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Cleanfeed Canada - What Would It Accomplish?
Bennett Haselton has another article on offer for us today, this time looking at the implications of a Canadian initiative to protect children online. Bennet writes: "Cybertip.ca, a Canadian
clearinghouse for providing information to law enforcement about online
child luring and child pornography, has announced that a
group of major ISPs will begin blocking access to URLs on Cybertip's list
of known child pornography sites. A Cybertip spokesperson says that the
list fluctuates between 500 and 800 sites at any given time." Read on for the rest of his analysis.
The system is named after a similar
filtering system used by service provider BT in the UK. It is also
reminiscent of a law passed in Pennsylvania in 2002 requiring ISPs to block
URLs on a list of known child pornography sites; the law was struck down in 2004 on First
Amendment grounds. Although child pornography is of course not protected
by the First Amendment, the law was struck down partly because the ISPs
were blocking entire servers and IP address ranges, hundreds of thousands
of non-child-pornography sites were also being blocked.
Under the implementation of the Cleanfeed system, representatives from Sasktel, Bell Canada, and Telus claim that only exact URLs will be filtered, not sites hosted at the same IP address. (Although conventional Internet filtering programs sold to parents and schools have also made the same claims, only to turn out to be filtering sites by IP address after all, so we'll have to wait until the filtering is implemented before we know for sure.) The other difference of course is that the Cleanfeed system is not the law, so there's nothing to "strike down" in court. Cybertip did acknowledge that this means customers can get around the filtering for now by switching to a non-participating service provider, although they are encouraging more providers to sign up. Cybertip declined to say whether any providers had simply refused to participate. But of course it's much easier than that to get around the filter, since filter circumvention sites like Anonymouse and StupidCensorship will not be blocked.
So, if it's that easy to circumvent, does it do any good? Even respected Canadian academic and columnist Michael Geist, hardly a friend of censorship in other forms, has spoken out in favor of the plan. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it doesn't accomplish anything meaningful, and may set a horrible precedent that could make it much easier to block other content in the future.
First of all, it seems that it obviously won't stop anyone who is deliberately looking for child porn. Empirically there's no way to tell -- we don't whether systems like Cleanfeed in the UK have prevented people from accessing child pornography on purpose. Even if the providers are counting the number of blocked accesses to known child porn sites, nobody knows what people have been looking at instead through proxy sites like Anonymouse. All we can do is ask, logically, whether it is likely to work. I think purely logical arguments are frustrating when there is no empirical data to act as a referee, but let's face it, users are not going to self-report on their success at finding child pornography, and there's no way to see what users are accessing through encrypted circumvention sites. Logic is all we have.
So, consider people who are deliberately looking for child pornography. Such people are likely to be resourceful to begin with (since real child porn -- remember, non-sexual pictures of naked children do not count -- is vastly less common than regular porn; Cybertip claims after all that they "only" have about 800 sites on their list, compared to millions of regular porn sites). Virtually all such people would be aware of circumvention sites like Anonymouse, or of peer-to-peer networks, which Cybertip says they have no plans to block. So nothing is blocked from people who want to get around the filter.
The only scenario where the filters could make a difference is the case where someone accidentally accesses a child porn site. Now when I first read the Cybertip press release announcing that the filter would aim to stop "accidental" exposure to child porn, I thought that was just a tactfully sarcastic way of referring to the people who get caught accessing child porn and claim it was just a mistake. But Cybertip.ca claims they've received over 10,000 reports since January 2005 from people who accessed child porn by accident. Even though that only works out to about 15 per day, I have to concede in those cases it almost certainly was a bona fide mistake, for the simple reason that nobody would voluntarily report accessing a child pornography URL that they visited on purpose. But even so, there's the question: What have you accomplished by blocking accidental exposure?
I would argue that the harm done by child pornography is to the minors coerced into the production of it, not to the people who view it. (This, by the way, corresponds with current U.S. jurisprudence; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that a law banning fake child porn was unconstitutional, even when the viewer can't tell the difference.) Obviously you prevent the most damage by stopping child porn at the production stage, but if it's too late for that, you can try to stop people from obtaining it willfully. This lowers the demand and decreases the incentive for people to produce more in the future.
But how would it lower demand if you block people from accessing it accidentally? If those people weren't going to proceed to buy or download more pictures anyway, then they're not fueling the demand. You can block them from accessing the pictures, but the pictures are still out there, and the people who really are fueling the demand can still access them.
So it seems that by blocking someone from accidentally viewing child porn, all you've really accomplished is to avoid offending their sensibilities. Now I don't mean that mockingly, I'm certainly not disagreeing with anyone whose sensibilities are offended by child porn. But there are lots of graphic pictures on the Internet that could offend someone's sensibilities, which are outside of Cleanfeed's mandate. Consider a photo of a 16-year-old having sex, versus a photo of an adult woman fellating a horse; even though the former is illegal to possess and the latter isn't, I think most people would be more grossed out by the second one. (I would even argue that there was more harm to the participants in the making of the second one, and in this case the law's priorities are a bit screwed up. Poor horse!)
So, why block 1% of the content that would offend someone's sensibilities, when 99% of the content that would still offend that person would still be out there? The fact that the 1% is illegal doesn't answer the question; even if it's illegal, you don't have to block it, so what have you accomplished if you do?
Possibly law enforcement is sick of people using the "I accidentally clicked on it" excuse when they get caught accessing child pornography, and wants to remove that as a defense. But couldn't someone just as easily claim that they "accidentally" accessed child pornography through a circumvention site like Anonymouse? They could claim that they thought they were accessing a regular porn site, they were using a circumventor to protect their privacy, and they didn't know that the site carried child porn and didn't find out until they'd already accessed it. So it doesn't seem like the filtering would remove the "accidental" defense.
So, I don't think the filtering accomplishes much at all, but it could set a very bad precedent once the filters are in place. Once Internet users have accepted the precedent that ISPs should block content that is "probably" illegal, what's to stop organizations and lawmakers from demanding that ISPs block access to overseas sites that violate copyright, for example, as the RIAA did in 2002? The technical means will already be in place, and more importantly, people will have gotten used to the idea that legally "questionable" content should be blocked. And with lobbyists claiming that 90% of content on peer-to-peer networks violates copyright laws, wouldn't it follow logically to block peer-to-peer traffic as well?
