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The DOJ's New Spin on Blocking Software
"For example," said DOJ attorney Eric Beane during opening arguments, "one filter even blocked a website promoting a marathon to raise funds for breast cancer research. Part of the CIA's World Fact Book was blocked. And a page with an ACLU calendar. [Blocking software blocks] a significant portion of other materials on the World Wide Web, materials that in many cases are necessary for a child to complete his homework." (Opening arguments transcript, p. 37.) As someone who has been publishing critiques of blocking software for years, I read those words and felt like cheering, despite the fact that I'm sitting in the other side's fan section for this match. (Beane is right, but he's missing the point, which is that whatever problems exist with blocking software, are minor compared to the problems with COPA -- because blocking software raises no constitutional issues when it's used by a private party in their own house, whereas COPA affects everyone in the U.S.)
The irony, of course, is that three years ago, in the trial over the similarly-named Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) which required blocking software in all schools and libraries that receive federal funds, it was the ACLU pointing out the flaws in blocking software and the Department of Justice claiming that blocking software was accurate and effective.
At first it would seem that both sides are now guilty of flip-flopping. But reviewing what was said then and what was said now, my conclusion is that the ACLU did nothing more than shift their focus to a different set of facts, while the government did contradict themselves. And the source of this seeming flip-flop actually comes down to something pretty simple: two different ways of stating one set of numbers.
Now before going further I can't resist saying that I think the whole debate over "harmful to minors" material is pretty silly, because I don't think the pro-censorship side has ever put forth a reason why they think that pictures of naked people, or even people having sex with each other, are harmful to people under 18. I disagree with some people on matters like abortion and the death penalty, but I at least think they have some facts on their side; but I don't know of any facts supporting people who think that pornography is dangerous. Why is a woman's nipple harmful but a man's nipple isn't? How are the majority of high school students who have already had sex anyway, supposed to be harmed by pictures of other people having sex? And apart from the logical paradoxes, the pervasiveness of the Internet has now given us empirical data too: virtually all minors have now have access to anything they want to get on the Internet (either at home, or by sneaking to a friend's house), and where's the evidence that adolescents' brains have been hormonally turned to mush any more than they always have been?
But for the remainder of the discussion, suppose you're addressing people who believe that nudity and sexual material really are harmful to people under 18. (In any case, the judges probably believe it, and even if they don't, they're bound by legal precedents that assume as much.) The question is how accurately blocking software achieves this goal.
Blocking software has two types of error rates: underblocking (failure to block porn sites) and overblocking (blocking of non-pornographic sites). Underblocking errors are usually expressed one way: the percentage of porn sites in a given sample that are not blocked. But overblocking errors can be stated in two ways: the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked, or the percentage of blocked sites that are not pornographic. (There are borderline cases like nude art sites, but it turns out they're not common enough to affect the margin of error much; the vast majority of sites are either clearly porn or clearly not.)
The key is that if you want the overblocking rate to sound low, you talk about the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked. If you want it to sound high, you talk about the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn.
For example, in the 2003 Supreme Court arguments over CIPA, Department of Justice attorney Theodore Olson downplayed the error rates of blocking software by saying:
"But even if it's tens of thousands of the -- of the 2 billion pages of material that is on the Internet, we're talking about one two-hundredths of 1 percent, even if it's 100,000, of materials would be blocked."Here he's referring to the percentage of non-porn sites that are filtered. Attorney Paul Smith, arguing against the law, countered:
"And so we have -- on these lists is a proportion, a huge proportion, perhaps 25, perhaps 50 percent of the sites that are blocked that are not illegal even for children."and:
"And the evidence is that there's about 11 million websites on the Internet, in --in the accessible part of the Internet and that 100,000 of those are the sexually explicit ones and that the --there are at least tens of thousands more that are on the list. So it's --the Government also says in their brief that about one percent of the Internet is over- blocked, which would be about 100,000 sites. So it is a substantial percentage. It is also a substantial amount. And most importantly, it's a very large percentage of what they're blocking is not what they intend to block."-- that is, talking about the percentage of blocked sites that were non-pornographic. Both sides cited the same figure (100,000 non-pornographic sites blocked, apparently referring to an average across all blocking programs) -- but that same number could be seen as an "error rate" of either one hundredth of one percent, or 50%, depending on which formula you use.
Then in this year's COPA trial, the ACLU called CMU professor Lorrie Faith Cranor who testified that in tests that she reviewed,
"[blocking software programs] correctly blocked an average of approximately 92 percent of objectionable content. And they incorrectly blocked an average of 4 percent of content not matching the test criteria."(Oct. 24th transcript, p. 57.) Back to talking about the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked -- which, again, when you put it that way, sounds low. On the other hand, although I couldn't find exact numbers cited by the DOJ's lawyers on the number of sites that were incorrectly blocked, in the portions of his opening argument quoted above, Eric Beane focused on the sad fact of the sites that were blocked -- not the fact that they comprised only a tiny fraction of sites on the Web. The two sides simply swapped formulas.
