Chevron had to pay $2.2 million to employees because it allowed its internal email system to be used to transmit sexually offensive jokes.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say "personal responsibility". Given today's technology, and the technology of the forseeable future, it is practically impossible to keep an employee from sending offensive or illegal material through a corporate email system.
IMNERHO, it is the employee who sent the offensive email who should be held accountable. Company policy should require that the employee in question be fired. Company policy should also require that all employees be well informed that the company policy is termination is such cases.
The law should require that the person responsibile for the offensive email, not the company, be held accountable for it's contents.
Unfortunately, as has been pointed out before, common sense is not law.:(
3) Make policy on personal web-browsing. Make it clear what is not acceptable. And deal with abusers promptly.
I'd make that "deal with ALL abusers promptly.
In far too many companies, middle and upper management are allowed to get away with things that would get the wage slaves on the factory floor on in the cubicle farms fired on the spot.
Such policies only work (and only protect companies from wrongful dismissal suits) when they are enforced equally.
People are much more likely to send or receive "inappropriate" material via email than by post. The two mechanisms require different sets of rules.
The operative word in that statement is People. It is people who send email, and hence it is the person who sent the email who should be held accountable for it's content.
This whole mess with people litigating over every stupid little thing is caused by people refusing to take responsibility for their own actions.
Yes, there are many situations where a person or a company has clearly wronged another, and in those cases the party at fault should be held accountable, in a court of law if neccessary. But most cases that end up in front of a judge are cases of people not wanting to take responsibility for their own (often stupid) actions... like the lady who sued McDonalds because she spilled her hot coffee in her lap while trying to drink it and drive her car at the same time.
There are better ways to deal with the issue of email and corporate liability than the straightjacket one-size-fits-all legislation and policies which we currently have.
Oh please, that is a pretty idealistic thinking, just get your voice out there the law will change.
Well, that's how it's supposed to work!
The primary reason that it doesn't work that way, is the fact that those at the tops of the big companies with clout profit from these laws that make their employees suffer.
Both the sexual harrassment laws, and the privacy laws that are currently on the books are bad, and need to be changed.
You're right, InsaneGeek, they probably won't be changed in my lifetime.
Why? The reasons are actually quite simple:
1 -- People don't know about them. Take for example the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act that was passed in 1998. The only people who knew about the subcommittee hearings on that bill were the companies who lobbied for it to begin with, and who benefit from a law that harms the vast majority of the US population. It was never publicized, and therefore anyone opposed to it was excluded from testifiying at the hearings. Presto, we have another bad law.
Thanks to all the bull$#1t lawyer-eze written into these things, people also don't know whether or when such laws might or might not apply to them.
2 - Those in power don't listen. Why should they? What are we going to do? Vote them out of office?
They have us so convinced that our vote doesn't make a difference that over 70% of those eligible to vote don't bother anyway!
Replace a Republican with a Democrat (or vice versa) and all you get is a change in which tax goes up to pay for all the new bad laws they'll make trying to return the favors garnered from all those huge campaign contributions from the big companies who want to protect themselves from being sued by the people they've wronged.
No, InsaneGeek, FascDot is quite right. The laws need to change.
> Okay, you menctin the FBI's Carnivore system. > This topic hit the "media" and now everyone is > quoting it as "violating fourth ammendment > rights" blah blah > > Why did we not here of this sooner? When was > this put into place? How long did it take to > make this public?
This type of behaviour by government agencies is a relic of the Cold War. They use the premise of "National Security" (though these days the politically correct form of the term is "Anti-Terrorism") to omit or delay informing the public of their oppressive and blatantly unconstitutional activites.
The fact is that they don't tell us about these things a) because they don't HAVE to (no one is forcing the FBI to tell us how it's watching us... which leads me to ask "who's watching them while they're watching us?"), and b) because it's not in their best interest as Big Brother. After all, we can't defend ourselves against a threat that we don't know exists.
I see Carnivore as a threat not only to the fourth ammendment, but to the second as well... though not in a direct sense.
The whole purpose of the second ammendment is to make sure that the government cannot disarm the people. The basic premise behind Jefferson's writing of this ammendment was that the government's military apparatus can not take over the country by force as long as the citizenry can shoot back.
