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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.
Why do I have the feeling that all this will do is block many websites and services that have nothing to do with child pornography, inconveniencing thousands of innocent web users, while the paedophiles find new ways to trade child porn and are barely inconvenienced? I'm all for fighting child porn, but blocking individual websites or newsgroups is clearly not working, and blocking vast chunks of websites and newsgroups is going to result in blocking mostly legitimate content. Would it be too much to ask for these organisations to actually focus their resources on catching the paedophiles for once? I'm not even sure which is worse in society - a paedophile with child porn, or a paedophile who can't get hold of child porn but wants to see naked children...
... that have child porn?
Can we call this the "Yet Another Useless Stupid Deal For Nothing"
I hate child pornograpy as much as anyone SHOULD, but I know whats a PR stunt that wont solve a thing and will only reduce internet's freedom to share information in exchange for absolutly nothing at all whatsoever.
How can we convey to the public that the internet's value depends directly on ISP's not being able to discriminate traffic by content?
How can we put out there the idea that the internet has all this potential for individual freedom and that any kind of attempt to enforce any kind of legal stuff in it will only hinder the potential it has FOR THE COMMON JOE?
Fucking legislators, fucking ISPs and fucking, unreasonable and plain stupid bible-hugging assholes.
NO SIG
The ISPs can monitor all your traffic as deeply as they want to, and gather up whatever the local law enforcement needs for a warrant.
And you have no recourse, ever, thanks to the new FISA ammendments, brought to you with help from your pal and mine, Senator Barack Obama.
Hey, Mr Hope himself even supports the death penalty for child sex offenders. That'll be fun.
The good senator will spearhead this witchhunt with truth and hope and change and (bullshit), and all the expanded priveleges of the White House.
They'll have minimal impact on the perverts, but no doubt they'll get a chance to tighten the screws on the rest of us. Which is, of course, what it's all about.
And I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with anything the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has its fingerprints on. It's been caught phonying up statistics and acting in a manner that could best be described as "self-serving" on more than one occasion.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Gotta love that ad for Giganews that is being put up on that article by Google AdSense.
When you announce censorship to stop piracy, everybody gets up in arms about net neutrality.
When you instead use child pornography as your scapegoat, the majority will turn a blind eye to your censorship efforts.
Note that the first thing to go was alt.* on usenet, a large source of piracy. If they had choked off alt.* because of piracy, there would have been much talk about net neutrality. Since they did it because of child pornography, nobody mentions net neutrality.
"I commend the nation's cable operators for utilizing the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) to negotiate and collectively enter into a unprecedented industry-wide agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to limit the availability of child pornography on the internet."
No agreement is, or ever was, necessary for any ISP to proceed forth to fight child pornography. The fact that some kind of mutual agreement is in place suggests something else is going on behind the scenes. Would NCMEC have prohibited ISPs from fighting against child pornography without an agreement? I doubt that. Maybe these ISPs knew all along they were part of the problem with child pornography? Or is NCMEC trying some more extensive shake-down tactics?
The big question will be just to how far will these ISPs go in the name of protecting children? Just how many will use it as a false excuse to shut off internet resources that have nothing to do with child pornography and were not even the victim of spammers of such content?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It won't protect me from my uncle... Or any other child - this stuff isn't new. As if no child was ever molested before the internet. These are nothing but keywords - to elicit emotional response and push through their agenda. That way if you oppose them, they can say "You support kiddie porn!"
The FCC admonishes Comcast for their P2P traffic management techniques.
Never fear. Now major ISPs can start blocking P2P altogether in the name of a cooperative effort with government (45 attorney generals), to crush child porn.
The FCC can't oppose a measure "to crush child porn".
It's a very crafty political technique.
There are a lot of people who want to see child pornography crushed. It's a popular political position to take.
ISP entirely blocking access to an IP, just because some of web pages served from it may include 'undesirable' content (for ISP's definition of the day for 'undesirable'), is definitely non-neutral.
There aren't that many of the general public who understand what "network neutrality" means, or the harm it will cause when ISPs start blocking sites for arbitrary reasons.
I'm sad to say, that Network Neutrality will probably be the first casualty of this cooperative.
It will start with "child porn" illegal stuff, but it won't stop there.