As for Peacefire's own studies over the years of blocking software error rates, one of the legitimate criticisms that could be made about our efforts was that we focused almost exclusively on the second number, the percentage of blocked sites that were non-porn. If you were interested in how blocking software actually affects the surfing experience of minors who are forced to use it, perhaps you would focus more on the first number, the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked. Perhaps, you might say, that as an organization addressing the blocking software issue specifically from a minors' rights point of view, we really should have focused on that number quite a bit! But I did get a bit preoccupied with playing "gotcha" with the blocking companies, focusing on the percentage of blocked sites that were obvious mistakes, because it was frankly too much fun publicizing the absurdly high error rates of their programs, which belied the claims made by most blocking companies that all sites on their blacklist were examined by a human at their company before being added. (Although it seems to have done some good -- as far as I know, no blocking company is making that claim about their product today.)
The error rates were indeed absurdly high; we took a sample of the first 1,000 .com domains in an alphabetical list, ran them through several programs, and found that of the sites blocked, between 20% and 80% (!) were errors. (The median error rate was about 50%, which corresponds to the figure given by Paul Smith in the CIPA trial oral arguments quoted above.) This surprised even critics of blocking software, and skeptics complained that we must have made mistakes or simply fudged the numbers. (The whole point of using the first 1,000 .com domains was that if we had used a random sample and gotten error rates like that, we could have been accused of "stacking the deck" and using a fake random sample that was loaded with known errors and not truly random.) Years later, it came out that the companies whose products we'd tested, had been following a policy that if they found an objectionable site on a given IP address, all sites on that IP would be blocked, on the theory that hosting companies often group porn sites together on the same machine. Trouble was, while this may have often been true for bona fide porn sites, it was not true for most sites that featured just an incidental shot of someone's bare breasts or a large amount of profanity -- but this would also be enough to get all sites blocked at a given IP. So the 80% error rate was about what you'd expect after all.
You might think that a product with an 80% error rate could never survive in the marketplace, but consider who was buying the software. On the one hand, you had schools and companies buying the programs -- but they didn't care whether it worked so much as they cared about being able to show, for liability reasons, that they did something. On the other hand, you had parents who really did care about keeping porn off their computer -- but how many parents really did any thorough testing of the product, other than making sure it blocks the obvious sites like Playboy.com? A serious test could take days. Their kids are the only ones who would end up doing any thorough "testing" of the product, and if they found a way around it, it's not likely that they would tell their parents. With no market pressure to fix problems, an 80% error rate wasn't really surprising.
But even the most vocal critics of blocking software only pointed out that blocking software sometimes blocked sites about plumbing, or soccer, or aluminum siding; we never claimed that most of those sites would be blocked. Even with our high numbers of wrongly blocked sites, if they had been expressed as a percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked, they would have still sounded like a "low error rate".
The moral is, always keep track of what the "error rate" refers to in these debates. By moving around a few variables in a formula, the Department of Justice was able to go from saying in 2003 that blocking software was minimally intrusive, to making a speech in 2006 that made blocking software sound so tragically limiting that you could practically hear the violins playing. (I know, people who live in glass houses... *ahem*)
And what about the ACLU? If the Department of Justice is guilty of flip-flopping, from saying in 2003 that blocking software is a reasonable and narrowly tailored solution, to saying in 2006 that it's clumsy, ineffective, and overbroad, is the ACLU guilty of flip-flopping in the opposite direction?
Actually, the ACLU's position has always been consistent: blocking software has First Amendment problems when used in a school or library, due to overblocking and underblocking errors, but if used in the home it is still a lot more effective than a law like COPA, which would score pathetically on the same scale. As ACLU attorney Chris Hansen stated in opening arguments:
"COPA does not reach the 50% of all speech that is overseas... Filters are the most effective. Almost all of the filters that [expert witness] Mr. Mewett tested were at least 95% effective. Think about the 5% ineffectiveness compared to where we start with COPA being 50% ineffective..."(Opening arguments, p. 22. Note: Chris Hansen has confirmed that the official transcript is wrong; it has him saying "35%" instead of "95%", which wouldn't make any sense.) As for overbreadth, COPA would criminalize speech by adults, intended for adults, something that no blocking program could ever do -- and as for minimizing collateral damage to innocent sites, does anyone think that even if COPA is upheld, parents will throw out their blocking software?
Even though the ACLU focused on different statistics in the two trials, in both cases they were focusing on the numbers that were relevant to the issue. When talking about constitutional problems with blocking software in schools and libraries, the percentage of blocked sites that are incorrectly blocked, is important, because it's their First Amendment rights that are at issue. The DOJ lawyer talking about all the sites that weren't blocked, was missing the point. If your site is being blocked, it hardly matters to you that for every blocked site there are hundreds that are not. "Hey, your site is not accessible, but don't worry, your competitors' sites are!"
On the other hand, when talking about the use of blocking software in the home, the publisher's First Amendment rights are not at issue; the issues that most parents would care about, are how effective it is, and whether most clean sites are still accessible. Well of course most of them are. Blocking software is not that bad.
Confused? The option to just stop making a big deal out of porn on the Internet is looking better all the time, isn't it?
