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Passing Porn, Banning the Bible
Please read this press release from The Censorware Project. Their target today is Bess, a new piece of protect-the kiddies software from N2H2 that seems to be even more defective than some of its competitors. Look at the list of sites Bess bans (it's in the Censorware Project press release), and at some of the ones it allows to pass. Then laugh. I did, but sadly, because many U.S. legislators want this kind of software installed in all public schools and libraries. I could go on and on here, but why bother? Read the Censorware Project press release for yourself. It may lead you to a few porno sites, but at least they're ones that have passed Bess's scrutiny, and that's all that counts, right?
The problem is not so much violence which has, after all, been around as long as the human race (if not longer -- some animals are pretty violent).
The problem is the increasing need for instant gratification, without thinking about the consequences, whatever they might be. Kids learn "I want that -- gimme that!" at a very young age, and that mentality leads to more social problems than exposure to the Seven Dirty Words or to nudie pix ever will.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I've got two words for you: configure junkbuster.
Mostly, I like the ability to get rid of ad banners (which is what it was designed for) and filter cookies. But you can configure it to deny specific sites and censor pages by keywords, and that is a good start.
I guess the more annoying step is to make sure that the user can't kill the proxy, or run the proxy on some other machine and allow no other access to the web...
Not that I'm in favor of censorware, but I also am not in favor of ads, or poorly written software...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Secondly, there is an idea buried here. Perhaps the parent feeds the browser (or router) a list of approved sites and/or site domains. The parent can then add sites as needed or wanted (as kiddo whines, "Can I link to megasportssite.com?").
If software were instrumented this way, you could also create a small industry of selling site lists. I could then subscribe to a site list, and they would send me a list of approved sites every month that I could "install" as part of my master list. Depending on my parental style, I could get my list from anybody from "Toys R Us" to Billy Graham (or even multiples--any site on any list can be accessed).
This would cause a very restricted browsing experience, but the restrictions could be dropped by parental control.
This doesn't help on accessing the Web from places other than home, but I'm not sure anything shy of "1984" would.
--The basis of all love is respect
You joke, but some censors have seriously accused us of shilling for the porn industry. We've got a really sarcastic and informative response to that, which you could read in our Admin section if it weren't totally slashdotted at the moment. Oh well.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
My understanding is that students in school do not enjoy the same degree of Constitutional protection that adults do. Minors (under 18) simply do not have the same rights as adults. They don't have the same responsiblities, either. (I am not saying I agree or disagree with this.)
While the Supreme Court stated in one opinion that Constitutional rights do not end at the schoolhouse gate (sorry, I forget the case), they also have held that the need to maintain order in the school will often override a student's freedom of expression. This is the basic justification for dress codes and prohibited clothing such as Nazi armbands, gang colors, etc.
The whole issue of Constitutionally-protected speech gets a lot more complicated when dealing with minor students. It's a fascinating area, but get ready to be shocked and angered every once in a while if you decide to research it.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
So maybe we need something like Open Directory but just for kids, or rather only pertaining to limited sensibilities. A list of sites that are good instead of rules for sites that are bad. Sure, it would still limit the horizons of kids, but something open and dynamic like that would certainly be more fulfilling than just slashdot and freshmeat (no offense CmdrTaco and Scoop!)
Had it at the high school I just graduated at. It was an unquestionalbe load of garbage. Some form of transparent proxy and it appended to any HTML file you loaded.
What I enjoyed was discussing the legal issues of this software with my friends. After all, my homepage isn't "Powered by N2H2" as it says when loaded. This neat little banner is added to every page. So tell me, can they legally DO that? Modifiy the look of MY webpage?
It was quite a fun topic, the administrators at the school library HATED the thing, they just had to install it, orders from above.
but I've never heard porn drive people to go door-to-door and irritate people,
It's called SPAM, and the porno "industry" sure does produce *a lot*
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If my employer restricted my ability to visit www.footfetish.com, it wouldn't really make a difference to me (although they wouldn't have to steam clean the carpet as often.) This is trivial. Now if they blocked slashdot, productivity here would go through the roof! Of course we'd all quit after a couple of weeks, but we'd be able to get a lot more work done in those 2 weeks. This only applies to the techies, but if you replace slashdot with ebay or investor.msn.com it would apply to the sales and marketing department as well. Why don't we see blocking software that filters out popular time wasting sites?
