The most dangerous thing about restrictive copyright laws isn't what they do to old works. It's what they do to new ones. Copyright has traditionally been tempered by the doctrine of "fair use," which allows a limited amount of appropriation for the purpose of parody or criticism. [... ] In 1991, for instance, the long-forgotten '70s pop star Gilbert O'Sullivan, discovering that rapper Biz Markie had appropriated three words from his song "Alone Again (Naturally)," successfully sued, not for a share of the royalties, but to suppress Biz Markie's record altogether.
How ironic, that a link in this story may have been the catalyst for further censorship via copyright and legal thuggary, as it appears that the 15 minute silent film "Star Wars: The Remake" Parody has now vanished from the net, after receiving a rather glowing review in the aforementioned article.
Remind me to give George Lucus another $8 when his next Star Wars film comes out. (NOT)
We don't think so. Aside from protecting freedom of speech, Freenet is also designed to be an efficient dynamic caching system. If information is requested a lot from a limited number of nodes, the nodes that the requests pass through will cache the information, lowering the load on the network. If information is inserted on a limited set of nodes and then subsequently requested a lot from a separate set of nodes, with repetition, the sets will close in on one another in the network topology until they are "neighbors" and only the originally targeted nodes are suffering from the attack.
In other words, in order to harm Freenet with a flood you need to consistently change your point of entry into the network and continually insert and request new data, and you will still only increase the workload for the network that is linear to your own. Given an immense will and capacity greater than the total of the entire network, it is possible to cripple any public network (including the Internet itself) with floods, but it is our intention to always keep Freenet as resistant to this as theoretically possible.
couldn't they have come up with something different? How do I recommend something called X-bone to a PHB?
I rather like the name. It stands a very good chance of further emberasing the censorware crowd. As for recommending it to a PHB, simply pronounce it as "cross"bone rather than "ex-bone." After all, that is clearly what the X is refering to (as in "Railroad X-ing", etc.
The issue here is that the blockee would have to prove the blocker harmed them in some way with deliberate untruths. Thats pretty hard to do.
Wouldn't misrepresenting the site to thousands (millions?) of customers as "pornographic", "violent", "extreme", "hate-mongering", and whatever other categories they have qualify?
If you click on a site, and a cybercensor message pops up "this site has been blocked" there is a very obvious implication in that message that the site contains offensive material for which the software was installed to block. If Mattel has knowingly blocked sites which do not meet the criteria they have represented to their customers, surely this qualifies as defamation and provides a strong argument for libel.
Harm is done in that potential readers have been prevented from reading their essay. This results in professional harm (wider readership -> wider recognition -> higher professional esteem) to the web page author directly, not to mention the more widely discussed (in this no-doubt soon-to-be censored forum at least) social and political harm to our society as a whole.
Whether one could make it stick or not I don't know, but some speach-friendly lawyers should definitely take a look at it.
Also, doesn't legal action against a person outside of the US infringe just a bit on the national sovereignty of the other country (e.g. Canada and Sweden)?
Perhaps in the short term you will win, but over time even you will get sick, get injured, or have a dependent that will.
I was hit by a car while crossing the street, in a crosswalk, with the signal. Some idiot decided to turn right on red and was too busy watching the oncoming cars for a gap in the traffic to bother looking in front of his nose to see if there were any pedestrians (this was in Chicago, where there is no shortage of pedestrians).
I got lucky. I landed on his hood, rather than going down beneath his tires. I got off with just a couple of bruises, but I still needed to go to the hospital, simply to make certain there were no internal injuries.
Gambling with your life to save a measly $168/month is your decision, but don't be surprised if the majority of the people reading your post consider you to be very penny wise and pound foolish financially, not to mention foolhardy in the extreme for taking such an unwarrented risk with your physical health.
Open source doesn't make software more secure, and neither does closed source. It was established a long time ago that a skilled administrator was the most important security device.
Your first sentence is not at all correct. Your second sentence is very true, and explicitly explains why your first comment is not, if you think about it.
Open Source tools and operating systems give the "most important security device" the ability to do something to correct an emerging security issue, which in a closed source environment may not exist.
An example: the SYN DoS weakness discovered a while back, in both Windows and various UNIXen. Open source administrators and Linux/FreeBSD kernel hackers had a fix out within hours, while Microsoft and others languished for days or even weeks before releasing a fix. It made absolutely no difference how good or skilled a system administrator responsible for Windows machines was in that scenerio - they simply could do nothing about the problem (short of sitting in the office watching the system and doing a manaul reboot) until Microsoft got around to releasing their patch. The same was true of other closed source platforms which have an otherwise much better history of quality control than MS. The open source admins, on the other hand, were able to fix the problem (and share the solution with the world) almost immediately.
Clearly, the Open Source paradigm allows for a much more timely and robust response to security threats:
The product is subjected to peer review in every phase of its development, allowing many security fixes to be performed pro-actively, before weaknesses are ever exploited. In contrast, closed source never goes through any significant peer review whatsoever.
Open source provides accessability to the code allowing thousands of minds to address security issues which emerge as a result of an exploit (such as the SYN DoS attack), and share their solutions with the rest of the world in an astonishingly short time.
Security through obscurity has been demonstrated time and time again to be ineffective, and always results in a reactive, rather than proactive, solution, catalyzed by an exploit of said weakness. With open source there is no temptation whatsoever to attempt to engage in "security through obscurity" as the source availability guarantees there will be no obscurity.
A citizen of a theoretically democratic country exhorting citizens of other countries to stop his country, so he has a place to escape to when things get bad ---- something is very, very wrong with the picture.
As the one who made the statement you refer to, I couldn't agree more. Something is very, very wrong here, indeed.
Hence the diatribe with the provocative subject line.:-)
There are no "good" reasons for this. If anyone commits real crimes - murder, robbery, arson, whatever - then bust 'em. Otherwise, you are creating a class of political crime.
Some German folks should probably weigh in on this one, but at the risk of annoying everyone on both sides of this touchy issue I'll weigh in with my unsolicited opinions, as an Auslander (foreigner) who lived there for a number of years.
While I too disagree with Germany's approach to their Nazi, and more recently, neo-Nazi problem, one must consider the practicalities of their situation. After world war II there were still a large number of people who, privately, still supported much of what the Nazis had stood for. The allies and early German administrations felt the danger represented by this anomolous political sitiuation was simply too severe, and too immediate, to allow themselves the luxery of tolerating it in the name of free speach or expression, so yes, in effect, they did create a "political class" of criminals. It is illegal in Germany to be a Nazi, period. You can go to jail for espousing Nazism, displaying Nazi symbols, making Nazi salutes, etc. This is their solution to an intolerable problem. It is not necessarilly a good solution, and it does have a heavy price, but it is the solution they have chosen.
