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Senators Call for Universal Internet Filtering
An Anonymous Coward writes "US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children. Their statement came at the end of a Senate hearing in which civil liberties groups were not invited."
From TFA:
"While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child's online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material," Sen. Inouye said. "In that context, we must evaluate our current efforts to combat child pornography and consider what further measures may be needed to stop the spread of such illegal material over high-speed broadband connections."
How does he jump from kids seeing pr0n to pr0n of kids? Is this a special type of logic you learn when you get into politics?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
They tried this, and COPA was gutted after the civil liberties folks got back in the loop. I wish Ted 'Series of Tubes' Stevens and Senator 5-0 would stop trying to govern parenting. Heck, isn't Stevens up against the wall for some illicit activities in Alaska? Looks like he can't even protect himself from himself, let alone watching out for other people's kids.
Let parents deal with kids. If the parents can't do it, there are local resources that can help. Legislating to the family unit won't work. There are more important national things begging for attention, like getting a bridge built to a barely inhabited island in AK.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Or as Lewis Black put it: "Republicans and Democrats, working together. The only thing stupider than a Republican, or a Democrat, is when these little pricks work together."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Might this be the first step towards legislating mandatory adoption of Trusted Computing as a way of controlling the internet and content, using the tried-and-true "think of the children!" method of bulldozing reasoned opposition by those that prefer their computers do what *they* want, instead of what corporations and the government wants?
n g/20031001_tc.php
For those unfamiliar, here's a link to an EFF page on Trusted Computing.
http://www.eff.org/Infrastructure/trusted_computi
Here's another link to an excellent piece by Ross Anderson.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
Not trying to be all tinfoil-hat-like, but it seems these days that it's trumped-up issues like this that precede an attempt to limit freedoms and increase control of the population. Awareness of these possibilities is the first and most important step to preventing a world none of us wants to live in.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
RTFA! The senate did not, in fact, pass a law banning or filtering anything. They commissioned a study to propose alternatives. That is the politician's polite way of saying "I'm not going to do anything meaningful for you today. Come back in two years, after I get re-elected."
Vote Quimby!
http://xkcd.com/756//
As a 3d artist I feel threatened by this desire to filter and monitor the internet. Look on CGTalk, there are tons of nude 3d girls and other characters on there. If they start this up then we might have to censor ourselves if we want to post our work online.
F--- the F'in Children already.
Parents.
Do
Your
F'in
Jobs
or better yet, don't breed 'em if you don't want the responsibility.
I mostly agree with you but what has insider trading to do with it? Who needs insider trading when you can directly pick pockets... why expose yourself to a dangerous lawsuit when you can legally steal.
\u262D = \u5350
If you listen to his speeches and read more about him, you will see that he is staunchly against any regulation of the Internet. He believes that the government should try to stay out of the lives of the individual as much as possible. Check out his stance on personal liberty. He is also the only Republican candidate against the war in Iraq. He opposed it from the very beginning because he felt that we must actually declare war if we are to invade another country. He basically is calling for a return to a government dictated by the constitution -- namely that any powers not specifically given to congress by the constitution should be left to the states.
If you want to learn more, you can search for Ron Paul on YouTube and see his campaign speeches. I think you will see that he is quite a bit different than most of the Republican candidates -- especially the front runners.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Do not allow children or right wingers to connect.
Go form your own network. call it Kids-net. Right wing christians could use it too.
Speaking as one of those moral voters, I just want to say that they're way out to lunch on this one. This plan is ridiculous.
I can scarcely imagine a less productive exercise than this, but I'm sure they'll not only imagine such a thing, but attempt to pass it into law.
The reality is, if you are really concerned about what children have access to on the Internet, you should be able to activate a setting the would lock access to a separate DNS service and a set series of IP addresses that only provides content that has be accessed, reviewed and approved as fit for children web sites, as the web sites would have to be applicable to each of the age ranges for children, obviously what is fit for a young adult is not suitable for a toddler.