--Shoeboy
I wish someone would stand up and tell the schools government, and parents that even with software, the www isn't a babysitter.
...
... also parents would be able to set up their kids on a certain for-kids site and know they can't wander off ...
... 8-(
Now, having said that, considering how people use it as a baby sitter, maybe filtering software isn't going in the right direction
When I was learning to ride my bike, I was only allowed to ride on certain streets. My parents simply told me what streets I *could* ride on, they didn't try to list every street that I *couldn't* ride on. If filtering software worked this way, it would IMHO be better for corporations and libraries that want their net connected computers to be information appliances (no need to go to most sites)
I realize that this leaves most of the net unaccessable, but for the 12 year olds, and the libraries that want online news access, book reviews, etc. wouldn't this be "better"?
Personally I believe that everyone should grow up and learn to live without censorware, but that isn't going to happen any time soon
--Wuzoe
I'm a nice person. People like me.
I can't believe some of these restrictions. It's... almost inconceivable. Consider their ban on "Message/Bulletin Boards" - "Sites that permit semi-permanent messages to be posted and read by others." Heaven forbid the little kiddies should have a free discourse of any kind. Posted and read by others? Why, who knows what those ravening internet users might post! Swear words! Heretical leanings! Thoughts! I wouldn't be surprised to discover /. is banned under this clause. Too free.
Then there's their block on unfiltered searches. Consider this corrupting search string:
"http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=women". Egads, cover their sweet little eyes! They might be looking up such horrendous topics as women in the military, or the accomplishments of women! All, no doubt, in a sick demonic attempt to see nude bodies - we all know that women have no interest apart from the sexual.
Of course, they also ban "Free pages". Because of course, unless you have Big Money behind the site, you know it will all end in tears. The entire geocities complex is blocked, including such appalling sites as my blood-and-lust-centric Lucy Test. I don't like the banner ads either, but how many times have I been shunted to a geocities page when researching something that intrested me? Not for Bess users, though. Good old Bess, she doesn't have time to spend, say, THINKING about the worth of certain sites. She'd rather toss a pure white blanket over the lot and be done with it.
Frankly, I can't imagine the distorted hairy-palmed little trolls who rate sites for companies like this one. They spend their days looking at a good sight more porn and dementia than I ever do. Straight-backed Christians of the world - if you believe that information corrupts, then do you really want these polluted individuals deciding what your children see?
This has ruined my day.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Oh, I know that much, and I don't agree with that either, but remember that even if you are 18, you still don't have your full rights as long as you are still in school.
It doesn't matter if you're an adult or not, as long as you're in a high school, and probably a college as well, you waive some of your (more important) adult rights. Why? I don't know, but I'd love to see people fight it.
Heck, it doesn't matter if you're in college or not, they'll still try to censor your newspapers and restrict the content you see. They just have less of a legal basis to do so...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I interviewed at N2H2 before taking my present job at a Large Internet Retailer in the same city. So here's a load of irony for you:
:).
1) Bess runs on Linux. Exclusively.
Yes, the whole system. When a company or school (they have a near-lock on the academic market) decides to buy Bess, N2H2 sends out a tech to install a linux box (or boxen). Those boxen all talk to more linux boxen to keep the URL lists current.
2) N2H2 funds free software projects.
They paid for outside developers' time to get ipfwadm finished, and they are active in the perl circuit.
3) Most of the people who work there don't think that censorware should be installed for anyone older than 12, but they can't say no to a client.
4) Robots go out on the net and flag suspect sites, and the call on whether or not to block a flagged site is made by a human. So if something is being blocked, then someone decided to block it. The converse, of course, is not the case.
5) They drag their feet when making offers to perl hackers, and the perl hackers go to work for Large Internet Retailers instead
I'm sorry I came to this discussion late-- hopefully this post will bubble up a bit.
Well accually legally I believe that your backpack belongs to your parents. So they force you to take your parents property to school everyday (obviously this part your parents probably consent to). Then at random times without consulting your parent, (or you, which your parent by loaning it have entrusted such desisions) they search your backpack. Doesn't sound very legal to me, could easily be challenged. Though schools could just have a letter at the beginning of the year requesting a parent waive all rights concerning you (HAHAH).
I haven't seen anyone mention Active Guardian.
http://www.activeguardian.com/
They are listed in freshmeat. Work in combination of squid. They are an open source project. There are some drawbacks at the moment. They were looking at one time for someone to set up a database to help rate site.
