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Censorware Not Good, Just Better Than COPA
The thrust of the judge's findings about blocking software was that it blocks a high proportion of pornography, blocks a low proportion of non-pornographic Web sites, and that it is difficult for most kids get around. I think that these conclusions are correct for the purpose of the decision he was making -- in other words, blocking software blocks a high proportion of pornography compared to the law in question, and is difficult to get around compared to the law in question. But let's not get carried away -- blocking software is not that accurate, and not that hard to defeat.
Consider first the accuracy rates cited by the judge. Citing expert witness reports, he wrote, "I find that filters generally block about 95% of sexually explicit material", and then quoted several different rates for overblocking provided by expert witness reports, ranging from about 4% to 11%. I wrote earlier about the different ways to interpret overblocking error rates -- the gist was that if you care about the constitutional issues with filter use, then you look at the percentage of blocked sites that are non-pornographic (i.e. for every porn site that gets blocked, how many research sites get canned along with it), and that number tends to be high. On the other hand, if you simply care about the effectiveness of blocking software in a home setting where there is no constitutional issue raised, then you look at the percentage of non-pornographic sites that are blocked, and that number tends to be low.
For example, suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Web sites in a given sample are sexually explicit, or 100 Web sites out of 10,000. To use Judge Reed's numbers, suppose that 95% of those porn sites, or exactly 95 in this sample, are blocked, whereas of the other 9,900 sites, 5%, or exactly 495 of them, are not blocked. Then the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked is only 5%, but the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn is actually 83% (495 blocked non-porn sites, out of a total of 495+95=590 blocked sites). One of our past studies of blocking software did indeed sometimes find error rates of about 80%, due to errors caused by IP address blocking and filters being tripped up by keywords (even when "keyword blocking" features were supposedly turned off -- because in that case the program still blocked sites on its master blacklist, and those blacklists are frequently built by scanning the Web for keywords).
Another portion of the judge's ruling dealt with the difficulty of getting around blocking software:
Filtering companies actively take steps to make sure that children are not able to come up with ways to circumvent their filters. Filtering companies monitor the Web to identify any methods for circumventing filters, and when such methods are found, the filtering companies respond by putting in extra protections in an attempt to make sure that those methods do not succeed with their products... It is difficult for children to circumvent filters because of the technical ability and expertise necessary to do so by disabling the product on the actual computer or by accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer and successfully avoiding a filter on the minor's computer... Accessing the Web through a proxy or intermediary computer will not enable a minor to avoid a filtering product that analyzes the content of the Web page requested, in addition to where the page is coming from. Any product that contains a real-time, dynamic filtering component cannot be avoided by use of a proxy, whether the filter is located on the network or on the user's computer.After the ruling came out, I tried some of the best-known blocking software programs to see how easily they could be defeated: Net Nanny, SurfControl, CyberSitter, and AOL Parental Controls. Net Nanny and SurfControl apparently could not block https:// sites at all, so I was able to get to https://www.StupidCensorship.com/ and access anything I wanted from there, despite the fact that that site had been public for over a year. Apparently I do have the "technical ability and expertise necessary" to "access the Web through a proxy", but then again I'm not a minor, so, kids, don't hurt yourself trying that.
CyberSitter did intercept the https:// request so it did block StupidCensorship.com, but it didn't know about some of the other proxy sites that we had mailed out to our users recently. One of those did however get blocked because the word "hacking" appeared on the page -- as in,
This site is a tool for circumventing Internet censorship to promote free speech. It does not enable any hacking, cracking or any illegal activities (since it doesn't let you to access any sites that you couldn't access from home anyway).so it's probably safe to say that if the CyberSitter filter is that paranoid, it would result in a good deal of overblocking as well. AOL Parental Controls also did not block the latest proxies, although it wouldn't let me load sites like Playboy through the proxy, presumably because it recognized the contents of the page and blocked it (so on that point, Judge Reed was right).
