Given I've not seen a single sponsored link for child porn via Google amongst the dozens of How To Make Money On EBay, How To Get Gold In WoW and various home business ads, I'm guessing a full quarter to a half of their business model is not built on child porn.
Tell me about it -- I mean, I spend hours a day on the Web, and I have never seen a link, sponsored or not, to anything that could remotely be considered child porn. Nor have I ever stumbled onto any such material, even when looking for adult erotic material. If this stuff is actually out there, it's well obfuscated -- I'm sure ther don't put links around the Web reading, "Get the newest kiddie porn!! Click here!!" Any site peddling that crap is probably hidden behind multiple URL redirects and passwords, and doesn't advertise openly. So where are the hordes of people who are supposedly "stumbling" onto this stuff? I think you'd have to be actively looking for it, plus know someone who knows someone who knows someone, etc., who provides a link.
(Not that I haven't seen a lot of perfectly legal websites whose motives I question seriously. Like the hordes of "child starlet" tribute sites -- detailed and obsessive -- run by adult males. Nothing pornographic or illegal.....but very creepy.)
Here's my concern with this kind of rule. Suppose someone is online viewing whatever vanilla porn they like and a malicious pop-up ad under false pretenses redirects them to something like really-horrible-k1ddi3-pr0n.xxx. They didn't want to go there, but now their ISP sends their information to the government. What happens to that person now?
On one hand, I see this as a fairly specious argument. I surf the Web constantly (I have no life) and I have never "accidentally" clicked on a link that brought up k1dd1e pr0n. It's not like these sites are indexed in Yahoo or advertise on Google -- they tend to operate in the shadows.
Even if it does occasionally happen, I'd like to think that even in the midst of the thinkofthechildren hysteria and the increasing desire for total surveillance, anyone with half a brain (and I will charitably grant that even our beloved Prezdint has at least HALF a brain) could distinguish between a web activity log that showed that someone once clicked on a link with no blatant indication of the destination, arrived at a "naughty" site, then quickly left, versus someone who spent hours there on a repeated basis and downloaded images from it.
But, true, this and other draconian laws and proposals are not about any specific crime or threat. These folks envision a perfect world in which fighting crime would require no investigative legwork -- everything you do on a minute-by-minute basis will be watched and logged, and your physical location will be constantly available. If you do something naughty, they will not only know exactly what you've done, when, where, and to whom, but will know exactly where you are at that moment to come and arrest you. Think of the savings in money and man-hours!! You wouldn't need detectives to slog around, following false leads and shadows and nebulous tips -- the whole process will be automated! Maybe the chip they implant in you to know your whereabouts could even be connected to the motor centers of your brain, so they don't even have to come get you -- if you commit a crime, your body will automatically walk to the nearest police station to turn yourself in!! Hell, you could even program a self-dectruct mechanism into the thing, so if you commit a capital crime, it would just blow up and execute you on the spot. We will watch old reruns of "Law and Order" and "CSI" and laugh, marveling at how "quaint" it was in the old days.
The freightening thing is, at one time I would have dismissed the above scenario as a wild fantasy sutiable only for the plot of a bad Sci-Fi Channel made-for-TV movie. More and more, I'm starting to think that it's not as ludicrous as I imagined.....
Let me start by saying I'm not defending the DMCA or laws of its ilk -- but I understand to some degree why the Powers That Be (Reg. TM) are scared shitless by the digital age.
In the print-and-analog era, piracy on a massive scale was both difficult (as regards production and distribution) and resulted in a product that was of a sufficiently degraded quality to enable the original licensed product to retain some advantage over their black market copies. Sure, you could use your dad's office xerox machine to copy that physics textbook instead of laying out a couple of hundred bucks for the book, but a massive pile of photocopies was unwieldy and far less convenient than a nicely bound book. Sure, you could make cassette copies of LPs (in my youth, I had a whole circle of friends who would share their music thusly), but the audio quality took a nosedive. Sure, you could make VHS dubs of movies, but every successive copy generation reduced the video quality significantly. And if you were looking to profit from such activities, your options for publicizing your wares and distributing them made the concept difficult to execute on any large scale. Now we live in an age in which the content of that 1100-page textbook can be digitized and fit on a CD or jump drive. And perfect digital copies of music and movies can be quickly and easily shared with thousands of people on the Net.