THe internet is only 2% porn anyways
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Advocacy is good up until the point that you get to exclude relevant facts inimical to your argument. then it just becomes a matter of winning, justice, fairness and truth be damned.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Does any one else think its not the purpose of the government to say what we can and cannot know, use and look at? Although I doubt the government will ever stop trying to do this, from trying to ban certain books to trying to ban how we use the internet. We just need to keep voicing our opinion and telling them we don't agree with this. --- http://www.iheartmygeek.com/
Why don't they prevent kids from calling 900 phone sex numbers first?
Or walking in on their parents by accident? How's that for harmful?
they'll keep trying to censor things so long as people keep pushing their religion into government
think of the seventeen year old congressional pages!
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
Why don't they just maintain a blacklist of sights with "mature" content, and make the list freely avalable to people who whish to block such material. That sounds like a whole lot eaiser solution than what they are talking about.
If it's dead, you killed it.
many in government are pushing stuff like this so that they can effectively control anything we can see. They start with the easy stuff, items likely to appeal to the broadest base, then then slowly add to it.
Of course they may try to wrap it up in pretty sounding names, fairness doctrine is a good one for anyone who has read about some plans for radio, and apply what worked in other areas to the internet.
After, do Nazi's offend you? They are censored in many areas of the world and its not religious based. Stuff like that will come to the US under the guise of "Hate speech / hate crimes". It won't be religious based. Even if it were it would only because it provides a convienent boost.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There is an easy solution to the problem. Blocking software with a central, and public, white list. Using a central process (with local overrides) allows small libraries to benefit and not have to maintain their own white lists, and opens the process to review. And by public/open, I mean that any citizen could look at approvals and rejections, time & date, and who is responsible for the white list request and who's decision it was to ultimately approve or deny it.
And you must allow the white list process to come from both directions, for instance, that breast cancer website could request to be added, perhaps with small fines if they are approved and subsequently change their content such that they would have been denied (changing breast cancer to breast porn, for instance).
If we must block content, at least do it intelligently. We have the technology and the means to build an infrastructure to support this model. We do not, and will not ever, have the means to enforce something like COPA. Our court systems are already full enough, thank you very much.
I wonder how many of these attorneys were guilty of sneaking over to a friends house to look at their older brothers porn mags? Sorry, I had access to porn way before the net was around and I'm sure my son is going to find a way to look at naked ladies regardless of what blocks are in place on the net, or anywhere else.
This is disgusting. We're having an argument that is primarily motivated by religion in front of the DOJ and trying to force that moral view on the rest of the country. Show me proof that nudity, or even showing sex to children, somehow scars them for life. Answer: You can't. In fact, you can look at european culture for proof if you like. Do we need to dig into the mounds of proof that only teaching abstinence doesn't work either? You can make the exact same analogy about Beer, and how the problems we have over here compared with the notable LACK of problems they have in Europe around college bingeing, etc. Beyond that, if the parents want to badly to prevent their children from seeing it, they have the ability to do so. It's called personally responsibility. Chaperoned play-dates. Unplug or password the computer etc etc. People go around putting latches on all their kitchen drawers and outlet covers on their plugs - and then they explain to the kids as they get older. Generally speaking, by the time their old enough to get around the simple safe guards, they've been taught about it. (Of course...... sexuality only seems to be deadly to Americans, but I digress). Hell, let's take this to the logical conclusion. Women and men need to be segregated lest they their lust overcome them. Women must wear veils and never show skin other than their eyes.... oh wait. I think there's a religion out there that does that already. I could go on and on and on regarding this issue. Russia tried to restrict the Western viewpoint. The Nazis burned books. The Middle East... and so on. This is one more form of clear repression, but what amounts to a very large group. America: Land of the Free and home of the Brave? Only if you're a good Christian.
Could it be that the ACLU is using this argument just to win this case? That they are only arguing for software blocking just to defeat COPA?
The submitter talks about flip-flopping, both on the side of the DOJ and the ACLU, but arguments you made in other court cases can't be brought up in later court cases, can they? I mean, the judge doesn't rule against you for flip-flopping, right? You base an argument on the facts of this case and this case alone? Even if the DOJ faces off down the road against the ACLU in a software-blocking case, and the DOJ argues that the ACLU was for software-blocking in the past, the ACLU can say "Your honor, that was in a different case with different circumstances. We were arguing for the effectiveness of software blocking *over* COPA".
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Parents should be putting the restrictions on children not the government.
Considering the subject is pr0n, I believe the correct spelling is "fisting post"
Isn't this something that a globally enforced .XXX domain name for erotica and .MAT for mature would fix?
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
I believe this snippet of the prosecution's opening remarks sum up what I'm trying to say nicely: "There is no other medium of communication that has a federal criminal harmful to minors law. It is not a crime to engage in harmful to minors speech in books or magazines or leaflets. It is not a crime to engage in harmful to minors speech on radio, on records, on movies, on videos or even, indeed, on broadcasts or cable t.v. in all of those instances, there is either no federal law at all or the federal approach to has been regulatory, not criminal."
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
I thought only 1% of webpages contain porn. So what percent of the internet is harmfull to children? 2%?
