Slashdot Mirror
Has Verizon Forfeited Common Carrier Status?
An anonymous reader writes, "Freedom of speech, the future of the Net, you name it. In October, a U.S. vigilante group asked Verizon to cut off Net access to Epifora, a Canadian ISP that hosts a number of (entirely legal) web sites offering support to minor-attracted adults. Shortly thereafter, Verizon gave 30 days notice to Epifora, ending a 5 year relationship. Telecos have traditionally refrained from censoring legal content, arguing that as 'common carriers' it is outside of their scope to make such decisions. Furthermore, they have refrained because if they did so in some cases, they might be legally liable for other cases where they did not exercise censorship. The questions are: has Verizon forfeited their claim to common-carrier status by selectively censoring legal speech that they do not like? And can the net effectively route around censorship if the trunk carriers are allowed to pick and choose whom they allow to connect?"
Verizon is just protecting the children, you pedophile freak.
Seriously though, Common Carriers should really not be censoring ANY content if they want to be common carriers. Here in the real world, though, Verizon and all of the other big telcos have the FCC in their pockets, so I wouldn't hold my breath on anything happening to them because of this.
seems like a similar debate to net neutrality.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Next
So, since they did this, isn't the obvious thing to do to sue Verizon for transmitting something bad that "hurts" you? They are no longer protected now, yes?
In theory, yes, but no corporation with that much money will ever be held accountable to the laws of our country unless they kill the citizenry, and even then, only after many, many years, and especially not when they're Thinking of the Children
My Heart Is A Flower
But it's not going to be a quick process. If the backbones censor content, then encryption and onion routing will make sure that the backbones can no longer see what they carry. That however requires a change of protocol and will take time.
The phrase "minor-attracted adults" makes baby Orwell cry.
Can the editors please mention that a site might possibly not be safe for work?
As eager as I am to rally behind censorship, I'm not too keen on gay shirtless men popping up on my monitor as I eat my lunch. My Christian coworker might think odd things of me.
They certainly aren't arresting people or hanging them or even imprisoning them. The article says they "destroy lives", when in fact the guys they "sting" destroy their own lives.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Now these pedophiles can go underground where, um, there, um, harder to find.
Shit.
Censorship is an ethical cancer. There can be no legitimate justification for it. This will not stop either the corporations or the legislators from implementing as much of it as they can get away with.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I suppose that depends on the definition of "support".
If by "support" they mean support groups like AA where "minor-attracted adults" seek help in not acting on impulses and addictions, then not really; it bears distinguishing between pedophiles and people who recognize that their attractions aren't healthy, even if they feel natural.
If "support" is more like a NAMBLA textbook for seduction, then a euphemism it is.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Actually, it's a typo. The submitter meant "miner-attracted adults." It's a group of people irresistibly drawn to hard hats and black lung disease. Just goes to show you can find a website for anything on the Internet.
Business 1 is their common carrier business which does not do any censoring etc, but just provides common carrier services.
Business 2: Value added services (hosting etc). This business then does all the censoring etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The parent post really should be updated advising of that.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
"Minor-attracted adults" sounds a lot better than "perverts," in which case the argument seems to lose much of its strength.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Minor attracted adults? AKA pedophiles? You're going to have a hard time drumming up sympathy for that particular group, no matter how legitimate the sites are.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"Epifora, a Canadian ISP that hosts a number of (entirely legal) web sites offering support to minor-attracted adults." You have got to love the way they say, "Minor-attracted adults". The way we put that is pedophile. Not even the person posting the story was willing to put their name on it. Without knowing the websites it is hard to tell if they where legal in the US or not. Notice no links to the sites, no titles of the sites, no nothing.
Yeah, no kidding. I spent about 5 seconds trying to parse "minor-attracted adult" before I realized they meant regular old perverts.
This may be the first ever recorded instance of an astroturf campaign by perverts. I'd say next time, if they want a nice story, find a better "aggrieved" party. This is one nobody's going to stand up for.
Depends on the age, and the law now doesn't it?
If the age of consent is lower than that of the age of majority (ie, a minor) you could be referring to a 17 year old potentially.
Here in Canada, the age of consent is 14 as long as you're not in a position of authority over the minor in question, with people making noises about raising it to the age of 16.
If I look at a 17 year old girl, am I a pedophile? I think not. I could legally have sex with her, but since she's half my age, I probably don't stand much chance/wouldn't have much in common with her anyway, so I'm not gonna go out and try. But, it hardly makes one a pedophile to stare at her b00b13z, she's merely a minor, but one who is legally allowed to have sex -- including with a dirty old man like me if she so chooses.
I don't know anything about the sites in question (and TFA seems to be slashdotted already), but there is not an immediate transition from "minor" (not old enough to vote or sign contracts) and "child" which is implied by pedophile. Depending on where you live, there are a few years of late adolescence which is a gray area.
Of course, now that I've tried to point out the distinction between being attracted to a minor and what it means to be a pedophile, I'm sure I'll be accused of being one, or at the very least supporting them. Which I don't. I'm merely trying to point out that "minor-attracted" might, in fact, NOT mean pedophile.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Kind of hard to judge with absolutely no real information, but that has never stopped anybody on Slashdot before.
If the ISP shut anyone down without a court order, regardless of what content they're hosting, then they've forfeited their common carrier status in my mind. If they found the site and thought it was illegal, they should have contacted the authorities. Otherwise, they should have done nothing. With the facts we have, we can answer the question asked in the summary.
fud notfud yes no maybe
Maybe itsatrap as well.
Why do we have tags if the same braindead ones are displayed for most of them?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
A business can be in two businesses. Verizon is both a webhost, which pretty much never qualify for 'common carrier' consideration, and it's in the internet tubing business, where its tubes transport god-knows-what. If the very same websites are hosted somewhere else tomorrow, Verizon will still carry their internets through their tubes (though the internets may arrive late, because of all the movies).
Likewise, theoretically "Pall Mall" and "Camel Club" clothing isn't advertising for cigarettes. And Microsoft's hardware division doesn't have to worry about being a monopolist.
Not that Verizons WANTS to be a Common Carrier. That would imply some sort of network neutrality. They would love to use inferior internet tubing for 'non monitored content', which might contain kiddy porn, as opposed to 'Verizon approved content', which they'd push to much wider tubes with higher pressure and less leaks.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
The right to refuse business is a long-standing tradition, at least in this part of the world. Verizon can generally choose not to do business with whomever they wish, with certain provisions relating to discrimination.
It is not censorship, it is Verizon's right to say "you can believe and say whatever you like, but please take your business elsewhere." Last time I checked, pedophiles were not a protected class under the U.S. Federal Civil Rights Act, or the Americans With Disabilities Act.
So no, I do not believe Verizon's status as a "common carrier" would be in question with regards to this matter. But thanks for asking!
Age of consent and age of majority are different legal issues.
Whether or not you consider them different moral issues is your issue.
KFG
It seems an odd thing for Verizon to do. I'm sure it's not the first time they've been asked by somebody to censor something they didn't like, but the fact is that if they actually did they'd be inundated with requests.
I don't think that Verizon actually wants to be an internet censor. It's more work for them, and it doesn't serve any of Verizon's corporate goals.
Even odder, and unmentioned in the summary, is that the group is apparently part of a reality TV series funded by NBC. They supposedly complained about the stalker behavior. It Epifora any worse than Myspace for that?
I think that somebody got punk'd here. It might be Verizon, but I suspect that it's Guidemag.com.
What the hell is a "minor attracted adult", if not a pedophile?
Notwithstanding the common carrier issue and the legality of the material, it bothers me to see the mainstreaming of pedophilia with terms like this. Years ago I worked at a Montreal ISP. Someone notified us of one of our user's 'secret' webpages--a page not linked from his home page, requiring you to know the exact URL. The page was a collection of links to NAMBLA and like organizations and websites, including a message board for "child lovers".
On the message board, pedophiles alternately discussed sitting in parks watching children play, and discussing how they "came out" to themselves and each other, and accepted themselves for who they are. What was most subtly grotesque was the manner in which they'd adopted the rhetorical stance of the queer community. They talked about 'coming out', and about accepting themselves, and reclaiming terms like 'boy lover'. They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades.
I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this. This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't.
The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Why don't you just say pedophile?
I can't believe political correctness has filtered down to the point where we don't want to offend the pedophiles!
God forbid we make anyone uncomfortable about their perversion.
I cannot check the article, (slashdotted), and since no link to the sites in question was provided, I am left to trust that the sites were good-natured content, and entirely legal, instead of deciding for myself.
I also wasn't able to find out the name of the vigilante group, as it wasn't included in the summary. For all I know it could be the ACLU.
The discussion should be about the principal of content filtering, not what content was filtered or who requested it. Everyone has websites that they feel only tarnish the internet. Demogaugery like this:
Does not help your position. They are pedophiles, interest/lobbying groups and entirely legal in Canada. Your choice of words turned me off to a subject which I completely agree with the summary on, because it shows the same double standard you are crying about.
FanFictionRecs.net
Just goes to show you can find a website for anything on the Internet.
Not if you're on Verizon.
First of all, if you read the article, 2 sites were named as being found objectionable by Verizon:
"The company's clients host a number of websites and chatboards-- such as Boychat.org and Freespirits.org-- with a pederastic slant."
The article also seems to indicate that they would be legal in the US:
"With its transgressive content, Epifora had faced scrutiny before. After a July, 2001 report in Canada's National Post, MCI-Canada approached the Ontario Provincial Police for an opinion, and inspector Bob Matthews, of the OPP's "Project P" declared the material on Epifora's servers in compliance with the Criminal Code. That says a lot, as Canadian law sets a higher bar than the US and most other countries, making no distinction between, say, photographs of minors having sex, textual descriptions thereof, or even speech "advocating" such acts."
Furthermore, I believe you are missing the point:
Weather or not you agree with what is being said, free speech is protected by law in Canada and in the US. The issue here is weather or not Telcos should be able to censor content by refusing to provide access to their backbone. Verizon is refusing a Canadian ISP access to the backbone because they host a few websites that Verizon doesn't like.
The websites are legal in Canada for sure. Should Verizon be allowed to do this? I don't think so. This is a slippery slope that nobody wants to end up at the bottom of.
What does support mean? Does that mean support in finding children to abuse? That's not the way we typically use the word. Support usually means helping people who admit they have a problem and want to make things better. Alcoholics, drug users, rape survivors, widows, etc all have support groups and resources.