Whether they were right or wrong in this assessment is an interesting discussion of its own. Nevertheless, their reasons for this policy were very obvious, very good, and very, very compelling. One of the aforementioned "heavy prices" Germany is paying today IMHO is an expression of pent up, suppressed speach in the form of neo-Nazism. Another is the much more insidious (and possibly more dangerous) tendency for institutions in Germany to engage in large scale, draconian censorship which other democratic nations would be reluctant to consider (the USA being a possible exception) for reasons which, while much less compelling than the Nazi issue, appear to them to be nevertheless "good."
This isn't a justification, merely a commentary on the state of things as I see them. Again, while I disagree with their choice to use censorship to address the Nazi issue (far better to allow your opponent to make an ass of themself and then ridicule them publicly than to suppress their right to express themself), I think one must be a little understanding as to why the felt compelled to do so. This empathy should not, however, be extended to include the modern day abuses of this power which some institutions in Germany appear to now take for granted as their "right."
If Germany is indeed a mature, "grown up" democracy (to borrow a phrase from the press), then they really should reevaluate the role censorship is playing in their society.
On the other hand, so should we here in the USA, as you imply and as numerous stories here on slashdot and elsewhere have made abundantly clear, time and time again.
Please cite examples of "cracking" copy-protected software to release it under the "GPL"
Although your post has the ring of flaimbait, I will assume you are just woefully misinformed about both the mp3 community (where both legal and, unfortunately, a great deal of illegal copying does occur) and open source software, and are lashing out at offenses you perceive which in fact are either not as pervasive as you think, or completely non-existent (to my knowledge no program has been "cracked" and subsequently distribued under the GPL as open source software).
As a counter example, I will use myself. My situation is by no means unique to slashdot or the net as a whole, indeed, if you search prior archives for mp3 related discussions, you will hear many others voicing the exact same scenerio.
All of my mp3's are legal. Yes, that's right, every last one of them.
90% of them are ripped from my own CD collection.
Another 5% are authorized downlaods from mp3.com and elsewhere, by artists who are trying to get exposure. On occasion I buy the CD, either to support the artist or to have available in places I can't listen to mp3's (e.g. my airplane, or a friend's car), although I am by no means obligated to do so.
Even those that I have downloaded which are "unauthorized copies", as defined by the RIAA, are not illegal! How can I make this bold claim? Because I already own the vinyl record, or the cassette tape, or some other medium (8 track in one particulary archaic case, CDs in others). I have already paid for the right to store the music in whatever medium I wish, including mp3 format on my hard drive. This has been decided in court decision after court decision. Whether I hook up my friend's turn table and arduously rip the record to cd or mp3 format (I have done this for some rare Hungarian pop music form the mid 1980s), or download the exact same song from someone who has already done the work using napstre, makes no difference. Indeed, I can even pay a third party, commercial enterprise, to convert the data from one medium and format to another, perfectly legally. This right, as well, has been sustained in numerious court rulings, the recording industries protestations notwithstanding. I own a right to the music, as evidenced by the physical record in my possession, and am entitled to be able to listen to it with the tools at my disposal and to store it in whatever form I wish, be it mp3 or binary code tatooed on my left bicep. This, too, has been decided more than once in a court of law.
In other words:
I. Do. Have. Every. Right. To. My. Property. Which. I. Have. Paid. Good. Hard. Cash. For.
The old-guard recording industry, for all its rhetoric to the contrary, is far more concerned with crushing the emerging competition they are feeling from sites such as mp3.com, than they are with preventing unauthorized copying of music.
The RIAA, and its foreign equivelents, are confronted with the unpleasant situation in which artists are refusing to sign contracts giving the recording companies 99.9% of the profits from CD sales and instead are selling (or giving away) their music on-line in exchange for 50% (!!!) of the CD sales proceeds, or simply greater exposure of their work.
Worse still, artists are actually defecting from the recording industry, discovering that they can make better money selling 1000 CDs and taking home $5/CD, than they do by selling 90,000 CDs and only keeping $0.05 per CD.
This, the old-guard recording companies simply can't abide. Their strategy is, of course, under the guise of fighting unauthorized copying, to use the clout of a dysfunctional legal system and the long arm of government law enforcement to destroy the emerging paradigm shift in its infancy and protect their defacto monopoly.
Germany has for a long time been actively censoring right wing and neo-nazi hate groups, with obvious and very, very good reason. The unfortuante side effect of this is that they are in some respects much further down the slippery slope of censorship than many other countries, so much os that such draconian measures as these are not only thinkable, but remarkably reasonable sounding to the powers-that-be. Other examples include the indictment of compuserve execs for their customers use of the internet to access foreign porn sites, the xs4all political web censorship fiasco, and so on.
Of course, warez kiddies will still be swapping their musing using ssh tunneled ftp, new protocols, or even old protocols encapsulated or stealthed to get around the packet blocking. The only thing that will be killed will be legitimate, competing businesses such as mp3.com, not children swapping warez and illegally copied music.
This, as far as the old-guard recording industry is concerned, is a perfectly acceptable solution.
I know, I tend to blurt out the same untruth as well when I'm feeling emotional about something (e.g. "the USA diserves the oppression it will get if this censorship continues!").
We do not deserve to lose our rights,irrespective of how involved we are in teaching others and promoting our political and social values, or not. If I chose to be a hermit with a keyboard, I am entitled to the same rights as someone who is out in the limelight, day in and day out, working to protect those same rights.
No one deserves to lose their rights, for any reason, much less laziness.
That having been said, losing one's liberties is a natural consiquence of laziness. Not because it is deserved, any more than a victim of an airline accident in the Andes deserves to starve, but simply because that is the nature of things.
I know I'm nitpicking, but I grow wearing of hearing "we deserve this, they deserve that," as though the atrocity which came about as a consiquence of something is somehow justified, when it simply is not.
That having been said, I agree 100% with your prescription: get involved and get others involved. Failure to do so will have the undeserved consiquence of our losing our rights and our liberties.
You can download the slashdot code yourself, setup a pro Microsoft discussion forum, and editorialize (or not) any way you please.
That is the meaning of open source: you have access to the source code and can do with it whatever you like (subject to conditions of the GPL, MIT, BSD, or other open-source license it is distributed under).
Open source is completely orthogonal to the issues you raise. Certainly slashdot, an unashamed open-source advocacy, news, and disucssion community, is in no way obligated to pay any lipservice whatsoever to stories or products you may think highly of, but you have access to the very source code slashdot is built from and can easilly build your own pro-M$ (or pro-whatever) site yourself.