I think we should spend more time worrying about protecting children in the real world from Chester the Molestor(Mark Foley), horrible parents, war, poverty, and hunger. If the worst thing that happens to a child is they see some porn, they have been very lucky (and I hope they took notes).
Does anyone know of a study or statistics that actually evaluates exposure to pornography on non-adults?
The study would be difficult (it would probably have to rely on self-reporting for evidence, and not only is self-reporting frequently misleading, but easy access to pornography may correlate with other factors in the home).
Sure, passing laws "protecting" the children from the evils of the world is good re-election fodder, but is there any evidence that pornography is harmful to children, and if it is harmful, how harmful is it?
I don't care if it is fair or unfair. I decide what is fair and unfair. If I want to block 100%, that is MY choice. If I want to block 1% that is MY choice.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Now before going further I can't resist saying that I think the whole debate over "harmful to minors" material is pretty silly, because I don't think the pro-censorship side has ever put forth a reason why they think that pictures of naked people, or even people having sex with each other, are harmful to people under 18.
This reminds me of the many successfully defended IRS criminal prosecutions I have read about. When the golden question "show me the law that I am in violation of and I'll pay my taxes" is posed and no answer comes in response, you have to wonder how much of what we "know" is assumption, and how much is verifiable fact?
Why does our govt (and govts in general) prefer COPA to blocking?
1) Tactical -- it's an old bromide that the best defense is a good offense, though our govt's record on throttling sources of Bad Things isn't quite stellar, is it?
2) Govts (and their beneficiaries) desire to extend their control, which COPA provides to a greater degree than blocking. COPA says "the world is a bad place that must be subjugated", blocking says "distasteful information is a fact of life, and here's a way to mitigate it."
3) Govts (and their beneficiaries) desire to limit outside influences on their actions, by various methods such as secrecy or merely reducing the number of eligible voters by criminalizing their tastes. COPA obviously does this way better than blocking.
"If it fills just one more jail cell ^H^H^H saves one child's morals, it would be worth it."
Enforcement of CIPA (or CIPA compliance) is what gets public institutions the vaunted "Erate" monies that continues their low connection fees (+70% off phone company rates.) As such, organizations WANT to follow CIPA rules (including having a blocking filter) to maintain these monies.
COPA would be something for the courts, and legal associations to make money. Nothing more. At least with a Blocking filter on our end it's easy enough to toss a URL in that's being popularized by the media (myspace.com etc) to prevent students from sitting there all day during the business technology classes they're supposed to be working in.
On top of which, when there is good communication between the instructors and the IT staff, it's not a problem to remove a website from the blocks, or exclude it entirely from the filter. (Oblig. F/OSS ref: On top of which, the software that lets you do so is free. ) What it sounds like is a few lawyers, ones with their noses in the trough and ones outside the political machine, sat down and said "hey you know, there's a whole racket we could exploit that nobody has taken advantage of... who wants write a law?"
Porn is the golden goose to the internet, everyone wants to kill it and take it apart to find out why it works so well. But to do so will kill the golden eggs it happens to lay, innovation, cheaper bandwidth, ubiquitous streaming etc. What laws like this end up doing is driving innovation on the part of pornographers (who have already shown their capacity to innovate) to avoid this unenforceable law. Inevitably it will result in more businesses going overseas to avoid the stupidity altogether and the American economy will suffer the consequences of over-regulation.
The proper URL is dansguardian.org I do apologize.
The ACLU has been very consistent on this matter. They didn't like CIPA because it required blocking software in public areas. This impinges on the freedom of speech of many people. They don't like COPA because it censors information that may be inappropriate for children. This too impinges on the freedom of speech of many people. What they're saying is, "We don't need a law that inhibits free speech to protect the children. There are tools out there to protect children should their guardians deem it appropriate, without inhibiting everyone else."
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
"The key is that if you want the overblocking rate to sound low, you talk about the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked. If you want it to sound high, you talk about the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn."
Specifically: "blocked sites that are non-porn" Vs. "non-porn sites that are blocked"
How does this change the percentage? And how does that make it the key? Is it a skellington[sic-humour] key?
How are the majority of high school students who have already had sex anyway, supposed to be harmed by pictures of other people having sex?
The answer to that question is pretty well researched, though almost impossible to implement beyond the family unit.
It's pretty clear to researchers who study the effect that sexual images have on children that they don't develop healthy behaviors around sexual issues. They treat sex as an "object" and not really a part of a more complex relationship. Be careful how you interpret that last statement because it's not an endorsement of monogamy or other more conservative social agendas.
One can observe the effects in American society. Showing nipple at the superbowl generates huge controversy. A healthy adult seeing it will probably call it a cheap stunt. The social costs may be in the increased spread of STD's, though a zealot could whip out other factoids.
It comes down to who is raising your children. The parents or the television/internets. Most of the time it is the latter.
Flame On!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
the government? blah...
squidguard and dansguardian and a few others have blacklists...
simple to install and use...can even get 'ipcop' and load the plugin for it...single disk nearly automagical install...