In a legislative climate where lawmakers have proposed everything from jail time for p2p developers to letting the RIAA hack people's PCs for distributing copyrighted files, we should resist any kind of content-based blocking that would let them get their foot in the door. That includes even well-intentioned efforts like Cleanfeed.
Under the implementation of the Cleanfeed system, representatives from Sasktel, Bell Canada, and Telus claim that only exact URLs will be filtered, not sites hosted at the same IP address. (Although conventional Internet filtering programs sold to parents and schools have also made the same claims, only to turn out to be filtering sites by IP address after all, so we'll have to wait until the filtering is implemented before we know for sure.) The other difference of course is that the Cleanfeed system is not the law, so there's nothing to "strike down" in court. Cybertip did acknowledge that this means customers can get around the filtering for now by switching to a non-participating service provider, although they are encouraging more providers to sign up. Cybertip declined to say whether any providers had simply refused to participate. But of course it's much easier than that to get around the filter, since filter circumvention sites like Anonymouse and StupidCensorship will not be blocked.
So, if it's that easy to circumvent, does it do any good? Even respected Canadian academic and columnist Michael Geist, hardly a friend of censorship in other forms, has spoken out in favor of the plan. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it doesn't accomplish anything meaningful, and may set a horrible precedent that could make it much easier to block other content in the future.
First of all, it seems that it obviously won't stop anyone who is deliberately looking for child porn. Empirically there's no way to tell -- we don't whether systems like Cleanfeed in the UK have prevented people from accessing child pornography on purpose. Even if the providers are counting the number of blocked accesses to known child porn sites, nobody knows what people have been looking at instead through proxy sites like Anonymouse. All we can do is ask, logically, whether it is likely to work. I think purely logical arguments are frustrating when there is no empirical data to act as a referee, but let's face it, users are not going to self-report on their success at finding child pornography, and there's no way to see what users are accessing through encrypted circumvention sites. Logic is all we have.
So, consider people who are deliberately looking for child pornography. Such people are likely to be resourceful to begin with (since real child porn -- remember, non-sexual pictures of naked children do not count -- is vastly less common than regular porn; Cybertip claims after all that they "only" have about 800 sites on their list, compared to millions of regular porn sites). Virtually all such people would be aware of circumvention sites like Anonymouse, or of peer-to-peer networks, which Cybertip says they have no plans to block. So nothing is blocked from people who want to get around the filter.
The only scenario where the filters could make a difference is the case where someone accidentally accesses a child porn site. Now when I first read the Cybertip press release announcing that the filter would aim to stop "accidental" exposure to child porn, I thought that was just a tactfully sarcastic way of referring to the people who get caught accessing child porn and claim it was just a mistake. But Cybertip.ca claims they've received over 10,000 reports since January 2005 from people who accessed child porn by accident. Even though that only works out to about 15 per day, I have to concede in those cases it almost certainly was a bona fide mistake, for the simple reason that nobody would voluntarily report accessing a child pornography URL that they visited on purpose. But even so, there's the question: What have you accomplished by blocking accidental exposure?
I would argue that the harm done by child pornography is to the minors coerced into the production of it, not to the people who view it. (This, by the way, corresponds with current U.S. jurisprudence; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that a law banning fake child porn was unconstitutional, even when the viewer can't tell the difference.) Obviously you prevent the most damage by stopping child porn at the production stage, but if it's too late for that, you can try to stop people from obtaining it willfully. This lowers the demand and decreases the incentive for people to produce more in the future.
But how would it lower demand if you block people from accessing it accidentally? If those people weren't going to proceed to buy or download more pictures anyway, then they're not fueling the demand. You can block them from accessing the pictures, but the pictures are still out there, and the people who really are fueling the demand can still access them.
So it seems that by blocking someone from accidentally viewing child porn, all you've really accomplished is to avoid offending their sensibilities. Now I don't mean that mockingly, I'm certainly not disagreeing with anyone whose sensibilities are offended by child porn. But there are lots of graphic pictures on the Internet that could offend someone's sensibilities, which are outside of Cleanfeed's mandate. Consider a photo of a 16-year-old having sex, versus a photo of an adult woman fellating a horse; even though the former is illegal to possess and the latter isn't, I think most people would be more grossed out by the second one. (I would even argue that there was more harm to the participants in the making of the second one, and in this case the law's priorities are a bit screwed up. Poor horse!)
So, why block 1% of the content that would offend someone's sensibilities, when 99% of the content that would still offend that person would still be out there? The fact that the 1% is illegal doesn't answer the question; even if it's illegal, you don't have to block it, so what have you accomplished if you do?
Possibly law enforcement is sick of people using the "I accidentally clicked on it" excuse when they get caught accessing child pornography, and wants to remove that as a defense. But couldn't someone just as easily claim that they "accidentally" accessed child pornography through a circumvention site like Anonymouse? They could claim that they thought they were accessing a regular porn site, they were using a circumventor to protect their privacy, and they didn't know that the site carried child porn and didn't find out until they'd already accessed it. So it doesn't seem like the filtering would remove the "accidental" defense.
So, I don't think the filtering accomplishes much at all, but it could set a very bad precedent once the filters are in place. Once Internet users have accepted the precedent that ISPs should block content that is "probably" illegal, what's to stop organizations and lawmakers from demanding that ISPs block access to overseas sites that violate copyright, for example, as the RIAA did in 2002? The technical means will already be in place, and more importantly, people will have gotten used to the idea that legally "questionable" content should be blocked. And with lobbyists claiming that 90% of content on peer-to-peer networks violates copyright laws, wouldn't it follow logically to block peer-to-peer traffic as well?
In a legislative climate where lawmakers have proposed everything from jail time for p2p developers to letting the RIAA hack people's PCs for distributing copyrighted files, we should resist any kind of content-based blocking that would let them get their foot in the door. That includes even well-intentioned efforts like Cleanfeed.
In Canada, the internet comes without 4chan.
Another attempt to get adults to give up some freedoms in the name of the precious children who must be free of sex predators so they can grow up to live in a society that gives up freedoms in order to protect the precious children...