Oh, BTW, the FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE story came out yesterday. I just finished an ftp install onto a test box about a half hour ago. A very, very nice release, and a significant improvement over the already excellent 3.4-STABLE.
DCMA is AFIK a USA thing... We can do anything we want in whatever country we live in, provided we don't break the law where we live.
Tell that to the US courts who feel no compunction whatsoever is handing down injunctions against people in other countries for activities which, obviously to any casual observer, do not concern the aforementioned courts in the least (c.f. DeCSS, etoy.com).
Tell that to the US special agents who routinely kidnap people abroad, bringing them over to the United States to stand trial under US laws, often for activities or behavior which was committed outside of the US and therefor outside of US jurisdiction.
Tell that to the US Army, which on more than one occasion has invaded a country for violation of US Law (remember Panama and Noriega?), completely at odds with both international law and international norms.
Tell that to the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, who can coerce with extreme economic threats any government (including, ironically, the US) legislation of nearly any kind under the argument that trade is "unfairly restricted" otherwise. Definitions are deliberately vague, changing to fit the political agenda of the moment.
Most of all, tell that to the Politicians whose hubris in ordering such actions threatens to destroy not just the external victims of their intoxication with power, but the US itself.
Not that they'll listen. After all, if they won't even listen to their own people (and from personal experience I can assure you they don't), they certainly won't listen to a bunch of durn' pinko commie bedwettin' ferrener's anyway. Still, the more voices added to the chorus, the more difficulty they'll have in ignoring it, over time.
Much more importantly, tell your governments to start standing up to the US and stop being our lapdogs! After all, if we lose the battle to stop and reverse the hemorrage of civil liberties here, it would be nice to have somewhere to escape to, in order to fight again another day. If your governments continue to behave as an extention of our own, this option won't exist and the downward spiral and attrition of civil rights and liberties may well reach an irreversable point.
I think that web sites against censorware should find a way to detect a censorware product and display a banner, instead of the requested page, indicating that the site does not support censorware and the website can not be viewed if you're using a censorware filter.
This is an excellent suggestion for a partial technical solution to a technical / political problem!
Assuming censorware can be identified by an http daemon, getting a large percentage of web maintainers to "self-block" their content from users of censorware could have a very interestin impact. Imagine an adults ire when they discover an ever growing number of legitimate sites they want to access have refused to deliver their content because of the censorware they installed on their children's behalf. Instead they get a banner berating them for using the product (perhaps with relevant links to anti-censorware sites which they discover to their dismay are censored!). Although it is unrealistic to expect sites like Yahoo (aptly named, c.f. "yahoos" in Gulliver's Travels) and Google to join in, these big sites rely in no small part on the smaller, personal, and useful sites many of us maintain for our respective comminities. By "freezing out" the censorware users we become not only a large voice against such products, but an evergrowing incentive for people to drop the use of the offending filters.
Alternatively, for those who find cutting off censorware users entirely to be too draconian, one could set up a banner page the censorware user is forced to confront and (at least the first time) read, before continuing to the actual content. Idaelly such a banner page would include links to anti-censorware site and reputable news sites documenting their abuses. After having seen the message once they would of course click through quickly without reading, but that doesn't matter for two reasons: (1) They will have read the message at least once and (2) the message will be reiterated on a subliminal level every time they see such a banner, even if they don't read it explicitly. For the same reason you see Coke and Nike logos plastered everywhere, seeing educational, anti-censorware logos everywhere will have an effect.
Finally, if the censorware products censore a growing number of legitimate sites for displaying such a page and/or logo, this will merely add even fuel to the argument that using such software is much more dangerous to the children one is trying to protect than the so-called harmful material one is trying to protect them against, both by cutting them off from important resources and education materials and because of the distortion its politically/economically motivated censorship has on the public discourse and the ability of its customers to form their own opinions in an informed manner.
In short, I like your idea very much. While not a panacea, it provides the possibility for confronting censorware users with the tradeoff they have made in a very "in-your face" way. The more sites to take this stance, the more they would either be confronted with the cold facts of the choice they have made, or the less usable the net becomes to them because of the software they are using. Either would tend to put people off form continuing its use, which is a net positive for the net as a whole.
If any apache/html gurus out there could toss together a quick 'howto' to accomplish this I would be happy to support it at our site. Alas, I am too buried with work right now to dig into this and impliment it right now myself (call me lazy if you will, though swamped and exhausted would be closer to the truth).
It is a little late to be responding, however, if you had bothered to read the post to which I responded you would have noticed that I was answering a specific question regarding DeCSS with a pointer to where the reader could get the answers they were (presumably) looking for. The reader may indeed have confused the DeCSS issue with the "Trade Dress" issue of this thread, however, three is absolutely nothing in my post, or the site I referred them to, which would have led to their confusion.
The original questioner can clarify whatever "confusion" they may have on the issue be reading a wealth of material at the aforementioned site. It is a stretch reaching lightyears to assign any level of additional confusion to my short post, and perhaps more representative of your own confusion than anyone else's.
Finally, if you define referring someone with a question to a reasonably authoritative source on the subject to be sowing confusion, then perhaps that explains the arrogant, and confused, content of your own rather bitter reply.
But is junkmail illegal? I personally have more of a problem with getting paper junkmail which takes more time to dispose of as I attempt to be a good recycler...all I have to do is hit the delete key in my inbox
I applaud your efforts and determination to recycle the paper wasted by junk mailers, but you miss the point entirely. Unlike junk mail (and the far more irritating junk phone calls), with email and usenet SPAM the cost of delivery is borne by the recipient, either directly (as in Europe, with their per minutes line and ISP charges) or indirectly as an ISP charges slightly more for internet access to offset the cost of the bandwidth which the SPAM has taken (and SPAM takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth).
Junk faxes are illegal, and have been for years, because the cost of toner and paper are borne by the recipient, and each junk fax costs the recipient real dollars. The same is true of SPAM.
Recycling paper may be more of a hassle than deleting unwanted mail, but multiply the bandwidth and disk usage of your unread mail by several million and the cost to the consumer for unsolicited SPAM is appalling. And while we could stop deforestation and meet our paper needs next growing season by planting hemp and producing paper from it rather than trees, there is no similar way to reclaim the bandwidth, diskspace, and people's time (also a considerable expense) which SPAMmers routinely steal from their victims.
The judge's decision is a farce, both logically in terms of the legalities themselves and in terms of their real-world effects. Not only should the state of Washington appeal the decision, but someone should take a very hard look at his portfolio and bank accounts. And everyone should forward their morning's SPAM to the idiot as well -- let him share in the consiquences of his ill-considered decision.