The goverment might not be able to become totalitarian by military means in the US, but there are other, subtler means by which the same effect can be achieved. Carnivore is one such way, though now that it's been exposed, the people can defend themselves against it.
The fact that it took so long to bring it's existence to the public's knowledge is more proof that our government is both dishonest and corrupt.
It is a symptom of a government that has become used to not being accoutable to the people for it's actions. Our government has forgotten that *they* are supposed to be working for *us*, and not the other way around.
As Plato said: "Whereas the truth is that the state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst."
> The question is, how do we prevent such thing > from happenning?
A good start would be for people to do their own thinking, and to take responsibility for their own actions.
If people refuse to exercise some self-control, of course the government will take over that control.
I know it's cliche, but "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"... and that means on a personal level. The Constitution was written by people who believed in personal liberty, and personal responsibility.
If we want to be free of the kind of oppression that systems like Carnivore make possible, we have to watch for them diligently, and take the government to task when we find them.
We also need to elect government officials who will be honestly accountable to the people, and will hold every government agency accountable... which means we need to get a *lot* more people off their asses and into the voting booths in November.
We also need to let people know that there are choices other than the RepubliCrat nominees.
When less than a third of eligible voters show up for a Presidential election (less than 27% of those eligible voted in the last one!), the United States ends up with exactly the government we deserve.
> The argument that nobody should mind unless > they are committing a crime always pops up when > some invasion of privacy is being advocated.
Indeed. This claim is one of the fundamental principles of all totalitarian regimes.
> What constitutes a crime may well look very > black and white when you mention child > pornography
Does it, really? The case of The Tin Drum (an excellent movie that won numerous awards... before being siezed as child porn in one US state and records of who rented it subpoenad for grand jury indictment proceedings) and the fiasco with the removal the works of David Hamilton, Jock Sturges and Sally Mann (regarded as some of the greatest contemporary photographers by their peers) from the shelves of Barnes and Noble bookstores come to mind as examples of what can happen when one person's interpretation of an artistic work differs from another's.
There are even those who consider Michelangelo's sculpture of David to be pornographic, even though a replica of it stands before our very own Library of Congress. There are those who are absolutely shocked and disgusted by some of the great masterpieces of painting displayed in galleries like Sancouci and the Louvre.
Furthermore, there's the issue of the 'net being a worldwide medium. While it is considered perfectly acceptable for women to sun themselves, and for children to go naked, at the public beaches of the French Riviera, they would get arrested for public indecency in California.
So, in an email exchange between someone living in the US, and their relatives living in Europe, which "community standard" gets applied? What should happen when one of the European family members posts snapshots at PhotoPoint of the outing to the beach that include naked todlers playing in the surf?
It's not as black and white as it may seem at first glance.
> what happens when some future or in some case > current laws start to gnaw away at basic > freedoms.
It's happening every day. Just look at the DeCSS case.
And then there's the FBI's Carnivore system, which, by it's very nature, violates the fourth ammendment rights of ISP users by reading every email passing through a network that it's connected to, looking for "something illegal".
The FBI defends this Mongolian Hordes approach, invading the privacy of every single subscriber to an ISP in order to find the *one* who *may* be discussing illegal activity in an email, by stating that there is no explicit law to prevent it.
George Orwell, move over. Big Brother's big brother is here...
In my neck of the woods (New Jersey), the internet enabled PC's in the childrens area are blocked. The PC's in the main area are not, and are clearly marked as such. That seems to me like a good solution in any case.
It's a step in the right direction, at least. I'd rather see either parents or a librarian keeping an eye on the kids at the PCs. A person is, after all, more capable of judging appropriateness than a program is.
I cannot see how anyone, in their right mind, would object to placing some sort of blocking software on PC's in childrens areas of a public library.
I object to it primarily because it sets a precedent for censorship, along the lines of "first they came for the communists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew..."
I do not hear you complaining about the types of books the library places in the childrens section to browse. Isn't THAT censorship by your definition? I mean SOMEONE ELSE decided what books those kids can see?