Blar.
If we start blocking entire ranges of IP's in Canada, US, UK, etc then the host countries who refuse to take action against these sites may start noticing that the whole world has blocked them. Some of these sites are "pay" sites too, so if we start cutting off their revenue then of course that's is also good. It's harder to develop a pay model via p2p where most of the child porn is traded but of course we should go after the commercial child pornographer' first which is mostly on web sites. I admit we can enver get rid of child porn 100%, but Money should not be made on this sick enterprise.
...if those websites are blocked?
You brought up a lot of interesting arguments on why those ISP's should not be able to put in such a system, unfortunately all your legal reasoning is based on American law and not Canadian law. If you haven't figured it out yet, things are different up here. Child porn is simply a bad idea and I stand behind the Canadian ISP's making a effort to limit the damage done. If the world did everything by your standards nothing would ever be done as nothing is every 100%.
ok. so this will make it harder for people to access child porn...and that's a good thing, but not impossible...only an inconveience really. Why not spend money and develop a systems that accuratley tracks CP traders and frequent CP site visitors. or maybe a better system to track sex predators on social networking sites, which is an even scarier problem. The blocking is a good step, but not a very big one, a lot more ground needs to be gained but you have to start somewhere I guess.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
But, isn't it easier to take down these sites, instead of blocking them? I see cops catching the drug dealers, not forming a ring around them so people won't buy drugs from them. So why don't they do the same thing to these sites.
Why BLOCK access? Do they think that, if people ignore them they will go away?
It is only a matter of time before the police will block sites they disagree with that has nothing to do with child pr0n...
Create "Safe List" and give every ISP user Online form to turn "protection" on/off.
- simple to implement
- no software install on user end.
Why not? Because protecting children is not a point!
Censorship is what they are after.
As the summary says, the blocking will be trivial to circumvent. So, why not make the blocking available? It sounds like a value-added feature that will be great marketing fodder. You can either advertise ``safer surfing'' or ``no blocking,'' depending on whether you implement it. As long as it's a free market decision and not a government mandate, I think it's all good.
See what I've been reading.
Suggesting there is a slippery slope here is a bit of a stretch. Depending on how the filtering is done (and I think we can all agree that is the critically important part here) this could be very good. It means I cannot accidentally end up at a site providing illegal material. Child porn is a bit odd under canadian law (as it is everywhere) because what counts as porn, what counts as a child, what counts as art, what about virtual actors or drawings blah blah blah, meaning that production of child porn is illegal but possession of somethings which other places *may* define as child porn could be legal etc... All in all, if its likely illegal here, I'd rather not land there accidentally, and no one who does browse/pay/participate in those sites has any excuse if they are caught.
If goofle.com and goohle.com both led to child porn, but google.com does not, I would tend to prefer the former two by default be inaccessable. Possession of child porn, either because someone spammed me or because I can't type properly is not really something I want to deal with. Whether you're guilty of anything or not, if your name gets in the paper with 'Child pornography' next to it, your job is gone, your marriage is gone, and all in all you aren't in a good place to be.
Being from Canada, I think the whole idea is just silly. They're treating the symptoms and not the root cause - again.
Ignoring the fact that CP is definitely illegal here, incompetently blocking CP is not going to solve anything. Pedophiles and sex offenders are just that, you don't grow or learn into it when you get older. The effort and resources could be better put to catching these criminals rather than just blanketing the subject.
On a side note, opting out is practically impossible being that every major internet provider in Canada has already signed up.
I'm not sure if Canada has common-carrier laws like our American counter-parts, but if we do, this must be some clear violation of that stature.
Am I the only one that read that and thought about misleading child molesters into thinking they'll win a date with a kid to get them to purchase online magazine subscriptions, then sending Dave Sayer to one lucky molesters house with a camera crew periodicly ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Maybe the real intent of this campaign is to keep Canadian citizens distracted from the real issues facing their country. Or perhaps to see just many rights people are willing to surrender in the name of fighting _____________.
I still don't understand the concept behind making images illegal. Granted, someone who wants to look at this kind of stuff might have a really messed up sense of morality, and probably reality as well, but I don't see how this is a legal issue before there is an actual victim. I would think that the kind of depravity which would cause someone to seek out such images would be better handled by the Church than the law, as it seems to me that this is more of a spiritual and emotional problem than a legal one. I just don't see how the threat of jail time is going to fix someone's dirty obsession.
OTOH, this probably does not have anything to do with the question at hand, and is instead a proxy for those who want to control the population by making certain thoughts criminal. This issue would be merely the test bed for effective means of thought control, a legal means of establishing the validity of thought crime. If, by using an emotionally charged subject, they can establish a legal equivalence of the crime, and merely thinking about it, then it paves the way to the extension of making political crimes subject to the same kind of enforcement as well.
If you think about it, the above dialog applies equally well to both child pornography and terrorism.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Here is more about it: http://www.pkblogs.com/thegallopingbeaver/2006/03/ canadian-software-will-breakdown-great.html
Best of all, that very tool is now open source!
But even so, there's the question: What have you accomplished by blocking accidental exposure?
Well for one, you're potentially protecting yourself from false accusations of accessing child porn, when you legitimately accessed it by accident by clicking on some link where you didn't know what would come up.
That is assuming of course that the agencies won't be using this proxy and filter list to charge people who are blocked with *attempting* to access the material.
Wrong example man, WRONG example. Poor horse, _RIGHT_.
-math
Consider a photo of a 16-year-old having sex, versus a photo of an adult woman fellating a horse; even though the former is illegal to possess and the latter isn't, I think most people would be more grossed out by the second one. (I would even argue that there was more harm to the participants in the making of the second one, and in this case the law's priorities are a bit screwed up. Poor horse!)
What are you talking about "poor horse"? It's getting a free BJ and I'm sure if he didn't like it or it was "causing harm" the lady would get her head kicked clean off. Last I checked, horses are quite big and very strong, I've seen them kick a door right off it's hinges.