MANY schools use this...and it blocks a LOT of GREAT content...because A&P classes NEED to research the human anatomy...
words like penis, vagina, breasts...BLOCKED DENIED inappropriate words
Health and Biology try looking up sexually transmitted diseases...BLOCKED DENIED inappropriate words
history, abuses of prisoners in concentration camps...BLOCKED DENIED violent material
and that has absolutely NOTHING to do with IMAGES on those pages...
as I've demonstrated MANY times... create a site...name your images something like 'heavenlyangel001.jpg' have no illicit text..and it will get through EVERY FILTER if not explicitly on a blacklist...
oh then there are the bazillion of URL-proxy's out there...enjoy blocking all of those
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Let's start by getting a few things straight. According to recent numbers about just how many web pages there are on the Internet, the statistic that only 1% of those pages contain pornographic material means that there are over 600 million pages with pornographic content. That is definitely a problem. As to Puls4r's statement that this is primarily a religious or moral issue I say examine the facts. Studies show that pornography is one of the most addictive substances known to man. We have passed law after law to protect minors from addictive substances like alcohol, tobacco and other drugs - but done nothing to protect them from Internet pornography. We are raising a generation of porn and sex addicts, which may very well lead to an increase in deviant sexual behavior. Teens growing up with pornography develop unhealthy and incorrect attitudes about sex, women and relationships in general. Some studies show that eventually porn addicts may turn off to relationships altogether because they are incapable of having a normal, healthy relationship. I agree COPA may not be the way to go - but something needs to be done. The problem with Internet pornography goes far beyond any religious or moral debate. We must have a solution that protects minors and un-wanting consumers, but that allows adults to access the legal content they want. I've found something that looks like it could work - www.cp80.org.
Whenever you want to disprove (or prove) a hypothesis that "doing action X to children hurts them", you encounter some problems; pesky little things like research ethics often get in the way of scientific research.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Meek's Law states:
If technology can be exploited, it will be.
Meek's Corollary states:
All technology can be exploited
No matter how this is decided on the free speech front, it will only be a matter of time before blocking technologies are bypassed. Look at spam. Once predicted to be dead by this year, it has had a renaissance of sorts, with spam volume doubling this year. The reason? The blocked learned to beat the blockers. People are deceiving themselves if they think there is some sort of technological panacea that will address complex social issues that manifest themselves on the Net.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Why is a woman's nipple harmful but a man's nipple isn't?
Because it teaches young girls that their self-worth is dependent on their ability to arouse a man. It exposes children to issues which they should not have to deal, and distorts their perception of the primary purpose of sex.
The primary rationale behind outlawing porn is emotional, not religious. China actively persecutes Christians, yet they also outlaw porn. It isn't simply a religious issue - it is about the emotional well being of children. Even atheist China understands this.
Today, American teenagers have epidemic rates of emotional problems. Where did they come from? What changed from 100 years ago?
100 years ago, heck, even 50 years ago, teenage girls prided themselves on their ability to do domestic duties - cooking, cleaning, social graces, etc. Teenage boys thought of sports and college. Now, both seem to be preoccupied with their appeal to the opposite sex. Their sense of self is now defined by factors largely beyond their control - i.e. their appeal to the opposite sex. Their happiness is no longer within their own control - it is now controlled by a fickle population, one beyond their ability to understand.
Porn only reinforces the notion that a person's self worth is a matter not of their personality and intelligence, but of their sexual appeal to others. It's a subjective, ever changing standard.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Why not designate all adult sites with a ".xxx"? Then it would seem simple to block out the unwanted material? There are public indecency laws in place already to cope with indecency outside that "zone" or "zones". Maybe I'm just simple.
Advocacy is good up until the point that you get to exclude relevant facts inimical to your argument.
IANAL but if you are presenting an argument to a judge or jury, you are not responsible to provide information to them that incriminates your client or their cause. In fact if you did so you wouldn't be a good lawyer.
The responsibility of counter argument or evidence falls solely on the attorney's on the opposing side of the case be it corporate lawyers or attorney generals for the state.
Only the judge and/or jury are supposed to take both side's information into account before making a decision. Not the lawyers presenting their argument.
Outside court is a different story, but you often have to keep in mind that public opinion does creep into the courts. So it is in the best interest for lawyers to never present both sides at any time ever.
In a truly fair world, it would be nice, but unfortunately that isn't how things are.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
blacklists, in situations where one can just add a redirect to an entirely new domain name/IP/whatever, are not effective. It will take care of the major players like playboy, but will fail miserably on the 50-80% of pr0n that's elsewhere. This is why the blocking software is so horribly inefficient and has such high error rates.
Clones are people two.
This will make the white list as effective at controlling "good"/"bad" sites as wikipedia is at controlling facts on controversial subjects.
Clones are people two.
It was religion long ago, then nationalism and pride that was used by the minority power-holding to supress people's free exchange of ideas. In this century both of them are not heeded as much. What to do ? Need to find some other thing that is exploitable for supression - enter child abuse.
we are all delicate on the matter, everyone knows it, and they exploit it - for what - for something that will in fact definitely be used to supress things that are harmful to the power holding minority.
Read radical news here
In recent arguments over the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act, both sides have argued over the efficiency of Internet blocking software.