But none of the products could stop the doomsday weapon, which is to burn an Ubuntu Linux CD and boot from that, bypassing any security software installed under Windows. I can see your eyes glazing over at the thought of kids attempting to do that, but it's merely an unfamiliar process to most people, not actually difficult. (I've been saying for years, that with the greater difficulty of using Linux over Windows, there's nothing cool or clever about running it just for its own sake so you can feel badass, and the only time you need it is if you want to do something that only Linux lets you do. Well, here's something!)
But in spite of everything, I think the judge's conclusions about blocking software were still broadly correct, because he was comparing the merits of blocking software against the merits of a law that would have prohibited commercial pornography from being published on the Web in the United States. In talking about the "effectiveness" of such a law, the judge and lawyers cited the fact that as many as 75% of adult sites were hosted overseas anyway. But even that high number understates the situation, because hypothetically if all the porn on the Web in the U.S. did get outlawed, it would be easy for anyone to spend all their time looking at porn from outside the country. When you're talking about a supply of content that is so large that nobody could finish looking at it all if they spent the rest of their life trying, it doesn't really matter if 25% or 50% or 75% is located within your legal jurisdiction. I never stop hoping that a judge will say, "Look, pictures of naked people don't hurt anyone, no, not even people under 18. Shoot, when I was 13 and president of Future Lawyers of America, my friend gave me a copy of Playboy as a down payment for my unsuccessful attempts to defend him on curfew-breaking charges in Foot v. Ass, and look how I turned out." But even a judge who firmly believed that people under 18 were harmed by pornographic images, would have found little reason to uphold this law.
The thrust of the judge's findings about blocking software was that it blocks a high proportion of pornography
..was difficult to read without having thoughts I shouldn't be having at work :P
Anyways I'd argue his math is flawed as we don't know the number of porn sites in existance (and how do we rank it? by site? what about mirrored domains pointing to the same content? etc) along with the non-porn sites being blocked (was it offensive material that borderlines porn? Something a parent installing a filter would want blocked anyways?) etc. Pulling numbers out of you ass without backing it up only results in figures favorable to your cause...
But none of the products could stop the doomsday weapon, which is to burn an Ubuntu Linux CD and boot from that, bypassing any security software installed under Windows.
But if you're really that afraid of your kids, you can stop that for free, right? Just password your BIOS setup at boot and disable boot from cd/disk. Then, later, if you need to boot from CD/disk for some reason, you have the password to re-enable it.
Wouldn't that fix the issue?
Citing expert witness reports, he wrote, "I find that filters generally block about 95% of sexually explicit material"
He doesn't get the driving force behind the people who want these sort of laws. They don't want to reduce the SEM their children see, they want to eliminate it completely and will never be happy otherwise. Which shows just how far out there they really are. You can't uninvent things.
If I (or parents of kids, respectively) get to decide what I (or said kids) get to see, it's a good thing.
If the state dictates what you may see and what you may not, it's not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think censorship software like netnanny, etc. is the way to go for issues like these. It allows people to *self* censor the content that they receive. I have no problem with that. Sure, it requires some work on the part of the end user but that's a far better solution than having everyones content censored for the benefit of the few. It's up to parents to protect their kids. It is not reasonable for parents to expect society as a whole to be censored and stifled simply because they are too lazy to make the needed effort required to properly raise *their* children.
None of this will even come close to keeping children from looking at porn. How many of us here had never seen pictures of naked people before we got on the web? It's ridiculous farce to act as if blocking pornographic images on computers will have any real effect on the access to porn that children have. It won't even stop them from seeing porn from the internet, as long as they know someone who will download it for them for a dollar.
Yes, I thought the two judgements that day dovetailed nicely.
The basic point is (to steal someone else's example): a parent should no more feel it is right to let their child roam unsupervised on the Net then let them roam unsupervised in any major city in the world. It is up to the PARENT and not the INFRASTRUCTURE to ensure their own child's safety, regardless of anyone's view of the morals/ethics/etc of porn and other 'unwanted' content.