Yes, and I think it's just as wrong. I feel everyone (including children) should have access to the entire library. I see nothing wrong with putting books specifically written for children in a particular section or room, but I don't think that children should be specifically confined to that room when visiting the library.
If a child happens across a book that they don't understand, or one that disturbs them, they should feel free to discuss it with their parents (if my kids don't feel they can discuss such things with me, then there's something wrong with my parenting), and they should know that they're perfectly free to not look at that book.
My wife takes my kids to the library twice a week, and they basically have their own little safe place to wander around/browse/read/learn/enjoy. I do not have to worry or care about what book they might pick up while in that area.
If you feel that you don't have to worry or care about what your children are up to at any given time, then you, sir, are a fool. Who's to say that there's not a copy of some children's book that you object to in that section (some parents, for example, object to Jennifer has Two Daddies. And what about the horrible violence found in the Roadrunner comics and cartoons often found in the children's section)?
Its a safe, age appropriate place.
And who, exactly, decides what is "age appropriate"? My seven year old may be intellectually capable of reading (if not fully grokking) a Nancy Drew mystery, while my neighbor's seven year old may not. My five year old may be emotionally capable of understanding the concepts presented in Jennifer has Two Daddies, while my neighbor's five year old may not. My ten year old may be fascinated by the challenging ideas and concepts presented in Lions Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, while my neighbor's ten year old sees nothing but gobbeldygook.
What is appropriate for any given child should be determined by the parents of that child, and no one else. All this drivel about "age appropriateness" is just another way to label and categorize something that is inherently non-categorizable, namely people.
As to the question of who is better qualified to forge the list of blocked sites, I say a commercial entity that have people who earn a salary doing this sort of thing, should bear the responsibility/chore of figuring out what site should be blocked and which shouldn't.
You'd really trust some corporation to decide what's good for your children? I sure wouldn't.
Blocking some sites inadvertantly is no big deal...you said yourself that the 'net is very big. I'm sure there are thousands of sites that contain the same information that was contained in the one blocked site.
The problem with that thinking is that the block lists are generated by filter programs. ANY page with the same content will be blocked by the filter.
The simple fact remains that the only way to know, monitor, and control what your kids see on the 'net, is to keep an eye on your kids while they're on the 'net... just as the only way to know, monitor, and control what your kids do at the mall, is to keep an eye on your kids while they're at the mall.
Just look at USWest (or, as it's colloquially known, USWorst), and their unresponsiveness to thousands of customers wanting DSL. Though they have the monetary and manpower resources needed to make it happen in short order, they prefer to line the personal pocketbooks of their board members and high level executives (while paying pitifully low wages to the linemen who do all the work that makes them that money). Why? Because there's nowhere else that their customers can get service.
> Shouldn't we be focusing on the slightly more important but less relevant to you issues here?
Like what?
You think the rain forest is any more important a natural resource than the 'net?
You think the rain forest is any less important to us than the 'net?
> Jeez, get off your moral high horse and start talking about something the majority of people actually give a shit about.
Less than 20% of eligible voters showed up to the last presidential election.
What makes you think the majority of people give a shit about anything?
> but fail to notice companies are patenting human DNA
Look again. (It's all over last week's/. postings.) We noticed, and we're pissed.
> stick to the geek aspect
What? Geeks aren't interested in environmental issues? Geeks don't care about people's rights and liberties being trampled by governmental incompetence and corporate greed?
Let me get you a crowbar... it might just help you extract your cranium from your rectum.
>Forgive me for bashing us techies (being one >myself), but honestly, I believe that there is >FAR more to understand within the various laws >lawyers understand than in the technology we >techies know."
That, IMNERHO, serves to show just how insanely complex and convoluted our laws are. Let's face it, how many non-lawyer types actually grok the laws that apply to whatever it is they do? For that matter, how many lawyers grok more of the law than whatever subcategory applies to their specialisation?
What's worse, how many of our law *makers* (all those people in Congress that we find ourselves complaining about all the time...) actually grok the laws they are passing beyond the concept of "I'll vote for yours if you vote for mine" or "if you vote for this we'll help you get re-elected"?
The issue here, I think, is more politics vs. technology rather than lawyers vs. geeks. What we need to fear is politicians being influenced by big business interests (i.e. money grubbing) toward making laws that that further profit mongering at the expense of the individuals who make up the general public.