Instead of banning child porn sites and pretending this is going to reduce exploitation of children, it should be really easy for cops to get warrants to search the logs of child porn ISPs and do undercover operations to find child predators. Unfortunately the reality is that political pressure dictates that cops work to reduce the appearance of crime (not actual crime) since that is what local governments want in order to look good for the next election. They also like controlling what people can and can't see.
Definitions of child are also getting increasingly out of touch with reality. In Alberta for instance the age of consent is 14 (which I think is fairly reasonable) but child porn definitions often use "under 18" as the definition (not I haven't RTFA).
I am wondering if they're opening themselves to a charge under the OHRT for blocking legit content. Just wait til they block a political site that has nothing to do with child porn. Or a class action lawsuit.
I dont understand why they're opening the door on themselves to being classified as a non-common-carrier, meaning they will have to filter *ALL* content. If they filter child porn, why not filter emails for the same content, or discussions of same? Or discussions of *ANYTHING* illegal, from planning a bank heist, to a terrorist dinner get together to copying your friends' matrix DVDs illegally? (Not that the govt isnt already scanning for some of this).
I hope everyone does their homework on this and finds what sites they block and compiles them in a list and files a formal complaint thru the necesary channels.
-math
Site in country X.
Country X doesn't care.
Canada cops can't arrest people in country X.
In this case the best Canada can do is stop Canada's contribution to the site's traffic. It won't cause the site to shut down but if every country does it it might. That's called "doing your part".
Extrapolating about Canadian law based on American law works half the time, given that both American law and Canadian law are descendants of British law, and even after the 1776 schism of the common law, several countries have enacted treaties to harmonize aspects of their laws. Even if it falls into the half where it does not work, it's still useful as a way to state that such a measure could never cross the border.
This is a typical, statist response to problem solving and is no more effective than Stalinist five-year plans. Give citizens the tools to act in their own self-interest and let them determine what, if anything, they wish to block. Centralized approaches simply will not work. Someone will always find an unanticipated means to circumvent centralized planning. Effective solutions only occur by devolving control to the lowest possible level.
Another attempt to get adults to give up some freedoms in the name of the precious children
What freedoms are those, again? If I don't want to see you internet access to a given site, well, that's my right under free market principles. If you don't like it, find another provider. If I want to simultaneously limit my corporate liability and improve my public relations by actively preventing people from committing a crime (deliberately accessing illegal content), well, that's my right.
If you want to set up your own ISP in Canada without those restrictions, go ahead. If you want to set up an ISP that only shows web-pages about cats, or muffins, or religion, or science, or whatever, go ahead... it's not illegal.
I think you're confusing hype with loss of freedoms. The entire "child pornography" topic is usually just hype -- because if governments and citizens really cared about child abuse, they'd spend more time finding better ways to monitor and prevent child abuse by parents and relatives.
In the vast majority of cases, the abuser is someone the child knows well, and the abuse is not recorded in any way. Given this truth, why all the fuss over the recordings (the "child porn"), and where is the outrage over the real issue, the child *abuse*? The misplaced focus is depressing...
And watch the safer-surfing ISPs decline to renew peering arrangements with no-blocking ISPs, forcing no-blocking ISPs to pay extra for transit to customers of safer-surfing ISPs. And watch the safer-surfing ISPs route mail from the no-blocking ISPs to junk mail folders. And watch both the local cable ISP and the local DSL ISP in a given town become safer-surfing ISPs.
Am I the only one who read the tag and thought, "how am I supposed to think of the children if I can't look at their nekkid pictures?"
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Now if I can just figure out how to get my competitor's websites into the Cybertips list, I can put those suckers out of business right quickly! Seriously, doesn't this give whoever maintains the list a heck of a lot of power?
Ban children from accessing the internet!
End of conversation. You're welcome.
The most important thing about this program is that it is building a censorship infrastructure in Canada. Once all ISPs have implemented a national blacklist (supposedly only of child porn sites), it is simple enough to expand it to include other sites.
Child Porn is just a MacGuffin, a universally despised act that is easy enough to strike up paranoia about. Unlike Terrorism, or Drugs, or Global Warming, or other issues, it has universal political support for legislation dealing with the problem.
Here is how the system is going to be expanded in Canada:
1. Block Child Porn Sites (after all, only a filthy disgusting pedophile would be against blocking child porn sites).
2. Block "Hate" Sites (after all, only a filthy digusting Nazi would be against blocking hate sites).
3. Block Political "Advertising" (After all, we don't want people with lots of money advertising on the internet, and corrupting our democracy!)
4. Block Dangerous Information (after all, why does someone really need to know how to build a gun, or a bomb, or manufacture drugs)
5. Block Sites that Compete Unfairly (after all, Google has a monopoly on search engines! Canadians shouldn't use an American monopoly, they should use a Canadian search engine, run by the CBC!)
6. Block Sites that Exploit Women (after all, we don't want women to be exploited... that is why we need to ban the Miss Universe pagent website!)
7. Block 'Bad' News Sites (after all, Fox News or Al Jazeera are highly biased news channels... they could confuse the minds of Canadians with their one-sided programs).
And so on, and so forth. Once the infrastructure is in place, it costs NOTHING to expand the list of blocked sites - and it is always easy enough to come up with some sort of reasonable arguement why certain sites should be blocked. Once this system is in place and works well, every political party will be screaming to have something they don't like banned - and without any real Libertarian minority in Canada, the only arguement will be over what things should be banned.
Cleanfeed Canada advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting child pornography. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) other legitimate sites would be affected
(x) It is useless against anonymous proxies
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Proxies
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on censorship is unacceptable
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about it without being censored
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(x) I don't want the government looking at my surfing habits
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I would gladly give up my own personal freedom and well being to make sure my children grow up safe. That's just what being a parent is, protecting your children, even if it is costly. Now you may say that I'm just perpetuating the cycle, and eventually we will all give up our rights and freedoms, but I say that there is no 'right' to abuse my children, and no 'freedom' to watch them being abused on some child porn website. I can't imagine that you wouldn't want to give up your ability to look at child porn just because you feel you are free to do so and giving up that ability hinders your freedoms somehow. And what's so wrong about a world free of sex predators!?!
Har?
Acts of child exploitation should be illegal, but not the images.