The concept of fair use was something the studios, publishers, and other corporate meagaliths could live with so long as abusing the concept (for profit or otherwise) on any significant scale was problematic. Now, getting that software package or music album or Hollywood blockbuster gratis can be as quick and easy as a few clicks of the mouse.
A parallel is the ongoing controversy over providing and accessing public records online. We're all familiar with the concept of "practical obscurity" -- previously if you wanted to access these records, you had to physically travel to whatever city and edifice in which the documents were archived, then deal with buereaucracy, surly and underpaid public servants, and lots of musty and dusty file folders to find that divorce decree or property deed or tax record. It was legal to do so, but the sheer impracticality of time and logistics the process meant that few would even attempt it. Having those same records (filled with personal information) made available on the Internet is ripe for abuse by scammers, blackmailers, and just plain busybodies.
(And we could start a whole nuther thread about "adult" material and the way in which politicos are more and more amenable to restricting or even denying adult access to such things in the name of "protecting the children.")
Fuss, fume, and write your congresscritter all you like, but eventually you will have to realize that these sort of "baby-with-the-bathwater" laws are the wave of the future -- indeed, the future is already here. This is the dark side of technology -- the "unintended consequences" not just of laws, but of digital technology in general -- "information wants to be free," but now that it is not only free, but easy, expect more and more restrictions on your rights and freedoms. I don't like it any more than y'all do, but as long as savvy and aware people like/.ers are in the extreme minority, and the vast voting populace consists of easily manipulated and apathetic sheep, don't expect things to improve anytime soon.
This I don't understand. Can somebody help me out? Why wouldn't they want to keep all of the porn sites in one domain, where a very simple filter could eliminate all of it from view?
It's very simple -- Christian groups don't want porn "segregated" -- they want it to disappear entirely. Providing a special domain is an admission that porn has a legitimate place on the Net, and that concept is anathema to the folks who don't just want to avoid it themselves, but deny anyone else the choice to view it.
It seems like an unenforcable law. They are going to have to put 1 out of every 5 people in jail for 2 years, and that's not going to fly.
Naw.....it's like any other basically uneforceable law -- they can't arrest anywhere close to everybody, so they'll just nail a few random people now and then and hope it works as a deterrent. You know, like how the occasional speed trap scares folks into driving slower, or the occasional prostitution bust gets all the hookers off the street?
Oh, wait.....most people still speed, and the World's Oldest Profession still flourishes.
So much for deterrence.....
One thing I'd worry about though is how one defines what is pornography and what isn't. Is a site that talks about STDs and safe-sex going to be labelled as adults-only by the religious right? Is a nudist colony site pornographic or simply counter-culture? Is a site that has "bad words" an adult site?
I would want to see a very clear, objective, strict, narrow definition of adult/pornographic content for this bill. i.e., "Images displaying sexual intercourse." (That is slightly too narrow, I'd think, but the intent should be clear.)
You have to understand that to a lot of the people who are the most vocally fighters of p0rn, even the Venus De Milo would probably be considered obscene. (Bare boobies, after all, and might encourage development of an amputee feitsh.....)
The general sentiment behind this sort of thing is "sex = BAD," period. They are concerned about anything that might actually imply to their young'uns that people do engage in and even ENJOY sex. (Shudder.) You will see them try to move STD information sites, sites that deal with counseling young gay people, etc., to the XXX domain.
Oh, and don't even use that canard about adults having a right to view the stuff -- the backdoor effect that they seek is to make it difficult for ANYONE to access this material, because the "think of the children" garbage is a smoke-screen for the fact that they don't want adults looking at it, either. If it restricts adults' rights, well that's just too damn bad.
Got quite a chuckle out of this. I think you'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the near future.
Why do you think that, for example, the arr-eye-ay-ay and the emm-pee-ay-ay want to so burden software and hardware with DRM that it will ultimately make it difficult, if not down right impossible, for you to freely share even something that YOU yourself created? Because it undermines their LP-era system. If people demonstrate that it's possible to freely distribute software, music, or video without DRM or limitations and still be successful, it gives the lie to the "party line" that the Big Boys need to be protected or they will go belly-up.