While I do agree that sexually abusing children is terrible, I also can see that it is probably related to a mental illness. I have read that such individuals are not necessarily in control of their actions. Isn't a good thing if these people are seeking help? If my child is abused, can I now sue Verizon for denying access for the abuser to a resource that might have gotten him to control his problems?
Exactly the problem. This time, nobody will stand up because it's a bunch of sites for perverts. Set the precedent with something like this, then move on to other targets.
I'd rather the perverts continue to talk about whatever the hell they talk about, and they get held accountable IF they break any real laws.
Well, They have split their business. Which Verizon is this taking about? Core? Business? Wireless?
I haven't read the article, but from the description the site in question is hosted in Canada, and it's the connection to the hosting company that's being cut. Which would be entirely in "Business 1" in your system.
"Minor-attracted adults" sounds a lot better than "perverts,"
That it does. Why not rename the whole spectrum?
Creepy flasher guy in the park - Genital Display Engineer
Pedophile priest - Faith-based Genital Manipulation Facilitator
Gary Glitter - Overly-Child-Friendly Entertainment Provider
Any others?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
This is an action that a company deemed to be in its best interests. They decided to disconnect from a paying customer. The same customer is welcome to seek connectivity services elsewhere. They are not being "blocked."
Is it censorship? It might be censorship if, after they connected through another provider, were subsequently blocked. It might be censorship if the order for disconnection was at the demand of a government entity. From what I have read, it's a vigilante group and not a government entity making the damands. (Is this group connected to government or other controlling entities? Are they themselves controlling or overly powerful and influential?) At what level would it be considered censorship?
I think that by cutting off the entire relationship, they may have preserved their common carrier status, but then again...? Well, I think it's an interesting case to file into the back of my mind until anything similar comes about. But for right now, they just decided to sever a business relationship due to moral or ethical concerns. I would think that if they cut off, say, Iran, China or North Korea, would we be suggesting that it should be called censorship or would it be a "boycott" of those countries because of their crimes against humanity?
I would have to go back and look this up, but after the Cable Companies won (overall) in the Brand X case and the SCOTUS said they did not have to be classified as common carriers, the DSL companies petitioned the FCC, and two months later the fcc reclassified DSL carriers as well, so they were no longer beholden to common carrier rules. there was a one-year carry over, where they would continue under the old rules, which, i think, just passed.
This news.com story pretty much sums it up from summer of 05
Yeah, 'cause here in America it's the law that's repelling 14-year-old children from 50-year-old men and women...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Common sense would be going to the authorities that have legal ground to stand on. You know, like, the police.
Not an ISP who's job is to provide access to content. THAT is vigilantism.
It's called due process, and it used to be a pillar of democratic-type nations.
That being said, it's not the ISP or carrier's duty to shut anyone down except for abuse or by subpoena. That's why Verizon did the wrong thing and there's no reason to use doublespeak like "minor-attracted" to sugarcoat it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
These sites, although gross to 99.99999% are legal, sadly. Censoring legal contact because they feel it is bad content is in general a bad idea.
I don't want to see where this ends up.... Because if censoring legal content due to moral inhibition is a steep and dangerous slope, and once it starts it could possibly landslide.
I would add that the pages Mark Foley pursued were 17 years old and he has incorrectly been labeled a pedophile.
You are exactly right of course. "Minor-attracted adults" aren't uncommon at all since "minor" is an arbitrary age that is typically older than the age of sexual maturity.
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:ppVgafEcNaYJ: www.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm%3 FID%3DA2E247F1-CB55-4215-9F96211CDCD52F41&hl=en&lr =&strip=1
Apparently the ISP got cutoff because of Perverted Justice, which is funded by NBC.
And I just saw this article on Fark: "Dateline NBC" finally kills itself a pedophile
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If we do that no human would be alive afterwards. Everyone can be considered sick, perverted or disgusting by someone else. *thinking* It _would_ solve a lot of problems... Blessed be JB
True, although pedophilia involves the sexually immature or sexually maturing. "minor attracted" includes more than that.
What if this is Verizon DELIBERATELY blowing their common carrier status as an end run?
If it is, watch for them doing a lot more of this in the future. Then when they start blocking access to Google (or whateveR) they'll say, look, we're policing our own network now. We're NOT a common carrier.
And thus kill Net Neutrality.
I make no claims as to the correctness of this theory. It's just something that occured to me.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Congressmen Foley, is that you?
Mark Foley?
I haven't RTFA, or tried to follow any links. But what if they aren't talking about a support group of that sort, but rather a group that works to find psychological help for people with this problem so that they can be stopped. What if a person finds themselves as a "minor attracted adult" and knows this is wrong, and wants to seek help? What options do they have?
Should we castrate them and lock them up in jail? Even if they've committed no crime?
Now if the site in question is one as you say, then I say yeah... hang 'em. But a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and I'm all for "minor attracted adults" to seek help.
I was thinking about this, and also wondering if there might be a distinction in the actions taken. Maybe you're a "minor-attracted adult" until you actually *do* something, at which point you become a pedophile. So maybe it's like the distinction between "someone with homicidal thoughts" vs. "a murderer". I don't know, though, because I'm a little frightened to google for "minor-attracted adults". Who knows what's going to come up, or what list it might put me on?
"The way we put that is pedophile."
Apparently by "we" you mean "us gay bashers" since the sites are apparently simple gay men sites.
"Without knowing the websites it is hard to tell if they where legal in the US or not."
So go ahead an label them pedophile sites. Good job.
"Kind of hard to judge with absolutely no real information, but that has never stopped anybody on Slashdot before."
Not even you.
If I understand Common Carrier status correctly, it shields also against civil liability (as long as you comply with the DMCA when you get a takedown note). I think the real danger of losing CC status is that the RIAA might be able to sue you for the entirety of copyright violations on your network.
Any lawyers, care to comment??
C - the footgun of programming languages
Being legal in Canada and being legal in the US are two very different things.
Since more than one person has stated that they are not work friendly I have too question if they are in fact legal in the US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
what happens betwen consenting adults is not the same as what happens between an adult and a child who cannot engage in informed consent
what's so complicated to you about that difference?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yea, a threat no bigger than the threat posed by allowing anybody with the money to acquire guns.
Due to the sheer perversity of this issue, kiddie porn is being used as a surefire joker card by people/interest groups all around the world to bring censorship to internet.
Read radical news here
"In October, a U.S. vigilante group asked Verizon to cut off Net access to Epifora, a Canadian ISP that hosts a number of (entirely legal) web sites offering support to minor-attracted adults."
"Entirely legal" where, exactly? So long as we're talking about (ahem) "minor-attracted adults," we've already seen rulings from their respective courts that things like simulated child pornography are legal in the United States but not in Canada.
So before we get up in arms about what happened here, how about some details about what was hosted and where it is and might not be "entirely legal?"
I think the real question here is what they mean by "support". Is this the AA type "let's help each other get over this unhealthy addiction/obsession" support, or NAMBLA type "boohoo, nobody understands us, here's how to get little boys in your bed" support? 'Cause, you know, that makes quite a bit of a difference....
Dude they are for "minor-attracted adults"! The site was slashdoted before I even got to it.
So I had no idea that it was a site Gay site when I posted. Unlike you I guess I do not equate pedophilia with Gay rights.
However if you want to increase Homophobia and anti-gay feelings then go right ahead. Nothing will make the extreme right happier than equateing Homosexuality and "minor-attraction".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
To all the geniuses who are saying that a "minor-attracted adult" is a pedophile, that is incorrect.
A pedophile goes after those who have not finished puberty.
An ephebophile ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophile ) is one who has finished puberty, but may still be a minor.
Your pubescent status does not correlate to your minor status under the law.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I would say that you are being a little naive.
Almost every expert on pedophilia would say that this is a VERY BAD THING.
1. pedophiles need to stay away from children. They should not be fishing or trying to help the succeed.
2. There where no passwords, warnings, or age limitations on people reading the messages that I saw.
As to how legal they are I do not know. How beneficial they are. I would say not at all. Real medical intervention is needed not sitting around a message board.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
if i am dead drunk i can get in my car turn the ignition and get on the freeway
and if i wind up splattering your guts against the highway median, well then your family can seek recourse in court, right?
that's the same stupid logic that you have
someone is already dead in my example. in your example, somebody's good name has already been ruined. too late to seek damages
so how about this: how about we make against laws against stupid things so we don't have to go seeking accountability for damages after the fact?
of course you would counter by saying that just passing a law doesn't prevent people from doing that which is illegal. but there's a presupposition there: that passing a law has the intention of perfectly altering everyone's behavior. no law ever does that. but it does prevent SOME behavior. and that is better than not preventing any behavior, if no laws are written, and everything is allowed, and damages are sought after the fact
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060909
If they give up their common carrier status by deciding what is and isn't appropriate, they can now be held responsible for all the inappropriate (and illegal) material that goes through their network. That includes p2p, spam, etc.
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Mod me to hell and gone, I don't care, but this is yet another prime example of people simply refusing to take responsibility for their own actions. How about you yell fire 10, 50 or a hundred times, till people get the "joke" and then on the 101st time, there really is a fire, and a crowded cinema full of people die, because they stopped believing you.
Communication is an important thing, and it depends on meanings of words and short phrases. In certain circumstances, you actually want to be able to convey huge volumes of data with only one or two words. If someone deliberately and willfully tries to erode the data content of that word or phrase (by censorship, by the childish bullshit outlined by the parent, or even by propaganda/google bombing/whatever), then they all deserve to be slow roasted. Its hard enough to move ideas between people as it is, without additional static clouding things.
Idk about Canada but you are wrong about the US. In the US such concerns are a state matter and the laws vary. Some states still attempt to outlaw homosexuality entirely but few states define the age of consent at 18. 16 and 17 are the typical ages.
Curiously, Texas, and perhaps others, define the age of consent below 18 (17 in TX) but have laws prohibiting certain behavior with minors (below 18). As a result, the legal age remains 18.
Pedophilia as a legal concept is not necessarily the same as the sexual orientation itself.
My point is that you jumped to judgement without seeing any actual content. You have no idea why the term was used but you were more than happy to assume that it meant "pedophiles". The ambiguity worked but not in the manner you thought. The purpose was to dupe YOU.
Being gay myself, I don't think it's likely that I'll be the one promoting homophobia.
"Nothing will make the extreme right happier than equateing Homosexuality and "minor-attraction"."