I never really thought that child porn laws affected me until my daughter was born. I regulary post pics of her to flickr and I am constantly worried about what is appropriate or not, it's insane. Child pornography is a pretty fuzzy slope, and I've heard stories of other well-intentioned parents getting burned before. Having these laws just stifles and restricts normal people, while letting child molestors go unnoticed and underground.
I also feel compelled to post this mesage AC since there is such hysteria with this subject. I'm sure others who would otherwise post support for image legalization won't because of potential accusations.
>I'm not sure if Canada has common-carrier laws like our
>American counter-parts, but if we do....
Its stunning how many canadians know more about american laws, customs and well....everything else, than about their own country.
The more you live here, the more you wonder if anyone would notice if this became a US state or a banana republic like Guam or Puerto Rico.
As a canadian, I can not tell you what is the difference between both people.
I think northern USstates have more in common with their canadian counterparts than with their southern countrymen.
I'm trying hard to understand the purpose of this, to no avail...
First, I think it's ridiculous to block Child Porn from people who might accidentally stumble upon it. If you come across a CP site your free to easily close the window or to register the address and take appropriate measures (report the IP address to authorities or something). I can't think of any other illegal activity where the state is concerned from people accidentally witnessing it while they don't do anything about it.
Second, I assume we agree that someone actually looking for CP won't be stopped because of this filtering. Perhaps he'll have to work harder to access the site, but there are many ways around ISP filtering.
Third, the article talks about "protecting children online". Are they concerned about children accidentally (or willingly) accessing CP? The younger a child is, the bigger the chance he/she has to access what would otherwise be considered child porn without requiring the net... sometimes looking in the mirror is enough. I'd be more concerned about the child posing in the picture than about a child that might be looking at it. I guess most parents would like to shield their kids from all porn, and not just the more illegal ones.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Well, the ISPs can prevent their customers from using lots of sites they don't like in the name of "protecting the children". The few people who either don't trust the ISPs to make those choices for them or who are child pornographers, etc. will circumvent it - but the ways in which they might do so may be easier for government(s) to monitor. As long as only a few people circumvent the restrictions, the signal/noise ratio is high, making monitoring of those means worthwhile. The Canadian gov't might even presume evil of users circumventing the blocking ISPs. And of course, no large business would ever abuse the privilege of controlling its customers' access to information...
It's kind of like a war - mine the easy way, put snipers on the hard way. Of course, this would be war on one's own citizens/customers, but that's a minor detail.
They're treating the symptoms and not the root cause - again.
Of course they're treating the symptoms, and not the root cause. We do not even know what the root cause is, let alone have any treatments it. We have no idea what makes a pedophile a pedophile, or how to alter them to no longer be a pedophile. Same for racists, kleptomaniacs, gays, and windows users. Don't you think if we knew how to cure aberrant behaviour, we would?
No, the only thing we can do is make it easier for people to block out websites that promote/depict behaviour they find unacceptable. As long as there are strict guidelines as to what gets put on the blacklist, periodic reviews, and policies/procedures for getting delisted, I'm fine with this.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If you disagree with this law or feel it isn't necessary then you are giving gas to the car that is the exploitation of children. Might as well support child furry-porn, or furries in general, or zoophiles, and child labor. There are a lot of sick people out there and there are steps needed to be taken in order to stop such retardation from spreading!
As long as this law doesn't breach the rights of law-abiding citizens, then I'm all for it. I believe the canadian government fully reviewed this law so that it was as impartial as it can be and does not affect those who are already innocent.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Cybertip claims after all that they "only" have about 800 sites on their list, compared to millions of regular porn sites).
And of those 800 sites (the FBI, by contrast, say there's hundreds of thousands!), 'll bet that 99.9% of them contain, at best, questionable content. That is, they offer content that may offend some, may or may not be considered illegal (in any number of jurisdictions), and most definitely do not contain of anyone having sex. The other 0.1% I'll leave aside.
The truth of the matter is there are, and have always been, many sites that are designed to appeal to prurient interests. So what else is new,right? These sites do not cross any line that would make them subject to being shut down by local authorities. They want to stay on the "legal" side, and typically prefer to stay on the "legal and innocent enough" side, because they don't want the attention, but more importantly, their income is based on credit card receipts. In recent years, credit card companies have implemented policies refusing payment to such sites.
So, let's call them "girlie" sites, because that what they are. Girlie sites with a lot of suggestive poses and clothing, but little (if ever) nudity, and definitely no sex of any kind. And if that sounds too benign, note that these are the very sites you read about in the papers when they get shut down. The headlines, of course, are very different.
Now as to the matter of "harm", well that's a legitimate question. A parent that allows their child to engage in any kind of modelling, prurient or otherwise, may be harming that child. Dr. Phil would say, "Yes, they definitely are being harmed, exploited and abused." On the other hand, if the content of Myspace is any indication, that conclusion doesn't reconcile with the attitudes and mores of today's kids (or parents, it seems), and doesn't take into account the parents' or child's wishes, irrespective of how outsiders may judge them.
The people who do commit real crimes against children typically are family relatives or friends of the family. They don't have websites.
This getting together of ISPs under the pretext of protecting children is disigenuous and dangerous. The motivation for this and similar actions I see as two-fold. First, most parents aren't being very good parents (all too busy, right?), and the internet was never designed to be "kid-friendly." Removing access to content that isn't suitable for kids is a legitimate, but highly debatable, goal. Second, most people have a strong dislike for prurient subject matter, and have an even stronger disklike for prurient subject matter that involves anyone under the mythical age of 18. If you can't convince the site owners, the models, or their parents to stop, the goal becomes legislating away access for the customers. The scenario could be best described as, "Yeah, it's not illegal, but we're not going to let you watch it." and is simply legislating morality.
The human race is fascinating... here we are in the midst of the following events:
- An ongoing, unjustified war in Iraq which has killed between 100,000 and 750,000 people,- The ongoing occupation of Palestine which has, just in the past 6 months, resulted in hundreds of assassinations and "collateral" deaths
- The recent war in Lebanon which killed over 300 children under 12 (you are concerned about the children, right?)