Right now it uses four methods to filter sites.
1) PICS Ratings
2) Ban word list
3) Ban site list
4) approved site list
I am sure they can use any help they can get
JC
Although I have no kids of my own, I've volunteered for the Big Brother's organization, and had the following experience. My "Little", as they're called, will simply refer to as johnny. His mother will be referred to as Jane.
Now, knowing that I'm a computer geek, Jane asked me to monitor Johnny's surfing if I let him access the internet from my computers. She, like the creators of BESS along with it's users, wanted to protect him from obscene material. No problem, I thought, I'm not exactly the irrisponsible sort, that's why I volunteered in the first place.
So one day, Johnny and I are over at my house, and he asks if he can get on the internet. I proceed to fire up my FreeBSD *blatent plug* gateway's ppp connection and a browser app for him to use.
Out of curiousity, I didn't make any mention of monitoring, or restricting his destinations. I just let him go, and watched quietly. What I saw absolutely horrified me! No, it wasn't porn, or a gay rights site, or subliminal satanic messages... It was the most blatently grotesque commercial site I'd ever seen. Run by the General Mills Corp, and targeted at impressionable young children, the http://www.yourschoolrules.com site - Johnny's favorite - is nothing but pathetic brain-washing type kids games and puzzles and stories. Strewn throughout each are the cartoon characters of all of GM's breakfast cereals.
If you ever thought Saturday morning kids TV shows were bad, with the constant barrage of kid-targeted commercials - check out this site! To access the "full" site, the kids have to "sign up" and give GM a bunch of info about themselves. This helps them market their products better. Of course, they have the standard "be sure to ask Mom or Dad if it's ok to tell us this" message. But since you can't access anything without complying, I can't see kids really worrying about such a detail. Johnny sure didn't, and my PC was filled the GM cookies like you wouldn't believe.
This exploitation of children, knowing full well how impressionable they are, is far more of a threat than seeing words like shit and ass - or God forbid... a REAL breast!
Anyway, just had to share this. I tried to explain to Johnny why *I* didn't approve of that site. Jane, she wasn't much help, as long it wasn't "obscene", it was ok with her. Frankly I find the commercial brain-washing of children far more "obscene" than a breast!
My entire school district, which thankfully I graduated from a year ago, used Bess as their net filter. This included at the public library, where I worked for quite some time as a Technical Handyman, for lack of a better term, in the children's computer room.
:)
It was positively the worst net filter I've ever seen--and that's saying something, considering the rather pitiful quality of even the best ones out there. More often than not, all it did was hinder students from finding information for school reports (I've seen everything ranging from abortion topics to the Emancipation Proclimation be blocked by Bess.)
First of all, putting filters on the computers within the high school always seemed a bit silly to me...who is actually going to look at porn in the middle of a large room that is almost constantly filled with students and teachers? It was such a non-issue it became somewhat of a joke among those of us who actually understood the system.
Second, it became SO MUCH of a hinderance that the librarians (because they didn't know how to use the damn thing themselves) actually enlisted my help on more than one occasion to teach the class how to turn Bess off so that they could finish their reports. No one ever said they were the brightest librarians in the world
Third, at a public library...well, it's all been covered before. The only new idea I have to add is that in two and a half years of working there, not once did any kid actually come in with the intention to surf the web and find porn. As amazing as this may be to the bureaucrats back in DC, most children do not like going to the library. Therefore, they're only going to be there when they actually have valid work to do. The few kids who actually do enjoy being in libraries are not the ones you have to worry about. That leaves......no one. Again, I had to turn off the damn thing numerous times so that students could actually do their assigned work.
Filters just suck.
-
The bill of rights is binding upon state governments, and state governments organize school districts (though they usually delegate control to local school boards). So the bill of rights is binding on school districts. For that matter, any entity (such as a school board) that is the recipient of tax money is bound by the bill of rights.
Hate to perpetuate an offtopic thread, but this argument is intellectually unsound.
The problem is that the Bible itself has many morally "bad" passages, especially the Old Testament. You'll find God commanding His followers to rape, murder, pillage, etc.
When reading the Bible, it is important to understand the goal of various passages. Most of the morally "bad" passages you refer to are in historical books written to describe what happened. This is quite different from prescriptive passages which were intended to be instructional.
