship. But it does neither.
place 'marks and notices' on each page containing 'sexually explicit' content
What, like a picture of a cock?
This website rated: FUCK YOU.
"The following web site has been rated PG-...".
ILLEGAL OPERATION
http://kris.koehntopp.de/artikel/rating_does_not_w ork/
Why Internet Content Rating and Selection does not work
In April and May 1999 my wife and I were working with others on a study on controlling harmful and prohibited content on the Internet. The study favoured Internet Content Rating and Selection as the premier method of content control, but during our work on the study we found that ICR&S systems have a lot of fundamental problems which stem from the nature of the media and which make it impossible to create a useful ICR&S system.
- Internet Content Rating and Selection applies only to the Web
- Labeling content that is not harmful nor prohibited is a requirement but cannot be enforced
- Establishing a metric invites a dysfunction
- Translating from one metric into another does not work
- E-commerce and ICR&S are natural adversaries
- Proxy-based ICR&S cannot work in an E-commerce enabled environment
- Recipient-based ICR&S can only work in a cooperative setting
- Third Party Rating cannot be based on URLs
- Third Party Rating cannot keep up
- Third Party Rating creates privacy issues
- Third Party Rating has no standard complaints procedure
- First Party Rating cannot be enforced
- First Party Rating does not scale down the problem enough
- Labels need to be tamperproof and tamperproof labels are expensive
- Wildcard labels cannot be checksummed
- Content rating cannot keep up with dynamic content creation
- Dynamically creating content labels is expensive in current implementations
- ICR&S systems may make error diagnosis more complicated and will decrease performance
- False application
- False positives destroy trust into ICR&S and into the Internet
Summary: The easiest way out for everybody is just to rate their website as "XXX" no matter what content is on there. That way you are on the save side of the law liability-wise, and if some kiddo cannot view your side, let that kid complain to their parents.
Now, what exactly is the penalty for overrating your site?
Hrm... What if a full scale multi-megapixel image was posted? W/O resizing, and 8megapixels, the genitals could easily take up the full screen, and appear to be the focus, while actually not zoomed in on anything but the subjects face.
My karma makes buddha cry.
One thing that we need to remember is that censorship and rating are two radically different things. This system, as I understand it, is simply to add a rating system similar to the movie system or the grossly over-simplified music system. No one is preventing the publication of the smut, they are simply helping to make sure that the material which is inappropriate is less accessible to those to whom it could be detremental (and if you want to try and argue that porn is actually good for kids, go right ahead. I sincerely hope you don't garner much support). Personally, I don't see why those who publish materials are so unwilling to take responsibility for its content. It seems strange that we should cower behind "it's art" rather than plainly and simply admitting what our published content contains. If there's really no problem, then why are you afraid to say what's there? If you're going to be an avant-guarde artiste, starting a world revolution that will expand and extend the human consciousness and understanding beyond any previous boundary, then what do you care if there's a rating on it? It's gonna change the world, right? In the words of Bill Cosby, "riiiiiiight!"
Because the strictest parents' kids DO NOT tell their parents the truths. The parents go to their deathbed thinking their kid didn't do any of the things (s)he did. . .
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
"A third new crime appears to require that commercial Web sites not post sexually explicit material on their home page if it can be seen 'absent any further actions by the viewer." -Shake your mouse vigorously over the screen to load images...oh wait mouse?
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
Based on the way the average voter can be brainwashed to vote for complete morons, and the lack of outcry over horrible legislation (DMCA, PATRIOT), and the lack of outcry over actual spying, I'd say that's what the average person wants.
I was having trouble figuring out if websites had sexually explicit content or not. Now I'll know for sure that www.hornyhousewivesdowhateveryouwant.com has porn!
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
..and it seems like the smallest minds are the lightest, so they tend to float to the top.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
It is shame so many statistics aren't, especially when used by the government.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Ok, we all say it eval and terible. Enough about that.
IF done correctly it might be a nice gray area.
IF all sites are required to carry it, and IF 'art' and medical information is given a wide exception, then it could be alright. As a parent I want my child to be able to access ALL material on the web with the understanding that comes with it - that some of it is explotive and possibly degrading. When they are old enough to understand this and accept this then he (and maybe some day, she) may view it.
My objection, and those of more then a few of slash-dot readers is that this is masked as a possibly exceptable method with which censorship can be implemented at a state/IPservice level - to be blocked at the whim of any external discribed moral justification, local or otherwise.