- The use of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon, leaving hundreds of thousands of minelets on school grounds, in forests, and in back yards,
- The ongoing massacres in Darfur,
- The ongoing war between the Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers,
- The potential threat of a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel,
- The growing national debt and deficit of the United States,
- Global climate change,
- Governmental interference with scientific studies, and non-scientific policy decisions
- The return of so-called "morality" (read: christian morality, highly offensive to an atheist like me) into the US legal system
- The depletion of our world's natural resources at an alarming rate
- The erosion of the public domain and privatization of all information
- Continual attacks on the US electoral system
And what are we talking about? Sex. Children are dying and being horribly maimed from the bombs we build, sell, and drop. And we're concerned with sex. The US has 1/4 of the world's prison population, and we're concerned with Sex. Be it gay marriage, under-18 porn, or buying sex toys in Texas. We're on the verge of running out of oil - a mainstay of our global economy. Our environment is heating more quickly than ever witnessed by humans. We have leader-fueled rhetoric causing the destruction of entire neighborhoods. And we talk about Sex.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
They continue giving their teens and pre-teens web cams, high speed Internet, and computers in the privacy of their bedroom and not in the family room where the parents *might* once in a while take notice of what they are up. Silly me. The family room is for cable and satellite television where a plethora of channels market sex to them right under the watchful eye of mom and dad who never think to just maybe turn the channel to Discovery Science or History Channel International.
Nope, it's that army of sex predators twisting their kids like Darth Sidious. Ooh, they've found the phantom menace...
Yeah, geek humor aside, this does remind me of the witch hunts of old, the commie hunts of the 50s, and the satanic cult hunts of the 80s. Always some nefarious group to place the blame on rather than the as usual incompetent parenting.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The goal being de facto censorship by pressuring all ISPs to filter. If an ISP won't filter, you organize a boycott coupled with a shame campaign so that not only do they lose the people who actively boycott, but also people who don't want to be labeled as a pervert for staying. That leaves just the perverts. And then once you have all the perverts using one ISP, you hit it with a raid, seize the user records, and bust all their users, wiping out that ISP.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Well hello slippery slope. Look I hate the exploitation of children as much as anyone, especially sexual exploitation, it makes my blood boil. But, the fact of the matter is this sets a dangerous precedent. The question is obvious - what will they block "for" you to "protect" you next?
I think the only real impact we'll see is unrelated sites being blocked with no real explanation as to how they got on the list, as with most blacklists. Also, we may eventually see people being raided/arrested mistakenly for... I don't know... going to a site that springs a blocked popup ad on them?
While I'm predicting the worst, I expect that as part of the filtering, people will now find that there are logs of every URL they've accessed in the few cases where those logs don't already exist. Usually they don't matter (ISP server logs, etc) but now they may be skimmed to profile net users' habits for law enforcement agencies like CSIS.
Ultimately, if this isn't scrapped in the early stages, expect its reach to spread first across other kinds of porn, then P2P sites, and looking at the history of Canadian Customs & Revenue Agency, eventually we'll have any sites they disagree with blocked, for example, for expressing certain opinions. (Look up all the books that customs has confiscated for no legally acceptable reason...)
Then again, not nearly as many people have been afraid to speak out against this as I thought, so it's also possible that it'll be gone within a year of its implementation.
Whatever happened to due process?
If these sites contain child pornography, wouldn't that be a crime in and of themselves? Shouldn'these sites be taken down?
Okay, what if the sites are out of country you ask? Isn't it still a crime to view them? Instead of blocking them, shouldn't the government be trying to go after people viewing them?
I do not like the idea of an ISP censoring, regardless of how noble it might be.
...even if this does nothing, you're in favor of it because it feels like it's doing something.
The world is indeed populated by stupid people. No offense.
NO,absolutely not. Child porn images should never be legal and nothing anyone says could convince me otherwise.
If you have concerns over an image you are posting to flickr then just don't post that image. It is pretty simple.
to all of their Canadian users.
First of all, child pornography depicting real victims creates problems. One, it can in a sense justify the crime, so those viewing it are in a sense justifying what happened. Two, it harms the minors after the fact by people still viewing what has happened to them.
As I said in another post, the issue is due process.
If these sites contain child pornography, wouldn't that be a crime in and of themselves? Shouldn'these sites be taken down?
Okay, what if the sites are out of country you ask? Isn't it still a crime to view them? Instead of blocking them, shouldn't the government be trying to go after people viewing them?
I do not like the idea of an ISP censoring, regardless of how noble it might be.
Who makes the determination of what sites to block? If you leave this to the politicans, they'll stretch the determining factors too far and legitimate pornographic sites might get caught up in the cross hairs. This is one problem not easily solved.
I don't care if the system is not perfect. Enough with the conspiracy theories, this is Canada we are talking about not some totalitarian country. If this system can stop just one person accessing kiddy porn that is not technically savvy enough to bypass the system than I am all for it. This is child porn we are talking about remember, every little bit helps.
Bennett's article refers to the problem of blocking web sites by IP address or ISP, which is easy but creates large amounts of collateral damage. (One blocklist that anti-censorship people complained about in the past blocked all of terra.es, one of the world's largest hosting sites, and IP-block overkill is a well-known problem with anti-spammer blocklists.) Alternatively, you could put URL proxy filters on all web traffic at the ISP peering points, which is a large expense and does strongly invite blocking other kinds of traffic once you've done it, as the parent posting discusses. Proxying all web traffic is an approach some smaller ISPs took in the past, so they could use caching proxies and avoid the bandwidth costs of re-downloading common pages, but I doubt it's very common today, except perhaps at corporate and university firewalls.
There is an intermediate technical approach if they're clever - instead of running all web traffic through filters, or blocking all of the IPs that carry the banned material, route the IP addresses of the banned sites to a filtering server, and do the more detailed URL filtering there. This lets you avoid URL handling for most traffic that isn't banned, but still lets you do it for the IP addresses that the targets are in or near. The Internet currently carries about 200000 routes - this would require adding fewer than 1000 routes to ISPs' routers, which isn't a big impact, and lets you reduce costs by using much smaller servers for URL filtering. It also keeps the censorship service as a small specialized application rather than a massive infrastructure that's inviting more censorship.