Despite saying in one place that killing is bad, God commands His followers to kill all the male children prisoners, and keep the female children prisoners for sex slaves.
Note the difference between murder - unlawful and malicious or premeditative slaying of another, and killing in wars where another country is being morally judged. A prohibition on murder by no means disallows war.
Finally, the directive to kill all males and keep women and children was designed for moral and religious purity. In male-dominated cultures, killing all the men prevented dilution of their religious views with "heathen" populations. And there's no indication that the females were to be used as "sex slaves"; they became members of the conquering nation (an accepted wartime practice of the day) and were married just like "native" women.
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
A while ago a director of a Christian camp program (a small group of college-aged students attend this camp for nine months at a shot) asked me what I would recommend to ensure that "innapropriate" sites are not visited by the camp's computer (singular).
I suggested he keep the campers from viewing innapropriate pages the same way he kept the campers from buying porn mags - teaching them why such things are discurraged and trusting people to make their own decision. It took a few hours of talking, but he eventually agreed that was the best course of action for people of this age group.
One less facility using censorware is a good thing. An administrative type trusting in personal responsibility is a miricle that I have thanked God for, and hope to witness again in my life.
Schools are allowed to search more than JUST lockers. At any point they can search you backpack without your permision. Now, I don't know about you but my school didn't loan out backpacks. I remember quite clearly an assembly that was manditory that all students attend that they searched all the backpacks on the way in, whether you wanted the to or not. When you are under 18 you do not have your full rights as a citizen.
As for the other comment on the same level as the one that I replied to about colleges being allowed to censor and search, public schools are not allowed. I don't know about private schools, they may, depending on what you have to sign. I remember that in order for a resident advisor to search your closet they need your permision or a search warrent with police accompeniment. Also, the school cannot restrict what you see, read or hear. There are ways that they may take to reduce the ability to see that information, like restrictions of information viewed on lab machines, but they cannot prevent you from that information. If the school offers internet access they cannot block you from seeing sights, they can fire your teachers for visiting some sights, but they cannot restict your access as a student.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
I used to teach, so point me to a legal decision if you think I'm wrong. If you are 18, you are an adult, and the legal relationship between the school and the student changes. One day you're at their mercy, and the next day thay can NOT violate the constitutional rights that you share with every adult. All public schools I have dealt with received some Federal funds, and all were supported by of tax dollars. They are governmental institutions and are subject to Constitutional prohibitions on violating your rights (unlike private schools). Of course, they don't tell you this. If you don't know you have rights, schools can violate them with little consequence.
On the other hand, 18-year-old students who threaten to break their teachers face can be expelled, charged with assault, and tried and sentenced as an adult (smiles at the memory).
Ooo, maybe we should let people decide what content they should view, after all, at least some popular censorware does a worse job than they would, themselves...
...that's what I thought. And we know that the extreme right wing moral majority is all in favor of the Constitution, and at least the Second Amendment... why not the First Amendment?
:)
Actually, your average elementary school student either has no concept of "porn", or is disgusted by it. And if they aren't, is that so bad? Maybe they're just a little ahead of their time...
Which brings us to our third point. Let's look at a scenario here.
1) User: I want to go to www.foo.com.
2) Stupid Proxy: www.foo.com is blocked. Sorry.
3) User: Why? I want to see it.
4) Stupid Proxy: Sorry, www.foo.com is blocked.
5) User: Well, I'll just find another way to get there, then, I really need to see that.
6) Stupid Proxy: ???
7) User: There, see, I knew it was okay.
Now, I'm all in favor of teaching children how to *hack* at an early age, I just find it pitiful when you have to do that to get *work* done. I had to in High School, because of the excessive, draconian security measures. I wasn't really popular with the computer administrators, but I could save my files to a disk, or use a DOS command if I wanted to, and that's what counted.
Where does it say in the Constitution, that students or children aren't people, and therefore don't deserve those basic rights that everyone else has?
My advice: if you don't like the First Amendment, then shut up.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I would say that is the only method that will work (parental supervision). While it's nice to believe that internet filtering or the vchip or some other sort of what is essentially a passive type of agent technology will help educators or parents exercise some control over what the children in their care are exposed to the two major difficulties will ultimately be insurmountable:
1)Content on the net is constantly changing. There's no way to keep an accurate list of good/bad content.