To be truely valuable, the web can never be 'child-safe'. If that is the goal for the average parent then it needs to be clearer for them: You can't let you kid wonder the net unsupervise - like any city street or park. Help them by being there with them.
If done well, I could support a law like this. But let's face it - it will not be. I don't TRUST this law or any other that looks, sounds, or smells like it.
Leave things the way they are.. I have only seen porn when I've wanted it, the way it is now.
We don't need this.
Look at the conditions. First, the porn site must say it's a porn site. They do that already. Second, the site must have a separate entrance page that doesn't display any explicit content, that's done already too. The third part is that it can't mislead people into visiting the site by displaying things that aren't sexually graphic. Forgive me but this seems like a cover bill that codifies what's already done so they can tack on other random crap.
As not even the US Supremes have provided us with a definition of pornography that is usable in the real world, it's obvious that to ensure you cannot be affected by this daft law (which would never survive a "free speach" challenge) all you need do to label all web pages with "hard core porn" tags.
Male offcourse.
Yet I have a very simple solution. Only lesbian couples or single females will be allowed to raise childeren. All men will be forced to move to an island, australia perhaps and run around naked. It is the only way to keep childeren safe.
There are online predators BUT they would be the way they are even if there was no internet. Take care of them in the real world. The way to do that is to get more regular cops getting payed a decent amount of money and not getting them to waste time making sure every nudie side has a warning page.
But that doesn't win elections. "Regulate the internet" does. "Pay more taxes to get better police" does not. Welcome to democracy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Rather than trying to have every website in the world say "WARNING: PR0N!" -- which would likely lead to massive censorship of content, Lessig proposed that the agent making the request submit what it didn't want to receive at the time of the request. Or in technical terms, send an http header like:
Then, the server that received the request (if it was properly configured) could decide what to do with that information. If they wanted to play along, they could refuse the request with something like: Or they could serve the page as normal.In typical Bush administration fashion, this Gonzales proposal is ass-backwards. The proposal has this fantasy land idea that somehow every site on the web is going to comply and open itself up to mass censorship by announcing they have porn. It also wants to throw in the tough guy approach of threatening jail time -- for exercising free speech, no less!
The Lessig proposal, like most of his ideas, is a practical, workable, real-world solution. The client proposes what s/he does and doesn't want to see, and the server makes the decision. Even though the whole system is voluntary -- I can see many porn sites complying with this idea because it (a) allows them to say they are helping filter content from children and (b) gives them control over the process.
As has aleady been pointed out, there already are suitable technologies that is superior to what this law calls for. A sensible law would just state that all pornographic sites subject to American law have to use PICS, ICRA or another way of putting information about the contents of the website in the META tags. This would also benefit search engines: You could tell Google to not return websites that have a high pornography rating (or only those sites...). The sensible approach would be to encourage and promote self-labeling rather than making random demands.
Then again it's politicians talking. American politicians talking about ponorgaphy. It's utterly impossible that the result is in any way sensible or even realistic.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Essentially, the Protestants/Puritans/Quakers/etc who first came to the U.S. from England were a bunch of sexually repressed religious prudes (or at least that's how they act in public). They still live in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Englad, New York, etc.
The other group of asshats we can blame are the hellfire & damnation preachers (Methodists, Baptists, & others) who swept through the middle of the United States.
Their mindset has effectively shaped the morality of the U.S. for over 200 years.
P.S. If you like, you can blame the Catholics too, but the U.S. was mostly founded by Protestants.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Go piss up a rope
The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be capital punishment for it or anything, but why don't we just take the safety labels off everything and let the problem solve itself?
Time to donate to the ACLU again. Thanks for the reminder, Gonzales.
On the same website that is reporting the Gonzales/censorship story, we find the following piece of hilarity and counterpoint to Gonzales obsessive need to be frightened of the mere mention of sexuality:
9 -1041_3-6062548.html?tag=nefd.pulse
http://news.com.com/Kids+outsmart+Web+filters/200
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Those nazi bastards want you all in the system. Your either with us or against us. The Bush family owns prisons, a lot of prisons. It is the Industrial Prison Complex. Dont you sheep people get it. How long before half the population is in jail and the other half is guarding them. Dont let this happen here.
>the government does not trust its own citizenry
I know what you meant. It's a symptom of disease, though, that everyone phrases it like that, talking about the government and "its people".