It's not uncommon for people to believe falsely, in retrospect, that they witnessed something "live" on TV. Videotape "looks" live, and if the replay comes very shortly after the event, the confusion is often inevitable. Millions of older Americans swear they saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald "live" on TV -- in reality, only NBC carried it live. (ABC didn't even have a remote unit at the site, and CBS was in the middle of a commentary and cut to Dallas about a minute after it happened. But they all played videotape of the shooting endlessly over the next few hours.) And let's not forget that Dubya claimed he saw the first plane that hit the WTC live as it happened. Conspiracy theorists latched onto this as evidence of foreknowledge of the attack, that Bush somehow had a "secret satellite feed" of the attack, etc. When, in reality, he was probably just mistaken. (Always a safe bet when Bush is involved.)
And, no, the Challenger didn't "explode," but try explaining that to the average layperson whose knowledge of physics and aerodynamics is probably nil. I've tried to explain the difference between a fireball and an explosion, tried to explain concepts like slipstream and aerodynamic forces to friends over the years. Mostly, I am met with glazed over eyes, or stubborn insistence. ("I SAW it with my own eyes!! It BLEW UP!! Any idjit can see that!!") So, hell, if folks want to believe it exploded, no skin off my nose. The accident is just as tragic, regardless.
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well.
Except that most folks these days want instant gratification (forget any process that is "slow") and as for rigor and mental discipline.....well, insert your own sarcastic remark here.
People generally believe what they want to believe -- whatever gives them comfort or satisfaction. It's the old comforting falsehood vs. distressing truth problem. When you need to believe something is so for the sake of your mental and emotional well-being, all the facts in the world dangled in front of your face will not change your mind.
I have always believed that the truly intelligent person is one who both can analyze facts rationally and accept the conclusions that follow even if the result goes against what they "want" to be true. Reason should trump emotion. "My gut, my intuition, and all that I have been taught tell me this is not so. Yet because the facts tell me otherwise, I will embrace the truth, regardless of how much I wish it were not so."
If you are at least 30-40 years of age, and have not in the course of your adult life had at least one or two preciously held beliefs turned 180 degrees because you opened your mind to all the facts and listened to the arguments of both sides, then you are not an intelligent, thinking person, regardless of how many degrees may be hanging on your walls.
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Given I've not seen a single sponsored link for child porn via Google amongst the dozens of How To Make Money On EBay, How To Get Gold In WoW and various home business ads, I'm guessing a full quarter to a half of their business model is not built on child porn.
Tell me about it -- I mean, I spend hours a day on the Web, and I have never seen a link, sponsored or not, to anything that could remotely be considered child porn. Nor have I ever stumbled onto any such material, even when looking for adult erotic material. If this stuff is actually out there, it's well obfuscated -- I'm sure ther don't put links around the Web reading, "Get the newest kiddie porn!! Click here!!" Any site peddling that crap is probably hidden behind multiple URL redirects and passwords, and doesn't advertise openly. So where are the hordes of people who are supposedly "stumbling" onto this stuff? I think you'd have to be actively looking for it, plus know someone who knows someone who knows someone, etc., who provides a link.
(Not that I haven't seen a lot of perfectly legal websites whose motives I question seriously. Like the hordes of "child starlet" tribute sites -- detailed and obsessive -- run by adult males. Nothing pornographic or illegal.....but very creepy.)
On one hand, I see this as a fairly specious argument. I surf the Web constantly (I have no life) and I have never "accidentally" clicked on a link that brought up k1dd1e pr0n. It's not like these sites are indexed in Yahoo or advertise on Google -- they tend to operate in the shadows.
Even if it does occasionally happen, I'd like to think that even in the midst of the thinkofthechildren hysteria and the increasing desire for total surveillance, anyone with half a brain (and I will charitably grant that even our beloved Prezdint has at least HALF a brain) could distinguish between a web activity log that showed that someone once clicked on a link with no blatant indication of the destination, arrived at a "naughty" site, then quickly left, versus someone who spent hours there on a repeated basis and downloaded images from it.