The stupidity of the senators is made obvious just be that latter part, come one, lets filter the Internet so that it is suitable for toddlers, a kindergarten grade Internet http://www.funnyhub.com/pictures/pages/elephant-sl ide.html, a republican congressmen's version of tubes that run the republican Internet.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Ok... you've got a good point. But here's the thing, and I like to tease my old dad about this because I've busted him with this as well.
The guys don't know how to use computers. They really actually expect people like us to believe them when we get a call "Can you help me, my hard drive is full", you go there to check what happened and find out he has about 550Gigs of upskirt latex lesbo teen porn. What they're hoping we'll believe is that because the internet isn't safe, he clicked a link on the Wall Street Journal site, got a virus and now his drive is full. I have personally caught a politician, two major corporate CEOs, and worst of all my dad in this lie.
It really becomes all about protecting kids to them. They lobby and try to make it seem they actually are working actively to solve the problem. What's really humorous is, it strikes me that they don't actually research ahead of time what they're talking about. Politicians only listen to people smarter than them if the persons name is actually important enough that while they're explaining that they asked for help from a smart guy, every idiot like themselves would recognize the smart guys name and give the politician credit for being smart enough to choose that guy in particular. What's worst is that some of them actually use John Dvorak for information... but that's a different rant.
If these idiot politicians were to spend even an hour researching a good adviser, they might try calling Marc Andreeson (sp.) or if they're important enough, Bill Gates, or if they're bright enough Linus. Any one of these three guys can in less than a minute talking act as a bullshit meter for the politician that's just going to make a fool out of himself and the people that voted for him.
A good idea...
Moron Politician : Hey Sweet-tits, can you get me Bill Gates on the line? (this is him talking to his 19 year old secretary his wife doesn't approve of)
Sweet-tits : Just a minute
*** Ring Ring ***
Bill Gates : Hi, umm yeh this is Bill Gates, please tell me you're not trying to squeeze me personally for campaign contributions again, those hookers you tried sending me spent nearly 2 hours in my lobby here at Microsoft before I was forced to have them arrested and charged for indecent exposure.
Sweet-tits : **giggle**
Moron Politician : It's nothing like that Bill, but I'm sorry to hear you didn't like them, I've used them myself a few times. Actually I got busted with porn on my hard drive again and if I don't want to be thrown out of office, I need to pretend like it was research and try to propose a "Save the future criminals" bill at the house. I was hoping you could hop on the wagon with my idea that I have.
Bill Gates : Well, shoot, I can't promise anything, but if there's something I can do to help, let me hear about it.
Moron Politician : Well, I wanted to propose a filter be required on the Internet to block kids from anything dangerous online. You know, block the pictures.
Bill Gates : Hundreds of companies already write products like these, there are even good ones that are free out there, but Moron, you know that it's not the pictures and videos that are the real problem, the real problem is the stalkers in the chat lines that are 50 year old men pretending to be 13 year old girls. That's the real problem. Can't write a filter like that, literally impossible. Please tell me that these stupid ideas aren't what you're wasting all the tax payer money on?
Moron Politician : Hell no, thanks to being in office, I've managed to shave 3 points off my game and am hoping to play an exhibition game soon with Bob Barker to raise money for kids. Well if you get any good ideas, please call Sweet-tits and have her setup a call for us. I need to come up with a good "Save the Brats" thing soon. By the way, I just recently had a second line for my secretary installed under my desk so that when the phone rings, she doesn't have to stop working. I really recommend it.
Bill Gates : **** Click *** Beep Beep Beep ***
Sweet-tits (with her mouth full) : Oo eenk eeds onna elp?
I've seen it worse than that. I've seen a university page on water striders (the insects) deliberately blotting out the exact spot where two insects were copulating. I mean, INSECTS.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
As U.S. District Court Judge Lowell Reed said: "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection".
I still don't understand where "Christian==Republican" and "Non-religion==Democrat" came from....and where do other religions such as Muslim fit in? Can they only be Democrats? Or don't they actually belong to any political parties in the US? You do realize there are shades of gray and things don't fall into a black/white paradigm, right?