******* Children's Internet Protection Act Struck Down
Shannon P. Duffy The Legal Intelligencer 06-03-2002
Striking down key provisions of the Children's Internet Protection Act as unconstitutional, a special three-judge U.S. District Court in Philadelphia has ruled that Congress went too far when it threatened to pull certain federal funds from any public library that failed to install "filtering" software to block access to sexually explicit Web sites.
The judges found that the law runs afoul of the First Amendment because filtering software simply blocks too much and that mandating its use would therefore force libraries to censor the speech of millions of Internet speakers.
"Commercially available filtering programs erroneously block a huge amount of speech that is protected by the First Amendment," Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a 198-page decision in American Library Association v. United States. (Decision in Word format.)
Becker, who was joined by U.S. District Judges John P. Fullam and Harvey Bartle III, found that the government failed to show the law was "narrowly tailored."
"The First Amendment demands the precision of a scalpel, not a sledgehammer," Becker wrote.
In a rarely used provision, Congress mandated that any appeal of Friday's decision will go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court which is required under the law to take up the case.
The ruling was applauded by the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, who had argued that the law would make it tougher for people without home computers to get information on topics such as breast cancer and homosexuality, which are sometimes accidentally blocked by the filters.
Stefan Presser, the ACLU's legal director in Pennsylvania, said he hopes the ruling will convince Congress to give up its effort to regulate speech on the Internet since the courts have also struck down two previous laws -- the 1996 Communications Decency Act and the 1998 Child Online Protection Act.
"It is certainly my hope that now that Congress has taken three strikes it will get out of the business," Presser said.
ANALYSIS OF FILTERING SOFTWARE
Becker's opinion opens with a three-page table of contents which shows that about half the decision is devoted to fact-finding.
One of the largest sections in the fact-finding focuses on the technology of filtering software -- who makes it, what it does and how it works.
The court concluded that all filtering software suffers from two key flaws -- "overblocking," in which the software blocks access to protected speech, and "underblocking," in which it fails to block sites that include material that is obscene or harmful to minors.
And since the Internet keeps expanding everyday, the court concluded that the software will never be good enough.
"No presently conceivable technology can make the judgments necessary to determine whether a visual depiction fits the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or harmful to minors. Given the state of the art in filtering and image recognition technology, and the rapidly changing and expanding nature of the Web, we find that filtering products' shortcomings will not be solved through a technical solution in the foreseeable future," Becker wrote.
Government lawyers urged the court to uphold the law unless the plaintiffs could show that any public library that complies with CIPA's conditions will necessarily violate the First Amendment.
Plaintiffs' lawyers insisted that the test was not so strict and that they were required only to show that CIPA would effectively restrict library patrons' access to "substantial amounts" of constitutionally protected speech, therefore causing many libraries to violate the First Amendment.
Becker took the easy way out, saying the government lost even under the stricter test.
"We believe that CIPA's constitutionality fails even under this more restrictive test of facial validity urged on us by the government. Because of the inherent limitations in filtering technology, public libraries can never comply with CIPA without blocking access to a substantial amount of speech that is both constitutionally protected and fails to meet even the filtering companies' own blocking criteria," Becker wrote.
LIBRARY AS PUBLIC FORUM
One of the key battles in the case was over whether a public library is a public forum.
Government lawyers argued that librarians already exercise considerable discretion in choosing a library's collection of books. As a result, they said, a public library is a "limited public forum" whose content-based decisions are constitutional so long as they are "rational."
But plaintiffs' lawyers insisted that the court should subject CIPA to "strict scrutiny" since it attempts to regulate the Internet, a forum that is separate from the library's book collection and more closely resembles the town square.
Becker sided with the plaintiffs, saying "the relevant forum for analysis is not the library's entire collection, which includes both print and electronic media, such as the Internet, but rather the specific forum created when the library provides its patrons with Internet access."
The Internet, Becker said, has been described by the U.S. Supreme Court as a "vast democratic forum" that is open to any member of the public to speak on subjects "as diverse as human thought."
As a result, Becker said, if a public library provides Internet access and then "selectively excludes" certain speech on the basis of its content, courts must employ the strict scrutiny test.
"These exclusions risk fundamentally distorting the unique marketplace of ideas that public libraries create when they open their collections, via the Internet, to the speech of millions of individuals around the world on a virtually limitless number of subjects," Becker wrote.
"When public libraries provide their patrons with Internet access, they intentionally open their doors to vast amounts of speech that clearly lacks sufficient quality to ever be considered for the library's print collection. Unless a library allows access to only those sites that have been preselected as having particular value... even a library that uses software filters has opened its Internet collection for indiscriminate use by the general public," Becker wrote.
Government lawyers argued that one of CIPA's goals was to protect library patrons from being harassed by other patrons who wanted to use the Internet access for sexually explicit or even illegal material.
But Becker found there were better ways of solving the problem.
"The proper method for a library to deter unlawful or inappropriate patron conduct, such as harassment or assault of other patrons, is to impose sanctions on such conduct, such as either removing the patron from the library, revoking the patron's library privileges, or, in the appropriate case, calling the police," Becker wrote.
Becker agreed, however, that the government has a legitimate interest in "preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, or in the case of minors, material harmful to minors, and in protecting library patrons from being unwillingly exposed to offensive, sexually explicit material."
But even such a valid goal can't save a law that isn't "narrowly tailored," Becker said.
On that point, Becker said, CIPA is fatally flawed.
"Given the substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech blocked by the filters studied, we conclude that use of such filters is not narrowly tailored with respect to the government's interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors," Becker wrote.
"Given the inherent limitations in the current state of the art of automated classification systems, and the limits of human review in relation to the size, rate of growth, and rate of change of the Web, there is a tradeoff between underblocking and overblocking that is inherent in any filtering technology," Becker wrote.
I tried one out as a sort of beta tester for the office and really didn't like it.
It isn't for everyone (certainly not for me!).
Beside the cursor keys, the other special characters were a bitch to find at times. Perhaps they'll fix this for the version that they send to the U.S.
Your experience was obviously biased for whatever reason.
Agreed. Didn't claim otherwise, and I prefaced it with "I was using an demo prototype unit".
From a development point of view, it looks like a lot of good apps are in the works. I also agree that the Symbian Office apps are top notch also.
It's full-featured, it's got all the features you could want if you actually do work on your handheld, and many fun things in case you don't.
I consider the stylus an important feature if I want to do work on my handheld.
It makes Palms look like glorified wrist watches, and WinCE devices look... horrible.
Palms may be glorified wrist watches, but I find them to synch a lot better than the Communicators. That, in my opinion, is an inexcusable flaw. If you're going go synch tons of data (I had a 64 MB card in there that I put various demo files on), at use a cable that synchs faster than a serial.)
The battery, however, really took a beating. I would leave that thing on for (what seemed like) forever...and very rarely would have any problems.
My employer gave me two for testing earlier this year. (We're an integrator; Nokia was talking to us about selling them, and we were talking to other companies [such as IBM] about developing/selling applications for our end users.)
As phones, they rock. The best feature (by far) is the speakerphone. I could set it on my monitor, lean back in my chair, and talk to customers without them ever knowing that I was using a speaker phone (when I called my mom, she said it sounded no worse than a regular cell phone call). Setting it up with Outlook contacts is a cinch (I didn't try synching it with any other contact management prorams). The nice wide screen is nice for HTTP: browing (compared to, say, the iPaq, where you have to scroll over to the right to see the rest of the page). I had several movie clips (Spider-man, Episode II, Jurassic Park, etc.) that I would use to show customers just how awesome that little screen was...
As organizers, however, they SUCK ASS. There is NO stylus, and you can't touch the screen like you can on a Palm. You change one contact's info, and it takes fucking forever to replicate those new changes over (an eternity compared to Palm's Hotsynch). While a few features are cool (they've got programs in there open up Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents), overall it is very unimpressive compared to the many other PDAs out there (Palm, iPaq, etc.).
I'm not sure why the transfer rate is so bad. It takes an eternity to backup over a serial cable (the prototype NFS unit I had, at least, didn't come with any sort of firewire, USB, etc. cable). When you back it up for the first time (everything on the little hard drive to your desktop), you might as well do something else for the next several hours.
I had all sorts of weird bugs on my prototype. The first software version that they gave us was very buggy (I couldn't even synch it with Outlook). Finally I got in touch with a Nokia engineer who FedExed me a copy of their latest one. While that fixed my Outlook problems, I still had all sorts of weird synching problems under Windows 98 and 2000. (For example, my computer would all of a sudden stop seeing my Communicator. I would have to reboot just to see the Communicator again.) This was like 3 months ago, so hopefully they fixed all that in their latest release.
All in all, I've spent hundreds of hours testing them. (Setting them up for sales reps to show customers, recording bugs, installing all sorts of programs [yes, even DOOM!], racking up 5000 minutes on my long commutes each month...etc.). All this testing, and I still can't say that I'd recommend this for the average PDA user. (There are, however, certain niche markets that could definitely benefits from this sorta gadget.)
The sales manager in our company wanted me to set it up so that sales reps could access a 5000 record ACT! database on a Citrix server via these communicators. Because of other more important projects, I put that on the back burner. Has anyone else done anything similar with them?
What happens when someone changes one insignificant thing on the song? (e.g. an extra drum beat, second of silence at the end, etc.)
This would change the hash that they search for. (This obviously applies to people who've altered company logos on Photoshop, etc.)
Trying to stamp out the illegit stuff out there is too big of a task. The only way that they can maintain their hegemony is to ONLY allow their "legit" stuff to play...hence the recent actions of companies to lock down home computers, DVD players, etc.
Thomas Pynchon's _Crying of Lot 49_
on
CDs Want To Be Free
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lot49.com is an interesting tribute to Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, an intersting exploration of life in CA. (My favorite part is the name of one of the bands--Sick Dick and the Volkwagens)
For those interesting in a real headtrip, try to plow your way through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Among the most high-profile efforts is research funded by the National Security Agency to develop a more secure version of the open-source Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft's Windows.
My question is, under the GPL, will they have to tell us what modifications they made?
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the users, under the GPL.
Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.
What could the NSA do to compel them to show us what modifications they made?
Slashdot Mirror
here.
I searched for several (what I thought were good) keywords before I submitted it. My apologies if it was...
here.
It talks about slate (and non-slate) surfaces, the table cabinet, rales, cushions, felt, variations of play, and table specifications.
Very informative!
www.addall.com/used searches smaller book shops for used and out-of-print books.
here.
C++ Primer Plus (by Prata) is a damn good book. Much better, IMO, than the plethora of other C++ books out there.
here.
According to Forbes, this is how much it will cost to clone a person.
There is a Law.com article on it also.
... even a library that uses software filters has opened its Internet collection for indiscriminate use by the general public," Becker wrote.
Copy/pasted below:
*******
Children's Internet Protection Act Struck Down
Shannon P. Duffy
The Legal Intelligencer
06-03-2002
Striking down key provisions of the Children's Internet Protection Act as unconstitutional, a special three-judge U.S. District Court in Philadelphia has ruled that Congress went too far when it threatened to pull certain federal funds from any public library that failed to install "filtering" software to block access to sexually explicit Web sites.
The judges found that the law runs afoul of the First Amendment because filtering software simply blocks too much and that mandating its use would therefore force libraries to censor the speech of millions of Internet speakers.
"Commercially available filtering programs erroneously block a huge amount of speech that is protected by the First Amendment," Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a 198-page decision in American Library Association v. United States. (Decision in Word format.)
Becker, who was joined by U.S. District Judges John P. Fullam and Harvey Bartle III, found that the government failed to show the law was "narrowly tailored."
"The First Amendment demands the precision of a scalpel, not a sledgehammer," Becker wrote.
In a rarely used provision, Congress mandated that any appeal of Friday's decision will go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court which is required under the law to take up the case.
The ruling was applauded by the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, who had argued that the law would make it tougher for people without home computers to get information on topics such as breast cancer and homosexuality, which are sometimes accidentally blocked by the filters.
Stefan Presser, the ACLU's legal director in Pennsylvania, said he hopes the ruling will convince Congress to give up its effort to regulate speech on the Internet since the courts have also struck down two previous laws -- the 1996 Communications Decency Act and the 1998 Child Online Protection Act.
"It is certainly my hope that now that Congress has taken three strikes it will get out of the business," Presser said.
ANALYSIS OF FILTERING SOFTWARE
Becker's opinion opens with a three-page table of contents which shows that about half the decision is devoted to fact-finding.
One of the largest sections in the fact-finding focuses on the technology of filtering software -- who makes it, what it does and how it works.
The court concluded that all filtering software suffers from two key flaws -- "overblocking," in which the software blocks access to protected speech, and "underblocking," in which it fails to block sites that include material that is obscene or harmful to minors.
And since the Internet keeps expanding everyday, the court concluded that the software will never be good enough.
"No presently conceivable technology can make the judgments necessary to determine whether a visual depiction fits the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or harmful to minors. Given the state of the art in filtering and image recognition technology, and the rapidly changing and expanding nature of the Web, we find that filtering products' shortcomings will not be solved through a technical solution in the foreseeable future," Becker wrote.
Government lawyers urged the court to uphold the law unless the plaintiffs could show that any public library that complies with CIPA's conditions will necessarily violate the First Amendment.
Plaintiffs' lawyers insisted that the test was not so strict and that they were required only to show that CIPA would effectively restrict library patrons' access to "substantial amounts" of constitutionally protected speech, therefore causing many libraries to violate the First Amendment.
Becker took the easy way out, saying the government lost even under the stricter test.
"We believe that CIPA's constitutionality fails even under this more restrictive test of facial validity urged on us by the government. Because of the inherent limitations in filtering technology, public libraries can never comply with CIPA without blocking access to a substantial amount of speech that is both constitutionally protected and fails to meet even the filtering companies' own blocking criteria," Becker wrote.
LIBRARY AS PUBLIC FORUM
One of the key battles in the case was over whether a public library is a public forum.
Government lawyers argued that librarians already exercise considerable discretion in choosing a library's collection of books. As a result, they said, a public library is a "limited public forum" whose content-based decisions are constitutional so long as they are "rational."
But plaintiffs' lawyers insisted that the court should subject CIPA to "strict scrutiny" since it attempts to regulate the Internet, a forum that is separate from the library's book collection and more closely resembles the town square.
Becker sided with the plaintiffs, saying "the relevant forum for analysis is not the library's entire collection, which includes both print and electronic media, such as the Internet, but rather the specific forum created when the library provides its patrons with Internet access."
The Internet, Becker said, has been described by the U.S. Supreme Court as a "vast democratic forum" that is open to any member of the public to speak on subjects "as diverse as human thought."
As a result, Becker said, if a public library provides Internet access and then "selectively excludes" certain speech on the basis of its content, courts must employ the strict scrutiny test.
"These exclusions risk fundamentally distorting the unique marketplace of ideas that public libraries create when they open their collections, via the Internet, to the speech of millions of individuals around the world on a virtually limitless number of subjects," Becker wrote.
"When public libraries provide their patrons with Internet access, they intentionally open their doors to vast amounts of speech that clearly lacks sufficient quality to ever be considered for the library's print collection. Unless a library allows access to only those sites that have been preselected as having particular value
Government lawyers argued that one of CIPA's goals was to protect library patrons from being harassed by other patrons who wanted to use the Internet access for sexually explicit or even illegal material.
But Becker found there were better ways of solving the problem.
"The proper method for a library to deter unlawful or inappropriate patron conduct, such as harassment or assault of other patrons, is to impose sanctions on such conduct, such as either removing the patron from the library, revoking the patron's library privileges, or, in the appropriate case, calling the police," Becker wrote.
Becker agreed, however, that the government has a legitimate interest in "preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, or in the case of minors, material harmful to minors, and in protecting library patrons from being unwillingly exposed to offensive, sexually explicit material."
But even such a valid goal can't save a law that isn't "narrowly tailored," Becker said.
On that point, Becker said, CIPA is fatally flawed.
"Given the substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech blocked by the filters studied, we conclude that use of such filters is not narrowly tailored with respect to the government's interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors," Becker wrote.
"Given the inherent limitations in the current state of the art of automated classification systems, and the limits of human review in relation to the size, rate of growth, and rate of change of the Web, there is a tradeoff between underblocking and overblocking that is inherent in any filtering technology," Becker wrote.
I tried one out as a sort of beta tester for the office and really didn't like it.
It isn't for everyone (certainly not for me!).
Beside the cursor keys, the other special characters were a bitch to find at times. Perhaps they'll fix this for the version that they send to the U.S.
Here is a Wired article on it.
Your experience was obviously biased for whatever reason.
Agreed. Didn't claim otherwise, and I prefaced it with "I was using an demo prototype unit".
From a development point of view, it looks like a lot of good apps are in the works. I also agree that the Symbian Office apps are top notch also.
It's full-featured, it's got all the features you could want if you actually do work on your handheld, and many fun things in case you don't.
I consider the stylus an important feature if I want to do work on my handheld.
It makes Palms look like glorified wrist watches, and WinCE devices look... horrible.
Palms may be glorified wrist watches, but I find them to synch a lot better than the Communicators. That, in my opinion, is an inexcusable flaw. If you're going go synch tons of data (I had a 64 MB card in there that I put various demo files on), at use a cable that synchs faster than a serial.)
The battery, however, really took a beating. I would leave that thing on for (what seemed like) forever...and very rarely would have any problems.
Believe me, you'd rather have something else. I've tested them quite extensively, and I think that they suck overall.
IMHO..."out of the box", the Palm-based phone devices are way ahead of the game.
My employer gave me two for testing earlier this year. (We're an integrator; Nokia was talking to us about selling them, and we were talking to other companies [such as IBM] about developing/selling applications for our end users.)
As phones, they rock. The best feature (by far) is the speakerphone. I could set it on my monitor, lean back in my chair, and talk to customers without them ever knowing that I was using a speaker phone (when I called my mom, she said it sounded no worse than a regular cell phone call). Setting it up with Outlook contacts is a cinch (I didn't try synching it with any other contact management prorams). The nice wide screen is nice for HTTP: browing (compared to, say, the iPaq, where you have to scroll over to the right to see the rest of the page). I had several movie clips (Spider-man, Episode II, Jurassic Park, etc.) that I would use to show customers just how awesome that little screen was...
As organizers, however, they SUCK ASS. There is NO stylus, and you can't touch the screen like you can on a Palm. You change one contact's info, and it takes fucking forever to replicate those new changes over (an eternity compared to Palm's Hotsynch). While a few features are cool (they've got programs in there open up Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents), overall it is very unimpressive compared to the many other PDAs out there (Palm, iPaq, etc.).
I'm not sure why the transfer rate is so bad. It takes an eternity to backup over a serial cable (the prototype NFS unit I had, at least, didn't come with any sort of firewire, USB, etc. cable). When you back it up for the first time (everything on the little hard drive to your desktop), you might as well do something else for the next several hours.
I had all sorts of weird bugs on my prototype. The first software version that they gave us was very buggy (I couldn't even synch it with Outlook). Finally I got in touch with a Nokia engineer who FedExed me a copy of their latest one. While that fixed my Outlook problems, I still had all sorts of weird synching problems under Windows 98 and 2000. (For example, my computer would all of a sudden stop seeing my Communicator. I would have to reboot just to see the Communicator again.) This was like 3 months ago, so hopefully they fixed all that in their latest release.
All in all, I've spent hundreds of hours testing them. (Setting them up for sales reps to show customers, recording bugs, installing all sorts of programs [yes, even DOOM!], racking up 5000 minutes on my long commutes each month...etc.). All this testing, and I still can't say that I'd recommend this for the average PDA user. (There are, however, certain niche markets that could definitely benefits from this sorta gadget.)
The sales manager in our company wanted me to set it up so that sales reps could access a 5000 record ACT! database on a Citrix server via these communicators. Because of other more important projects, I put that on the back burner. Has anyone else done anything similar with them?
Add to that Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen.
This is kind of offtopic, but I just read a book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World. It talks about Venter's interesting background. Other scientists mentioned:
Susan Greenfield,
Geoffrey Marcy,
Polly Matzinger,
Saul Perlmutter,
Gretchen Daily, and
Carl Woese.
What happens when someone changes one insignificant thing on the song? (e.g. an extra drum beat, second of silence at the end, etc.)
This would change the hash that they search for. (This obviously applies to people who've altered company logos on Photoshop, etc.)
Trying to stamp out the illegit stuff out there is too big of a task. The only way that they can maintain their hegemony is to ONLY allow their "legit" stuff to play...hence the recent actions of companies to lock down home computers, DVD players, etc.
Winamp's take on pens being used for evil.
Lot49.com is an interesting tribute to Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 , an intersting exploration of life in CA. (My favorite part is the name of one of the bands--Sick Dick and the Volkwagens)
For those interesting in a real headtrip, try to plow your way through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.
Pynchon is an interesting hermit. He didn't accept his award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Instead, he sent Irwin Corey.
(BTW, You'll enjoy GR a lot more if you read it with a companion.)
Interesting; thanks for sharing. I see you credited qubit.com. That's a great resource.
Any other books you'd recommend on the subject?
One problem with all of this is separating fact from hype when it comes to nanotechnology.
The money may come in, but the market has to correct sometime.
I predict a "nanotechnology" version of the web economy bullshit generator in the not-so-near future!
Dot-con business plans were hard enough to understand; I can only imagine how bad these nanotech ones are read...
Interesting. Thank you.
My question is, under the GPL, will they have to tell us what modifications they made?
From GPL:
What could the NSA do to compel them to show us what modifications they made?