But, true, this and other draconian laws and proposals are not about any specific crime or threat. These folks envision a perfect world in which fighting crime would require no investigative legwork -- everything you do on a minute-by-minute basis will be watched and logged, and your physical location will be constantly available. If you do something naughty, they will not only know exactly what you've done, when, where, and to whom, but will know exactly where you are at that moment to come and arrest you. Think of the savings in money and man-hours!! You wouldn't need detectives to slog around, following false leads and shadows and nebulous tips -- the whole process will be automated! Maybe the chip they implant in you to know your whereabouts could even be connected to the motor centers of your brain, so they don't even have to come get you -- if you commit a crime, your body will automatically walk to the nearest police station to turn yourself in!! Hell, you could even program a self-dectruct mechanism into the thing, so if you commit a capital crime, it would just blow up and execute you on the spot. We will watch old reruns of "Law and Order" and "CSI" and laugh, marveling at how "quaint" it was in the old days.
The freightening thing is, at one time I would have dismissed the above scenario as a wild fantasy sutiable only for the plot of a bad Sci-Fi Channel made-for-TV movie. More and more, I'm starting to think that it's not as ludicrous as I imagined.....
Subsitute "U.S." for "China" in the article, and you may have a /. subject a few years hence.....
In the print-and-analog era, piracy on a massive scale was both difficult (as regards production and distribution) and resulted in a product that was of a sufficiently degraded quality to enable the original licensed product to retain some advantage over their black market copies. Sure, you could use your dad's office xerox machine to copy that physics textbook instead of laying out a couple of hundred bucks for the book, but a massive pile of photocopies was unwieldy and far less convenient than a nicely bound book. Sure, you could make cassette copies of LPs (in my youth, I had a whole circle of friends who would share their music thusly), but the audio quality took a nosedive. Sure, you could make VHS dubs of movies, but every successive copy generation reduced the video quality significantly. And if you were looking to profit from such activities, your options for publicizing your wares and distributing them made the concept difficult to execute on any large scale. Now we live in an age in which the content of that 1100-page textbook can be digitized and fit on a CD or jump drive. And perfect digital copies of music and movies can be quickly and easily shared with thousands of people on the Net.
The concept of fair use was something the studios, publishers, and other corporate meagaliths could live with so long as abusing the concept (for profit or otherwise) on any significant scale was problematic. Now, getting that software package or music album or Hollywood blockbuster gratis can be as quick and easy as a few clicks of the mouse.
A parallel is the ongoing controversy over providing and accessing public records online. We're all familiar with the concept of "practical obscurity" -- previously if you wanted to access these records, you had to physically travel to whatever city and edifice in which the documents were archived, then deal with buereaucracy, surly and underpaid public servants, and lots of musty and dusty file folders to find that divorce decree or property deed or tax record. It was legal to do so, but the sheer impracticality of time and logistics the process meant that few would even attempt it. Having those same records (filled with personal information) made available on the Internet is ripe for abuse by scammers, blackmailers, and just plain busybodies.
(And we could start a whole nuther thread about "adult" material and the way in which politicos are more and more amenable to restricting or even denying adult access to such things in the name of "protecting the children.")
Fuss, fume, and write your congresscritter all you like, but eventually you will have to realize that these sort of "baby-with-the-bathwater" laws are the wave of the future -- indeed, the future is already here. This is the dark side of technology -- the "unintended consequences" not just of laws, but of digital technology in general -- "information wants to be free," but now that it is not only free, but easy, expect more and more restrictions on your rights and freedoms. I don't like it any more than y'all do, but as long as savvy and aware people like /.ers are in the extreme minority, and the vast voting populace consists of easily manipulated and apathetic sheep, don't expect things to improve anytime soon.
This I don't understand. Can somebody help me out? Why wouldn't they want to keep all of the porn sites in one domain, where a very simple filter could eliminate all of it from view? It's very simple -- Christian groups don't want porn "segregated" -- they want it to disappear entirely. Providing a special domain is an admission that porn has a legitimate place on the Net, and that concept is anathema to the folks who don't just want to avoid it themselves, but deny anyone else the choice to view it.
