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COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat
A US federal appeals court today struck down COPA, the Child Online Protection Act, a Clinton-era censorship law that the Justice Department has been struggling to get implemented for a decade. (The ACLU filed suit as soon as COPA was signed in 1998 and won an immediate injunction.) The battle has made it to the Supreme Court twice, and the DoJ has essentially never gotten any satisfaction out of the courts. This was the case for which the DoJ famously went trolling for search histories. In the ruling issued today, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that COPA violates the First Amendment because it is not the most effective way to keep children from visiting adult Web sites. The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
But it's for the children!!!!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Parents, it's your job to watch your kids, not anybody else's.
Je me fous du passé
Another stunning blow to the Bush administration and their complete disregard for our civil liber...
Oh. Never mind. I'll just go back to my job at the New York Times now.
There are so many good options for parental control software today that this kind of stuff is totally unnecessary. Then again, I guess that means that parents will actually have to buy it, and pay attention to what their kids are doing online.
Affordable Health Coverage
Finally. Now my children don't have to keep bugging me for my credit card when they want to visit adult sites.
COPA Suffers Yet Another Court Defeat
Better it than us. I'm tired of everything moving towards a nanny state.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080721/1545501748.shtml">Techdirt's latest on the topic
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Fuck parental controls. If you believe that your children are not old enough to "surf" on their own, then just put the computer next to you while your children use it.
"Parenting" - it doesn't end at birth.
What causes more harm to Children? Porn or Religion?
I see reports of kids dying because their parents were too superstitious to take them to a doctor because of their religion. i have never heard of a kid dying because he watched a porno movie or read a dirty book.
Oh wait... These are Metaphorical Children. They don't obey natural laws, only metaphorical ones.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I shall cut your country in two.
I'm tempted to go for 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense' except its taken them a few years to get around to this so perhaps 'delayedoutbreakofcommonsense'
Somewhere in here is a Barry Manilow joke.
COPA is just an artifact from the days when no one knew how to apply constitutional law to the Internet. Unfortunately, we are now in for years of quasi-successful bills that will only serve to screw up the structure and nature of cyberspace. I wish these politicians would at least try to learn about the Internet before they pass ridiculously unconstitutional bills.
Is/Was this the same law that required me to essentially ban anyone under 13 from my (kid friendly) forum website because I don't have the resources necessary to manage all those permission forms?
How is censorship going to protect the children?
I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography or religion. But censorship isn't going to protect them, it only harms freedom.
If they really care they should go after child abusers and child porn producers.
My children ARE porn stars, you insensitive clod!
Love,
Chris Matthews
See, let's start with little Johnny that watches lots of porn. Hard-core stuff. Ends up getting out of high school thinking that (a) wimmen like surprises, like rape, and (b) wimmen don't like him. Yes, (b) is a logical corallary to (a) but we won't go there. How did little Johnny get so twisted? Simple: nobody ever paid any attention to him and let him go off and figure stuff out for himself, like relating to other people. In today's world this is pretty easy to imagine.
Whose problem is it exactly when little Johnny acts out his hard-core rape fantasies? His parents? His teachers? Nope. It is your problem and mine because we have to live in the society that little Johnny is living in.
Is little Johnny fit for society? Who exactly is going to take care of little Johnny if he doesn't fit in society and can't be left alone with anything female? Couldn't we just give him back to his parents? Sadly, we can't lock him up until he accumulates enough rapes with witnesses to actually get a conviction. And just locking him up for a while isn't going to "fix" him - we have to deal with little Johnny for life and thousands more like him. How did it get this way? Because as a society we were content to assume his parents were responsible adults and could foresee what would happen if they were not effective parents. We all assumed that "the village" would help raise Johhny right even if his parents were incapable. What we got was a disaster and a human hardly worth the name.
What is the answer? I don't know. But for parents using a TV or computer as a babysitter and ignoring the kid results in damage. Damage to the kid and damage to society. We are currently dealing with that damage today, mostly in the inner cities but believe me, it isn't confined there by any means. Would COPA be a solution? Not really, but it couldn't hurt in this sort of case. Where would we go for a real solution? I think we need to think about some points:
Face it, today in the US a good deal of our troubles are parents that dump their children on "the system" and hope for the best because they haven't a clue. Or haven't the motivation. How exactly do we fix this problem? It isn't by hoping parents will do a better job. We have been hoping they would since the 1960s or even before that and it hasn't happened.
Yeah because going to an unsavory website and requiring access by giving them my credit card information without actually buying anything is a GREAT idea. I can't think of anyone I trust more with my credit information than a pr0n site... Not to mention a child would never be able to get access to a credit card, or the pr0n stashed in their parents' sock drawer, or saved on the hard drive, or on the recent documents list, or...
The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge.
It was an absolutely stupid idea to check anything with a credit card when you don't know even *who* that is going to half the time. And what the card is being used for.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I didn't know that Michael Jackson had a slashdot account?
If you ask me, any site that extols the virtues of Milton Friedman as an economists is "harmful to minors".
The problem is not children accessing porn. The problem is the bill is so damn vaguely worded that /. would require age verification.