And that's exactly what happened. They sold you on the idea that a gay site was a pedophilia site by using that term.
look at what he wrote. stop. think. infer a position, the only possible position that would find it worthwhile to write what he wrote
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does a bus forfeit common-carrier status by refusing to carry passengers without shoes? They do not.
Does a trucking company forfeit common carrier status because they refuse to carry live animals? They do not.
On the other hand, a trucking company will lose its common carrier status for insisting on inspecting your cargo absent an affirmative reason to believe its other than what you stated. And the bus will lose its common carrier status for refusing to let you on because they expect to be full at a later, more important stop.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Now look--even the article has been censored!
Thank you. Finally a voice of reason on here.
People incorrectly toss around the "pedophile" label for anyone doing or thinking something they deem inappropriate with someone a lot younger than them. In reality, a pedophile is someone interested in pre-pubescent children... which is a whole 'nother category than a lot of those who get incorrectly labeled such.
Amazing how many hypocrites on here will cry "burn in hell, pedophiles!" at someone interested in POST-pubescent minors, and then proceed to go jack off to Natalie Portman in Phantom Menace (she was 16-17 during filming), or Keira Knightley in Curse of the Black Pearl (she was 17 at the time)... or even Knightley in The Hole, where she goes topless at age 15.
Truth of it is, we as males are attracted to youthful beauty. While pre-pubescent sexual attraction is a sickness in my opinion, it's natural that once the "girl" starts to become a "woman", our natural biology kicks in and desires/thoughts can't necessarily be helped. This whole "18" and "minor" and "age of consent" thing is an artificial creation of very-recent society. Just because stuffy gray old men in some marble building deem it illegal doesn't make it unnatural, wrong, or worthy of condemnation.
Ok, first up let me make a quick statement to head off SOME of the flames. I'm a libertarian (small L because the LP is clueless, hope they eventually grow up....) so what consenting adults do isn't really my business and certainly shouldn't be the government's.
> I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was
> saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity
> perverted like this.
But it is an unescapable consequence because of the WAY the queers (and the Democrats) played the game. The only way they could turn it into a 'Civil Rights' issue was to have the unspoken requirement that behaviour, even that which almost all 'decent and moral folk' considered perversion, was no longer subject to criticism in exactly the same way as a consensus was developing that sex and race were off limits. In other words, behaviour was an accident of birth or caused 'by society' and the individual was not responsible. Thus if a person can't be criticized for being 'born gay' why should they be criticized for being born with an inability to be sexually aroused by adults or desiring to have sex with sheep? Even if we decide that shildren and sheep can't give consent, eveb if we ban kiddie porn because the production must involve a criminal act, thus making any attempt to act on these inpulses illegal there is no possible argument for criminalizing talking about it. And since we can't say these people are WRONG, eventually they will gain enough political strength (obviously within the Democratic party in the US) to push for coming 'out', demanding tolerance and eventually acceptance.
If instead the argument had been that being a homosexual, while it might or might not be a minor mental disorder, it shouldn't be grounds for the widespread discrimination that used to be practiced when the person is otherwise mentally stable. After all until quite recently alchohol addiction carried little social stigma even though everyone then and now rightly believed it a disorder. No that path would have never lead to the kind of political power to do things like redefine the English language, but it wouldn't have set up the political ground for the coming 'coming out' of the truly diseased sexual deviants.
More bluntly, had the argument been that homosexuality IS abnormal but when confined to consenting adults not trying to ram it down everyone else's throats it isn't harmful enough to society to warrent discrimination outside a few narrow limits, we could have retained the moral clarity to say fucking kids is RIGHT OUT.
Democrat delenda est
Support in this case means acceptance of feelings and understanding the own place in society and not breaking the law. Blessed be JB
Come on! All it would take is a quick act of congress to confer "common carrier" status upon any ISP that censors material that our glorius leaders want to be censored. Do you really think our congress critters would open up Verison to tons of financial liability because Verison decided to censor a website that has ties to pedophiles? Not bloody likely.
The real problem is that age is not a very good indicator of physical or mental maturity. Some people enter puberty very young, but may not be emotionally mature enough to cope with sex until many years later - there are probably a lot of people of legal age in whatever jurisdiction you inhabit who are not sufficiently emotionally mature, and quite a few of these make the papers periodically having screwed up their lives because of it. Maybe we should require people to pass a psychological exam before they are allowed to have sex (good luck enforcing that).
Of course, those of us on Slashdot are doing our part to remove this ambiguity by just not having sex with anyone...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Creepy, but doesn't sound illegal to me...
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I think in some states its even more complicated -- the age of consent is 16 in Minnesota, unless you are deemed an "authority figure", in which case a relationship between an 18+ person and a 16-18 year old becomes statutory rape. I seem to recall a young male coach (say, under 30) having a long-term relationship with one of his team members. The relationship was exposed when the parents read the daughter's diary -- she had been over 16 at the start of the relationship, but because he was an authority figure and the parents insisted, so he was charged with statutory rape.
I seem to recall the student even submitting a letter to the judge underscoring that the relationship was consensual, initiated by her, and that she was forced to participate against her will in the prosecution.
And I think other states may complicate it further by making sex between, say, two minors of less than 2 years age seperation not statutory rape.
Most of the RBOCs (Baby Bells) that do traditional telephony and Internet tend to separate the two when it's convenient, and merge when it's not.
This is based on my understanding, not being a lawyer, but working up close with these companies: Of course, they sell their services as bundled, but when it comes to VoIP or ISP services, that's handled by the non-regulated side.
The regulated side deals with the FCC, appears before the Public Utility Commission (mutatis mutandis for any given state), and has to report certain outages. Most people think of this as the "common carrier" side as well. Sometimes, the regulated side just makes facilities available to the non-regulated side; e.g., DS3s.
The non-regulated side is just like any other company; they can do whatever they want. They can cancel your service or slow it down if they dislike you; they can search your email for contact with competitors.
"And that's exactly what happened. They sold you on the idea that a gay site was a pedophilia site by using that term."
I didn't look at the sites until just now. I didn't even know that the site that the story was on was a Gay site until just a few minutes ago.
Have you looked at the sites in question yourself?
If not I can tell you that they are not a good idea at all. The one I looked at was full of profanity and had no passwords or age warnings on it. The site I could get to was called Boychat. It is a site for people that are attracted to boys! Not adult men but BOYS! They talk about channeling their sexual interest into "positive" channels like mentoring. Guess what that is a REALLY BAD IDEA.
Pedophiles are like alcoholics. They need to avoid their addiction at ALL TIMES.
For all I knew when I posted my comments those sites could have been for men that like little girls. I had no idea that it was hosted on a Gay oriented website.
I think that a Gay lifestyle website posting in any positive way about a pedophile website is one of the STUPIDEST things I have ever seen!
Legal or not those sites are sites for pedophiles. People that have sexual desires for children.
If I didn't know better I would have guessed that it was a fake site run by the extreme right to feed any homosexual hysteria.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
LoL. I wish I had mod points because that's just funny.
But I can't help but feel a little hipocritical[sic]. We (generally) don't seek to change homosexuals in this regard because "that's just the way they are". But simply because the object of their affection is under age (or not human) we cannot accept that as "natural" and feel compelled to change them.
It is not hypocrisy because there is a real and fundamental difference between the two behaviors. Acting on homosexual tendencies hurts no one and is not a conflict of rights between citizens. It is two consenting adults exercising their free will.
When a pedophile acts on their tendency, they are acting on a person who is not yet competent to make such an important choice and who has been trained to submit their will to their elders and authority figures. They don't have the rights of an adult and thus don't have the responsibilities. Having sex with a child violates a trust that child has in adults and is therefore unethical.
Wanting to have sex with another of the same sex or with a child, or wanting to kill people is not "wrong." But if you act upon the latter two then you are taking away the rights of another, and that is the point where your own rights end.
"of course you would counter by saying that just passing a law doesn't prevent people from doing that which is illegal. but there's a presupposition there: that passing a law has the intention of perfectly altering everyone's behavior. no law ever does that. but it does prevent SOME behavior. and that is better than not preventing any behavior, if no laws are written, and everything is allowed, and damages are sought after the fact"
please point out what interpretation of what a "law" is above that causes you such consternation?
because in your words, i find a definition of what a law is to be pretty sound, and not in the least out of agreement with what i said!
the issue is whether we have laws or not, which is what i was responding to in my post. you don't seem to have a problem with the existence of laws, so i have no problem with you, nor should you have a problem with me
it's as if you are just being contrarian for the sake of creating friction where there is none
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
are you assering that franklin's quote enables you to drive drunk?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Canadian Bill of Rights.
The Bill recognizes the following freedoms:
"1. It is hereby recognized and declared that in Canada there have existed and shall continue to exist without discrimination by reason of race, national origin, colour, religion or sex, the following human rights and fundamental freedoms, namely:
1. the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law;
2. the right of the individual to equality before the law and the protection of the law;
3. freedom of religion;
4. freedom of speech;
5. freedom of assembly and association;
6. freedom of the press."
It also states that no law - unless it expressly says so - shall be interpreted or applied in a way that violates the rights recognized by the Bill.
We've only had it on the books since 1960, so it may not have trickled down to your neck of the woods yet.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
"Does a bus forfeit common-carrier status by refusing to carry passengers without shoes? They do not." In this case, we are not talking about a dress code, we are talking about the content of **legal** but possibly controversial speech. A more accurate analogy is whether a bus company could discriminate base on the fact that you like to **talk** about not wearing shoes.
We have the best national telecommunications system that lobbyists can create.
You have got to love the way they say, "Minor-attracted adults".
Doesn't seem to mean a lot - would cover most people (see below).
The way we put that is pedophile.
Which is even sillier, as it clearly doesn't mean that, unless you can't read, comprehend, (or spell).
Minor: someone below the age of majority / adulthood.
Paedophile: someone attracted to pubescent or peripubescent children (often also defined as being someone older - so as not to encompass children attracted to those of similar age).
So, unless you content that puberty happens overnight at the age of majority, attraction to minors is clearly not the same as Paedophile.
In fact the terms are more likely to be exclusive - consider some of the Page3 history for instance, topless pictures of minors, sexually attractive to adults, used to sell newspapers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Three_girl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Fox [maybe NSFW]
Basically most of the Sun readership from the 1980s would be "minor attracted adults" - _except_ for the paedophiles, since they would not (typically) be attracted to such fully developed girls.