The Net was never devised to be an extension of child-safe Disneyland and should not be subverted to be one. Why should I be blocked from reading papers on X-Ray Crystalography because of some hamfisted filtering built deep into a Tier-1's manditory COPA mechanism? Especially if neither I nor the benign site in question are in the US.
Please note, US lawmakers, that quite a lot of the world and the Net *is* outside the US, BTW.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
It's kinda weird to keep seeing this cast as a technological issue with technological solutions.
It's actually a problem with a small but determined group of anti-social, anti-humanist
people who shout the loudest.
As long as there are mentally damaged people in the world who live in shame, guilt and fear
of their own bodies, and who have the arrogance to presume to prescribe
morality and acceptable behaviour to others then we will have the problem.
The problem is the pathological view of morality, not with any behaviour or technology.
This applies to drugs, pornography, religion, in fact anything that an individual
can do that has no harmful effect on others.
It will take generations, but we have to re-educate the fragile minds that have
a problem with other peoples behaviour instead of labling that behaviour itself
as the problem.
It would be great if psychologists could isolate that tendancy for certain
people to be dissatisfied with their lives no matter how much wealth and
success they attain unless they are able to forcefully interfere in the lives of
others.
I think that in time we will recognise this tendancy as bad mental health. Those
who today make a success in politics and media journalism through this behaviour
will eventually be recognised for what they, shunned and excluded from
public life and influence.
I don't understand why people act like censorware's mere existence is a bad thing. It is a good way for people to police themselves, which is how most enforcement of morality should be. When I have kids, I plan to use it. I also plan to teach them, especially my sons, about the dangers that come with it so that they know that it's worse than they suspect. To be honest, as a Christian, I'd far rather walk in on my kids getting wasted or stoned, and I say that as someone who comes from a line of alcoholics.
What is needed is a comprehensive, open source filtering system that requires you to contribute without any anonymity. Imagine something like the Wikipedia for filtering, but you have to mail a copy of your identifying information, and contribute under your real name to control trolling. That, and a multi-tiered categorization scheme to capture such nuance as "bland, risque, sexy, NSFW--ever!! and Possibly Illegal porn." Oversimplification perhaps, but just a thought. I think a great filtering system could be built if it were done in public, with transparency and room for people to configure it to their moral views.
You wish!
I like what you're saying but I don't think it is at all realistic. Take a look at history, man. The violent, the brutal, the strong, the aggressive, the psychopathic, the crazy all have a tendency to get ahead and rise to power. Sure the opposite happens sometimes, but that's just a rare exception to the general rule. I think this says a lot about people as a whole. I personally believe that people as a whole are aggressive, violent, etc. Sure we may have these tendencies *somewhat* under control in modern civilization, but those tendencies are still there just beneath the surface waiting for the chance to explode forth in another fight, crime, riot, war or revolution. There will never be a peaceful utopia on earth. People are violent animals - literally. Our society will always reflect that fact.
the solution is quite simple. Put the filter on the firewall, there are several that already live there. You can use any os you want, you're not going to get past it. It will still have all of the existing problems that desktop based filters have, but the doomsday is really fictitious.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Mod parent up. The brand of extreme moral relativism that says that it's just the prudes and the "fragile minds" who would want to block access to porn on the Internet is a kind of twisted fundamentalism that doesn't represent the values of most of society. There probably is nothing wrong with kids seeing nekkid bodies. On the other hand, the Internet is rife with hardcore porn that goes waayyyyyyy beyond nudity -- including images of violence, degradation, and deviant behaviors. Even if I agree that 8 years is old enough for a child to understand why a man would want to have sex with a woman, it is absolutely NOT old enough to comprehend why that man would want to strangle the woman while he does it. I'll agree that consenting adults should be free to enjoy whatever they want, so long as it doesn't harm themselves or others. But an 8 year old is simply not capable of being "sex positive." There's nothing wrong with parents wanting to shield their children from hardcore pornographic material.
Breakfast served all day!
Indeed I can. He'd go "eewwwkkk! yuck! See how big that one is? And with a donkey? Awsome!