Naw.....it's like any other basically uneforceable law -- they can't arrest anywhere close to everybody, so they'll just nail a few random people now and then and hope it works as a deterrent. You know, like how the occasional speed trap scares folks into driving slower, or the occasional prostitution bust gets all the hookers off the street? Oh, wait.....most people still speed, and the World's Oldest Profession still flourishes. So much for deterrence.....
One thing I'd worry about though is how one defines what is pornography and what isn't. Is a site that talks about STDs and safe-sex going to be labelled as adults-only by the religious right? Is a nudist colony site pornographic or simply counter-culture? Is a site that has "bad words" an adult site? I would want to see a very clear, objective, strict, narrow definition of adult/pornographic content for this bill. i.e., "Images displaying sexual intercourse." (That is slightly too narrow, I'd think, but the intent should be clear.) You have to understand that to a lot of the people who are the most vocally fighters of p0rn, even the Venus De Milo would probably be considered obscene. (Bare boobies, after all, and might encourage development of an amputee feitsh.....) The general sentiment behind this sort of thing is "sex = BAD," period. They are concerned about anything that might actually imply to their young'uns that people do engage in and even ENJOY sex. (Shudder.) You will see them try to move STD information sites, sites that deal with counseling young gay people, etc., to the XXX domain. Oh, and don't even use that canard about adults having a right to view the stuff -- the backdoor effect that they seek is to make it difficult for ANYONE to access this material, because the "think of the children" garbage is a smoke-screen for the fact that they don't want adults looking at it, either. If it restricts adults' rights, well that's just too damn bad.
Got quite a chuckle out of this. I think you'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the near future. Why do you think that, for example, the arr-eye-ay-ay and the emm-pee-ay-ay want to so burden software and hardware with DRM that it will ultimately make it difficult, if not down right impossible, for you to freely share even something that YOU yourself created? Because it undermines their LP-era system. If people demonstrate that it's possible to freely distribute software, music, or video without DRM or limitations and still be successful, it gives the lie to the "party line" that the Big Boys need to be protected or they will go belly-up.
It's not uncommon for people to believe falsely, in retrospect, that they witnessed something "live" on TV. Videotape "looks" live, and if the replay comes very shortly after the event, the confusion is often inevitable. Millions of older Americans swear they saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald "live" on TV -- in reality, only NBC carried it live. (ABC didn't even have a remote unit at the site, and CBS was in the middle of a commentary and cut to Dallas about a minute after it happened. But they all played videotape of the shooting endlessly over the next few hours.) And let's not forget that Dubya claimed he saw the first plane that hit the WTC live as it happened. Conspiracy theorists latched onto this as evidence of foreknowledge of the attack, that Bush somehow had a "secret satellite feed" of the attack, etc. When, in reality, he was probably just mistaken. (Always a safe bet when Bush is involved.)
And, no, the Challenger didn't "explode," but try explaining that to the average layperson whose knowledge of physics and aerodynamics is probably nil. I've tried to explain the difference between a fireball and an explosion, tried to explain concepts like slipstream and aerodynamic forces to friends over the years. Mostly, I am met with glazed over eyes, or stubborn insistence. ("I SAW it with my own eyes!! It BLEW UP!! Any idjit can see that!!") So, hell, if folks want to believe it exploded, no skin off my nose. The accident is just as tragic, regardless.
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well.
Except that most folks these days want instant gratification (forget any process that is "slow") and as for rigor and mental discipline.....well, insert your own sarcastic remark here.
People generally believe what they want to believe -- whatever gives them comfort or satisfaction. It's the old comforting falsehood vs. distressing truth problem. When you need to believe something is so for the sake of your mental and emotional well-being, all the facts in the world dangled in front of your face will not change your mind.
I have always believed that the truly intelligent person is one who both can analyze facts rationally and accept the conclusions that follow even if the result goes against what they "want" to be true. Reason should trump emotion. "My gut, my intuition, and all that I have been taught tell me this is not so. Yet because the facts tell me otherwise, I will embrace the truth, regardless of how much I wish it were not so."
If you are at least 30-40 years of age, and have not in the course of your adult life had at least one or two preciously held beliefs turned 180 degrees because you opened your mind to all the facts and listened to the arguments of both sides, then you are not an intelligent, thinking person, regardless of how many degrees may be hanging on your walls.