Yes, all of Usenet, or all of alt.* may die, even with all its perfectly legitimate and legal content and discussion areas.
Will the general (uneducated) public hear about it, or lose any sleep over it? Probably not.
First Usenet, then P2P, then IRC, then Youtube, then most of the web (other than major content providers' and business' sites).
Why are people hanging onto this myth? ISPs do not, and have never had, common carrier status.
Source, please.
Apparently, there are 88. 88 out of 107,000+ last time I checked. Roughly .008% of usenet is affected in this manner, and I'm not even going to get into group volume to find a more accurate estimate, because it would just drive that number down. So if I'm getting this right, 99.992% of usenet does not contain such things. This is one of a few things:
1) ISPs getting rid of a service that a small minority of their users use and saving themselves money on bandwidth, which is somewhat shaky, most of the people that use Usenet would find a 3rd party solution anyway, so the bandwidth savings would probably not be as large as expected.
2) ISPs are actually concerned with this content moving to other areas of Usenet if they block only the groups known to contain it, so they are essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Cliched, I know, but accurate. Or:
3) ISPs are doing this to appease corporate interests by getting rid of the offensive material along with everything else that could possibly constitute copyright infringement. It's already been said here a few times, but from what I can see, it's the most likely scenario. The public thinks they're great for fighting the perverts, while corporate interests think they're great by closing off an area of mass piracy. Again, see point 1, because the people that use it will go to external providers, and I have a feeling they may be next on this hit list.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
Owner of www.example.com: "Uh, yeah, I want to see the child porn blacklist. I think you might have blocked my site by mistake."
ISP: "Hey! This guy is trying to view the child porn blacklist!"
Police: "Oh hey, website owner. We're arresting you under suspicion of possessing child pornography."
Owner of www.example.com: "Wait, what?"
Police: "You asked for the list of sites, and on top of that, you tried to visit www.example.com, which was on the list. Clearly you wanted to see child porn."
"From what I gather, this is only the ISPs that have their own servers that are affected, and not independent usenet providers themselves (like Giganews)."
How long do you really think it's going to take for this to trickle over to premium USENET servers, if in no other way than to have their traffic as closely monitored, and potentially throttled, as that of P2P users?
*Any* time it's "for the children", you can be damn well sure that they'll be last on the list of those being served.
I smell herring, red, and believe this is far from a "flash in the pan feel good law". It will in time be seen as odious as the DMCA and others of like ilk.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
"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?)"
I agree... it likely contains "thousands of SPAM messages".
Do you honestly believe that pedophiles are that open about their openly illegal activities?
YOU are off you rocker if you believe that child porn is a "problem" in our society.
While certainly repugnant, I don't see how BANNING all the .alt.binaries newsgroups is going to help stop child porn.
I've been on Usenet for well over a decade, and I also have never seen child porn.
It's total knee jerk emotional hysteria, and you sir are are being used as a "tool" to censor the internet.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
Speaking personally, I am so fed up with the censorship, fear and repression taking place in our society in the name of fighting child pornography; that I would personally prefer to see an internet half full of child pornography before I see any more rollbacks of freedom along the lines this "Agreement".
The child porn excuse has long since lost its ability to outrage me into accepting even quite minor restrictions on liberties. Unfortunately, the general public seems so eager to become apoplectic that media outlets have essentially created an industry around giving people their daily outrage "fix". It's like Soma, except instead of making them happy all the time, they just get angry/outraged.
The effect is the same however, as people allow their emotions to overcome their reason, and we lose all ability to object or hold any kind of reasoned debate. It's like a Mass Panic, but in slow motion. Best to run with the herd, lest you get trampled.
May the Maths Be with you!
I think what we're really looking at here is the instrument by which P2P for the masses will be destroyed -- all in the name of "we must protect our precious little snowflakes!" -- and before anybody gets started on me, I am NOT a pedophile, child molestor, or sex offender of any type, and I am against all such activities and the people who perpetrate them. Still I assert that this, or something like it, is going to be the hammer that gets dropped on P2P. Think about it: If you're a pedophile, then you're insane to have your wares hosted on a web server somewhere that can be raided, and you arrested. You're better off using the Gnutella network and it's like, and BitTorrent, right? At least, it's plausible, and that's all they really need, is plausibility, because everybody knows that only dirty filthy criminals use P2P, right? Of course what will really happen is that like with anything else, their efforts will just drive the pedos deeper underground, and meanwhile P2P will likely have to evolve in a direction that likewise takes it out of the daylight and fairly deep underground, too -- because no matter what, you can't stop the signal, Mal..