$30 will go a very long way toward helping you avoid those long treks to the recycling center, and help you win back a big chunk of your valuable time. I have used this service and it does stop junk phonecalls altogethre, and junk mail slows to a tiny trickle. Highly recommended!
Perhaps many US slashdotter hate the French, because they look too much like yourselves.
You have hit the nail precisely on the head.
I often hear my fellow Americans disparagingly comment about France's absurd levels of nationalism while happy to proclaim their own patriotism to this country with their next breath. It is rather clear to nearly anyone who has spend any significant time in both France and the US that the level of nationalism, or "patriotism" if you will, is very similar in both countries.
Indeed, the similarities in how the French view their military, their industry, and take pride in their country and culture, and how citizens of the United States do the same, is quite startling.
Perhaps it is our very similarities that cause so many people in one nation to dislike the other, even though their dislike is based soley on rumor and innuendo, and either the most superficial of personal experiences (e.g. "the garcon was impolite to me, f*cking rude French!"), or, more commonly, absolutely no personal experience at all.
After all, it is a rare human being indeed who can have a mirror held up to themselves, look at their flaws, and feel grateful for having them pointed out. Far more common is the irrational desire to smash the mirror and use the shards to carve up the offensive individual who had the audacity to point out that one's own culture and society is not only imperfect, but in many ways actively malignant both to themselves and the rest of humanity.
And how easily we forget the rude waiter in Chicago or New York, yet relish and relive the memory of the rude garcon in Paris years later.
An example of this is expiry of copyright. Consider a film that has the full bells and whistles DVD protection. You have a copy of it. The copyright expires. Now what? Can you copy it? Nope. Can you reverse engineer the copy protection so you can copy it? Nope.
Don't expect copyrights to be expiring anytime soon. The Sonny Bono (may he rot in his grave) Copyright Act extended copyrights from 75 years to (I believe) 95 years, just in time to keep Disney's lousy Mickey Mouse out of the hands of The People(tm).
The DMCA is clearly written to protect corporate interests, and clearly assumes that copyrights will be extended, indefinitely. Expect legislation to extend copyrights again about 15-19 years following the enactment of the Sonny Bono Act. And, assuming some fairly radical campaign finance reform hasn't been passed (and it isn't bloody likely it ever will be in any form), expect your congressperson to industriously line their pockets with entertainment money in exchange for your rights again when the time comes.
With ipv6 looming on the horizon, it would appear that the open source community has an excellent opportunity to respond to the inappropriate behavior and policies of both the ICANN and NSI in a very positive, proactive, and effective way:
Actively develope and deploy a modernized version of DNS, with better authentication and all around security, and a more scalable heiarchy allowing for thousands, even millions of TLDs.
In parallel, establish an alternative, open, non-commercial, and distributed set of "root servers" which could map the existing.com names to the ICANN definitions, and allow the open source community to extend the name space at will. Those of us disgusted with ICANN can point our DNS servers at the Free Root servers and be done with it.
An extention to this: map all existing ICANN names from ICANN.name.com to ICANN.name.com.depp (for "depricated," also German for "dip shit":-)). This would then allow the Free (as in liberty) community to have our own.com,.org,.net TLDs completely seperate from ICANN.
We have the power and the technical expertise to free ourselves, so why not do it?
By no means do I endorse these rediculous restrictions, but to stop the commercialization of pirated software, they have to do something.
Something, yes. "Something, anything!" no.
If the intention of the law is to criminalize commercial piracy (turning a profit from someone else's work or intellectual property), then the law should be worded to do just that.
If the intention of the law is to criminalize consumers sharing a product they have purchased with their friends and family (as current copyright law in the US and elsewhere does), then it should be targeted to do just that, and we should not try to pretend it is doing anything different.
The DMCA, and the RIAA's efforts to get similar draconian legislation pushed through (which kills nearly all of the "fair use" rights we as consumers enjoy under current copyright law) to gut consumer rights for their products, should be recognized for what they are: legislation enacted to protect existing corporate oligarchies (primarilly but not exclusively The American Hegemony) at the expense of the consumer and the individual. We should not be forgiving of this behavior simply because such draconian, shot-gun-blast legislation happens to take down a few unscrupulous poeple along with the millinos of innocents.
And God Damn It! No child should be permitted to graduate from High School without experiencing the Blue Screen of Death at least twice daily, lest they be terribly ill-prepared for a real world, corporate Windows environment!
Down with Open Source Education! All Hail the Fuhrer of Computing! One World, One Internet, One Operating System!
Take those penguins away and give the infidels Windows 2000 CDs immediately! (Parents will be charged a nominal $200 class supplies fee, licenses subject to cancellation at Micro$oft's discretion, supplies in our warehouses exceeding capacity and collecting dust, so Act Now!)
I'm all for keeping minors from accessing unnacceptable material by whatever means possible.
Then, you go on to assert:
I believe in free speech.
Well, which is it? These two stances are diametrically opposed, and you simply cannot have it both ways.
People have demonstrated on numerous occasions that filtering is ineffective. Indeed, nothing can be said to be 100% effective, and although supervision by the parent is by far the most effective approach at preventing children from accessing on-line porn, even an adult may accidentally stumbe across something they'd rather not see, be it when walking down the street or surfing the web.
So clearly, to be absolutely effective, we must extend your whatever means possible to include more agressive policies. Whether you take tiny baby steps or large leaps, by following your philosophy to its logical conclusion one can only reach a situation where, in an effort to keep minors from accessing unacceptable[1] material on-line, the United States will need to institute far reaching supervision of the internet at all levels and in all contexts, sever all data links to the outside world (including Canada), and put all of the providors of pornographic content to the sword (or in solitary confinement, if the Jerry Falwells and Buchanon's are feeling generous - which I wouldn't count on). Even then, I suspect you'll find little Johnny hiding a dirty magazine under his bed, lusting after the Calvin Klein girl when he hits puberty, or simply reading the more lurid portions of the bible as erotic fiction, as people routinely did in my grandmother's day.
The end result? Your whatever means possible can only result in hundreds or thousands of wrongful imprisonments or even deaths, a muzzle on all speach, everywhere (whether adult oriented or not), draconian supervision of society at every level, and even then, there will still be children viewing what you deem to be inappropriate. We'll have lost most if not all of our fundamental rights (in a world of strained silence don't count on your religious rights to necessarilly be respected, either), and the children will be no more protected than they are today.
If you really want to prevent minors from accessing "unacceptable material" pluck out their eyes, punch out their eardrums, and sever tactile nerves to their fingertips (Playboy is offered in Braille, after all). Even so, I'll bet good money little Johnny will find some means to communicate a concept, word, or desire that the would-be censors don't approve of.