Censorship is unfortunately a real problem in Canada. I was once at a conference in BC that got picketed by lefties because one of the speakers was a controversial right-wing newspaper publisher from Vancouver area. He was in fact obnoxious, but he was there to talk about censorship, which he knew pretty well because there were censorship laws and regulations that had been written specifically to censor him. On our way to the conference, Canadian customs officials wanted to examine all the literature we were bringing with us - not because of censorship, but because we'd made the mistake of saying we were going to a conference and therefore they suspected we might be thinking about selling something that they could tax. A more well-known example of Canadian censorship was that US feminists got Canada to pass censorship laws because pornography exploits women, and of course the first material that customs started confiscating was lesbian pornography produced by other US feminists... Apparently the US doesn't have a monopoly on prudishness in North America.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What fun are international relations if we can't corrupt our neighbors to the north?
-Rich
ah - maybe he gets the point now
I would argue that the harm done by child pornography is to the minors coerced into the production of it, not to the people who view it."
ah - this is why the internet is full of people without training commenting on issues they aren't qualified to :)
of course he totally misses the case of people receiving HTML email with URL references to pictures. this is unsolicited kiddie pr0n and can be harmful
So it seems that by blocking someone from accidentally viewing child porn, all you've really accomplished is to avoid offending their sensibilities."
wow - 'sensibilities' is a little tame. this can be quite emotionally and psychologically harming. this is another problem that isn't tackled: child porn should not become so common-place that it is part of your 'sensibilities'. it should be rare enough to be shocking and disgusting.
So, I don't think the filtering accomplishes much at all, but it could set a very bad precedent once the filters are in place.
This is naive since providers already filter SPAM without asking permission for every email, and in fact users actually complain that providers aren't filtering ENOUGH transparently. so the argument is applied selectively when it is convenient.
what's to stop organizations and lawmakers from demanding that ISPs block access to overseas sites that violate copyright,"
well, don't elect those lawmakers. what can i tell you? they represent the people. if you have no fundamental faith in lawmakers then the smaller issue of whether or not ISPs are blocking illegal material seems a bit trivial.
if we give cops guns they may shoot us. what's to stop them robbing stores themselves and making this a police state?
... the rationalization continues.
the sad irony is that this will affect less than 10Mbps of total traffic on a >10Gbps total volume
Wait a minute... Canada *does* have censorship laws in place. Like it or not, you can't just go and buy whatever you like in the store here. Canada Customs regularly holds or rejects cross border shipments of books and videos. Ask any importer of these goods. Yes, Canada also has laws against hate literature.
You have to remember that Canada has no "first amendment" equivalent. The federal government is charged with "Peace, order and good government", and there's no mention of "the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". In short folks, this is not the USA, and like other commonwealth countries there is an implicit reliance that "common sense" will prevail, hence there is no need for strict laws covering every eventuality.
Now, the question Canadians have to debate is whether this is an acceptable curtailment of their rights. Many, I believe, would say yes without hesitation. Canada is very big on anti-child pornography, and people have shown little disagreement on spending public funds to curtail it. Does this seem odd? Remember, many Canadians don't really mind (or don't mind enough, perhaps) giving government control to these sorts of issues.
I know many American readers don't "get" this, but the approach is a fundamentally different way of doing things (ie. the "common sense" approach mentioned.) It's the same reason England doesn't have a constitution - ie. the belief that it's not necessary.
Recall also that Canada only recently repatriated its charter of rights, so many of the implications have yet to be felt in public events. Maybe someone could make a charter challenge on this point, but I'm not sure.
I've caught several pedophiles during my job in network security and it's awful. It's worse than anything
you can imagine, and be thankful that you can't imagine it.
The author writes "Consider a photo of a 16-year-old having sex, " and it must be said that this is not what child pornography is about.
In reality, child pornography is 8-year olds being raped by 45-year old men. It's school children getting a penis in theyr mouth. It's 3-year olds having penises in their anus. It's dirty, cruel and horrifying. There is no need to ever access it. Any measure that can be used to stop it should be employed, and those who willingly produce and spread it should be castrated like the sick bastards they are.
Think of the children, and it's not a joke this time.
The Cleanfeed system in the UK has been mentioned. This sounds OK but the problem I see is that the list of sites to block is built by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which does not just block child pron sites but also rascial hate and extreem political sites.
OK so far, many would say, but then it gets odder still. The list is not available for the public to see (wonder why?) only the government and police can get access. As it is implemented by ISPs they have non disclosure clauses. The list is automatically updated from IWF servers to the likes of BT.
There is really nothing to stop other classes of site from entering the list accidentally or on purpose. Worse still if you view a site on the list you dont get a message saying its blocked you get a site not found error giving you no idea if its unavailable or blocked. A site accidetally put on the list may take months to realise its there and then have to beg to be taken off it because IWF is not a government body so, no easy way to get mistakes put right.
Not a satisactory way to control net access.
As a Canadian, I'm a bit offended by some of the comments here. I realize that we're a small (speaking of geopolitical influence) country, but you have to understand, there are some pretty major things that people aren't getting that are crucial to the discussion.
First off, we have no first amendment, or anything equivalent to that in the states. Canada has a constitutionally enshrined Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the major difference between that and the states is that there are (other than some minor stuff) no absolute rights granted to Canadians. Instead, rights are granted within reasonable limits. Let's repeat that. Reasonable limits. It's phrased as something that "guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
So, what does this mean? As Canadians, we trust the government. We don't have the almost institutionalized (yeah, oxymoron) distrust of the government and self-reliance that Americans seems to have and the libertarianism that is prevalent at Slashdot. Assuming that this was government regulated (which it isn't), it would probably be allowed under the Charter, and even if it does violate Section 1 (above), we have a little something called the notwithstanding clause, which basically says that the government can ignore certain parts of the constitution for 5 years at a time.
No public outcry, you ask? No. Most Canadians are in favour of it, and I, for one, think that it's a very good and important clause to have. It allows the government to have more flexibility and power for dealing with matters. Quebec, for instance, has used the clause to help protect the French language for the past 15 years or so.