The government has no business trusting us or not trusting us. Its only concern is to earn and keep our trust.
We are not the government's citizens. It is the citizens's frelling government. Every time we forget that, horror follows.
For fucks sake when can these idiots stop chasing some so called 'moral vote' and get back to reality and practicality: It is 1000 times more obvious that websites which aresafe for kids or don't otherwise contain offensive material should be offered the chance to carry marks or certificates claiming so and filtering software can simply block the rest. This is most importantly, implementable today by private 'certification companies' without adding a single law and whats more it would work internationally without forcing countries to do anything, to top it off it would follow the philosophy of the internet entirely. But no, they want a mandatory X rating - whos going to make sure that absolutely every site out there follows this? whos going to enforce that across the world? Why the fuck would you risk letting your child see something that just happened to slip past a non-100% effective filter when the alternative is to create a massive allowed list that you can make absolutely sure is ok and even charge for the privileged! This is essentially harassing legitimate groups just because they dare to offend.
This doesn't make sense legally, it doesn't make sense logically, it doesn't make sense economically, the only person it can possibly make sense to is someone who is shit-high on crack cocaine. Now someone please tell me what im missing.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
From what I seen, this "game" is called "baiting" - as in, "jail-baiting". I don't know how far these kids take it - whether it stays online as a prank (probably the majority of cases), or whether it goes further to meetups and/or police involvement. I can easily imagine some of these 'tards going pretty gung-ho, emailing fake pictures (non-porn) from online sources of "who they are" to prove they are "adults" (plenty of source material on a GIS), then going into a chat via AIM or something, and having a pretty sexually explicit conversation with the adult - who of course thinks they are chatting up another adult.
Next thing you know, I am sure the kid could easily save a log of the conversation, then turn around and claim they were the ones baited, to their parents, a counselor at school, or directly to the police, perhaps showing the log (maybe edited, maybe not - who cares, right? It's just a game!). Guess what happens to the hapless adult's life?
Their shit is fucked up FOREVER, at least in the community they are living in. If they manage to get through whatever legal troubles they are likely to have (God help them if they have their own computer seized and they have porn on it!), they might still turn out to be a pariah in their community, their job, maybe their own family. If they are lucky, it is quickly found out to be a prank. If the kid persists though, they might find themselves in the end, in jail or prison. Furthermore, if they find themselves in prison, they will likely soon find themselves dead. Fellow prisoners don't care about truth, only perception (not that it is much different on the outside, though).
All for a supposed "game".
<sarcasm>Beat the little bastages soundly with a stick, stuff 'em in a gunney sack, and sell them to the gypsies - that'll learn 'em!</sarcasm>
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I don't know if it's been attempted, but one of the standards organizations should come up with a voluntary method for porn sites to mark their content as such. If it catches on, the stragglers should be much easier to manage with a potential "non-compliance list" like there is for open mail relays. It looks like a win-win to me. I can't imagine porn providers want to waste bandwidth on window shoppers.
Alberto "Waterboard" Gonzales should be pushing something like this instead of trying to intimidate people with a law that won't stand the Constitutional test.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
a way to find Pr0n on teh intraweb. Thanks to this Mexican guy, we now have easy access to all that kind of stuff. Just search for the tag, and your inn like flinn. No more mistyping urls to accidentally find teh pr0n. It's a stroke of genius!
Requiring age notices on adult websites kept minors away from pornography in the past, after all.
All Hail the Maggott Show
Let websites VOLUNTARILY rate themselves.
Have this rating posted on each page, in some standard format (in basic HTML) that is readily parsed by search engines' spiders.
Now, when a user's search results come up, segregate them into "rated", "unrated", and "all sites". Let the user pick which set of results they want to see. At worst it's just one more click, and could be set as your personal default with a cookie (just like Google preferences are now). However, let "rated" be the default view.
As to enforcement -- frex, if a site rates itself as PG but generates a lot of complaints that it's really XXX, the search engine could banish the site to the "unrated" list for a penalty period (how long depending on how egregrious their offense).
So -- if you want to remain a "rated site", and come up in search results for a majority of users, it's in your best interests to be honest about your site's content. Because otherwise, you'll be banished to Outer NoSearchia.
This would also be useful for getting rid of link farms and other garbage content that presently flood search results.