What are we really talking about here? The few ISPs left in the US that still have news servers? Blocking NNTP? What? All these guys predicting the end of Usenet don't seem to have the vaguest idea how it functions, and seem to assume that if some big-time ISPs shutdown their news servers that the whole edifice will come crashing down.
Give your heads a collective shake. Usenet's not going anywhere. It may mean that those few people who still get a free ride from their ISPs will have to pay, but so the fuck what?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A easy way for government to get rid of P2P sharing as well. I mean, if they can put the lock down on usenet and newsgroups what is to stop them from saying "P2P is a way to share child porn".
I feel this has bigger implications than most think.
It's funny: if you replace the words 'child pornography' with 'Scientology documents', you can roll this line of reasoning right back to when Helena Kobrin tried to rmgroup alt.religion.scientology. (I really recommend look up the newsgroup on Wikipedia, it's fascinating Internet history.)
Like filtering Bittorrent, a real reason for dropping the alt.* hierarchy is doubtless bandwidth. When I last looked some years ago, there were over 70,000 alt.* newsgroups, most of which had no traffic except spam, and some of which were meerely names to create ASCII art in the list of newsgroups. And the binary groups with the most traffic tended to be porn. So since people can download porn on their own fairly easily now, why should the ISP's take responsibility for such an expensive resource to maintain? Blocking child pornography hasn't been an excuse for over a decade, since 'NNTP-Posting-Host' became a de facto required field from all NNTP service providers.
Most of the ISP's I've seen mentioned are only dumping alt.*, not all of Usenet, which still has a lot of useful discussion groups. The Google archives of such groups are wonderful for obscure technical help, and some of the groups remain quite useful for technical discussions or social networking. Dumping those freely created and awkward to flush newsgroups, as a matter of policy, seems to make good business sense and needn't be burdened with the excuse of child pornography.
Most of our country's laws are based off Christianity. I honestly don't see why they don't just ratify the Bible and get it over with.
As a Christian I can tell you that no, they're not really.
People pick and choose which parts of the Bible they want to pay attention to (e.g. Leviticus 18:22) and which parts they want to ignore (e.g. Matthew 18:22).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Prostitution isn't a victimless crime. It could be, and sometimes is, but the general case is that it's gross exploitation and if you're looking for a victim, the prostitute is it. Sometimes a student or someone will make a money by selling themselves for sex. That's their choice. But for most prostitutes, the circumstances are so bad that you can't really apply the word "choice" any more. The reality of prostitution is a grim one and more complicated than someone making a decision to trade sex for money - it's surrounded by and part of a whole mesh of other crimes and abuses. I don't know about the USA, but the plight of immigrant girls from Eastern Europe forced into prostitution not just in countries like Turkey (where the slang term for prostitute is "a Russian") but even here in the UK, is widespread and as nasty as it gets.
We can debate the nature of the laws on prostitution, as well as how and when they are applied, but to consider prostitution to be a victimless crime and that the objection to it is founded in Christian puritanism, is except in a few cases, wrong. It may be that the puritanical attitudes that accompany Christianity and Islam make the situation worse for prostitutes in defining it as a shameful activity, but, although I think trading your body for money is usually damaging for reasons far more fundamental than any religion our species has evolved, it's a separate debate. If you want to see the victim in prostitution she (or he) is right there in front of you.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
This would probably matter more if most ISP-provided usenet feeds didn't have retention that can barely be measured in HOURS to begin with. I imagine the pedocons, like anyone else who has any serious interest in newsgroups in general, and binaries newsgroups in particular, probably pay for premium usenet service. What worries me is what happens when this (As obviously will be the case) does nothing. Will they eventually try to wipe out usenet altogether?
Giganews is up to 240 days retention on all binary newsgroups. If it's out there, anyone who wants it can have at it for $25 a month. But then, so it goes. That's always going to be the case...so where does it end? We start taking pointers from China? From Web 2.0 to Web Good-fuckin-Luck.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Solution, bring it above board, regulate it, unionise it.