So yes, in short, this is bullshit, and Down with censorship. Better shout it today, lest you be unable to even whisper it tommorow.
[1]The definition of "acceptable", and who defines it, is a can of worms which, although you've opened, we'll leave for another day.
Slashdot Mirror
The most dangerous thing about restrictive copyright laws isn't what they do to old works. It's what they do to new ones. Copyright has traditionally been tempered by the doctrine of "fair use," which allows a limited amount of appropriation for the purpose of parody or criticism. [ ... ] In 1991, for instance, the long-forgotten '70s pop star Gilbert O'Sullivan, discovering that rapper Biz Markie had appropriated three words from his song "Alone Again (Naturally)," successfully sued, not for a share of the royalties, but to suppress Biz Markie's record altogether.
How ironic, that a link in this story may have been the catalyst for further censorship via copyright and legal thuggary, as it appears that the 15 minute silent film "Star Wars: The Remake" Parody has now vanished from the net, after receiving a rather glowing review in the aforementioned article.
Remind me to give George Lucus another $8 when his next Star Wars film comes out. (NOT)
What about flooding?
From the FAQ:
3.2. Is Freenet vulnerable to flooding attacks?
Short answer: no.
Long answer:
We don't think so. Aside from protecting freedom of speech, Freenet is also designed to be an efficient dynamic caching system. If information is requested a lot from a limited number of nodes, the nodes that the requests pass through will cache the information, lowering the load on the network. If information is inserted on a limited set of nodes and then subsequently requested a lot from a separate set of nodes, with repetition, the sets will close in on one another in the network topology until they are "neighbors" and only the originally targeted nodes are suffering from the attack.
In other words, in order to harm Freenet with a flood you need to consistently change your point of entry into the network and continually insert and request new data, and you will still only increase the workload for the network that is linear to your own. Given an immense will and capacity greater than the total of the entire network, it is possible to cripple any public network (including the Internet itself) with floods, but it is our intention to always keep Freenet as resistant to this as theoretically possible.
It looks like a troll-moderator or astroturfer-moderater has moderated the parent down, presumably because it is unflattering to Microsoft.
This is inappropriate.
Someone with moderator priveleges today please correct this.
couldn't they have come up with something different? How do I recommend something called X-bone to a PHB?
I rather like the name. It stands a very good chance of further emberasing the censorware crowd. As for recommending it to a PHB, simply pronounce it as "cross"bone rather than "ex-bone." After all, that is clearly what the X is refering to (as in "Railroad X-ing", etc.
The issue here is that the blockee would have to prove the blocker harmed them in some way with deliberate untruths. Thats pretty hard to do.
Wouldn't misrepresenting the site to thousands (millions?) of customers as "pornographic", "violent", "extreme", "hate-mongering", and whatever other categories they have qualify?
If you click on a site, and a cybercensor message pops up "this site has been blocked" there is a very obvious implication in that message that the site contains offensive material for which the software was installed to block. If Mattel has knowingly blocked sites which do not meet the criteria they have represented to their customers, surely this qualifies as defamation and provides a strong argument for libel.
Harm is done in that potential readers have been prevented from reading their essay. This results in professional harm (wider readership -> wider recognition -> higher professional esteem) to the web page author directly, not to mention the more widely discussed (in this no-doubt soon-to-be censored forum at least) social and political harm to our society as a whole.
Whether one could make it stick or not I don't know, but some speach-friendly lawyers should definitely take a look at it.
Also, doesn't legal action against a person outside of the US infringe just a bit on the national sovereignty of the other country (e.g. Canada and Sweden)?
Your optimism is unwarrented.
Perhaps in the short term you will win, but over time even you will get sick, get injured, or have a dependent that will.
I was hit by a car while crossing the street, in a crosswalk, with the signal. Some idiot decided to turn right on red and was too busy watching the oncoming cars for a gap in the traffic to bother looking in front of his nose to see if there were any pedestrians (this was in Chicago, where there is no shortage of pedestrians).
I got lucky. I landed on his hood, rather than going down beneath his tires. I got off with just a couple of bruises, but I still needed to go to the hospital, simply to make certain there were no internal injuries.
Gambling with your life to save a measly $168/month is your decision, but don't be surprised if the majority of the people reading your post consider you to be very penny wise and pound foolish financially, not to mention foolhardy in the extreme for taking such an unwarrented risk with your physical health.
Your first sentence is not at all correct. Your second sentence is very true, and explicitly explains why your first comment is not, if you think about it.
Open Source tools and operating systems give the "most important security device" the ability to do something to correct an emerging security issue, which in a closed source environment may not exist.
An example: the SYN DoS weakness discovered a while back, in both Windows and various UNIXen. Open source administrators and Linux/FreeBSD kernel hackers had a fix out within hours, while Microsoft and others languished for days or even weeks before releasing a fix. It made absolutely no difference how good or skilled a system administrator responsible for Windows machines was in that scenerio - they simply could do nothing about the problem (short of sitting in the office watching the system and doing a manaul reboot) until Microsoft got around to releasing their patch. The same was true of other closed source platforms which have an otherwise much better history of quality control than MS. The open source admins, on the other hand, were able to fix the problem (and share the solution with the world) almost immediately.
Clearly, the Open Source paradigm allows for a much more timely and robust response to security threats:
I have a serious question for slashdotters here: do you really think the world would be a better place if Bill G. wouldn't have been born?
Absolutely.
Perhaps not dramatically better, but one less jerk is always a net gain.
A citizen of a theoretically democratic country exhorting citizens of other countries to stop his country, so he has a place to escape to when things get bad ---- something is very, very wrong with the picture.
:-)
As the one who made the statement you refer to, I couldn't agree more. Something is very, very wrong here, indeed.
Hence the diatribe with the provocative subject line.
There are no "good" reasons for this. If anyone commits real crimes - murder, robbery, arson, whatever - then bust 'em. Otherwise, you are creating a class of political crime.
Some German folks should probably weigh in on this one, but at the risk of annoying everyone on both sides of this touchy issue I'll weigh in with my unsolicited opinions, as an Auslander (foreigner) who lived there for a number of years.
While I too disagree with Germany's approach to their Nazi, and more recently, neo-Nazi problem, one must consider the practicalities of their situation. After world war II there were still a large number of people who, privately, still supported much of what the Nazis had stood for. The allies and early German administrations felt the danger represented by this anomolous political sitiuation was simply too severe, and too immediate, to allow themselves the luxery of tolerating it in the name of free speach or expression, so yes, in effect, they did create a "political class" of criminals. It is illegal in Germany to be a Nazi, period. You can go to jail for espousing Nazism, displaying Nazi symbols, making Nazi salutes, etc. This is their solution to an intolerable problem. It is not necessarilly a good solution, and it does have a heavy price, but it is the solution they have chosen.