I hate to tell you this, but that won't be the first porn that 8-year old have seen. And anyway, there is little evidence that porn is really more damaging for kids than e.g. the Bratz dolls. (Forgive me if that fad has already passed away, feel free to replace with the new equivalent :) )
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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Youth are not animals. You aren't some naive infant from 0-17 and then magically become a mature capable adult on your 18th birthday. Here in the state of IL, the age of consent is 17. So when you're 17, you can have sex with any 17 year old (and I believe 16 year olds too), as well as any adult. Since Laurence v. Texas, you can have any sort of consensual sex you want: orgies, anal/oral/vaginal, S&M, gay/straight/bi, roleplaying, and whatever else your perverted mind can dream up. A 17 year old could fuck your mom or grandma (if she's into it). A 17 year old can drive a car. A 17 year old can work full time. A 17 year old can buy a house, computer, and Internet connection (if he/she can somehow manage to get that kind of cash). Yet we need the state to make sure we use censorware to keep us from viewing breasts? Younger teenagers may have less legal rights than those who are nearly legal adults, but why should anyone be denied their free speech rights? Why should those who are sexually mature (and probably having sex), be denied the right to see representations of sexual activity.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
trying to regulate morality. We know that .xxx won't work and kids being resourceful will find a way to get around most blocking software. Its time for parents to be responsible for their children, for them to teach children that they are responsible for their own actions, that society has a set of morals that, for sometimes mind-boggling reasons, we abide by at least in public.
The porn industry is willing to let you block their sites via a tag or two. Blocking software will protect small children when you turn your back to clean the kitchen. Blocking systems would have protected the teacher.
There are many ways to attack this problem, none of them are a silver bullet. The one thing that cannot and should not be regulated is the parents responsibility to protect their own children. It's a big wide nasty world out there. Children will find out about it sooner or later, they can't be protected from it forever.
There is needs for solutions that protect public library systems, solutions that protect work systems, solutions that protect home systems. Even if all these are 100% effective little johnny might still get porn over at his friend's house. Nothing is foolproof and we should not be trying to legislate something to be foolproof or to assign blame when it isn't.
PARENTS need to be paranoid, not just blocking software packages. They should use all that they deem necessary to protect their kids, not what the court deems necessary. The best way to protect them from porn is to educate them, use blocking software, talk to them, use filters, educate them, and did I mention that parents need to talk to and educate their own children rather than rely on t he court to do it for them?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Using a good choosen OUT asm command could bring the bios in a factory reset. This is how I got it to delete a password that my parents had forgotten. Now granted I am not sure if it is the case with the msot resent BIOS or not. It could be that they are now protected against this.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Step 1, tell them not to do it.
Step 2, if they by pass the security, kick them in the ass really hard and ground them for a week from the computer.
Step 3 - If they continue to ignore your rules, conveniently "lose" them on a camping trip.
Seriously, my parents raised me (who was into computers since age 5) and never had problems with this. They would give me the beating of my life if I did some of the things these kids do. Of course they also just took the time to be parents and explained the world to me so I wasn't curios to do stupid things.
Christian Science Monitor had a commentary about this ruling. To sum it up for the /. crowd -- age-verification laws exist for pretty much any other pornography sold in the United States, the internet should not be an exception. Fundamentally she's correct, although, IMO, COPA itself would realistically have a trivial effect on kids seeing porn, since it just pushes providers off-shore.
Additionally, here's SCOTA's case summary and opinions on this law. The ruling on this was 5-4, same votes per judge as in United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group (which struck down a much broader version of the same law). Basically... you guys are one justice away from a very different internet. Consider yourself lucky it was Rehnquist that died and not Kennedy.
Personally, I have a problem with the fact that our obscenity laws revolve around Ginzburg vs United States -- a ruling from 40 years ago during the middle of the sexual revolution.