Cynical Idealist
This law has been getting beaten down for years!
These stories show how bad Slashdot has gotten. The thought of keeping little kids off of porn sickens the average Slashdotter? Absolutely pathetic excuses for humans.
And the thought of restricting the rights of adults for little or no foreseeable gain doesn't sicken you? That sickens me.
Pathetic attempt at trolling.
A quote from Justice department spokesperson Charles miller: "We are disappointed that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Congressional statute designed to protect our children from exposure to sexually explicit material on the internet."
See, all they're trying to do is keep kids from seeing sex on the internet, they're not trying to limit your freedoms.
Here's a solution that will make both camps happy: pass a law that all children must be executed.
I don't think COPA should be a constitutional ammendment by any means, but for the pornographers, it just makes sense. How do you make money off of giving away free porn? I would think you would want to verify the person had a credit card, just so you knew they had a means to buy your product anyway. Pornographers have gigantic bandwidth requirements, and they could significantly reduce those requirements by not allowing every Harry Tom Dick err... Tom, Dick, and Harry into their site in the first place.
Eggs
Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
nothing COPA-CETIC about this issue...
http://www.cetic.be/indexEN.php3
At least not on THIS planet...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It sickens me if you are letting your small children roam the Internet unrestricted and unsupervised.
But what that has to do with placing restrictions on websites, I do not know.
Do you really think the DoJ would be doing anything significantly different in this regard if we had a different president?
I groped a teacher when I was in 2nd grade.
I got my dick stroked by an 8 year old when I was 9. A lot.
I found porn when I was 12.
I'm a huge pervert now.
I think this started with my own internal struggle to explore real life, and I would probably be the parent of a poorly raised kid had I not been looking at porn instead of screwing high school girls when I was in high school. Well, okay, I'd probably be using condoms... if I could get them... without parents finding out.... ... kids' own brains are harmful to them! Remove the brains!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
If some people come to their senses. The vechicles being used to exploit kids these days aren't the reason kids are being exploited. Parents should watch what their kids are doing. It's called good parenting. The idiots blaming technology should keep using it to catch these sick fucks. I know what appalls me the most, that their are sick fucks out there taking advantage of children... The next appalling thing is that politicians don't have one clue about the real problem and wave a victory flag everytime they wage war against technology because some slimeball tells them this will get them more popular. People like Andrew Cuomo aren't doing anything good to help kids. NOTHING. NADDA. They are basically misleading parents ... and the parents (not to their fault, they just want to protect their children from horrible shit like usenet) are eating this up...
I'm more than agitated with this, not because it hurts technology somehow, but because you have more clueless sit hands politicians that have no touch with reality, just as long as they are popular. I wish it wasn't so illegal to slap some of these assholes upside the head.
Is it just me that remembers that the idea of "childhood" is at most a century old? Prior to that they were adults-in-training.
So this entire "Think of the children" crap is more about protecting an idea that these small humans should be shielded from the realities of life instead of educated so they actually do become adults.
I think the new definition of childhood actually extends into the mid-20s because of more societal pressure. They're in college, they really aren't responsible yet, etc.
Screw that. It's the parents job to get those little monsters properly trained to be responsible adults. Heck, overseas 'kids' are in professional training schools by they time they're sixteen. Here they're still considered helpless babes who can't do anything without mommy and daddy there to make sure they don't get 'damaged'.
Don't even get me started on that whole self-esteem vs actual value stuff that the schools are promoting.
I realize I'm starting to sound like an old fogey but I guess that's what I am. I'm tired of seeing these poor young adults with absolutely no idea of what is expected of them or how to achieve it. And all because of some misguided idea that they should be protected while they're young instead of taught.
I despair.
Living in Australia where my rights have been affected by a retarded law similiar to this I can say law or no law the kids will see the porno.
The other day I overheard two thirteen year olds discussing the use of an international proxy to evade the ISP level blocking of their scat exploration. From what I overheard, apparently they think scat is funny. They didn't sound like potential rapists.
Heck, when I was a kid I saw the evil porno, I now have a family and two kids - if anything seeing the evil porno seemed to have helped versus these upstart white collar kids who are off embezzeling money & snorting drugs.
Porno or not, quality parenting or not, it's the values that are instilled in a child that matters.
If both parents and society fail to instil values into a youth then the youth is like a boat without a rudder, they may get where they are going but likely they will drift into trouble along the way.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
parent needs a mod-up. It's very well thought-out, and I consider it very accurate.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Personally, I would like to see children protected -- but not from porn.
I take your statement to infer that you'd rather that children be psychologically damaged to the extent that they can't enjoy sex by the time they're old enough to engage in it? Hopefully not, but I've noticed that there seems to be some misunderstandings about the reasons legislators pass laws against porn. It isn't about forcing some Puritan morality on the public at large. It really is about protecting the children - not your children - theirs.