2)Different parents and/or educators are going to have different opinions regarding what sort of content is appropriate for a given group of children. Thus a tendency exists to err on the side of caution. In the case of software that doesn't recognize any difference between users, erring on the side of caution for a 5 year old is going to eliminate a significant amount of content that would be appropriate for a 16 year old.
The only workable solution is to have computer access in a place where it can be monitored by an actual living human being.
Check out Linux University
One other quick point, while I'm being moderated down to "ZERO" (which, given the overarching topic of censorship, open-mindedness, and 1st amendment blah-smack makes for irony you can't fake) on the subject of Bible Thumpers vs. Porn-Purveyors.
We all, from time to time, have our personal space invaded. Most often it is through unsolicited email. Very often this unsolicited email is from online pornography outfits that want you to come visit their website, so they can get advertising dollars, or sell you a subscription to some online porn feed, or in some other way take your money.
Those who SPAM with PORNLINKS almost always does so while hiding behind anonymous remailers and other trickery to make sure you can't really even know who sent it. The reason is obvious- if they did, they'd get flooded with angry replies! They are absolute cowards, and they are afraid to face the people they badger and spam directly, for fear we'd slap them!
Much less frequently, we might have a Christian knock on the doors of our homes or apartments, wanting to share the gospel. On the off chance that this does occur, most people react with anger and send the "Bible Thumpers" packing. Laughing at them. Maybe cursing at them. It isn't surprising that this happens! What IS surprising is that this doesn't discourage most Christians involved in this sort of ministry from knocking on the next door. And the next. Come what may.
Though it might be hard to believe, these people are not going to get a commission check if they can con you into going to church. Nor are they going to get some sort of kickback by selling you some magazine. They can't hide behind some anonymous remailer in doing this- they are looking you in the eye when they deliver their unsolicited message. They do this because their religion teaches them to "go forth unto all men sharing the good news". They do this because they believe that they have been forgiven of their sins, saved from Hell, and they feel the urgent need to share this "good news" with others who might choose to believe it. At the risk of looking stupid. At the risk of being despised by many. (At the risk of being told to s.t.f.u.)
Although most people don't ask the obvious question, "Why would these people risk looking stupid / being belitted / getting turned away if they geniunely didn't care or believe that what they were doing was worth risking these depressing responses?" But it is a worthwhile question.
At this point, many readers will already be incredulous, furious, ready to bail out on my message and complain to Cmdr Taco and Hemos that there is rampant offtopic nonsense going on. This is because the idea of Hell (common to ALL monotheistic religions, BTW) is so alien and offensive to so many people that to mention it engenders more hostility than contemplation. Hate it, love it or yawn-when-you-hear-it, this is what Christianity is about. Christ himself talked a lot more about Hell than he did about Heaven.
I hope that at least one single reader will labor carefully enough on my words to understand my point.
You can choose to hate or mock the Christian who knocks on your door and leaves you a bible or a free videotape, if you want to. But try to understand that those who go so far as to risk so much do so 99 times out of 100 because they believe that there is nothing more important they can do than share the Gospel. Than to help others find salvation, just as they have.
This article was quite enlightening. I have always argued that censorware did no good. Therefore the only way to protect children from the filth that these days runs unfettered through my personal mailbox and the web at large is simply to prohibit Internet access completely.
/. standards) porn photo as a top level MIME body part. What if the kids had been around? A SpamCop report got the guy's e-mail and web site accounts yanked and a $2000 ISP abuse charge on his Visa card - yes!)
/.!
/dev/null.
(It was once true that you had to go looking for porn and other offensive content to find it - that's no longer true. Now it arrives in neatly packaged daily doses of spam - I got one the other day with a gross (even by
I know this seems unthinkable, but, really, will education suffer in the least without the Internet? We managed to educate people 100 years ago far better than we educate people today, and we did it without any high technology. The web is easy, but very shallow. I really don't even think it's a very valid tool for research of the k-12 kind. Teach kids the importance of primary sources and how to use a library and they'll truly have learned something useful.
There are times I am truly thankful I send my children to a school that doesn't even have a computer lab, much less access to the Net. I've been in the IT business for a long time, and was one of the first computer students in public schools, and I can assure you that real literacy is far more important than "computer literacy" - something that is easily borne out in the most casual session of reading
Just say NO to Internet access in schools. There's really nothing to lose (except higher tax bills for a bunch of overpriced, obsolete computers), and our children to save.