I'm the head tech for a school district and anyone who has to help in the enforcement of COPA would be glad to see it go. It is so broad and lacks definition. Every time a student wants to write a paper on say gay rights, a whole can of worms is opened up for us to try and sort through and solve. Instead of providing technology for kids to use in their education, we play lawyer trying to see if we are gonna get screwed in some way shape or form by COPA.
Your television will not tell you when to start the revolution.
on the restrictiveness issue. He was right on the vagueness issue.
Restrictiveness should not necessarily be equated with onerousness. Instead it should be equated with which materials fall under the law's restrictions. The point is that if there is a valid government interest in regulating certain content, the government cannot use this as a pretext to sweep away other content it doesn't like.
For example, lets say the government doesn't want troop movements to be publicized in advance: a legitimate interest. It cannot pass a law that makes it illegal to report on anything the DoD does, because that would make it impossible to report on waste and fraud in defense procurements.
The judge thinks that software filters would be less restrictive. While they are less onerous, I think this idea is clearly wrong. Hypothetically, if we imagine that (A) the government has a compelling interest here and (B) that that interest is clearly and precisely identified in the law then (C) COPA would have been less restrictive than filtering, because filtering blocks materials based not on their content, but by their mere resemblance to content that should be restricted. In other words, no matter what your definition is, filtering will throw out more things improperly than human review would.
Over-restrictiveness is purely a matter of how much stuff you block that you shouldn't. Letting some stuff through that you shouldn't (false negatives) may make it look like you are being less restrictive, when in fact you are doubly failing. People who deny there is a public interest at all here may well prefer loosely tuned filters to human review of content, because they are less onerous to use, provided they let as much or more through than human review would. This is because they see no distinction between what the filters are supposed to block and what the filters are supposed to let through. But it doesn't make the decision to use filters right.
The worst thing about filters is their capacity to take away liberty without due process. If law enforcement says your content falls under restricted content, you can challenge this. If your content is silently filtered out by software, you may not be aware of the fact. If you are aware, you may have no means to restore your rights.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Back when the issue of Internet filtering became a matter of widespread public discussion, some fifteen years ago now, there were suggestions that filtering software be developed that would enable people to subscribe to filtering lists. The expectation was that different groups would have different agendas and thus publish different lists. People wishing to adopt filtering could then subscribe to lists based on their own needs and beliefs; some might choose the Christian Coalition's list, some the list published by Planned Parenthood. Support for this system could be built into browsers through a mechanism like AdBlock, or perhaps better, supported by a DNS-like system in much the same way spam blacklists function today. I thought these ideas had a lot of merit in that they worked the way the Internet has always worked, by decentralizing the decision-making process and putting it in the hands of the end-users. Sadly I've not seen many efforts in this direction over the years since these ideas were first proposed.
The first one is the idea that there are people that would like to remove all pornography in all forms from the Internet. Unproven except in a few cases of extreme wackiness. I doubt anyone seriously considers this to be an option.
The second point is as uncontrolled as the Internet can be, there is really no limit on what purveyors of filth can do. So you end up with the bukkake fest or the faked dog gangrape scene being shown to a preteen girl. This can seriously affect people's views of sex and their relationship to it, often for a very long time.
There are some that would simply say that if said preteen girl ran across this during a search for material at school that it is her own fault if it turned her off sex for life. I don't find this a particularly valid answer. "Careful surfing" isn't an answer - porn is driven by ad clicks and people will do almost anything to get clicks. Including trying to drag in people that have no interest in eventually paying, just to get the clicks.
Also, all porn isn't some nice friendly Westernized Playboy magazine. There are a number of cultures where seriously degrading and objectifying women is just plain fun. Add in some careful editing and you can have three dogs (unclean animals to start with) having their way with a girl in a school uniform. You might not find it funny and interesting but some folks think this would be great. Would your daughter?
OK, so assuming there is some stuff out there that has no place in a school environment how does one deal with it? Blocking software is mostly stupid because there is no binary determination of "degrading porn" yes or no. The blocking companies seem to also push other agendas as well, filtering out "hate speech" (Republicans) and "profanity" (Democrats). With domain registration in the hands of people that have no responsibility for anything except making money, it isn't even possible to contact the owner of a web site any longer. How does one get a few binary yes/no categories into a web site and enforced today? I don't think there is a good way to do that at all.