The scariest part of *that*, is the fact that the lobbyists who represent big business, and those who plan their strategies, have a *very* *good* understanding of the technolgies (much the way we geeks grok them), *and* their implications to big government and big business (which we geeks sometimes overlook...). Thus, they have solid technological amunition to combine with the virtually unlimited monetary firepower they can use to hold the lawmakers hostage.
I agree with you, PG, that the government goes too far with the way the laws are written. It just so happens that it's easier for them to catch and prosecute someone with a picture of a 13 year old girl getting raped, than it is to catch and prosecute the actual rapist. The laws are written the way they are so that law enforcement can make itself *look* like it's doing it's job. Kinda like those cops who wait out by the freeway all day handing out speeding tickets, rather than going out and finding the people who are commiting more serious crimes like assault, robbery, and murder.
They also go too far in what they define as pornographic. Here, the government caters directly into the hands of the puritanical Christian zealots of the "Religious Right", and their "Moral Superiority (patent pending)". There's something seriously wrong with laws that criminalize the great artistry of people like Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, and Graham Ovenden. The way the laws are currently written, a court could interpret an image of Michelangelo's David as pornographic.
I also agree with all those who have expressed the opinion that employers should have the right to censor (yes, censor!) what appears on their networks and workstations. After all, the network, the hardware, the domain name, the IP addresses, the software, and the mail exchange servers all belong to the company. I think a company has as much right to monitor and control what their employees do on company equipent, and during the time they're being paid to work, as parents have to monitor and control what their children do and see (on TV, the 'net, who they hang out with, etc.).
It seems like common sense to me that when I'm at work, I do work, and when I'm on my own time I do whatever the hell I want.
I'm convinced that the primary reason that companies have these crackdowns on people looking at porn, or whatever, is that they're afraid that the government will hold the business criminally liable for letting their employees do it. That's another symptom of the way the laws are written. After all, a pornographic image mailed to me at my work email address resides on the company server, and is thus company property... for which the company can be held criminally liable, the way the law currently reads.
As far as moral censorship goes... IMNERHO, it belongs solely and completely with the individual. If you don't want to see porn, don't look at it. If you don't want your kids to see porn, teach them not to look at it. They probably will anyway, though, and you know what? There's not a thing anybody can do about it! (Just look at what criminalization has done to the drug scene.)
Anyway, I'll get down off my soapbox now and prepare to be flamed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said, sir!
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say "personal responsibility". Given today's technology, and the technology of the forseeable future, it is practically impossible to keep an employee from sending offensive or illegal material through a corporate email system.
IMNERHO, it is the employee who sent the offensive email who should be held accountable. Company policy should require that the employee in question be fired. Company policy should also require that all employees be well informed that the company policy is termination is such cases.
The law should require that the person responsibile for the offensive email, not the company, be held accountable for it's contents.
Unfortunately, as has been pointed out before, common sense is not law.
I'd make that "deal with ALL abusers promptly.
In far too many companies, middle and upper management are allowed to get away with things that would get the wage slaves on the factory floor on in the cubicle farms fired on the spot.
Such policies only work (and only protect companies from wrongful dismissal suits) when they are enforced equally.
The operative word in that statement is People. It is people who send email, and hence it is the person who sent the email who should be held accountable for it's content.
This whole mess with people litigating over every stupid little thing is caused by people refusing to take responsibility for their own actions.
Yes, there are many situations where a person or a company has clearly wronged another, and in those cases the party at fault should be held accountable, in a court of law if neccessary. But most cases that end up in front of a judge are cases of people not wanting to take responsibility for their own (often stupid) actions
There are better ways to deal with the issue of email and corporate liability than the straightjacket one-size-fits-all legislation and policies which we currently have.
Well, that's how it's supposed to work!
The primary reason that it doesn't work that way, is the fact that those at the tops of the big companies with clout profit from these laws that make their employees suffer.
Both the sexual harrassment laws, and the privacy laws that are currently on the books are bad, and need to be changed.
You're right, InsaneGeek, they probably won't be changed in my lifetime.