Whether they were right or wrong in this assessment is an interesting discussion of its own. Nevertheless, their reasons for this policy were very obvious, very good, and very, very compelling. One of the aforementioned "heavy prices" Germany is paying today IMHO is an expression of pent up, suppressed speach in the form of neo-Nazism. Another is the much more insidious (and possibly more dangerous) tendency for institutions in Germany to engage in large scale, draconian censorship which other democratic nations would be reluctant to consider (the USA being a possible exception) for reasons which, while much less compelling than the Nazi issue, appear to them to be nevertheless "good."
This isn't a justification, merely a commentary on the state of things as I see them. Again, while I disagree with their choice to use censorship to address the Nazi issue (far better to allow your opponent to make an ass of themself and then ridicule them publicly than to suppress their right to express themself), I think one must be a little understanding as to why the felt compelled to do so. This empathy should not, however, be extended to include the modern day abuses of this power which some institutions in Germany appear to now take for granted as their "right."
If Germany is indeed a mature, "grown up" democracy (to borrow a phrase from the press), then they really should reevaluate the role censorship is playing in their society.
On the other hand, so should we here in the USA, as you imply and as numerous stories here on slashdot and elsewhere have made abundantly clear, time and time again.
Please cite examples of "cracking" copy-protected software to release it under the "GPL"
Although your post has the ring of flaimbait, I will assume you are just woefully misinformed about both the mp3 community (where both legal and, unfortunately, a great deal of illegal copying does occur) and open source software, and are lashing out at offenses you perceive which in fact are either not as pervasive as you think, or completely non-existent (to my knowledge no program has been "cracked" and subsequently distribued under the GPL as open source software).
As a counter example, I will use myself. My situation is by no means unique to slashdot or the net as a whole, indeed, if you search prior archives for mp3 related discussions, you will hear many others voicing the exact same scenerio.
All of my mp3's are legal. Yes, that's right, every last one of them.
90% of them are ripped from my own CD collection.
Another 5% are authorized downlaods from mp3.com and elsewhere, by artists who are trying to get exposure. On occasion I buy the CD, either to support the artist or to have available in places I can't listen to mp3's (e.g. my airplane, or a friend's car), although I am by no means obligated to do so.
Even those that I have downloaded which are "unauthorized copies", as defined by the RIAA, are not illegal! How can I make this bold claim? Because I already own the vinyl record, or the cassette tape, or some other medium (8 track in one particulary archaic case, CDs in others). I have already paid for the right to store the music in whatever medium I wish, including mp3 format on my hard drive. This has been decided in court decision after court decision. Whether I hook up my friend's turn table and arduously rip the record to cd or mp3 format (I have done this for some rare Hungarian pop music form the mid 1980s), or download the exact same song from someone who has already done the work using napstre, makes no difference. Indeed, I can even pay a third party, commercial enterprise, to convert the data from one medium and format to another, perfectly legally. This right, as well, has been sustained in numerious court rulings, the recording industries protestations notwithstanding. I own a right to the music, as evidenced by the physical record in my possession, and am entitled to be able to listen to it with the tools at my disposal and to store it in whatever form I wish, be it mp3 or binary code tatooed on my left bicep. This, too, has been decided more than once in a court of law.
In other words:
I. Do. Have. Every. Right. To. My. Property. Which. I. Have. Paid. Good. Hard. Cash. For.
The old-guard recording industry, for all its rhetoric to the contrary, is far more concerned with crushing the emerging competition they are feeling from sites such as mp3.com, than they are with preventing unauthorized copying of music.
The RIAA, and its foreign equivelents, are confronted with the unpleasant situation in which artists are refusing to sign contracts giving the recording companies 99.9% of the profits from CD sales and instead are selling (or giving away) their music on-line in exchange for 50% (!!!) of the CD sales proceeds, or simply greater exposure of their work.
Worse still, artists are actually defecting from the recording industry, discovering that they can make better money selling 1000 CDs and taking home $5/CD, than they do by selling 90,000 CDs and only keeping $0.05 per CD.
This, the old-guard recording companies simply can't abide. Their strategy is, of course, under the guise of fighting unauthorized copying, to use the clout of a dysfunctional legal system and the long arm of government law enforcement to destroy the emerging paradigm shift in its infancy and protect their defacto monopoly.
Germany has for a long time been actively censoring right wing and neo-nazi hate groups, with obvious and very, very good reason. The unfortuante side effect of this is that they are in some respects much further down the slippery slope of censorship than many other countries, so much os that such draconian measures as these are not only thinkable, but remarkably reasonable sounding to the powers-that-be. Other examples include the indictment of compuserve execs for their customers use of the internet to access foreign porn sites, the xs4all political web censorship fiasco, and so on.
Of course, warez kiddies will still be swapping their musing using ssh tunneled ftp, new protocols, or even old protocols encapsulated or stealthed to get around the packet blocking. The only thing that will be killed will be legitimate, competing businesses such as mp3.com, not children swapping warez and illegally copied music.
This, as far as the old-guard recording industry is concerned, is a perfectly acceptable solution.
We deserve this.
,irrespective of how involved we are in teaching others and promoting our political and social values, or not. If I chose to be a hermit with a keyboard, I am entitled to the same rights as someone who is out in the limelight, day in and day out, working to protect those same rights.
No, we don't. No one does.
I know, I tend to blurt out the same untruth as well when I'm feeling emotional about something (e.g. "the USA diserves the oppression it will get if this censorship continues!").
We do not deserve to lose our rights
No one deserves to lose their rights, for any reason, much less laziness.
That having been said, losing one's liberties is a natural consiquence of laziness. Not because it is deserved, any more than a victim of an airline accident in the Andes deserves to starve, but simply because that is the nature of things.
I know I'm nitpicking, but I grow wearing of hearing "we deserve this, they deserve that," as though the atrocity which came about as a consiquence of something is somehow justified, when it simply is not.
That having been said, I agree 100% with your prescription: get involved and get others involved. Failure to do so will have the undeserved consiquence of our losing our rights and our liberties.
You can download the slashdot code yourself, setup a pro Microsoft discussion forum, and editorialize (or not) any way you please.
That is the meaning of open source: you have access to the source code and can do with it whatever you like (subject to conditions of the GPL, MIT, BSD, or other open-source license it is distributed under).