Verizon is a "common carrier" only in the businesses that the FCC says they are, and the FCC has repeatedly refused to regulate Internet service OF ANY SORT as a "common carrier" service. The implication in the article title that Verizon has "common carrier status" for their Internet services that could be lost is a lie.
All issues of pedophilia aside, ( after all, laws and morals differ from country to country ) the
:) )
interesting problem is why are groups in country X ( in this case the US ) allowed to dictate the availability of information in country Y ( again, in this case Canada ) ?
Of course it's done everywhere ideals don't conincide with common thought, but left unchecked it will pretty much ruin everything it touches. No matter what the idea is, someone, somewhere is probably offended by it. Should we rip down the site ? Implement filters ? Cease and decist orders ? Disconnect them from the world ?
Simply because someone else disagrees with the existence of certain information doesn't give them the right to remove it. ( my opinion only of course and I realize that and $1.25 might get me some coffee if I don't offend them
An interesting example happened while checking my spelling of pedophilia above. My corporate firewall
( for my own safety of course ) blocked my Google search of the word. After all, no employee should *dare* even mutter or think of anything on the topic. To make it easy, the company simply blocks access to information they don't feel like getting sued over. Thus, my spelling is my best guess on it so if I screwed it up, you know why. ( After all, this IS America and everyone knows that if they DON'T block it, then they must be condoning it. )
Such a sad state of existence we live in anymore.
Somewhat off topic but a thought I've been kicking around a bit more these days.
Why is it that someone convicted of a sexual crime is treated so different than those who commit crimes of a different nature ? ( Ergo: Murder, fraud, assault, burglery, etc. etc. ) Sex offenders end up having to register, have to stay away from certain folks ( read that children ), wear signs, shirts and whatnot indicating their past crimes.
When's the last time you saw a registered murderer anywhere ? Or the guy walking down the street with " I defrauded a billion in pensions and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt " ?
Why are we SO hung up on the ' sexual predator ' when there are folks FAR more dangerous out there ?
Maybe I should just go back into my cave and stay there lol
poedophiles? No, poedophiles are people who are attarceted to CHILDREN, not "minors"
Having the hots for the 16yo cheerleader is no pedophilia, it's normal. It's illegal in the US, but it's STILL normal.
Remember, it wasn't that long ago that 16 was considered a prefectly good age to get married and start having kids.
If you want to win, why are you playing with me?
if everyone acted with responsibility and accountability, we would not only need no laws, we would probably have no wars and no poverty either
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Paedophiles are a matter for the F.B.I., and H.M.R.M.P, not for some spineless telco. I went over to the site, www.Epifora.com and saw no sexual oriented anything?! I can only wonder if this is some form of extortion, or someone has access to information that only the bad guys have access to. Civilians that know who the bad guys are, but do not inform law enforcement are just as bad as the bad guys, IMHO.
minor-attracted adults
WTF?WTF?WTF?WTF?
I thought I had seen it all . . . how the hell can you soften the term pedophile like that?
I suppose you would call Drug Dealers Illicit Pharmaceutical Vendors and refer to serial killers as those inflicted with Obsesive Compulsive Life Removal Disorder
Gimme a break, and get a clue.
Perverted Justice is getting thier way, and our society is eating it right up. These narrow-minded souls and others like them have already twisted the english language in such a manner as to cause (in many people's minds) to equate "pedophile" with "child molester", even though a simple etymological study of the words in question would quickly reveal that one has nothing to do with the other. I would think that here on Slashdot we geeks would be more intelligent than this. Then again, I might as well be Don Quioxte arguing about the differences between a hacker vs. a cracker. Even so, words help to define and propel thoughts, and what was once a valid word to describe a legitimate topic has now taken on a wholly wrong and sinister definition.
Why on earth is it that our society can't seem to fathom the idea that there could actually be people out there who truely and honestly love children (without any sexual connotations), on a level that isn't just mere lip-service meant to console the consciences of the "think of the children" moral hypocrites? The fact that this self-same group targets and rallies against such people, while entrenching the concept of "pedophile=child molester", further gives lie to their hypocrisy: This process has little to do with "thinking of the children", and everything to do with "thinking of myself and my power". What these people hope to acheive with this power is anyone's guess, but I can guarantee it will not be something free-thinking people will enjoy.
Instead, we are now a nation who constantly "thinks of the children", while simultaneously fearing them. This fear brings a cost onto our society, as such fear (ie, the legitimate fear of being branded a new-speak "pedophile") causes legitimate teachers and counselors to avoid working with children closely, doing what they do best - teaching, counseling, mentoring, and consoling. Our society, by deligitimizing contact between children and adults (including parents, on many occasions!), is slowly raising a generation of individuals who have never had honest adult guidance. Rather, the little guidance they may have had (from parents or others) was presented to them couched in fear, uncertainty, and doubt. These children aren't robots, they are picking up on these notions. One has to honestly wonder what effects such watered down (and dishonest through ommission) interactions will have on these children as they grow into adults. I sincerely doubt they will be good. In fact, it seems like it would serve to cause more of the same "for-the-children" behavior from these children-turned-adults, or it will flip 180 degrees from where it is today. Both of these outcomes are equally extreme, and neither are a world I want to live in.
Despite all of these cries of "for the children", though, our society continues to turn a blind eye toward the other side of the coin: The sexualizing of children and youth by the media. We the people legitimatize it by doing nothing about it - by letting it continue and expand in scope. By continuing to buy (for ourselves, and for the children, too) and consume the products being advertised, we are effectively saying out of one side of our mouths "this is OK", but lest any member of that society espouse an attraction to these youthful portrayals, we pounce on them and decry "PEDOPHILE" - figuratively rending the individual who dared to utter such thoughts limb-from-limb (interestingly, though, this seems to only apply to certain sub-groups within the larger whole - but this goes well outside the scope of this rant). We ostracize them as a pariah to the group. T
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Umm, no.
The only time its 18 is when someone over 18 is in a position of trust regarding the under 18 year old.The age of consent is 16 for everyone, the UK doesn't discriminate anymore.
See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/20000044.htm
The real probem is that no one seems to know what paedophile actually means. It doesn't mean "attracted to legally forbidden minors" it means attracted to children and is defined as pre-pubescent children.
Of course, in the US that has come to mean any age from birth to 17 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds
If you want to win, why are you playing with me?
Thus, the word "pedophile" means "lover of children", and the word "ephebophile" means "lover of early adults" - no sexual connotations should be implied by either. This is simple stuff, people - we supposed geeks here on Slashdot, with the tons of resources available to us, both on and off-line, should be able to figure this out. I have, why the hell can't you (I mean "you" as directed toward the denizens of Slashdot, not to you in particular, parent poster)?
It is only in recent history, most notably in America, has society sought to equate "pedophile" to "child molestor" (and, in theory, "ephebophile" to "statutory rapist", though given the lack of our societies knowledge of the word "ephebophile" as distinct from "pedophile", and the lumping of seemingly any adult interaction with children in the "pedophile" category, I sincerely doubt this is currently the case - give it a few years).
We as a society are going down the path where we are (at the very least entymologically, but quite possibly purposefully!) confusing "love" with "rape", of a good feeling/thought with that of a heinous and terrible action (regardless of the age of the victim!). Since words define and propel thoughts, and thus ultimately actions, to myself as a free-thinking person, none of this can end in good.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Common Carrier Status is not something that you can simply give up. It is not a right. Common carrier is a legal clasification given to those companies that were awarded federal funds in order to build private networks. In exchange for these federal funds, they are forced to provide universal coverage. Because they are forced to provide universal coverage they are also protected from having to police content on thier network. This is not an optional agreement and they can not forfeit thier status. It would take nothing short a bill reclassifing Verizon to do that.
Peg Bundy was HOT. The original MILF.
In the end the question is, does Verizon have a right to refuse service? The answer is yes they do. So what is the problem? A private organisation is refusing to contract with another private organisation. This is freedom of contract. This is capitalism at it's best. If you support capitalism then you must support Verizon's right to refuse service.
If you were serious, you have a strange view of how major corporations operate.
CEO discussion:
"Cutting off Epifora will have 'x' effect on our financial situation"
"Yes, but ignoring Peverted Justice will have 'y' effect on our financial situation"
"Hey guys, we'll just protect the children!"
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
It will not stop the pedophiles. Simple censorship will not stop them, and in the meantime you open up a can of worms. If the ultimate goal is to stop child abuse, shouldn't they focus on methods that WILL actually work?
Of course, in the US that has come to mean any age from birth to 17 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds
If a person were to turn 18 during a leap year and their birthday is after February 29th, wouldn't that person be 17 years, 365 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds old just before they turn 18?
Shed no tears for these guys, with the laws as they currently are, they may have crossed from free speech to illegal speech.
um... did you miss the part of the summary that said this site was legal?
"minor-attracted adults."
????
WTF, add me to the list of me-too's calling this hyphenation absolutely stupid.
Pedophilia MUST NOT be made to sound like someone who enjoys teaching primary school.
does Verizon currently have common carrier status? And if so, to which divisions does it apply: ISP, cellular or POTS?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"1. pedophiles need to stay away from children. They should not be fishing or trying to help the succeed."
Why do you say that? "Pedophile" does not mean "child molester", despite popular belief.
If paedophiles did stay away from children, I can tell you for a fact that their would be a serious lack of teachers and a minor lack of social workers. You won't identify all pedophiles because the current stereotype is bunk.
"2. There where no passwords, warnings, or age limitations on people reading the messages that I saw."
Aren't you pleased that you can see what the supposed "monsters" are discussing, or do you prefer to believe the stereotypes? Why should there be any age limitations? I'm one of the most vocal activists and I'm in my late teens.
"As to how legal they are I do not know. How beneficial they are. I would say not at all. Real medical intervention is needed not sitting around a message board."
Medical intervention does not "cure" paedophilia. Support helps people to behave responsibly.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
I'm not defending pedophiles, but these shows are REALLY close to entrapment. There is no 13 year old boy or girl. It's an adult acting like one over the internet.
Well, my girlfirend and I have had the opportunity to chat with a member of PJ on a couple of occasions (who is on my girfriend's buddy list) and I can tell you that they aren't even REMOTELY close to entraping these sexual predators. PJ is also NOT A VIGILANTE GROUP AT ALL. They do NOT take the law into their own hands--they work WITH law enforcement closely and make VERY sure they do not conduct themselves in a manner that would jeopardise the case against a suspected predator.