Bring it out of the back rooms and seedy motels and give the girls some decent protection.
Take the fucking control away from pimps and organised crime and you fix most of the problem.
Looks like GP was right.
;).
Perhaps one of the many reasons the homicide figure is lower is because they can't kill their hated person twice
Based on the statistics it makes more sense to have a burglary/robbery offender list rather than a sex offender list.
Anyway, putting people on such lists is wrong - once they've done their sentence, you have to let them out.
If a country doesn't have confidence in criminals turning over a new leaf, they should do what China does and execute people for all sorts of crimes - e.g. theft, "hooliganism".
a reasonable argument, except that if a user is downloading his porn from an isp's newsserver, its basically at no cost to the isp ( no upstream bandwidth is used ).
If they remove the newsserver, and the user then switches to bt/http/whatever, that *will* cost the isp upstream bandwidth costs, so from that economic point of view, its cheaper to maintain the servers.
A more likely reason is culpability and fear of lawsuits / criminal investigations for hosting illegal stuff- yes, I know safe harbour provisions, but there are arguements that could be made based on individual groups as seperate channels. I don't know if it would stand up, but I bet the ISP wouldn't want to pay their defence attourneys the cost of finding out...
as an aside, I suppose an economic argument could be made based around the usage patterns of heavy downloaders, the typical retention of ISP newsservers ( and the subsequent need for upstream fill servers ), and the relative inefficiency of nntp as a binary distribution protocol ( even with yenc ), but that is really just an argument against having a *bad* isp news server - disc space is cheap.
"Success is based on knowing how far to go in going too far"
In Australia child pornography is legal, if you call it "art".
Oh come on, that's total garbage.
A picture of a naked child is not a sexualised image to anyone but a paedophile. All of this media beat up crap about it being "irresponsible" on the behalf of the artist(s) because "of what paedophiles do with such images" is further perpetrating the viewpoint that a naked child is a sexual entity. You can't hold someone as immoral when you're espousing their own position.
Look at it this way: there are some people for whom stuffed toys are their fetish. Should we be calling for the banning of Sesame Street for its irresponsible pandering?
Could this be the end of Eternal September? People serious about wanting usenet access can get a pay account to access it and all the spammers and riffraff that have plagued it since the mid 90's will be for the most part gone. Still there are a lot of downsides of this, but I don't think losing a piracy outlet is one of them. Have you seen the retention of most ISP's these days? They don't retain enough of anything to be worth much anymore. Their binary section usually has a size limit which means that unless you are collecting each piece as it comes in, if you log in, you only see about 1/4 of the last uploaded chunks of the file. And don't get me started on how much they throttle the usenet speed (I'm talking sub dialup speeds). Anyone who uses it for binary access is almost certainly using a pay site that has decent retention and good speed. That isn't going to go away from what I understand.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I'm sorry to disagree with you, because i would like to protect the children, but not enought to give up all my rights to do so.
I do not believe that this agreement is for the purposes stated within. I believe they are using a strawman issue (kiddie pr0n) to establish a framework for controling and censoring the internet, something I cannot abide.
By the way, you should look up strawman arguments, since your post is making one. it's a common logical fallacy. so heres one back at ya: remember many of Hitlers "reforms" we're done to protect the children. obviously because you want to protect the children, you must support genocide and racism. Welcome to Slashdot. Godwin's law be damned.
Please explain to me how a PRIVATE company NOT providing a service free of charge ... constitutes an "observable erosion of civil liberties".
This agreement paints all such newgroups, whether or not they contain any illegal content, as probable cause for you to get arrested. I'd say that's a _huge_ erosion of civil liberties. It's illegal to possess CP, not happen to browse newsgroups with 'binaries' in their title. It is absolutely not my ISPs duty or business to record my browsing habits. They're opening themselves up to charges themselves by editing the material they provide access to (they could lose their common carrier status). Much like Slashdot disavows ownership of comments, ISPs should do the same and stay out of law enforcement.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
No, you'd have to include any European countries whose national health care covers abortions. They're murdering their own citizens too.
Isn't unnecessary spin great? See how we can so effectively snuff any rational discussion by tweaking words just a little bit? What a great technique you discovered!
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard