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US ISPs Announce Anti-Child-Porn Agreement
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that ISPs have gathered together with 45 attorney generals and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to form an agreement to crush child pornography. What does that mean? Probably the same as it meant for RoadRunner, Sprint, AT&T and Verizon customers — the end of the newsgroups." Here's the back-patting press-release from the various parties who signed on (the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the National Association of Attorneys General), though the actual text of the agreement does not seem to have been made public.
They could be generals with law degrees.
Check out the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica hierarchy sometime -- there are some groups with very suspicious-looking names.
(alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.child? Gee, I wonder what that could contain?)
Erotic pictures of Julia Child perhaps?
I disagree. I think they need to increase their efforts to stop the online distribution of child pornography. There are many sites that have been claimed by some to contain at least some child pornography - rapidshare, myspace, facebook, photobucket, etc; and these should be blocked as well. But even that isn't doing enough if they were to look at the larger ways of distribution. Email, FTP and HTTP have all been used in to distribute child pornography, and if the ISPs were committed to blocking child pornography, they would block those as well. That would only leave a few other things that would need to be blocked to stop child pornography - instant messaging, telnet and a few others. You say they are taking away legitimate purposes of newsgroups, but they are still leaving so many ways of getting child pornography -- so clearly you are a glass is half full and not half empty type of person, and in cases like this, that makes it seem like you are in favor of an internet part full of child pornography.
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.child? Gee, I wonder what that could contain?
That's an easy one. Thousands upon thousands of SPAM messages.
And I say, enough pussyfooting around the problem. The ISPs should strike at the heart of the issue: TCP/IP. That's what needs to be blocked!