Whether the chatter misrepresents themselves as a minor has NOTHING to do with entrapment at all. Law enforcement personnel work undercover all the time representing themselves as prostitutes, drug dealers and so forth. Entrapment is about enticing someone to commit an illegal act with the intention of charging them for that act--it isn't the same as misrepresentation at all. When a member of PJ goes online, they do so under a profile that clearly suggests he or she is underaged. They NEVER initiate a conversation with a paedophile. When someone messages an undercover PJ chatter only then do they respond and start a conversation. Once the conversation is started they do NOT make any effort to steer to the conversation to sexual content--generally they play the typical "angst-ridden teen" and mention shool troubles, or that they had a fight with a friend or so on. Sometimes they just talk about nothing in particular. In any case, they are simply compliant or agreeable with the suspect--if they ask for a picture they send one...of the paedophile sends a file they accept it.
They are simply putting the bait out on a hook and fishing for sickos. Entrapment would be coralling all the fish into a pond filled with freely-swimming bait. In any case, PJ have thier hearts in the right place but I could see them being overzealous in advocating the shutdown of these sites as they are quite passionate about the issue. I haven't seen the kind of content available on this "boychat" site so I can't say how illegal it would be, but it could be that one or more members of that forum have been conviced of sexual crimes against minors or have been chatting with undercover PJ members. That could very well be enough for PJ to try and shut down the site regardless of actual legality of the content.
I certainly think that Verizon has overstepped themselves here however. These guys are small-fry and from the article anyways appear to be more of a support group than a child porn ring. Yahoo chatrooms and Myspace and usenet are probably much bigger and more dangerous breeding grounds for paederastic sexual predators than some little forum sites. These outfits, however are either too big or have too much money to abuse this way.
I live in Canada and as the article states our laws ARE much stricter on the definition of illegal child porn. Its constitutionality has been challenged in the past even though our protection of "free speech" is not as rigourous as in the US. I'm pretty sure our child porn laws would be ruled unconstitutional in the US. OTOH, for some reson I cannot fathom we have 14 as an age of consent which is lower than the vast majority of the world, and though we are pretty strict about what kind of porn and behaviour involving minors is legal the penalites for violating those laws are pretty weak. That IS significant though is that the Canadian authorities have reviewed the material on this boychat site and have determined it is not illegal by our standards...this suggests to me that it is more like a child-abusers version of alcoholics anonymous. I think the site should be monitored closely by police but I certainly don't think it should be shut down if that is the case because perhaps it actually keeps paedophiles from acting on their urges. I also do not think it is Verizon's place to decide what content is appropriate. That is t
Do you even know what avant-garde means? And are you trying to say that Mac users are insufferable asshats? In that case, I'll leave decent OSes to me, and leave the crap known as Macintrash to you.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
~sigh~ ...and I was SO hoping to live my life without posting on slashdot, too.
...instead, it arose from internal affairs... the ages-old question of "what about me" when discussing politics INSIDE the MAI/AAM community. Using the terms "pedophile" or the more literate "paederotic" tended to offend and alienate those who, frankly, weren't paederotic... the large crowd of people who can confess to themselves that, yes, that 16yo has a rather nice chest. ...so, by all means, if you think "MAI/AAM" sounds too "sickly-sweet," feel free to use such terms as "infantfucker" or "diaper faery." We're quite proud of the label, frankly, and "diaper dipper" ONLY draws offence because of it's implications of primary heterosexuality... and we ain't breeder. Hell, some of us even make "Womb Raider" spoofs.
...the thing was hosted in Canada, of all places, with the lowest free-speech protections of any first-world nation whatsoever, and the administration reflected this.
Let's see... first factual corrections first. The term "minor attracted individual" (here miswritten as 'minor attracted adult') does NOT mean "pedophiles" - which is exactly why it was adopted. While Orwell may be turning over in his grave over this "philanthrope" prevention in the horiffic misuse of greek, DISequivocation is sort of the opposite of deception.
The common term "pedophile," and the accurate term "paederotic," were noted to exclude and ignore large amounts of the community - both the babylovers, and people attracted to anything with breasts (or on the BL side, anything with a few whiskers).
The "political correctness of not wanting to offend queers" had NOTHING to do with "omg this will sound sweet and fluffy." The current theory is that anyone with human decency in their soul would have already exercised it, and thus it leans more towards the "bigger albatross" theory - an astounding number of people WILL fight under a flag of "infantfucker pride" even though themselves won't swing that way - just to offend a bigot.
Secondly, there's been some FASCINATING mythologization about, oh, "meeting to exchange kiddie pr0n" and "exchanging tips on how to molest kids" and the like.
This is a fucking joke.
A quick view of the bottom of any post screen on http://www.boychat.org/ or a review of the FAQ at http://www.annabelleigh.net/, will in fact include such tidbits as "Do not advocate or counsel sex with minors" (rule #6)... which would be a 1st-amendment violation in the US, I believe, if done outside any specific case, as well as "Do not post erotica or overly-detailed sexual discussions" (rule #1) in light of Canada having the world's most stringent "written erotica" laws in the world... and, yes, rule #7, "Do not request meetings with posters who are under age 18"
Usually, rule #7 was invoked on underage youth showing up with a "I'm looking for gay guys in the ____ area," as well it should have been... but I suppose that's off the topic.
For half a flippin' decade, the RMCP read the board every single day, without any action being taken. Before plagarizing whatever tabloid you read that morning, perhaps it would be prudent to investigate the actual topic at hand? It is, in fact, rather impossible to discuss "ways to seduce minors" under one's real name (as many posters are) on a public forum read by the police department (who has been VERY helpful in consulting on topics of legal compliance), and still be in operation.
Finally, a technical note : Verizon's holdings (Sprint/MCI) did not provide any form of hosting whatsoever; all hosting was done by the hosting company Epifora, which has no responsibility for the sites it hosts.
Sprint/MCI, a subsidiary of verizon, was simply the *backbone provider*, and in fact holds regional monopoly as the internet backbone for the area.
"Common carrier" status - often discussed in the germ
I think in some states its even more complicated
It's basically complicated in all states.
In most states, the true age at which consentual sexual conduct with an individual becomes statutory rape is actually very young (like 12-14.) Until the 20th century, people were all right with that but then legislatures tacked on a new age--an age at which consentual conduct is recognized so it's not as severe as statutory, but is still illegal.
In my state (Ohio) the age range between 13-15 is covered by a law prohibiting "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor". Below 12 is just plain statutory rape. (And of course, if you rape someone of any age, it would be called rape.) (So far, Canada has chosen not to add this second range, and kept the original statutory rape at 14 and build nothing else on top of it. That might change.)
Then they built on (what's called in Ohio "sexual battery") a new law prohibiting sexual conduct with someone under 18 if the adult is a person in authority (or a family member.) That's a recent addition.
These laws are notoriously complex and arbitrary and frankly I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single legislator that understands them.
Didn't that concern go away entirely with recent deregulation? Sure, it's still an issue with voice communications but not Internet... at least not now.
I agree with you. Sex crimes are the only crimes punishable with open-ended sentences and are the only ones where sentences can be extended after the fact. I think that's disgusting. If you do the crime you do the time unless sex is involved---then you pay the price for the rest of your life. I can't see how the legal system gets away with it.
Regarding the corporate firewall, your company is entitled to limit what it's resources are used for so it doesn't need justification for filtering any subject when it gets down to it. My last employer wouldn't block such a query. Instead, it would log it in hopes of finding a firable offense to use against you. I kid you not.
As Verizon just blew it.
Not that the government really needed a reason to look at your data, but this was a stupid move that just opened their doors wide open to a lot of things.
I wonder what will happen when they are forced to censor data that doesnt originate on their network but simply passes across. ( since they are no longer a common carier, this is likely to happen sooner then later )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"miner-attracted adults." It's a group of people irresistibly drawn to hard hats and black lung disease. Just goes to show you can find a website for anything on the Internet.
Don'chya just hate it when someone posts about some variety of porn without bothering to include the matching link for it?
Legion Of Muscle Part 2 - The Diamond Mine
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"Have you looked at the sites in question yourself?"
/.'ed. Several other posters claimed they were simply gay male adult sites.
I have not because the article was
I would like to see these sites and would appreciate links to them so I can see them myself.
"The one I looked at was full of profanity and had no passwords or age warnings on it."
Does Canada have restrictions on that?
"The site I could get to was called Boychat. It is a site for people that are attracted to boys! Not adult men but BOYS!"
Gay men who are young and/or look young are called boys. Again, I haven't seen the sight but "boys" is a term commonly used and it does not carry the connotation of pedophilia.
"They talk about channeling their sexual interest into "positive" channels like mentoring. Guess what that is a REALLY BAD IDEA.
Pedophiles are like alcoholics. They need to avoid their addiction at ALL TIMES."
Pedophilia is a sexual orientation, not an addiction. You cannot possibly make an argument for your position.
"For all I knew when I posted my comments those sites could have been for men that like little girls. I had no idea that it was hosted on a Gay oriented website."
That's true, but religious zealots love to associate pedophilia with homosexuality when no such link exists. The fact that others here claim that the sites are simply gay men sites leads me to believe that's what's going on.
"I think that a Gay lifestyle website posting in any positive way about a pedophile website is one of the STUPIDEST things I have ever seen!"
Absolutely. Homosexuals are not associated with pedophiles and have enough image problems on their own.
"Legal or not those sites are sites for pedophiles. People that have sexual desires for children.
If I didn't know better I would have guessed that it was a fake site run by the extreme right to feed any homosexual hysteria."
Maybe. I'd love to see them for myself. I'd also like to see documentation that the sites are the ones that were requested to be removed.
I have no idea how you got that idea from anything I posted assuming this isn't a troll.
There is nothing OK about committing sex acts with children regardless of gender. There is nothing wrong with having sexual attractions because those you cannot choose. The attractions in pedophilia are not crimes; the bahavior is.
It's important to understand what exactly constitutes a "child" in this case as well. Pedophilia does not involve 17 year olds unless they look and act like 10 year olds. That is the sexual truth of the matter regardless of the complex and varying legal definitions.
Finally, nothing presented in the article described pedophilia AT ALL. For all we know, pedophilia (through "minor attracted adults) was dropped just to create a knew-jerk reaction against an adult homosexual site.