So -- a VOLUNTARY rating program, that is utilized by search engines to improve quality of results, would be a GOOD thing for everyone (except the link farms... so sad).
But there's absolutely no need for this to be regulated by the government. All that will do is drive noxious sites overseas and out of reach.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
if you're so concerned about your darlings getting exposed to pornography.
Or get Internet service from a Christian ISP
instead of creating new crimes.
Actually, no. Read up on how commerce clause has evolved. Based on all of that, let's try having an ISP immune to federal regulation.
Your ISP can't have suppliers from out of state or customers from out of state. Yes, that means their entire server farm and telephony hardware must be locally produced, and they can't be attached to the national and international internet. They can't provide services which could be exported out of state or provide services that facilitate interstate transfer, so no email or web hosting that is accessible out of state. The porn provider must also be local and have no non-local suppliers (from the images to the hardware to the pipe). Lastly neither business can have employees other than the owner to avoid labor regulations.
Even with all of these measures in place, if such a business is a complete edge case (like the farmer growing wheat for himself) or if there's enough public outrage at the business (like for marijuana) then you're screwed anyway.
Have a nice day.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Now this is just plain beginning to pee me off. Children supposedly have "innocence" which is worth protecting from "filth" (both terms in scare quotes because frankly I don't believe the conventional idea of either). However, to achieve this, we have to basically lock them in an information gulag, herd them from protected environment to protected environment, monitor their every doing and listen in on their every conversation.
I propose: that this very real "cure" is far worse than the frankly questionable "disease".
I propose: that children have civil rights to free association, free speech, free thought, free movement, and access to uncensored information. That these civil rights are more important than "innocence". I recall that women in the patriarchal era and negroes in the slavery era were considered "innocent" in the same way, and that then too it was a code word for repression.
I propose: that when anyone's natural rights are being stomped on, everyone's are in danger. As indeed the evidence bears out, with children being used to excuse attacks on adults!
Therefore: if you want your adult civil rights protected, you should protect children's civil rights. You certainly shouldn't sell them down the river to win yourself a walled-off "adult" space!
FREEDOM minus Privacy minus Porn minus DigitalRights ....minus.... well you get the idea
Are you still free?
For starters, this is a suggestion by the Attorney General. This is not a bill that has been submitted to Congress, this is more like one of those "trial balloons" that gets floated.
Consider - this is an election year, and so both parties are going to offer ideas that sound reasonable and appeal to their primary consituencies (pun intended). Gonzales and other members of the Bush team are going to try to do something to help before November. It won't get past the Democrats, but that can be spun into "perverted Democrats who don't care about protecting our children."
The Democrats are going to do similar things, such as proposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. It won't get past the Republicans, but that can be spun into "obstructionist Republicans who don't give a d**n about ordinary people."
It's a fun game, and any number can play....
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Come to think of it, such a rating system would actually draw traffic in many cases. Right now, you can't search for specific kinds of porn, because porn sites spam the search engines with every keyword they can think of. So if you Google "softcore", you'll get tons of explicit stuff that is anything but softcore. A mandatory ratings system would help me find exactly the kind of depravity I enjoy.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has suggested a mandatory website self-rating system. The system, very similar to one suggested under Clinton's administration, would require by law
Mr attorney, have you never heard of those two simple facts:
1. Internet means "international network" as in being not only in US, but being, you know, international.
2. US law doesn't apply automatically over the entire world.
The problem with a .xxx tld is, who decides what goes there? If its optional, sure, it makes finding porn easier. But if its mandatory, who draws the line and where is it drawn? Hanes.com, probably ok. sluttyschoolgirls.xxx, yeah, that makes sense. Fredericksofhollywood.??? Legitimate art too, if a museum has photos of its collection online and some paintings have naked people, or similarly, legitimate art nude photography. .kids is a much better idea. Places like cartoon network and disney and build a bear would of course sign up for .kids adresses, then parents have the option of filtering out everything BUT .kids, leaving their children only able to acess content thats preaproved. I think both should be implemented, but certanly not mandatory. Legit porn sites will keep a .com homepage, but will shift everything to .xxx. Porn sites dont want kids too see their stuff, kids dont have credit cards. Go to any big legitimate porn site and down at the bottom of their home page they have little icons for safesearch and netnanny and state their registration with these services.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
What she *did* do is protest against a communist, an ideology the Left (and so, the press) is in love with. For that, she'll be called a zealot, a heckler, a religious freak, or all of the above. Forget that she has a name, and a PhD
That's the US media for you. If you're an illegal alien protesting in favor of socialism, they'll put 20 cameras in front of you and translate everything you say. If you're of Chinese descent protesting against communism, organ-harvesting, infanticide, etc, the mainstream media will call you quaint, and not translate a word.
You've seen the proof with your own eyes. Sad, isn't it?
... at Wal-Mart, via magazines, the make-up aisle, and women running around in tight clothing, than I have seen online in a long time. Running across porn online accidently really isn't that easy to do unless you're stupid, careless, or naive.
What happens if a website is hosted in say France... is it still illegal not to self rate it?
STUPID IDEA
Say, if you want to control the content your daughter watches on the Web, it's fairly easy to do with a transparent proxy (squid) on a linux distro.
;-)
what rating?
This approach would be very difficult to enforce, unless they plan on deploying more Big Brother Watching departments? Rrrrright, under the guise of Anti-Terrism, of course.
Seriously, though... I can see the want for some "identification" but posting it on the site itself is a bit of an encroachment upon free speech and expression. Shall we also place stickers on artwork that has nudity, too? And what else shall we label while we're at it? Such an action would set a dangerous legal precedent for similar activities.
Though I don't believe this would fly (in any form), the better route would be to identify in the XHTML via META-TAGs, and have software utilize that information (if so desired by the individual) to mitigate the display.
Please, somebody... Explain to me what is sooo bad and truly horrible about sex. Nobody requires a rating on violence, war, hate speech, false patriotism, religious dogmatism, etc (not that I would be in favor of any such rating, but why single out sex?)
It is ok to display all forms of violence, but sex (which typically is a pleasure) is somehow outlawed.
On the one hand, censorship will never work on the Internet. You can never stop determined people. On the other hand - many people (especially those with children) don't want to be exposed to these sites.
The government has recognised the need for something to be done. But if their solution is inappropriate or inadequate then perhaps it is because the technical arena has not clearly presented what needs to be done.
Imho, the following needs to happen:
Importantly: This is not censorship - this is self rating. It improves user control rather than restrict it. Censorship is when some third party then blanket filters on this metadata, which frankly in a school is the appropriate thing to do.
Personally I would rather trust a site's self rating instead of leave the task up to some client-side filter that blocks access to a webpage because it happens to see a word it doesn't like, even if the context is completely innocent and non-adult material.
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
I consider income taxes to be a "sadistic abuse".
Perhaps everyone should just go ahead and label their sites as "potentially pornographic in the eyes of some viewers". The perceptions of persons unknown to their owners is entirely beyond their control.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why am I modded -1 Troll when some of my child comments are modded +5 Insightful?!
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Doesn't anyone think its pretty disturbing that this idea and most of the /. posts only seem to care about porn/smut?
Do people really think that porn/smut is bad for you? Your hands recover after a while;p
If there *had* to be a rating/censorship system then surely violence should be far far above porn?
But tbh any censorship of anything is just to cover up a fubar eductation system and bad parenting (that they will never admit too). And the censorship of the internet is just a futile waste of tax payers money
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
- An US law will only affect US sites. Even if the USA manage to talk Europe into adopting the law hlaf of the world will still not give a shit. Thus only tags in participating countries are somewhat reliable.
- The PICS tag format is everything but convenient. Actually, when I read up on it yesterday it looked more like a way of describing color spaces in RDF. Considering the number of sites without a DTD and a stated encoding, making PICS part of the standard would lead to a slow and sporadic adoption (unless backed up by a law). Of course the UAs could refuse to read untagged sites but that's hardly going to happen, especially as it would make those parts of the Internet that haven't been updated in a while completely inaccessible.
- The default settings... Hm. There we have the problem of what the majority of people want and what parents want. I could imagine that modt Mozilla devs would not want Fx to limit their ability to surf the web. Then again, that could be fixed by putting in a wizard that runs at first startup and prompts the user to configure this stuff.
- Better educated web developers? Many web developers don't have any education. Explaining PICS to people who have a hard time comprehending that there are character encodings besides windows-1252 would not be fun... Today it's more common to have some kind of internet presence than not and most people don't want to know what META or PICS or a DTD or the W3C is or why they should write standard-compliant HTML when their website shows up correctly in their IE.