You mean efficacy. I don't think anyone cares how many processor cycles or other resources are consumed by it. The ratio of false to true positives and negatives is much more relevant.
In schools, if you are trying to research breast cancer walks and can't access one page, then go ask your teacher. They can either log in and reveiw the website for you, or ask their IT to add it to the OK list. Problem solved, and in less time then it takes to get a bathroom pass. In Libraries, ok, maybe you don't want the librarian to know exactly what you're doing online and you feel embarrassed asking for a site to be removed. But wait, why are you looking at sites at a public library if you don't want the librarian to know about it? The only problem I can see is the case where blocking software company gets a huge contract with Budwieser to start blocking places that advertise Coors. Actually, the situation is much more complicated, the situation can't be that simple, because I'm procarastinating at work, and I need something to cry about.
I somwhere work on the Hill.
I have yet to see one letter opposing this piece of legislation (or here about one, out of the thousands we receive a week [although I here tons about immigration, outsourcing, public lands and other topics).
This is because most people which contact their legislators often are considering these laws on a case by case basis (at least that is my best guess), and often do not see or understand the larger effects the laws will have. They will not know the history of the previous legislation.
Slashdot is unique in that there is (at times) an informed majority present. I have serious doubts about the average American voter having a good understanding of these issues (based on the constituent correspondance that I have seen here). In the last couple of weeks, the only major thing I remember regarding an issue that Slashdotters consider important was a full page ad by Digital Freedom in the Roll Call (a newspaper that most legislators read on a daily basis) regarding DRM and piracy.
More needs to be done than voicing your opinion to your legislator. Go out and tell your neighbors, your work contacts, your online associates. Educate them... and then something might change.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
and that "children" is a pretty wide range of ages and abilities.
An adult on 17-year-old with mature critical thinking skills isn't going to be screwed up by a Holocaust denial site. An eight-year-old? You'd better have spent a lot of effort getting that eight-year-old to be skeptical, the effort might not work, and what school is going to train their students to question bad reasoning and arguments from authority? They'd put themselves out of business.
Anyone who gets their ideas about sex from mainstream porn will wind up seriously off the mark. Real women are based on carbon compounds, not silicon compounds(*). Real lovemaking has little in common with porn film activities. And I bet you wouldn't have to be on porn sites for long to find something genuinely contemptuous toward women. A line is crossed when the site starts calling them "bitches".
(*) Silicones, with an e, are silicon compounds. Specifically they're a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms with alkyl side groups.
If only the damn kids would use the school's computers for what they were intended. It seems to me that the school computers are mostly used for non-academic purposes by the students who use them, like playing Flash video games, etc.
Personally, I think access on school computers ought to be limited to a certain few specific online library sites that are created specifically for the kind of research high schoolers need to do, and perhaps several newspaper and major news agency websites.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I seriously doubt there have been any real studies about the "harm" that pornography does to children. But, studies of addiction in adults are common and porn is clearly addictive to some percentage of the population.
The real question is how exactly would you like to answer questions from your children after their viewing a collection of still images from a hardcore porn movie dealing with rape and/or bondage? Is this something that you would be comfortable with? As many younger children do, would you be comfortable with them acting out a scene from such a movie with friends or siblings? Do you believe that sexual relationships based on self-gratification are a positive or negative for the participants?
Also, if you found your 16-year-old son had "discovered" porn and was clearly one of the percentage of the population that responds to this with addictive behavior would you be comfortable with this? Would you deal with this by confinment, behavior modification or counseling? Or nothing at all considering that it was just a period in his life that he would outgrow?
This has nothing to do with morality and religion. It has everything to do with personality and how people interact with others. If, in response to viewing pornography, you treat sexual partners as objects to be used for self-gratification, you aren't behaving as society - any society - would like. If you "use" pornography and self-gratification to such an extent that it overshadows other parts of your life, you have a problem. It is clear from many sources that some percentage of humans do exactly that when exposed to certain types of pornography. Why do we want to expose children to this and then have to deal with the consequences of it?
What we need to do is sit down with our children and monitor them while they are online. Keep in mind that these kids are a lot more technically competent than most adults. You can try blocking/monitoring programs, but nothing out there is going to stop any motivated kid from getting unrestricted internet access for any significant amount of time.
Internet access should not be required for homework. It's too easy to just copy what you need from wikipedia. It takes all the pain and headache out of learning, and the only thing they get out of it is that all of life's answers can be found on a web site.
I feel we must teach our children of the hard times to prepare them for life outside our wallets. Introduce them to computers early on and they won't have career troubles. Get them out doors so they don't grow up to be fat vegetables.
Pretty simple, and it doesn't require the government to make technical decisions.
I don't think the occasional sight of naked people is damaging to children; however, I do think continued exposure to pornography could be: it can develop into an addiction, and it can give teenagers unrealistic ideas about sex (though TV and movies do that already).
In the home, the high false-positive rates with filters could be tempered one of two ways, I think:
a) whenever a site is blocked, pop up a dialogue box allowing a parent to permit the use of that site (temporarily or permanently, the page or the whole site) by entering a password.
b) Allow the child to go anywhere, but LOG all the sites which would normally be filtered. A child is less likely to actively seek out porn if they know their mother knows what sites they visit.