This means we will continue to see a lot of bad ad-hoc implementations that try to solve a problem that needs to be moved upstream.
Worry away - nobody's ever suggested that you shouldn't have the right to worry (and I can't imagine how we'd take it away from you). However, you should be very, very worried about what your kids see online. There appears to be loads of help protecting them from the evils of sex, but your children might still be exposed to: religious extremism (whichever religion you're not), glorification of drug use, glorification of violence, racial intolerance, pro-homosexual agendas (or anti), pro (or anti) abortion viewpoints... whew! It's almost as if they need to learn to think for themselves as they grow into adults! But at least they'll be able to grow up with the healthy notion that naked women are the tool of the devil and that they should be ashamed of their lack of control over their immoral thoughts.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I object to the characterization that wanting to protect children from sexually explicit material is "far out there." There is ample evidence that exposing young children to sexually explicit material is harmful to psychological development. Children should be allowed to remain sexually innocent. There is nothing "far out" about that at all. In fact I think that suggesting otherwise is pretty extreme. I would be shocked if any parent or psychologist anywhere would say that it's okay to show a 6 year old graphic sexual imagery. It is "far out" to suggest that free speech be eliminated to achieve the goal.
I do intend to protect my son from of porn for as long as I can. Protecting him from 95% of porn isn't any protection at all. At some point I'm going to have to get some help (maybe in the form of filtering software) but I certainly won't rely on it as my only solution. Like ALL parenting duties, they key is spending time with your children. Being involved in their lives is more effective than regulation or tech band-aids. If a parent expects the government or a technical solution to do their parenting for them then they are not doing their jobs, period.
Truth is, porn isn't on the top of my list of concerns. I worry about the massive exposure of kids to advertising (which is designed to erode self-esteem). I worry about the mass dosing of children with sugars. I worry that my very intelligent and energetic son will be "diagnosed" with ADHD by some lazy teacher who will want to put him on drugs because school isn't challenging. I worry that when he is older he will be exposed to and pressured to use drugs and alcohol. I worry that the idiot tailgating us is gonna put us in the hospital. I worry that the government will use "but think of the children!!!" to turn our country into a police state. After all of that and a lot more, THEN I worry about porn.
-- QED
What we need is an open censorware suite that is free for anyone to use and works well. I started to write one ("Oxymoron" I called it) but I got nowhere. Someone who knows something about browser programming, or the internet explorer plug-in API (as opposed to, say, bioinformatics and machine learning) should do this.
:).
On the subject of librarians:
a) They are technologically savvy, at least when it comes to research tools. They'll use an open alternative if one exists.
b) They are politically motivated. They absolutely despise the entire censorware industry and they will go to considerable lengths to avoid giving those bottom feeders money.
c) The organizations they work for are too cash-strapped to force the librarians to keep spending money on something they demonstrably don't need.
The upshot is that an open censorship program would not only be used, it would throttle the monetary impetus behind library censorship at the root.
If someone else has already done this, kindly point out in a reply so I can stop making a fool of myself
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You should probably provide some sort of evidence supporting this. I'm not a citation Nazi, but it really is a rather bold claim, especially given that it'd be tough to do a real study that involves exposing children to large amounts of pornography, just like it would be difficult to do a real study that involves exposing children to large amounts of radiation. Because of the potential for damage, you cannot set up an "experiment", per se, but only deal with situations that have already occurred, outside of any "control" you might have. For example, if a child's in the kind of environment where they've been exposed to unusual amounts of pornography, there are probably many other factors that are causing them trauma. This makes it rough on the sociologist or whomever is doing the study to really do anything other than find possible correlations. (I'm not a sociologist or particularly well-versed in study methodology, but I think you see my point).