Having everyone use PICS or a similar mechanism would be nice, but most of them aren't simple enough to be used by your regular MS Frontpage user and backwards compatibility will ensure that people will only adopt them when it's absolutely necessary (except for the few standards geeks). If the format was really easy to use (ie. hand-codable without significant brain ativity even for non-experts) and there was some kind of incentive to use it (explicit support for such tags by major search engines; Google giving tagged sites a higher PageRank) people might adopt it.By the way, there's one problem with a law requiring sites to state whether they contain pornographic material: What is pornography? What is art? When are the models of legal age? Do actions that are illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere get their own official tags (if the system is fine-grained enough to actually convey informations about the content)? Is there even an official set of tags? If yes, can people define their own tags?
A site containing women wearing nothing but panties in light bondage (the women, not the panties) might be art in Japan, but I'm quite sure that in the USA it would be pornography. There's clearly a conflict here. You can't apply the American standards to sites everywhere on the planet - for example, German webmasters would not be happy that they have to declare that their site shows underage models when all the models are nineteen years old.
The disparity between moral and social standards in different parts of the world would mean that you'd have to have a separate set of tags for every jurisdiction that participates in the mandatory self-rating thing - or you'd have a ratings board where the members are constantly arguing over what's acceptable. Both approaches don't work very well.
Maybe we should just go with the good old semantic web: The website has a machine-readable section that states that almost-nude women in bondage are depicted; the UA has to figure out itself if that's appropriate. Of course that makes it much harder to filter out everything you consider not suitable for your children. Maybe your government (and other organisations) can offer filter lists that contain all "evil" tags they acpect to find on the web. They could add a hotline where you can suggest further tags to be added. That seems to be the most simple and practical solution.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
People, even if senators or lawmakers, shouldnt be allowed to propose laws for things that are outside their expertise area. Most apparently the aforementioned attorney general does now nothing about the concept of 'dynamic web pages'. There are web entities that in them hundreds of pages are dynamically generated by user input every hour, or less. Im sure the attorney general in question would definitely be in at a loss to explain how such phenomenon that are specific to world wide web could be ever moderated as proposed. We definitely ban people from proposing laws outside their expertise area, or they should have to take 'adaptation courses' to be able to do so.
Read radical news here
I've yet to come across a site that purports to be something targetted towards underage children, but is really pornography. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess it's for one simple reason: you don't sell something to people who are incapable of buying it.
Yeah, I'm sure there's the occasional whacko out there who'll do it just to be a dick, but I'm guessing that search engines' natural filtering/ranking processes will kill most of these attempts right out of the door.
No comment.
To address another portion of your response...
While we're at it, do you and the wife ever have a little too much to drink? Perhaps we ought to bring back Prohibition to save you from your hangovers.
While my wife and I aren't really into drinking much at this point in our life (both in 30s), we have in the past consumed our fair share. I'm not sure though how this has anything to do with a self rating system that would match what is available for movies and TV programs. For that section of your comment, you look to be pandering to the mod crowd rather than relating something to the point.
I am not looking for the government to hold your hand (mine in this case). Do you have any responsibility for raising a child? How would you recommend protecting a child from online content that obviously looks to capitalize on typos? Wouldn't it be great to apply something like the Google preferences that allow you to filter content? Wouldn't it be nice to have the content providers provide metadata related to their content so you could:
- search for it
- determine if it's appropriate for your viewing based on some content rating(notice I am not saying to block content)
- apply blocking techniques to the content as needed
I suppose I could rely on third party software to filter sites, but that still won't get everything out there. Self rating is not perfect but if sites want to change their ratings inappropriately, a complaint system could be put in place. The number of people wanting to shutdown sites (adult for example) is probably not very big and I'm not part of that group. I just want to be able to effectively restrict content so my kids aren't exposed at a young age to topics most people would agree are only appropriate when they are older.I think you are focusing too much on the fact that I posted about making a typo rather than the fact that the provider is looking to capitalize on the typo. Just look at typing www.apache.com versus www.apache.org and you'll see an example of someone looking to get the traffic likely intended for the Apache Software Foundation.
Any chance you'll respond to either of my responses?
Jim
PS: I'll continue to check for the next couple of days. Of course looking at most of your past postings (the ones I can see), you seem to get Troll more than positive ratings. Also looking at your Patriotism, I'm not sure how we can differ on views as much. A self regulated industry certainly seems better than a government imposed rating system.