These options would work for children in the library too, but not for adults because of privacy concerns. ("Did you hear that Ethel was looking up breast cancer the other day?") Libraries should have some computers reserved for "adults only" with no filtering at all.
Good fucking luck.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
like most complex issues, penny arcade captures it best.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
...in this case would probably be prohibited from being published on the Internet.
Bravo.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How comes that the kiddo's get acess to porn ??? What is wrong with you people ??? Every bit of attention is necessary to well educate them. Including blocking programs.
Because it's not the government's $%&@ing job to trawl the WWW looking for what it deems to be "inappropriate" sites to add to a National Blacklist, that's why.
P.S. In a criminal trial, the prosecutor is responsible to provide exculpatory evidence. I only bring this up because you mentioned State AGs, who have the power to initiate criminal proceedings.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
the parties most familiar with the case are not concerned with truth, justice, or fairness, only with winning
At least it is honest. Would you rather have learned individuals telling us what "truth" "justice" and "fairness" mean? Ask any ten people what "truth" means and you'll get ten different answers. The problem with sophisticated thinkers telling us what these things mean is that sophisticated thinkers are subject to as much bias as interested parties are, but they think they're not. I'd rather have a system where the biases of the parties involved are front and center.
Law is like plumbing. Everyone needs it. Nobody likes when they don't have it, but nobody likes dealing with the people who have to make it function on a day to day basis (i.e. - plumbers and lawyers). But just like plumbers, lawyers have to deal with the messy details, while everyone else gets to use grandiose terms like "truth," "justice," and "indoor plumbing." ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
the parties most familiar with the case are not concerned with truth, justice, or fairness, only with winning.
This sounds pretty reasonable; generally it's the parties most familiar with any disagreement that will be concerned not with truth, fairness, or justice, but with seeing their side prevail. It's almost always a consequence of forming an opinion on an issue that you become attached to it, and begin to think that the 'other side' are idiots or worse.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'd like to ask you to come out and post that every time somebody claims there's a giant government conspiracy afoot. Think you can handle that? It would really improve things. :)
More seriously, I agree completely. "The government" as an entity, is so disorganized it doesn't know what most of itself is doing, most of the time. It's not trying to take over your life.
The people trying to tell you how to live your life aren't in some dark bunker in Washington, or even in some smoke-filled room; they're probably living on your street. Wake up early on some Sunday morning and you'll probably see them. Unless you lead a very sheltered existence, you probably know several. They are people who disagree with you so fundamentally, and feel so strongly about their own rightness, that they are going to use the laws and government to force you into line.
They have so far been successful because they are numerous, they are organized, and they are quite dedicated. (Maybe not dedicated enough to kill themselves over it, but dedicated enough to kill other people over it, in some cases.) And they have a whole lot of money to grease the wheels of power with.
This is how democracy works; if you can get enough people together, you can enforce your morality on everybody else by force. It's just a matter of getting enough supporters and hoping those who disagree with you are more disorganized than you are.
"The government" is a flag in the wind; it blows in whichever direction the side with the most hot air -- votes, money, time and resources -- wants it to go.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think he's more suggesting that certain governments could enforce their own laws against sites in their own CC TLD -- so all sites under ".us" would be U.S. jurisdiction and follow U.S. law, and ".ir" would be under Iran's. If certain countries wanted to restrict their own citizens to only browsing within their own country's TLD, then they could do that (although they'd have to build their own Great Firewall to do so).
Of course, it would be the end of the Internet as we know it, but I don't think that the anti-porn crusaders are going to let the fact that they'd be destroying one of the most significant human inventions ever created stand in their way.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Isn't this something that a globally enforced .XXX domain name for erotica and .MAT for mature would fix?
Yep. Of course, after the nuclear war and super-smallpox epidemic that wipes out 99% of the Earth's population, I don't think people will be that interested in porn for a while, so that would be the time to do it.
Oh, wait -- you mean, fix it today, in our world? Without killing nearly everybody that might possibly have a different idea of what "erotic" and "mature" mean? That's ridiculous. Don't be stupid.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Uh huh. Which is why all those people in Europe are forced to live our their worthless, depressed, miserable lives in torment; their spirits broken because they've seen so many naked people when they were growing up.
Get real. Our culture doesn't need porn to turn our kids into shallow, vapid little bastards; it does that perfectly fine with nothing but what can be shown on network TV. At the same time, it's quite easy to find sexual imagery in other parts of the world, and by all measurable parameters, children and adolescents have healthier attitudes to sex and relationships, have fewer teen pregnancies, and fewer abortions.
Porn is only bad when it's a young person's only exposure to sexuality. When the only breasts you ever see are Pamela Anderson's, and your only source for relationship advice is Snoop Dogg, it's no wonder that kids get screwy ideas. The problem isn't that they've seen Pamela's boobs or listened to Snoop Dogg On Dating, but that they haven't heard or seen healthy examples that answer the questions they're asking and what they want to know.