Why? The reasons are actually quite simple:
1 -- People don't know about them. Take for example the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act that was passed in 1998. The only people who knew about the subcommittee hearings on that bill were the companies who lobbied for it to begin with, and who benefit from a law that harms the vast majority of the US population. It was never publicized, and therefore anyone opposed to it was excluded from testifiying at the hearings. Presto, we have another bad law.
Thanks to all the bull$#1t lawyer-eze written into these things, people also don't know whether or when such laws might or might not apply to them.
2 - Those in power don't listen. Why should they? What are we going to do? Vote them out of office?
They have us so convinced that our vote doesn't make a difference that over 70% of those eligible to vote don't bother anyway!
Replace a Republican with a Democrat (or vice versa) and all you get is a change in which tax goes up to pay for all the new bad laws they'll make trying to return the favors garnered from all those huge campaign contributions from the big companies who want to protect themselves from being sued by the people they've wronged.
No, InsaneGeek, FascDot is quite right. The laws need to change.
> Okay, you menctin the FBI's Carnivore system.
... which leads me to ask "who's watching them while they're watching us?"), and b) because it's not in their best interest as Big Brother. After all, we can't defend ourselves against a threat that we don't know exists.
... though not in a direct sense.
... and that means on a personal level. The Constitution was written by people who believed in personal liberty, and personal responsibility.
... which means we need to get a *lot* more people off their asses and into the voting booths in November.
> This topic hit the "media" and now everyone is
> quoting it as "violating fourth ammendment
> rights" blah blah
>
> Why did we not here of this sooner? When was
> this put into place? How long did it take to
> make this public?
This type of behaviour by government agencies is a relic of the Cold War. They use the premise of "National Security" (though these days the politically correct form of the term is "Anti-Terrorism") to omit or delay informing the public of their oppressive and blatantly unconstitutional activites.
The fact is that they don't tell us about these things a) because they don't HAVE to (no one is forcing the FBI to tell us how it's watching us
I see Carnivore as a threat not only to the fourth ammendment, but to the second as well
The whole purpose of the second ammendment is to make sure that the government cannot disarm the people. The basic premise behind Jefferson's writing of this ammendment was that the government's military apparatus can not take over the country by force as long as the citizenry can shoot back.
The goverment might not be able to become totalitarian by military means in the US, but there are other, subtler means by which the same effect can be achieved. Carnivore is one such way, though now that it's been exposed, the people can defend themselves against it.
The fact that it took so long to bring it's existence to the public's knowledge is more proof that our government is both dishonest and corrupt.
It is a symptom of a government that has become used to not being accoutable to the people for it's actions. Our government has forgotten that *they* are supposed to be working for *us*, and not the other way around.
As Plato said: "Whereas the truth is that the state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst."
> The question is, how do we prevent such thing
> from happenning?
A good start would be for people to do their own thinking, and to take responsibility for their own actions.
If people refuse to exercise some self-control, of course the government will take over that control.
I know it's cliche, but "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
If we want to be free of the kind of oppression that systems like Carnivore make possible, we have to watch for them diligently, and take the government to task when we find them.
We also need to elect government officials who will be honestly accountable to the people, and will hold every government agency accountable
We also need to let people know that there are choices other than the RepubliCrat nominees.
When less than a third of eligible voters show up for a Presidential election (less than 27% of those eligible voted in the last one!), the United States ends up with exactly the government we deserve.
> The argument that nobody should mind unless
... before being siezed as child porn in one US state and records of who rented it subpoenad for grand jury indictment proceedings) and the fiasco with the removal the works of David Hamilton, Jock Sturges and Sally Mann (regarded as some of the greatest contemporary photographers by their peers) from the shelves of Barnes and Noble bookstores come to mind as examples of what can happen when one person's interpretation of an artistic work differs from another's.
...
> they are committing a crime always pops up when
> some invasion of privacy is being advocated.
Indeed. This claim is one of the fundamental principles of all totalitarian regimes.
> What constitutes a crime may well look very
> black and white when you mention child
> pornography
Does it, really? The case of The Tin Drum (an excellent movie that won numerous awards
There are even those who consider Michelangelo's sculpture of David to be pornographic, even though a replica of it stands before our very own Library of Congress. There are those who are absolutely shocked and disgusted by some of the great masterpieces of painting displayed in galleries like Sancouci and the Louvre.
Furthermore, there's the issue of the 'net being a worldwide medium. While it is considered perfectly acceptable for women to sun themselves, and for children to go naked, at the public beaches of the French Riviera, they would get arrested for public indecency in California.
So, in an email exchange between someone living in the US, and their relatives living in Europe, which "community standard" gets applied? What should happen when one of the European family members posts snapshots at PhotoPoint of the outing to the beach that include naked todlers playing in the surf?
It's not as black and white as it may seem at first glance.
> what happens when some future or in some case
> current laws start to gnaw away at basic
> freedoms.
It's happening every day. Just look at the DeCSS case.
And then there's the FBI's Carnivore system, which, by it's very nature, violates the fourth ammendment rights of ISP users by reading every email passing through a network that it's connected to, looking for "something illegal".
The FBI defends this Mongolian Hordes approach, invading the privacy of every single subscriber to an ISP in order to find the *one* who *may* be discussing illegal activity in an email, by stating that there is no explicit law to prevent it.
George Orwell, move over. Big Brother's big brother is here
OpenBSD -- it's Open Source, it has a formal spec, it's regularly and thoroughly audited.
It's a step in the right direction, at least. I'd rather see either parents or a librarian keeping an eye on the kids at the PCs. A person is, after all, more capable of judging appropriateness than a program is.
I cannot see how anyone, in their right mind, would object to placing some sort of blocking software on PC's in childrens areas of a public library.
I object to it primarily because it sets a precedent for censorship, along the lines of "first they came for the communists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew ..."
I do not hear you complaining about the types of books the library places in the childrens section to browse. Isn't THAT censorship by your definition? I mean SOMEONE ELSE decided what books those kids can see?
Yes, and I think it's just as wrong. I feel everyone (including children) should have access to the entire library. I see nothing wrong with putting books specifically written for children in a particular section or room, but I don't think that children should be specifically confined to that room when visiting the library.
If a child happens across a book that they don't understand, or one that disturbs them, they should feel free to discuss it with their parents (if my kids don't feel they can discuss such things with me, then there's something wrong with my parenting), and they should know that they're perfectly free to not look at that book.
My wife takes my kids to the library twice a week, and they basically have their own little safe place to wander around/browse/read/learn/enjoy. I do not have to worry or care about what book they might pick up while in that area.
If you feel that you don't have to worry or care about what your children are up to at any given time, then you, sir, are a fool. Who's to say that there's not a copy of some children's book that you object to in that section (some parents, for example, object to Jennifer has Two Daddies. And what about the horrible violence found in the Roadrunner comics and cartoons often found in the children's section)?
Its a safe, age appropriate place.
And who, exactly, decides what is "age appropriate"? My seven year old may be intellectually capable of reading (if not fully grokking) a Nancy Drew mystery, while my neighbor's seven year old may not. My five year old may be emotionally capable of understanding the concepts presented in Jennifer has Two Daddies, while my neighbor's five year old may not. My ten year old may be fascinated by the challenging ideas and concepts presented in Lions Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, while my neighbor's ten year old sees nothing but gobbeldygook.
What is appropriate for any given child should be determined by the parents of that child, and no one else. All this drivel about "age appropriateness" is just another way to label and categorize something that is inherently non-categorizable, namely people.
As to the question of who is better qualified to forge the list of blocked sites, I say a commercial entity that have people who earn a salary doing this sort of thing, should bear the responsibility/chore of figuring out what site should be blocked and which shouldn't.
You'd really trust some corporation to decide what's good for your children? I sure wouldn't.
Blocking some sites inadvertantly is no big deal...you said yourself that the 'net is very big. I'm sure there are thousands of sites that contain the same information that was contained in the one blocked site.
The problem with that thinking is that the block lists are generated by filter programs. ANY page with the same content will be blocked by the filter.
The simple fact remains that the only way to know, monitor, and control what your kids see on the 'net, is to keep an eye on your kids while they're on the 'net ... just as the only way to know, monitor, and control what your kids do at the mall, is to keep an eye on your kids while they're at the mall.
The truth is out there? Anyone know the URL?
Sufi wrote:
/. postings.) We noticed, and we're pissed.
... it might just help you extract your cranium from your rectum.
> The western capitalist world *IS* corporate
Yes. That's precicely the problem.
Just look at USWest (or, as it's colloquially known, USWorst), and their unresponsiveness to thousands of customers wanting DSL. Though they have the monetary and manpower resources needed to make it happen in short order, they prefer to line the personal pocketbooks of their board members and high level executives (while paying pitifully low wages to the linemen who do all the work that makes them that money). Why? Because there's nowhere else that their customers can get service.
> Shouldn't we be focusing on the slightly more important but less relevant to you issues here?
Like what?
You think the rain forest is any more important a natural resource than the 'net?
You think the rain forest is any less important to us than the 'net?
> Jeez, get off your moral high horse and start talking about something the majority of people actually give a shit about.
Less than 20% of eligible voters showed up to the last presidential election.
What makes you think the majority of people give a shit about anything?
> but fail to notice companies are patenting human DNA
Look again. (It's all over last week's
> stick to the geek aspect
What? Geeks aren't interested in environmental issues? Geeks don't care about people's rights and liberties being trampled by governmental incompetence and corporate greed?
Let me get you a crowbar
>Forgive me for bashing us techies (being one
...) actually grok the laws they are passing beyond the concept of "I'll vote for yours if you vote for mine" or "if you vote for this we'll help you get re-elected"?
...). Thus, they have solid technological amunition to combine with the virtually unlimited monetary firepower they can use to hold the lawmakers hostage.
>myself), but honestly, I believe that there is
>FAR more to understand within the various laws
>lawyers understand than in the technology we
>techies know."
That, IMNERHO, serves to show just how insanely complex and convoluted our laws are. Let's face it, how many non-lawyer types actually grok the laws that apply to whatever it is they do? For that matter, how many lawyers grok more of the law than whatever subcategory applies to their specialisation?
What's worse, how many of our law *makers* (all those people in Congress that we find ourselves complaining about all the time
The issue here, I think, is more politics vs. technology rather than lawyers vs. geeks. What we need to fear is politicians being influenced by big business interests (i.e. money grubbing) toward making laws that that further profit mongering at the expense of the individuals who make up the general public.
The scariest part of *that*, is the fact that the lobbyists who represent big business, and those who plan their strategies, have a *very* *good* understanding of the technolgies (much the way we geeks grok them), *and* their implications to big government and big business (which we geeks sometimes overlook
They also go too far in what they define as pornographic. Here, the government caters directly into the hands of the puritanical Christian zealots of the "Religious Right", and their "Moral Superiority (patent pending)". There's something seriously wrong with laws that criminalize the great artistry of people like Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, and Graham Ovenden. The way the laws are currently written, a court could interpret an image of Michelangelo's David as pornographic.
I also agree with all those who have expressed the opinion that employers should have the right to censor (yes, censor!) what appears on their networks and workstations. After all, the network, the hardware, the domain name, the IP addresses, the software, and the mail exchange servers all belong to the company. I think a company has as much right to monitor and control what their employees do on company equipent, and during the time they're being paid to work, as parents have to monitor and control what their children do and see (on TV, the 'net, who they hang out with, etc.).
It seems like common sense to me that when I'm at work, I do work, and when I'm on my own time I do whatever the hell I want.
I'm convinced that the primary reason that companies have these crackdowns on people looking at porn, or whatever, is that they're afraid that the government will hold the business criminally liable for letting their employees do it. That's another symptom of the way the laws are written. After all, a pornographic image mailed to me at my work email address resides on the company server, and is thus company property ... for which the company can be held criminally liable, the way the law currently reads.
As far as moral censorship goes ... IMNERHO, it belongs solely and completely with the individual. If you don't want to see porn, don't look at it. If you don't want your kids to see porn, teach them not to look at it. They probably will anyway, though, and you know what? There's not a thing anybody can do about it! (Just look at what criminalization has done to the drug scene.)
Anyway, I'll get down off my soapbox now and prepare to be flamed.