Open source is completely orthogonal to the issues you raise. Certainly slashdot, an unashamed open-source advocacy, news, and disucssion community, is in no way obligated to pay any lipservice whatsoever to stories or products you may think highly of, but you have access to the very source code slashdot is built from and can easilly build your own pro-M$ (or pro-whatever) site yourself.
Oh, BTW, the FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE story came out yesterday. I just finished an ftp install onto a test box about a half hour ago. A very, very nice release, and a significant improvement over the already excellent 3.4-STABLE.
DCMA is AFIK a USA thing... We can do anything we want in whatever country we live in, provided we don't break the law where we live.
Tell that to the US courts who feel no compunction whatsoever is handing down injunctions against people in other countries for activities which, obviously to any casual observer, do not concern the aforementioned courts in the least (c.f. DeCSS, etoy.com).
Tell that to the US special agents who routinely kidnap people abroad, bringing them over to the United States to stand trial under US laws, often for activities or behavior which was committed outside of the US and therefor outside of US jurisdiction.
Tell that to the US Army, which on more than one occasion has invaded a country for violation of US Law (remember Panama and Noriega?), completely at odds with both international law and international norms.
Tell that to the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, who can coerce with extreme economic threats any government (including, ironically, the US) legislation of nearly any kind under the argument that trade is "unfairly restricted" otherwise. Definitions are deliberately vague, changing to fit the political agenda of the moment.
Most of all, tell that to the Politicians whose hubris in ordering such actions threatens to destroy not just the external victims of their intoxication with power, but the US itself.
Not that they'll listen. After all, if they won't even listen to their own people (and from personal experience I can assure you they don't), they certainly won't listen to a bunch of durn' pinko commie bedwettin' ferrener's anyway. Still, the more voices added to the chorus, the more difficulty they'll have in ignoring it, over time.
Much more importantly, tell your governments to start standing up to the US and stop being our lapdogs! After all, if we lose the battle to stop and reverse the hemorrage of civil liberties here, it would be nice to have somewhere to escape to, in order to fight again another day. If your governments continue to behave as an extention of our own, this option won't exist and the downward spiral and attrition of civil rights and liberties may well reach an irreversable point.
I think that web sites against censorware should find a way to detect a censorware product and display a banner, instead of the requested page, indicating that the site does not support censorware and the website can not be viewed if you're using a censorware filter.
This is an excellent suggestion for a partial technical solution to a technical / political problem!
Assuming censorware can be identified by an http daemon, getting a large percentage of web maintainers to "self-block" their content from users of censorware could have a very interestin impact. Imagine an adults ire when they discover an ever growing number of legitimate sites they want to access have refused to deliver their content because of the censorware they installed on their children's behalf. Instead they get a banner berating them for using the product (perhaps with relevant links to anti-censorware sites which they discover to their dismay are censored!). Although it is unrealistic to expect
sites like Yahoo (aptly named, c.f. "yahoos" in Gulliver's Travels) and Google to join in, these big sites rely in no small part on the smaller, personal, and useful sites many of us maintain for our respective comminities. By "freezing out" the censorware users we become not only a large voice against such products, but an evergrowing incentive for people to drop the use of the offending filters.
Alternatively, for those who find cutting off censorware users entirely to be too draconian, one could set up a banner page the censorware user is forced to confront and (at least the first time) read, before continuing to the actual content. Idaelly such a banner page would include links to anti-censorware site and reputable news sites documenting their abuses. After having seen the message once they would of course click through quickly without reading, but that doesn't matter for two reasons: (1) They will have read the message at least once and (2) the message will be reiterated on a subliminal level every time they see such a banner, even if they don't read it explicitly. For the same reason you see Coke and Nike logos plastered everywhere, seeing educational, anti-censorware logos everywhere will have an effect.
Finally, if the censorware products censore a growing number of legitimate sites for displaying such a page and/or logo, this will merely add even fuel to the argument that using such software is much more dangerous to the children one is trying to protect than the so-called harmful material one is trying to protect them against, both by cutting them off from important resources and education materials and because of the distortion its politically/economically motivated censorship has on the public discourse and the ability of its customers to form their own opinions in an informed manner.
In short, I like your idea very much. While not a panacea, it provides the possibility for confronting censorware users with the tradeoff they have made in a very "in-your face" way. The more sites to take this stance, the more they would either be confronted with the cold facts of the choice they have made, or the less usable the net becomes to them because of the software they are using. Either would tend to put people off form continuing its use, which is a net positive for the net as a whole.
If any apache/html gurus out there could toss together a quick 'howto' to accomplish this I would be happy to support it at our site. Alas, I am too buried with work right now to dig into this and impliment it right now myself (call me lazy if you will, though swamped and exhausted would be closer to the truth).
It is a little late to be responding, however, if you had bothered to read the post to which I responded you would have noticed that I was answering a specific question regarding DeCSS with a pointer to where the reader could get the answers they were (presumably) looking for. The reader may indeed have confused the DeCSS issue with the "Trade Dress" issue of this thread, however, three is absolutely nothing in my post, or the site I referred them to, which would have led to their confusion.
The original questioner can clarify whatever "confusion" they may have on the issue be reading a wealth of material at the aforementioned site. It is a stretch reaching lightyears to assign any level of additional confusion to my short post, and perhaps more representative of your own confusion than anyone else's.
Finally, if you define referring someone with a question to a reasonably authoritative source on the subject to be sowing confusion, then perhaps that explains the arrogant, and confused, content of your own rather bitter reply.
But is junkmail illegal? I personally have more of a problem with getting paper junkmail which takes more time to dispose of as I attempt to be a good recycler...all I have to do is hit the delete key in my inbox
I applaud your efforts and determination to recycle the paper wasted by junk mailers, but you miss the point entirely. Unlike junk mail (and the far more irritating junk phone calls), with email and usenet SPAM the cost of delivery is borne by the recipient, either directly (as in Europe, with their per minutes line and ISP charges) or indirectly as an ISP charges slightly more for internet access to offset the cost of the bandwidth which the SPAM has taken (and SPAM takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth).
Junk faxes are illegal, and have been for years, because the cost of toner and paper are borne by the recipient, and each junk fax costs the recipient real dollars. The same is true of SPAM.
Recycling paper may be more of a hassle than deleting unwanted mail, but multiply the bandwidth and disk usage of your unread mail by several million and the cost to the consumer for unsolicited SPAM is appalling. And while we could stop deforestation and meet our paper needs next growing season by planting hemp and producing paper from it rather than trees, there is no similar way to reclaim the bandwidth, diskspace, and people's time (also a considerable expense) which SPAMmers routinely steal from their victims.