What's harmful to children is the attitude behind much censorship, which is basically that "sexuality is bad, and shouldn't be talked about." It's that silence on the part of parents and our culture in general, that would make kids watch porn and think that it's somehow representative of real life. A child who knows and understands what healthy relationships are supposed to entail, and also knows what porn is, and what it isn't, isn't going to be damaged by seeing it.
The problem isn't the porn. The problem is that we're incapable of talking about the porn.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
maybe these guys are missing the underline.. children, if we all stop having "children", then this whole issue would be resolved.
so everybody snip your vagina if your a women, and if you a man just get kicked in the nuts a few hundred dozen times, or better yet turn A sexual, if you're a female please for gods sake turn into a lesbian for all of mankind..z needs and make you post videos and pictures of your new adventures online...
case closed.
Well, not all law. Military Justice, for example, works a bit differently. Neither side is allowed to ignore or hide relevant facts, although the individual's' rights under the Constitution are still protected, in theory. In actuality, of course, a Colonel's word carries more weight in testimony than a Private's word. Still, Military Justice tends to be a bit more objective with less "salesmanship" and misdirection than what you see in civilian criminal cases. Criminal Justice in Iceland, Denmark and Sweden work similarly, though those countries have a different scope for individual rights. I'm in the process of researching "Justice" in different countries right now. I would suggest a book by Mortimer Adler called, "Six Great Ideas" for anybody who wants to have a mind-expanding introduction to things like Truth and Justice.
In Texas, the prosecutor does not have to provide exculpatory evidence until the trial starts. Many times this exculpatory evidence is buried in paperwork, and the defense has no time to evaluate the merits of the prosecution's case. Last week a guy was released who served 13 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The reason for his conviction was laid to this practice of withholding exculpatory evidence until the trial.
Impassioned pleas for guilt or innocence are entertaining, but when the name of the game is "win at any cost", Justice suffers.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
C,mon. If you are not a lawyer and I bet you $10 that you don't know the Constitution of the United States of America, or the Declaration of Independence, I have a 99+% chance of taking your money. You need two things besides ordinary reasoning ability to evaluate Justice: One is a broad introduction to Justice that can be found in any basic Philosophy text or even in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica". The other is a knowledge of the standards by which our laws are supposed to conform. If you don't know the Constitution, you don't have the second criteria. One thing that bothers me: Of the 99% who don't know the Constitution?...I bet at least 50% of those over 18 are voters.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
If so, I'd love to know how you reached that wild conclusion.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
A nipple shown for a split-second shouldn't be an issue in the U.S.
It is though and that's a reflection of how poorly sexuality is taught in the U.S. Showing your kids images of naked bodies without defining them or teaching them tools to deal with them results in this kind of crazy response to a nipple.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
My source is a friend who is a Marraige and Family Therapist. She has adults and teens coming through her and her colleague's offices attempting to undo their destructive sexual behaviors.
Guess what? Nearly all of them grew up in front of the TV with little parental supervision. Most watching material not age appropriate. (ex. Playboy channel)
Sex is just as much an "object"
This is where we disagree. It is a part of a complex human relationship. "Friends with Benefits" can be (not is, can be) a healthy human relationship. There are probably more bad long-term relationships than good ones. But it's impossible to generalize either way.
Lastly, you are missing out on the great psychological/social benefits of food if you treat it as simply an object. Try it. It's great!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
No, we probably don't disagree. At least we don't, if we first agree that food is _also_ an object which is consumed. I didn't say sex was *just* an object, or a gratification of a desire, or lust. But it is *also* that. And *sometimes* it may *just* be that. There's nothing terribly wrong with mindlessly consuming a 200 g bar of chocolate or a bag of chips in front of the TV now and then. There's something wrong with it if you do it every day, and in the process become obese and isolated. And it certainly isn't a healthy diet for kids.
The exact same point applies to sex and pornography. Banning pornography and nudity is equivalent to forbidding the display of chips *and* potatos because chips are unhealty. Being a father I certainly agree with you that kids ideally shouldn't be exposed to hard-core SM porn, but I also think that if it should happen, it would be my responsibility to explain it to them in a manner they would understand. And that way I doubt it could harm them. What *would* harm them was if I were to make a big fuss about it, because I was incapable of dealing rationally with it myself.
And exposure to nudity in general, model pictures, music videos, "erotic art", etc, should not be a problem at all, except for the fact that there usually is too much focus on thin models, promoting a bad ideal for girls. Seeing naked people of all sizes, sexes, colors and shapes - including various decorations - is educational, not harmful. Why is it OK to see pubescent African tribal girls with scarification tatoos and bare breasts in National Geographic, but the pierced nipple of Janet Jackson is not OK?
Apologies if you are Texan yourself and offended by ny rant against Texans. Naturally there are always exceptions to the rules. And as the other reply to my post made clear, we Danes certainly have our share of religious (and also non-religious feminist) nutters. I am aware of that. But contrary to Texas, they don't get to make the rules here (at least not yet.) And of course, Texas is a sexually liberated heaven compared to countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, or China for that matter. This is definitely not only a matter of religion versus non-religion.
-Lasse