Send flames to
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
In a public computer lab, I sat in the back row, surfing the web with trusty Netscape 1.0. It was a new program and people were really excited that you could see pictures on the web...porn was free...the world was happy.
One row in front of me, some kid was looking at some rather raunchy pictures....he either didn't know I was there, or didn't think I'd care.
Either way, he was making it nearly impossible for me to work. ...and he was getting alittle TOO much work done if you know what i mean....
How should public computer labs prevent this sort of mis-use. Frankly, I don't think users should have to glace up and see porn in a public lab. It's no different IMHO than allowing peep shows to show pornos to people walking by on the streets of NYC or something.
What do you think? How can you get porn blocked from public labs where all screens are viewable to everyone?
Werd.
Yep... *people* scanning the entire web. uh huh! It sounds like an exercise in futility -- and, yet, they're selling this stuff to PHB's in the school systems.
With the obvious loopholes, I can see this article inspiring link sites that add new unblocked porn sites immediately *after* each new release of Bess.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
This is meant as mostly humor, but the people I
know who spend a lot of time with porn generally
tend to be a lot more pleasant than people who
spend a lot of time with the bible. Certainly not
all bible thumpers are like this, but I've never
heard porn drive people to go door-to-door and
irritate people, advocate execution for violation
of the 10 commandments (or sexual 'deviancy'),
etc.
As Tom Lehrer says "I do have a cause, it's
obscenity. I'm for it"
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
To receive a complaint, two things have to happen:
1. The kids have to access an unblocked porn, racist, bomb-making, or whatever-the-parents-don't-like site.
2. The parents have to catch them.
If the parents are using a blocking service, they aren't likely to feel a need to monitor the kids' internet use, so #2 isn't too likely. Therefore, receiving few complaints means nothing. NASA received few complaints about the shuttle until it exploded without warning.
Let's suppose a kid wants to learn about digital video. There are quite a few sites on the net about it. What are the odds that the administrators of those sites would know about my new filtering service? Probably pretty low. So what you wind up doing is enormously limiting the possible inquiries your kid could make.
That seems bad to me. Kids have an unlimited amount of curiosity about the world. I think this should be encouraged, and it can only be encouraged by unlimited or nearly unlimited access to information. If a kid hits a brick wall every time he wants to do something, he's going to get discouraged and watch TV.
I really don't think we want that to happen.
D
----
Passing porn is definitely a bad thing, but the Bible, IMHO, should also be banned by these types of things. All material should be judged by the same criteria, regardless of whether the title of the book is "Huckleberry Finn" or "Fahrenheit 451" or "The Bible."
"Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." -Numbers 31:17-18
Is that the type of filth we want our children to be allowed to read? Should we be teaching them that killing male children is OK, and if they're female children, keep them alive to use as sex slaves?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem is that the Bible itself has many morally "bad" passages, especially the Old Testament. You'll find God commanding His followers to rape, murder, pillage, etc. Despite saying in one place that killing is bad, God commands His followers to kill all the male children prisoners, and keep the female children prisoners for sex slaves. (I posted one of the relevant quotes in a separate reply to this article) Nice morally uplifting book there.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Every day I hear about "harmful" material, about how damaging it is to our kids' tender psyches to see porn. It seems like people take this for granted; I've seen almost nobody question the proposition that porn is bad for kids.
I don't think there's anything that annoys me more than a proposition people take for granted, asserted in a million different ways but proved in none. This is especially true when I see the undeniably bad effects trying to get rid of the stuff has on people.
Thoughts?
D
----
Sounds like the perfect call for an open source filter proxy. After all, if the source code were available to every user, they could do what they want with it, set up their own taboo lists, and not have to pay site licenses for this sort of bullshit. Maybe keep two different 'allow' and 'deny' lists, like tcpd does.
;-)
Oh, and while we're at it, we could make it strip off ad banners too.
-Joe
It has been shown that throughout all history that the more any state (govt) tries to repress or ignore a certain set of ideas, that it eventually comes back to bite them in the butt. Namely in the form of a revolution. With that said, maybe this company and its software are the first steps twords that. This is a shoddy product that is used by many different branches of govt. Cities, counties, and in at least one case, a state itself. Slowly, and ever so, people are begining to realize what is happening, and when/if that critical mass of people do wake up, there will be trouble.