Also, since this is, to some degree, a discussion regarding morality, you would need to be careful defining terms like "damaging". For example, if you're willing to agree that viewing pornography, especially over a long period of time, greatly increases visual fantasies and greatly changes attitudes towards women among men, you'd still have a hard time getting people to agree on whether or not this is damaging, especially if no criminal action resulted from those increased fantasies and changed attitudes. Another way to say it -- for some folks, it's not problematic if a man plays out graphic fantasies in his head all day long about everyone woman he looks at as long as no criminal action occurs (yes, yes -- respond if you must to get the funny mod). But to others, this would be a strong indicator that damage has indeed been done to that person by the change in their mental behavior.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
It's interesting that you say that not viewing television or pornography warps your sense of reality. Some might say that it is the other way around.
You forgot exhotations to violence - both innane - Stickdeath - and graphic - the YouTube clip posted of a beheading.
there's forty seven of them I think you meant:
There are forty of them.
And the driving force of people who don't want to see these laws is freedom of speech. For instance, taking down a site or limiting another's freedom of speech is necessarily a more fundamental issue than limiting a user's access to speech on a computer that user doesn't own. It's not that they're not both bad, but you can argue that when restricted to parental use content filtering may be appropriate.
(I still don't recommend it.)
But there are effective limitations of the value of censoring the internet or sites on the web.
I take it as given that those who oppose both laws typically agree that there is no practical, distinct line between pornography and socially beneficial expression/information. Thus, one system blocks as much "bad" content as possible from the access of particular users, and attempts to allow "good" or "neutral" content. The other system forces universal censorship. What if I needed to provide a credit card to prove I'm over 18 to research abortion procedures or birth control? I want to learn more about "vaginal condoms" I guess. That's pure censorship.
The ambiguity, the dilemma, is of course do public schools or public libraries actually have the right to implement content filters. I believe that is also wrong, but that it is another fight. Possibly with many ways to attack it,
Steve
The censorware industry does not require vindication, it only requires customers, which it has. Fighting against being censored against our will by the government is a good thing. Fighting against software that enables self-censorship is not. The only people affected by censorware are those who bought it, and those who agreed to work for the people who bought it. All voluntary, nothing to protest here, move the fuck along.
Far more damaging to *my* young psyche was learning about (some of the) harrible things that happened in Nazi Germany. Talk about something I would rather not know, for years it haunted me terribly.
In comparison, this flap about porn is overblown. I understand it springs from some religions, but I am stymied why sex was considered so important to control. Too many kids, without moral prohibitions? Too many diseases?
Keep kids away from it, by all means, because (1) yuck, and (2) ick, but if they see a little here and there, that's just part of the maturing process.
suppose that 95% of those porn sites, or exactly 95 in this sample, are blocked, whereas of the other 9,900 sites, 5%, or exactly 495 of them, are not blocked. Then the percentage of non-porn sites that are blocked is only 5%, but the percentage of blocked sites that are non-porn is actually 83%
Is it just me, or are there several glaring errors in the OP?
You should probably provide some sort of evidence supporting this. I'm not a citation Nazi, but it really is a rather bold claim, especially given that it'd be tough to do a real study that involves exposing children to large amounts of pornography, just like it would be difficult to do a real study that involves exposing children to large amounts of radiation.
You are right that it would be difficult to provide the positive version of my statement due to correlations, which is why I wrote it in the negative.. I haven't seen evidence that porn is more damaging than bratz dolls. I have seen references to studies that finds that porn and bratz dolls correlate slightly with early sexual maturing in girls, and little effect if any on boys. Sorry, no links because a) I'm very tired right now and b) it was in Danish anyway.
I have never seen a study that correlates porn and criminal activities, but again, correlations makes such studies a bloody minefield so I wouldn't be surprised or convinced if a few showed either way. I think we'll have to wait for the meta-studies on that one. Interestingly, though, sexual offenses in Denmark are not high, yet most children at the age of 15 or so claim to have seen porn. But I know, it's just a vague hint, not claiming it proves much.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.