Most girls don't look like models. Most guys don't have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis_size/12 inches [NSFW] to satisfy their potential mate. What happens when little girls and boys look at porn is that they form unrealistic expectations of sex:
The complications and anxieties that such beliefs can form is left as an exercise for the reader. But I myself on more than one occasion have had to deal with the fallout from the porn industry, and am well aware that it does damage people. Perhaps not in the immediately recognizable, medical, or clinical sense, but it definitely affects people in a mental and spiritual way.
And honestly, why would you want to take anything away from a person's future enjoyment of sex? So you can maintain your own fantasies about what sex would be like if you could get it?
This law isn't about denying porn to those who will make an effort to get it, but rather, about protecting children from inadvertently stumbling upon it. As a parent, I don't want my child's Google search for "hot fire truck" to serve up porn. Until I'm convinced that an innocent phrase won't turn up porn, my kid isn't going to use the internet. So what a law like this really does is allow children to be exposed to the internet, because without such controls, parents such as myself just won't let our children use the internet.
When I was growing up, I was allowed unfettered access to a computer. Sadly, because of the widespread availability of porn (among other things...), I'm not sure if I'll be able to extend that same privilege to my children. And that's quite sad, that in a mere 20 years, the environment of learning and discovery with which I grew up has been co-opted from an intellectual playground into merely just another content distribution mechanism for the masses.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The United States wishes to require adult websites to verify ages of visitors "in case a child might see it".
The United Kingdom has recently criminalised possession of some adult material, "in case a child might see it" (well, the reasons are varied, but their "justifications" include this as a reason).
The United States law is struck down as a violation of freedom of speech. We do have freedom of expression under the European Convention of Human Rights which some believe this law will violate, however it has the get-out clause "subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, ... for the protection of ... morals".
The COPA law is broader than the pic-and-mix "extreme" images law, in that it covers all adult content not just some, but I thought the comparison is interesting. I am glad that the US has made this sensible step, I'm just unfortunate to live somewhere where the prudes are way ahead.
THE PAIN JUST KEEPS coming for Nvidia, this time in the partner space. Two of their key 'alpha' partners have just defected.
It is nearly impossible to make money selling Nvidia cards right now, NV squeezed partners margins too much, and when the going got rough, prioritised its own margins over partner survival. This gave partners the choice of popping like a zit financially or moving to less green pastures.
Like Gainward before them, two of the largest ones, XFX and EVGA have defected. Want to bet Nvidia doesn't know yet? In any case, partners leaving a company like rats leaving a sinking ship is never a good sign, lets see what happens in the coming months when the pain really piles on at NV.
The really interesting part is who they defected to, and it isn't ATI. Paperwork has been signed though, and it is a done deal.
I mean seriously how can anyone be more offtopic then this. Do these people just copy and paste random jiberish? I mean who are these people...
I'm pretty sure that's COPPA, not COPA. The former protects privacy, the latter from sex.
> The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site
> contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
I'm sure there are loads of detailed, duplicated scientific studies that shows "minors" exposed to "pornography" are psychologically harmed, presumably chronically and irrepairably.
They are probably lined up on the legislator's shelves right next to the studies showing gorgeous teachers copulating with drooling 15 year olds harms the 15 year old psychologically, "akin to a mauling by a dog".
I just can't seem to find that bookshelf, though.
Our legislators wouldn't pass a law without sound, scientific evidence of harm, would they?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Theres a shocker.
What about these kids Who grow up in backwards racist towns, whole heartedly beleiving that black people and gays are evil. The kids who make fun of the spanish teacher to her face by calling her a fucking jew, in the 7th grade no less. women are objects and their bodies are inappropriate, where the only redeming quality about them is they can cause sexual arousal.
Now one of these kids gets full access to the internet. Wanders about, finds different ideas and oppinions while still young enough to accept them as a possibility. Some of these ideas are on websites that are deemed 'adult' because of strong language and the general lack of cencoring. 'Porn' (which is a term that is based highly on oppinion) is available from actual artists or because of trolls posting it (note that these are two different interpretations of what porn consists of). Swearing is abundant, but the people behave like adults, generally. this kid reads and enters discussions with adults (yes, occasionaly sounding childish, but quickly learns proper behavior based on reactions from others and how they behave). and, because the child is young and can still change their mindset, they begin to wonder if all of the things the real world community taught them about other kinds of people is true.
This was my experience. I saw plenty of porn when I was young, even searched for it on purpose, and (oh my god) some of it wasnt rape, or wierd bondage/violence/poo fetishes, some of it was just two people screwing. Some stuff was just artistic nudity and that allowed me to appriciate male and female form when I draw or paint today. I talked and swore with many adults, and they didnt try to get me to come over to their house for candy. I experienced intelligent debate from a young age with adults.
I think what is more detrimental to kids is to keep them in 'kiddie land' untill they turn a certian age, at which point they are thrown into the adult world. When they take the time to learn things at their own pace they can take it in as they are able. And the internet has a profound power for good, for opening young minds to new cultures EVEN if they are backwards racists morons. like I was.
...shouldn't have a paper trail attached to them!
These stories show how bad Slashdot has gotten. The thought of keeping little kids off of porn sickens the average Slashdotter?
Absolutely pathetic excuses for humans.
Here's an AC who stands by their convictions... ohh, wait....
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of