I figured statutory rape as a generic category of "criminal sexual conduct" resulting from one party being a minor. Calling one category "statutory rape" specifically and one category "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor" is arbitrary (although some of the legal consequences may not be).
It's such a telling example of our failure to reconcile our sexuality.
"The particular sites were advocating more than just Pedophilia, they including child rape." Not only can you not prove that - you're lying. ...and the fact that you're lying - can be proven.
Here is a copy of a reply to my orginal post.
/positive/ site for so called pedophiles that would otherwise have no where to output their feelings. If boychat didn't exist, the members would be bottling up their feelings until they did molest a child."
"Two of the websites in question that Im aware of being hosted by Epifora are http://www.boywiki.org/ [boywiki.org] and http://www.boychat.org/ [boychat.org]. There are more site links listed on the BoyChat website, I'll leave it up to you to follow them.
None of the sites have obscene graphic material, it's mostly text.
The sites is more along the lines of a place for "Pedophiles" to focus there sexuality into something that is at least somewhat positive.
They speak of things such as fishing with kids and getting a high from making the kid happy. Or seeing their 'boy' succeed.
The boychat website is a very
This is how I found out that there was any "gay" connection to the site. The original story was posted on a site that caters to Gay men.
I don't know about you but I really find this very creepy and dangerous. It seems to be a great path to temptation and justification to me.
I know that vast majority of Homosexuals are not pedophiles just the vast majority of heterosexuals are not pedophiles. By stepbrother is gay and loves children in a none sexual way and would love to be an elementary school teacher but it isn't safe for him. It isn't worth the risk that he might loose the right to see his daughter if someone decided to accuse him. Stupid sites like the site that posted the original story make good gay men's life hell. At it's best it reinforces the idea that gay men are all promiscuous but thanks the this article it reinforces the idea that gay men are pedophiles.
So with that being said am I off your hook for being homophobic since I didn't know the original site was a site for Gay men?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't think of it as arbitrary.
The concept here is that there is an age at which an individual is too young to grant informed consent (like 12 and under in Ohio) so the charge is equivalent to rape....=statutory rape. (Sex with a 12 year old is always statutory rape regardless if you actually raped them.)
The "unlawful sexual conduct with a minor" I think is the most precise term you'll find. The state has made it illegal to have sexual congress with 13-15 year olds even though they aren't kidding anyone and will admit that they are old enough to grant consent. (Sex with a 15 year old would be rape if you raped them, but otherwise, is this lesser crime indicated here.)
The former law is clearly a protective law, the latter law is more intended to curb behavior that people have decided is morally wrong but is much harder to defend as truly protective of a "victim." (The no authority figure having sex with a minor law is probably both partially a protective law and a moral prohibition. I figure it's more then latter because its so new.)
Florida law is worse. Though these basic concept are retained, everything there is called sexual battery and it just comes in various levels.
It's not the stuffy old men, it's the stuffy old men who's wives have them by the political ballz if they don't do the right "moral" thing and pass laws to protect the "children".
It reminds me of this t-shirt from T-Shirt Hell:
8 8.gif
http://www.tshirthell.com/shirts/products/a588/a5
Libertas in infinitum
Legally, Verizon Communications Inc. is a corporation that has diverse operations and subsidiaries. Among these subsidiaries are common carriers. Among them are companies that are not common carriers. Both types use the brand name "Verizon".
Verizon Online is an ISP. As such, it is not, and has never been, a common carrier. UUNET, now part of Verizon Business, is also an ISP, and the ISP portion of its operation is not, and has never been, a common carrier. MCI's long distance operations, now part of Verizon Business, are a common carrier, to the extent that they carry telephone calls and leased lines ("special access" is the tariff term), but some parts of it are no longer common carriage.
With regard to the responsibilities and privileges of each (in the US), there are basically three different levels.
-A common carrier bears no responsibility for content, and isn't even supposed to look. Bits is bits. This is what Verizon does when it leases a DS3 between somebody's routers.
-A publisher is responsible for content. In the web world, this is generally the person who puts up the site, not the host.
-An ISP is not a common carrier, but is not a priori responsible for content; in its hosting role, it can be asked to take down objectionable content that they host, once they are made aware of it. An ISP in its transmission role is still an "information" provider, and is permitted to pick and choose what it wants to pass and what it wants to block. It may be asked to block objectionable material, though its not quite clear to me, at least, when it must do so.
So while I am the last person to defend VeriZontal, they did not do anything wrong here, if we're talking about their ISP blocking another. Indeed if an ISP did not block a known spam generator, it would be remiss in its duties. It was probably not the Telephone Company that did the blocking, though the international leased line business is basically deregulated and they probably could choose to deny service to an entity of questionable legality.
Here's the sticky part: This system all worked because of the split between the ISP and the common carrier. There might be a monopoly on local telephone lines, or a very few common carriers to choose from, but any number of ISPs could operate using (leasing) their services. Verizon was forced to keep the two sides separate. So Verizon New York leased its raw DSL common carriage to Verizon Online on the same terms that it offered to Earthlink and many other ISPs.
But (based on Verizon and SBC petitions) the FCC dropped that rule in 2005, effective this past August. So now Verizon New York does not have to offer raw DSL to anyone but Verizon Online. So the other ISPs can be cut off. This is why there is a network neutrality debate. With the old rule (which goes back to 1983 and really made the Internet possible), an ISP who blocked too much would lose customers to other DSL ISPs. Now, there's much less competition. So there are calls to legislate the behavior ("neutrality") of ISPs (such as Verizon Online, but this tends to trickle down to mom'n'pop shops too) themselves. This is not trivial, because it would lead to infinite fights over who is or isn't a spammer, what is or isn't objectonable, etc. The FCC screwed the pooch this time. And the beauty of it is that the fight over Network Neutrality stopped Congress from giving Verizon and SBC ("AT&T Inc.") what they really really wanted, national cable TV franchises.
The proper thing to do is to call only the first pedophilia, and call the second Ephebophilia.
Of course, the related issues are also a mess. One problem is the grouping of all sex offenders into a single group. Perhaps it is just me, but child-sexual-molesters are something very different than flashers, gropers (who grope adults, not children) and prostitutes. Violent Rapists (as opposed to statutory rapists, or those who have sex with somebody too intoxicated to consent) seem like a separate category as well.
Children have nothing from prostitutes and Adult rapists (violent or not). I certainly have no reason to fear prostitutes (unless I engage in sex with them). Nobody who is not related to the "offender" has anything to fear from one whose offense was incest (and it is debatable weather those related have reason to fear the "offender").
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
What you have said is absolutely correct. It just goes to show how many people do not understand the underlying principles behind free speech and simply parrot the line 'all censorship is bad' ... and amusingly, the person who marked you as flamebait was choosing to exercise /. version of censorship.
It is very possible that this support group is there to help paedophiles resist their attraction to children. I don't know because I'm not into that kind of thing. However, this censorship (of filtering) can have major implications elswhere. These implications can range from what content gets blocked, which content provider gets preferencial treatment and so on. One thing is very clear is the fact that for whatever reason, when a government or corporate power gets or usurps authority to take certain actions, that authority will eventually be abused.
I believe that companies like Verizon, SBC, AT&T, and their various combinations will likely abuse the power of censorship for the sake of making lots of money and squelching competitors. This is the reason why I advocate such things as FreeWan's Mesh Networks, Muni-nets and so on. People themselves need to build their own infrastructure so that the infrastructure is owned and controlled by everyday people rather than governments and mega-corporations. It will get to the point where the monitoring, filtering, and throttling will get so bad that the Internet will become just another medium controlled by mainstream media. When this happens, people will get creative and more local networks will be built. The technology to do this is already out there, and hackers will use it to their advantage. The telcos and media cartels need to accept the fact that their monopoly on information is finished. We the people are in control, now.
I don't know how I missed your original post. It's not in this thread so I never saw it. These sites certainly appear to be pedophile support sites. In the few minutes I looked I didn't see anything offensive or negative.
/positive/ site for so called pedophiles that would otherwise have no where to output their feelings. If boychat didn't exist, the members would be bottling up their feelings until they did molest a child."
:-) Hopefully, as a gay man, I'm off your list of homophobics as well ;-)
"The boychat website is a very
I could see how that might be so. I don't feel that molestation is ever inevitable but I certainly appreciate the problem!
"I don't know about you but I really find this very creepy and dangerous. It seems to be a great path to temptation and justification to me."
I would think simply inappropriate but creepy. Perhaps it could lure a boylover that lurks at gay sites
"So with that being said am I off your hook for being homophobic since I didn't know the original site was a site for Gay men?"
Considering that I agree with everything you've said plus I've seen the obvious pedophile support pages, I'd have to say yes
From what i can gather the sites in question are support groups attempting to prevent pedo's from actually carrying out and act of molestation. given that it's proven to be impossible to change a persons sexual orientation, it leaves us with 2 ways of dealing with these people. 1. locking them up or killing them. both of which will force them underground, putting kids at risk since then we won't know about them till they've commited a crime. 2. treatment and support, to try help them vent their sexual frustration in a manner which doesn't damage anyone. only an idiot thinks door number 1 offers any kind of solution. so i can only assume this group is a bunch of hystrical women screaming WONT SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN and letting all reason and logic fly out the window in an attempt to push their agenda. an isp censoring content purely because one group asked them to, is a disgrace and i feel sorry for anyone who uses their service. now that one little pressure group has succeeded, it will open the flood gates for any asshole who was ever offended by something to demand it be blocked to everyone no doubt the rightwing closest cases on here will mod me down.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Does this mean Canada can invade the US now? I promise to greet you as a liberator!
...and if you support capitalism, you don't believe in government involvement, regulation, or the ability to sue a business. With all of that removed, the protections of the common carrier status aren't necessary in the first place.
If the article had not been slashdotted, you would know that in this particular case Verizon had instructed its subsidiary, MCI Canada, to cut the connection.
Epifora is the ISP in question, MCI Canada just provided the physical connection.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, common carrier status applies in this case.
Verizon cut the phone lines to an ISP that hosted sites that offer community support to MAAs. Much discussion is devoted to self-acceptance and living within the law.
On the other hand, the group making the complaint to Verizon, Perverted Justice, has long been involved in entrapment schemes, and recently was involved in the death of one of their victims in Texas. Perhaps the funniest thing is the rumors that PJ founder "Xavier von Erck" got involved with a 14yo girl a few years ago.
Don't know if that particular rumor is true, but there have been a number of reports that he has made use of minors as young as 13 (IIRC) to go into sex chats with older men, and try to get those men to visit them as part of his entrapment operations.
There is absolutely nothing illegal at Free Spirits or Boychat. The only photos on the site are non-porn photos of the person posting when he was a boy or teen himself. All posted links are checked and if the link to illegal material, they are removed. The site also supports https.
A lot of non-boylovers read there regularly, hoping to find something to bring the boards down, but in 10 years on the net, they never have...
https://wwwboychat.org/
Yes, he is a hebephile, and thus worthy of our respect and admiration.
The Pages were as young as 16, making hes instant messages only potentially illegal under his own SMITH-POMEROY-FOLEY CHILD OBSCENITY AND PORNOGRAPHY PREVENTION ACT (one of his personal acts of self flagelation), and illegal in the pages home state of Louisianna, but legal in DC.
Perhaps this is why he opposed Gay Marriage so strongly, so that his constant sexual harrassment of Blue Blazered Post Pubescent children (legally) would not be a cause for divorce from his long time washington lover.
Foley seemed trapped by his desire to transition to a job a lobbyist, it looks like the Republican powers that be needed his support in florida since Grahmn was retiring and Kathy is tainted by the whole election fixing thing.
That lobbying gig is fucked now, too bad scientology boy.
I read the source the article was derived from asshole.
So, to complain that I lie shows that you know next to nothing.
Did you miss that part of the fact that by American law, they aren't legal, no matter what the article says, and that Verizon is an American company?
Oh, and BTW, I read the source that the article was derived from.
I am personally quite pleased to see a large company working against the warped, sick individuals who label pedophiles and child molesters as "minor-attracted adults" ... the more upset these freaks are, the happier the rest of civilization should be. This was not a story about censorship or about individual rights; it was a story about a corporation setting a limit to the disgusting depths of depravity it would be associated with. Every time some tech-savy person defends child molestation under the umbrella of "censorship", it becomes harder to convince the non-tech-savy to listen when we tell them about REAL censorship, privacy concerns, DRM, etc. I for one will consider a move TO Verizon. This did not really belong in YRO; NOBODY has a RIGHT to persue minors for sex.
Yes, they have, lets make an example out of them so that SBC/ATT and Comcast get the idea and don't try that.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Last year when the US Supreme Court decided that carrying Internet service on cable didn't make the cable companies telecommunication services under current rules, the FCC decided to "level the playing field" and said that the portion of any service used for broadband Internet would not be classified as a telecommunications service. Many ISP's were afraid at the time that this would give Verizon and others the power to deny ISP's connections to the Internet.
Fearing anti-trust suits, the telcos grandfathered in all current ISPs and still provide them with service, but if you are a new ISP, just try to get a DSL line for a customer - you can't. The telcos do not have to take on new broadband ISP's so they are not (they still have to take on dialups, though).
So cutting off the websites in question no longer falls under common carrier statutes and if the website owner was not a competitior, Verizon was free to deny them service.
I never thought you where homophobic. Notice I also never accused you of being for pedophiles. I figured that you have felt persecuted in the past and assumed that someone was persecuting you again based on limited information.
This is the problem today. People are trying to force us to the extremes.
In this case since it was posted on a site for gay men you assumed that anybody that had anything negative to say was being homophobic. It would be real easy for someone that doesn't have gay friends to see that site and think that the homosexual community supports pedophiles. They would be mistaken but they would be making the same mistake as you did. They would be judging on limited information.
My job as a married straight church going Christian that does have this knowledge is simple. I have to inform them that most Gay men are not pedophiles just as most straight men are not pedophiles.
Actually you have made my day. One of my goals in life is the contribute more light than heat. Maybe you and I managed that together.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Thank you for perpetuating a commonly-held misconception. When people hear about their "[right to] the pursuit of happiness," they conveniently mumble their way through the word "pursuit."
Unfortunately, that's the key word. You have a right to pursue happiness. You do not have any right (or guarantee) to succeed in your pursuit.
Your pursuit of happiness is not hindered by his exercise of free speech. Your pursuit carries on in its temporary (we all hope) state of failure.
http://undecidedgames.blogspot.com
You criticize Verizon's decision of ending a business relationship which made them a conduit for a pederast sites ("what's a pederast, Walter"), because the pederast sites were "entirely legal". What the hell? Does that mean that if the sites was illegal you would approve? If so, you're saying that only the government has the right to make moral decisions, and you're a lunatic. You're probably actually saying that "all censorship is bad," (that is, that no one should make moral decisions about their actions, or business dealings), and the government shouldn't get involved either, and your "entirely legal" arguement was purely hypocritical. ...and in which case you're also a lunatic.
As for your (non-)question, no a common carrier doesn't give up its status by deciding which ISPs it's going to do business with.
"Minor attracted adults". If that's not the vilest euphemism for pedophile I've ever heard...
http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/MAAs
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Per the article, Canadian standards are higher for this than US standards. I haven't checked the actual sites at issue, but generally 'minor attracted' is not the same as 'pedophile'. The impression I am getting is physically mature but still jailbait. And just to show just how hypocritical US law is, Utah[iirc] recognizes both Statutory & Common Law marriages - with a minimum age of 16 for Statutory and no minimum age for Common Law.
So, if you sleep with a 14yr old girl & call her your wife, it's OK, but don't try to go to the JP for paperwork - cause that would be just wrong.
The problem with 'pedophile' is it's really tricky to define. In the UK, the age of consent it 16 (for heterosexuals, 18 for homosexuals). Is someone a pedophile if they have sex with someone who's 16? After all, they're a minor. What about someone who is attracted to someone who is 14, but looks 20? What about someone who is in their 20s, but looks well underage. I've met girls who fall into both categories. The real problem is that age is not a very good indicator of physical or mental maturity. Some people enter puberty very young, but may not be emotionally mature enough to cope with sex until many years later - there are probably a lot of people of legal age in whatever jurisdiction you inhabit who are not sufficiently emotionally mature, and quite a few of these make the papers periodically having screwed up their lives because of it. Maybe we should require people to pass a psychological exam before they are allowed to have sex (good luck enforcing that).
If you join a friggin' *club* because you're systematically attracted to children, you're a pervert. That eliminates the accidental "but she *looked* 25!" argument.
http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/MAAs Here's an article which was written for people who dislike "paedophiles" for their thoughts - http://paedosexuality.blogspot.com/2006/10/fms.htm l
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
I never said that Foley was worthy of respect; only that he was not a pedophile.
There are several pages involved and I've also read that some were 16. It's my understanding that the age of consent in all locations involved was 16. The fact that the federal government has overridden state laws in this matter disgusts me.
You think Foley's opportunity as a lobbyist is compromised? I doubt it.
Frankly, I think that if pages aren't old enough to act like adults then they shouldn't be allowed as pages. Foley was guilty of abuse of authority but the claims that he is a child predator are ridiculous. Children shouldn't be working in Congress.
The division of Verizon in question is a Tier 1 peer, they are one of about a dozen [style:big ass & blinking]major[/style] data carriers in NA. AOL & Verizon@home are both ISP's. They provide consumer grade products, not commercial transport. Different rules apply to the 2 groups of companies. In this case Verizon@home would be liable for hosting obscene material, whereas Verizon - the peer - isn't for transporting the same material.
http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/MAAs
m l
Here's an article which was written for people who dislike "paedophiles" for their thoughts - http://paedosexuality.blogspot.com/2006/10/fms.ht
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
That is was many of the Epifora-hosted sites were for. Okay, they don't offer help from real therapists, but you can't expect an MAA to seek help from a therapist IRL, when they know they will be treated like a child molester.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
How, as a tier 2 provider, do you find another Tier 1 provider? It's not like they are everywhere. Most Tier 1's cover a specific geographical region and competition is legally barred in that zone. IE - there is nobody else to go to.
That's the issue here, to maintain it's common carrier status, Verizon-the-tier-1, has to provide service to everyone as long as what they do is legal, and they pay their bill. They don't get to choose, and in exchange, they get immunity from lawsuits regarding such minor things as facilitating copyright infringement etc... Per the Canadian legal system, they are not breaking any laws, and they are evidently paying the bills.... so cutting them off is a violation of the Common Carrier status, thus - they loose the protections based on that status.
gear up RIAA, you might just recover your $325M lost to piracy.....
Paedophilia / ephebophilia = sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children / teens (thought)
-
Sex with children = sexual activity with children (action)
Murder = (action)
-
The difference should be obvious.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
They are the Tier 1 Peer covering the area - so yes, they should be common carrier.
you are 35 and screwing a 17 year old
I don't know of any state where that's considered being a sexual predator. That's statutory rape, which is still a felony, but not punished as severely.
What do you know? The laws actually make sense. They have multiple lines with varying degrees of enforcement and punishment.
an infinitely small amount of time
In order to live in a society of laws, we need lines. Age is one of those lines. What if Germany moves their army "just a little bit" into Poland?
But pedophiles go to Jail
Only if they act on it. That's because they know what they do is illegal, and they do it anyway. Schizophrenics might never even commit any crimes.
Maybe he was a "victim" of a pedophile when he was a kid.
So, what? Punish his abuser. Being a victim in a previous crime doesn't absolve you of responsibility for your actions. If you were robbed, that doesn't entitle you to rob someone else to "get even".
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
That was a reply to anon.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Sex crimes are the only crimes punishable with open-ended sentences and are the only ones where sentences can be extended after the fact.
You're probably talking about NY, and that policy received much criticism. They should do like Florida and just put the person away for 25 years on the first offense, no parole, no judicial leeway. Then the person can't commit as many crimes, because they'll be in prison. Problem solved.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/04/14/294/
d =16420251
Also:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=200459&ci
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You have entirely failed to make a case:
"Oh yes they are. These vigilantes are creating their own "law" by condemning lawful free speech and are actively pursuing punishment by working to deny the "perpetrators" with access to the internet"
The exercise of free speech is not vigilantism. It is merely exercise of free speech. Animal rights activists who write to a newspaper to ask it to remove a sportsman column are doing the same sort of thing. They are "condemning lawful speech" (which is never the creation of a law, and is ALWAYS a part of free speech: the freedom to criticize others' speech).
The original article used the word "vigilante" without any regard to its meaning. So are you. I don't care about who the "burden" is on, but it is clear that you are way out on a limb by choosing to use the vigilante/vigilante term for a subject to which it never applied.