So, let's go back to child porn. There is no reason in Canada why banning IPs that lead to child porn is bad. It's totally legal. I would totally support it. It wouldn't lead to bad things here. We trust the government. I realize it's different in the States, and that's totally cool and fine, but we have our way of doing things and it works very well for us. It's our culture.
Why not just have the police track down everyone reporting sites, as they have clearly viewed the content and are therefore (through a browser cache, or hard drive file recovery tool) in possession of CP.
This is exactly why the images shouldn't be illegal. Clicking on a link accidently (with no intent) can make anyone an immediate criminal.
I would gladly give up my own personal freedom and well being to make sure my children grow up safe.
Then give up your OWN freedom. Don't mess with everyone else's freedom.
And oh, by the way, this isn't about the "freedom" to look at child porn. 'Coz you know good and well that it won't stop there.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
3. Block Hacking sites (possibly a subclass of dangerous information)
:(
HackCanada, Nettwerked and RantRadio would be some of the first to go. Way too much politically incorrect information
(libertarian?)
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Don't get me wrong, the left here is certainly guilty of censorship, but censorship exists on the right just as well. Let's just face it; freedom of expression in Canada isn't very protected, regardless of your political orientation. Telus v. Voices for Change, and David Orchard v. Mulruney's RCMP goons, are the first things that comes to my mind .
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Wouldn't it be more productive to let access to these sites go unrestricted, but log every request that goes to them? Maybe insert some sort of warning page (via the ISP's web proxy) to tell the end user that they're being watched?
After a certain threshold of accesses for a single account, pass the particulars to the authorities to take a closer look.
I'm sure that there are legal issues with this idea... but there are also legal issues with trying to censor access, as suggested in the article. At least my way would lead to arrests of the pervs.
My mother-in-law once asked me about where to get some bridge games to try out on her PC. I said "just go to versiontracker.com and look around" She replied "virgintracker?" I laughed and said " NO!.....VERSIONTRACKER!" Now what would have happened if she never qustioned me and went there? She would be thinking "and that dirty bastard married my daughter!" from her jail cell right now.
That is a most clueless point of view you have.
censorship is a trigger happy thing.
it means preventing acccess to some information. what information ? who to decide ? a few 'non-profit' organisations and government agencies. based on what ? public opinion. how long ? not too long.
censorship always starts out to satisfy public sentiment so that public can accept it. step by step it turns to a controlling mechanism for those who can use it to their ends.
you are not giving up YOUR personal freedom. you are giving up your children's future freedoms also, by providing powers-that-be and powers-that-wannabe by the mechanism to supress stuff that are detrimental to their own profit, and probably profitable to your children.
Read radical news here
Is it TOO hard to realize that, ONCE you give a mechanism that can control the public to powers-that-be, they use it to their ends.
This has ALWAYS happened to be so during the course of world history. And it certainly did not change a year ago.
The excuse for erecting up a control mechanism is child porn today, which is chosen because it is something that public will not be able to resist and object. Not something else.
Once the mechanism is in place, it is in place. Can be used to meet whatever end.
Read radical news here
Since it's yet another "Give-up-your-Freedoms-for-the-sake-of-the-Childre n-Month" how about giving up the
... first let's block child-porn,
freedom to use land mines? Thousands of kids step on these each year and hop around with
artificial limbs for the rest of their lives. Nobody spending millions of dollars here to
stop the US (and China etc.) from using (and producing) these fuckers.
Hell no... first let's get the blocking infrastructure in place here
then all the "whacko conspiracy" sites, then all sites that "violate community standards" and
then at the end all sites that _could_ "violate community standards".
"Locking the door of the house won't prevent theft, because all the thieves are aware of locked doors and will try to get access another way"
It is your claim that "Virtually all such people would be aware of circumvention sites like Anonymouse" is unsubstantiated. It is also could not be proven.
I am getting sick of "thinkoftheinternet" crowd. I am sick of the whiners who are foretelling 1984 from mere pinches to oh, so sacred "rights".
I think that people who move forward such arguments: "it is for a penny, it is for a pound", "it is a bad precedent" somehow think that laws and precendents are the only way to fight for your freedoms.
Ponder on this: are you afraid to stand up and die for your freedoms when it will come to real 1984? Right now you are eager to let flourish all the possible vices, because right now you can fight all other restrictions to your real freedom (that make sense not only to extreme libertarians) sitting on your ergonomic chair in front of your laptop, because absense of legal precendents is on the sight of freedom-lovers.
Of course, when later on, if some common sesne government will succeed (finally) in restricting the human scum on the Internet, there will be a "legal precendent" and then it will be more difficult to fight for you real freedom.
THAT is the part that scares the beejesus of the arm-chair "human-right-fighters". THAT is the real reason those lazy-boys are so active now. THAT is why we have so many defenders of human scum. Because you, sir, is a sissy, not worthy of the heroism and REAL love for freedom of people who fought for it many years ago.
It is not the "legal precendents" that lead to real and severe restrictions of REAL human rights, it is corruption in the government. Governments will easily break any laws, like current President did, without much consequence.
The idea that somehow "absense of legal precedents" will protect you anyhow of future 1984 is silly.
The only real threat to freedom are people in current government who shamelessly brake laws of the land and abuse the constitution of this country.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It is in the nature of human sexuality that it is not very targeted. Naturally, it is very simple cycle of arousing and gratification. So whatever leads to arousing might lead to gratification and after one cycle is completed, next cycle will go much smoother. That is how deep mutual attraction between husband and wife is formed, but also all kind of sexual addictions and perversions are formed as well.
So, yes, the danger is that one might look accidentally at the child pornography and get aroused accidentally. For every child molester there was first moment it experienced sexual excitement at the site of the child. By limiting it and removing this moment from the internet we are limiting the number of these triggering moments and number of future pedophiles.
And "sensibilities" by the way is a consequence of that. It is natural disgust that partially prevents us from this unwanted sexual excitement.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Duh.. Wasn't even thinking about that one :-) Scales pretty well, and while it's easy to avoid (because people can use any DNS server they want), most people use their ISP's DNS server. That's more likely to be what they did. It avoids the IP overkill problem, and avoids the DNS round-robin problem, and if you're only trying to filter out some URLs on the targeted servers, you can do that at a proxy filter.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks