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Rhode Island Bill Would Impose Fee For Accessing Online Porn (providencejournal.com)
If a recently introduced bill passes the General Assembly this session, Rhode Island residents will have to pay a $20 fee to access sexually explicit content online. The bill, introduced by Sen. Frank Ciccone (D-Providence) and Sen. Hanna Gallo (D-Cranston), would require internet providers to digitally block "sexual content and patently offensive material." Consumers could then deactivate that block for a fee of $20. The Providence Journal reports: Each quarter the internet providers would give the money made from the deactivation fees to the state's general treasurer, who would forward the money to the attorney general to fund the operations of the Council on Human Trafficking, according to the bill's language. If online distributors of sexual content do not comply with the filter, the attorney general or a consumer could file a civil suit of up to $500 for each piece of content reported, but not blocked, according to the bill.
ludicrously and patently unconstitutional
The RI lawmakers are Idiots.
And like the Australian blacklist, 'somehow' content that has nothing to do with that listed on the bill will end up blocked. Like rival businesses. Or political opponents.
Or is the list of banned content going to be made available for public ... scrutiny? Ahem.
I'll be fascinated to see how they expect this to be implemented.
Legal because I have no doubt they can create a tax or fee on anything they want to.
Hypocritical because Rhode Island claims to also be in favor of "Net Neutrality"
http://www.providencejournal.c...
Porn is almost half the Web. Putting a fee on it is almost like having a hamburger fee at Burger King.
Table-ized A.I.
And if you point out how absurd their idea is; you're against 'doing something', and supporting human trafficking + child porn.
It really is a genius rhetorical device that works surprisingly well.
Good luck proving in court that "because his packets were this size, he *must* have been viewing porn". If that's so accurate, VPNs would be worthless in repressive states like China and Iran (and apparently Rhode Island now, too, lol) because they could just *tell* that you're visiting a site they don't like, and shut you down.
But VPNs are still very effective in many countries if your endpoint isn't a "known" VPN operator. The other option is for the ISP operator to maintain a strict whitelist of which IPs/websites are reachable from their network; a few countries have begun to think that this is the only true way forward, because if you default to routing any traffic, it's still trivially easy to bypass just about any filtering or deep scanning attempts using standard crypto like TLS.
Sure, you can probably inspect the timing and bandwidth utilization of an encrypted connection to distinguish between streaming video, working in an online office suite, uploading a video to a streaming service, or viewing a restaurant's menu, with high accuracy of being able to at least rule out one or more of those categories. But being able to tell which actual *website* is being visited, or what content is being consumed? That seems very unrealistic to me. The degree of confidence you'd have in your assertions would be, at best, around 50% or so, and almost always much lower than that. This sort of "suspicion-based reasoning" wouldn't fly in most courts in countries that uphold basic human rights.
Oh, and any timing based traffic analysis deductions can be easily defeated client-side by inserting random, non-deterministic jitter into all outbound packets. Since the server endpoint's send rate is also dependent on your client's responses (TCP ACKs), you can effectively control the delay in your server endpoint's responses by introducing small amounts of random latency into your own client's ACKs. Then you can further muddy the waters by having the endpoint pollute the encrypted tunnel with nonsense data. The most accurate conclusion that could be claimed with a high degree of certainty thereafter would be "They seem to be using a lot of throughput for some reason".
Indeed, any justice system that would allow such leaps in logic based on packet size and timing analysis (while having no idea of what the actual contents of the datastream contained) is not a justice system I'd want to be subjected to. That's getting dangerously close to guilty until proven innocent.
Pretty sure Rhode Island still has that law that it's ok for a stripper to be as young as 16...as long as she's home before curfew.
Yep, there it is : http://abcnews.go.com/Business...
Ah, America.
-Styopa
There were several multi-shot weapons in existence at the time the Constitution was being drafted. (Puckle gun, Giridoni Air Rifle and others) But by that same logic the 1st Amendment only applies to speech expressed verbally in person, via hand written or hand cranked press printed documents. Surely the founding fathers could never have imagined being able to post a Message or opinion in a way that could be instantly seen across the nation and even around the world.
By your logic the freedom of speech does not apply to any of our modern communication methods. No phones, no computers, no Radio, no TV or interweb. Not even multi-color high speed presses capable of producing thousands of newspapers an hour.
If the 2nd only applies to muzzle loaders, then the 1st and 4th are equally limited to protecting our rights via the technology of the 1780's.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
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