Where were you when the voynix came?
The whole common carrier thing is more complicated than this. Of course, I agree that Verizon should not have dropped these people even though most of us find the site's content to be questionable, if not offensive. But there are lots of kinds of traffic that an ISP needs to filter, and they have been traditionally reluctant to do so.
For example, DOS attacks. You could argue that DOS attacks prevent the system from working correctly, and so they must be blocked by th ISP to ensure proper functionality. And I think that most network engineers would agree with you. But see, here, we're starting down the slope a little-- when we say a common carrier does not block any traffic, we don't really mean "any" traffic. It just blocks the really bad stuff. In any case, we could probably make a strong argument that blocking this stuff doesn't violate their common carrier status. Same thing goes for DNS cache poisoners, BGP manipulators, and so on.
OK, now what about RPC worms? Certainly, they make make Help Desk techs unhappy, and probably a fair number of sysadmins as well, but is it breaking the system? Not at all-- the Internet is working fine, delivering those RPC buffer overflow attacks to their unsuspecting victims, turning their machines into botnets and whatnot. But a lot of people have been pushing for ISPs to do something about this-- certainly, I have contacted a number of ISP abuse departments myself. So here's another class of traffic that we want the ISPs to deal with-- filter-- before it even gets to us. Does this violate their common carrier status? I don't know-- it's in a grey area.
Here's another one-- SPAM. SPEWS is a great example of a DNSRBL whose sole existence is to place pressure on ISPs to drop abusive customers. Actually doing so certainly technically violates the idea of a common carrier, even if it doesn't violate the spirit, unless you really consider SPAM to be a valuable bit of Internet communication. Some spammers might, I guess. But I think there's probably nearly universal support for ISPs to drop the really awful spammers.
The point of all this is that common carrier status is not so cut-and-dry. Where do we draw the line? There's also the question of a company's right not to do business with someone. If an ISP decides not to accept the business of a questionable website, is this filtering/censorship, or just a good business decision? I don't think this is at all clear.
5. Do not advocate or counsel sex with minors.
- Rule #5, boychat.org and annabelleigh.net
inspector Bob Matthews, of the OPP's "Project P" declared the material on Epifora's servers in compliance with the Criminal Code.
That says a lot, as Canadian law sets a higher bar than the US and most other countries, making no distinction between, say, photographs of minors having sex, textual descriptions thereof, or even speech "advocating" such acts.
- Bill Andriette, the Guide
It is proven beyond all possible equivocation that you are flat-out lying. What is more, you are engaging in a pattern of fraudulently accusing specific people of criminal activity for which their innocence is proven.
I strongly suggest you cease.
You've... lied alot, yes, but the proof that you're lying is ample to a degree obscene. There was not a damned thing illegal about any website hosted by Epifora, Inc under US, UK, or Canadian law.
"That's right, because I've never claimed that free speech is vigilantism"
Do you want me to quote where you did? A hint: you were referring to the subset of free speech known as "slander."
"No they aren't because they aren't claiming that crimes are being committed in the column"
Would that matter to this? No. Claiming this or that is merely speech. It is not action. It is not vigilantism. In fact, there is nothing those animal rights activists can possible say (short of threatening some sort of action, such as assault) that can remotely be called vigilantism. Certainly, no description, pejorative, or anything which might in someone's opinion be "slanderous" can ever be vigilantism.
If there was some definition by which the mere act of free speech (including "slander") could count as "vigilantism", you'd have found it by now and presented it. You haven't. I even looked for one myself. Slander is something you say, vigilantism is something you do. It is very "ill-informed" to confuse the two.
The original author, like you, used vigilantism without regard to its meaning. There is no evidence that any vigilantism occured. Yes, I am close-minded enough to want to use words within, or even close to, established meaning. My close-mindedness is based on the facts of the definitions of these terms, not my "opinion." That is why I refuse to acknowledge the repeated false claim that free speech can be vigilantism. A search on the words "slander" and "vigilantism" find precious to imply that anyone else has the false idea that speech can be vigilantism. I do, however, find references to groups accused of both, but the mentions very typically accuse certain groups of two different and distinct bad activities (slander and vigilantism).
Back on topic. Do I think Verizon should have blocked the rapists' gathering site? Actually, probably not, regardless of the anti-rapist group's proper exercise of its free speech to pressure Verizon to get rid of the pages.
Where were you when the voynix came?
heh... alright, alright... the aneurystic hysteria of the subject line was more me amusing myself than any actual outpouring of vitriol against you... but seriously.
...see? It's not really THAT hard to wrap your mind around, is it?
It's simple.
All paederotic individuals are minor-attracted individuals.
Not all minor-attracted individuals are paederotic.
See? Wasn't so hard, was it?
Now, to answer such questions as "are MOST minor-attracted individuals paederotic," one would have to ask one's self such questions as whether more people are attracted to a 19yo with a C-cup, or a 4yo (presumably WITHOUT a c-cup)...
I'm sure different people would have different answers, some saying "more people would go for the 4yo," and some saing "nah, most people would go for the 19yo." Either way, however, the 21yo buying drinks for a 19yo that s/he hopes to get jiggy with - while "furnishing alcohol to a minor" - is not, clinically speaking, paederotic in orientation.
Nah. If you'd bothered to read anything, the term "minor attracted individual" exists entirely for internal discourse because there are a diverse array with in the faction, and most blocs in the AAM/MAI community are not paederotic in orientation.
Just because you call two 19yo college students dating one another "paedofiles" merely shows that you're a remarkably bloody ignorant person. Both of them are "minor-attracted," as can be shown by reading the charge you'd get if you sold either of them alcohol in the US... but only ignorant trash as yourself would call them "petafiles" to justify beating completely-random people with a tire iron.
That would be... what?
Tending their garden?
Writing literature?
Voting?
See... every time someone says "I'm going to send you to jail for your immutable status," I just have to... laugh my fool ass off. It's a lot like saying "You'll go to jail if anyone finds out you're black." The rule of law, at least, has never worked like that... however much people like you try to corrupt it.
Now, go log off and visit your local library. It will do both you and the world much good.
The logic-impaired : civilization's greatest threat...
"You must actually be a member of the vigilantes"
I'll let you have the last word, with satisfaction at thinking that I am a member of "the vigilantes", never mind that no vigilantes have been discussed (only people exercising their rights of free speech.).
Where were you when the voynix came?
Yeah - I've had practice shooting down your orwellian doublespeak... but yes, it's a yes or no question, no essays, and everyone can figure out the answer.
Just a piece of unrelated trivia...
You're OBVIOUSLY not a rights holder of Ms. Temple's work, I see...
Seriously, however... for the most part it's neutral. Let's take an example - let's say a woman engineers a bridge. Does it really flippin' matter one way or another to whether or not the bridge is useful if she's queer or not?
Exactly. Its value to society is unchanged. Same as if that babyfuckin' woman instead build's car saftey seats, or devotes her life towards promoting toy saftey with regards to choking hazards, or in fact, whatever the HELL she does.
Umm...
"is minor"
"is attracted"
"minor attracted."
I suggest you study boolean algebra.
Yup.
I'm a-gonna do it...
Discuss!
Nope... no text.
No text...
"I'm a-gonna do it... ...I'm gonna bring up the example of Dr. Kevorkian, orgiastic consensual serial murderer... :p"
Last time I knew, Mr. Jack Kevorkian does not have his medical license. It was pulled.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Thanks.
Incidentally, it was advanced gradeschool logic, followed (much) later with formal boolean algebra in the course of programming... but that still doesn't change the underlying facts.
Contrary to your assertion, the existance of a in set b means neither that all, nor even most, of b are in set a.
This is why it was an -nt message, and if you frankly can't read an obvious two-word point as to something you were obviously confused about without reams of snide commentary, I'm going to have to ask you to log off and sign up for that Intro to Logic class, yourself.
Thank you.
Ad-hom is the last refuge of the profoundly chickenshit, you know...
While we're at it... to the best of my knowledge, there is no "boylove.com," nor to the best of my knowledge has there ever been...
Have fun.
Luckily, the rest of the world will also be reading, so quite bluntly, dodging the issue won't help...
That would be one or two goons who tend to claim affiliation with PJ.
It seems that when one takes it upon themselves to record chats in which the overlord of PJ discredits himself - especially when they make it into the wikipedia article - PJ goons have no qualms whatsoever about targeting law-abiding minors in criminal attacks.
You know - that very same criminal hate group which is the topic of the entire thread. Frankly, I'd rather expect you to be a little more up on the topic - at least enough to be aware that the wiki article exists - before discussing...
How... charming of you. You assert that you don't grasp anything I said - quite literally - while trying to project.
1) You tried to assert a grotesquely flawed and clinically inaccurate definition in an apparent attempt to hide the excesses of hate groups.
2) I proceeded to call you on the invalidity of using such as definition.
3) You pussed the fuck out with the message above. Poorly at that.
So basically, since you don't grasp simple english...
1) Definitional exclusion of the victims of violence from being counted is invalid.
2) As noted and established, the targeted class is at minimum 1.2 billion in number, many of whom are children.
3) You may either explain support for the impact of criminal hate groups on over a billion completely innocent lives - or, you may cede.
Then again? I suppose you did the latter.
The Verizon subsidiary was the tier 1 monopoly provider. The ISP, otoh, did not boot them.
No boy chat and girl chat is NOT like a AA meeting. They support each other in LUSTING after children. They are not supporting each other to get over pedophilia. They are proud they are pedophiles.
On occasion... and while I'm advertising "flaws of the regieme," click here.
16, dear, 16... though we've been chatting for a year or two...
Actually, I was drafting a comprehensive media management response which she opted to discard... but thanks for asking.
Umm...
Read the links again.
She didn't solicit sex over the internet, and that's not what she was targeted for.
False. Click the little underlined things.
Other news, ostensibly 16 year old {edit} ella has been indentified, with only a autheticated photo preventing full contact information being posted here. As soon as the photo comes in, up everything goes. Address. Telephone. Stay tuned.
Actually, the minors targeted have not been trying to have sex with... anyone... as far as any of the claims involved have asserted.
Yes, I did edit the quote a bit, because that's exactly the point...
Frankly, I suppose that makes all the difference. Much as from the start, the question has been more one of whether the "vigilance comittee" model of ethnic cleansing for those who committed no crime is a morally valid one. If memory serves, you supported and defended an organization which had illegally targeted children in interstate stalking and harassment in the course of doing so.