The judge's decision is a farce, both logically in terms of the legalities themselves and in terms of their real-world effects. Not only should the state of Washington appeal the decision, but someone should take a very hard look at his portfolio and bank accounts. And everyone should forward their morning's SPAM to the idiot as well -- let him share in the consiquences of his ill-considered decision.
Finally, I recommend you take a gander at
http://www.privatecitizen.com/
$30 will go a very long way toward helping you avoid those long treks to the recycling center, and help you win back a big chunk of your valuable time. I have used this service and it does stop junk phonecalls altogethre, and junk mail slows to a tiny trickle. Highly recommended!
Perhaps many US slashdotter hate the French, because they look too much like yourselves.
You have hit the nail precisely on the head.
I often hear my fellow Americans disparagingly comment about France's absurd levels of nationalism while happy to proclaim their own patriotism to this country with their next breath. It is rather clear to nearly anyone who has spend any significant time in both France and the US that the level of nationalism, or "patriotism" if you will, is very similar in both countries.
Indeed, the similarities in how the French view their military, their industry, and take pride in their country and culture, and how citizens of the United States do the same, is quite startling.
Perhaps it is our very similarities that cause so many people in one nation to dislike the other, even though their dislike is based soley on rumor and innuendo, and either the most superficial of personal experiences (e.g. "the garcon was impolite to me, f*cking rude French!"), or, more commonly, absolutely no personal experience at all.
After all, it is a rare human being indeed who can have a mirror held up to themselves, look at their flaws, and feel grateful for having them pointed out. Far more common is the irrational desire to smash the mirror and use the shards to carve up the offensive individual who had the audacity to point out that one's own culture and society is not only imperfect, but in many ways actively malignant both to themselves and the rest of humanity.
And how easily we forget the rude waiter in Chicago or New York, yet relish and relive the memory of the rude garcon in Paris years later.
No.
(The short answer.)
http://opendvd.org
(Why the answer is "No", with all the facts and details you could ever want.)
An example of this is expiry of copyright. Consider a film that has the full bells and whistles DVD protection. You have a copy of it. The copyright expires. Now what? Can you copy it? Nope. Can you reverse engineer the copy protection so you can copy it? Nope.
Don't expect copyrights to be expiring anytime soon. The Sonny Bono (may he rot in his grave) Copyright Act extended copyrights from 75 years to (I believe) 95 years, just in time to keep Disney's lousy Mickey Mouse out of the hands of The People(tm).
The DMCA is clearly written to protect corporate interests, and clearly assumes that copyrights will be extended, indefinitely. Expect legislation to extend copyrights again about 15-19 years following the enactment of the Sonny Bono Act. And, assuming some fairly radical campaign finance reform hasn't been passed (and it isn't bloody likely it ever will be in any form), expect your congressperson to industriously line their pockets with entertainment money in exchange for your rights again when the time comes.
We have the power and the technical expertise to free ourselves, so why not do it?
By no means do I endorse these rediculous restrictions, but to stop the commercialization of pirated software, they have to do something.
Something, yes. "Something, anything!" no.
If the intention of the law is to criminalize commercial piracy (turning a profit from someone else's work or intellectual property), then the law should be worded to do just that.
If the intention of the law is to criminalize consumers sharing a product they have purchased with their friends and family (as current copyright law in the US and elsewhere does), then it should be targeted to do just that, and we should not try to pretend it is doing anything different.
The DMCA, and the RIAA's efforts to get similar draconian legislation pushed through (which kills nearly all of the "fair use" rights we as consumers enjoy under current copyright law) to gut consumer rights for their products, should be recognized for what they are: legislation enacted to protect existing corporate oligarchies (primarilly but not exclusively The American Hegemony) at the expense of the consumer and the individual. We should not be forgiving of this behavior simply because such draconian, shot-gun-blast legislation happens to take down a few unscrupulous poeple along with the millinos of innocents.
< apropos humor >
/apropos humor >
And God Damn It! No child should be permitted to graduate from High School without experiencing the Blue Screen of Death at least twice daily, lest they be terribly ill-prepared for a real world, corporate Windows environment!
Down with Open Source Education! All Hail the Fuhrer of Computing! One World, One Internet, One Operating System!
Take those penguins away and give the infidels Windows 2000 CDs immediately! (Parents will be charged a nominal $200 class supplies fee, licenses subject to cancellation at Micro$oft's discretion, supplies in our warehouses exceeding capacity and collecting dust, so Act Now!)
<
First, you proclaim:
I'm all for keeping minors from accessing unnacceptable material by whatever means possible.
Then, you go on to assert:
I believe in free speech.
Well, which is it? These two stances are diametrically opposed, and you simply cannot have it both ways.
People have demonstrated on numerous occasions that filtering is ineffective. Indeed, nothing can be said to be 100% effective, and although supervision by the parent is by far the most effective approach at preventing children from accessing on-line porn, even an adult may accidentally stumbe across something they'd rather not see, be it when walking down the street or surfing the web.
So clearly, to be absolutely effective, we must extend your whatever means possible to include more agressive policies. Whether you take tiny baby steps or large leaps, by following your philosophy to its logical conclusion one can only reach a situation where, in an effort to keep minors from accessing unacceptable[1] material on-line, the United States will need to institute far reaching supervision of the internet at all levels and in all contexts, sever all data links to the outside world (including Canada), and put all of the providors of pornographic content to the sword (or in solitary confinement, if the Jerry Falwells and Buchanon's are feeling generous - which I wouldn't count on). Even then, I suspect you'll find little Johnny hiding a dirty magazine under his bed, lusting after the Calvin Klein girl when he hits puberty, or simply reading the more lurid portions of the bible as erotic fiction, as people routinely did in my grandmother's day.
The end result? Your whatever means possible can only result in hundreds or thousands of wrongful imprisonments or even deaths, a muzzle on all speach, everywhere (whether adult oriented or not), draconian supervision of society at every level, and even then, there will still be children viewing what you deem to be inappropriate. We'll have lost most if not all of our fundamental rights (in a world of strained silence don't count on your religious rights to necessarilly be respected, either), and the children will be no more protected than they are today.
If you really want to prevent minors from accessing "unacceptable material" pluck out their eyes, punch out their eardrums, and sever tactile nerves to their fingertips (Playboy is offered in Braille, after all). Even so, I'll bet good money little Johnny will find some means to communicate a concept, word, or desire that the would-be censors don't approve of.
So yes, in short, this is bullshit, and Down with censorship. Better shout it today, lest you be unable to even whisper it tommorow.
[1]The definition of "acceptable", and who defines it, is a can of worms which, although you've opened, we'll leave for another day.