I noticed in reading the comments that people seem to have confused COPA, the Children's Online Protection Act, which seeks to restrict content posted by web site owners, and CIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act, which seeks to require schools and libraries to use Internet filters to block access to sexually explicit material.
I can't believe you can't keep these laws straight!;) Don't forget COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and CPPA, the so-called "virtual child porn" law.
But where's the consipriracy fun in that?/. would rather imagine a cabal of CEOs and politicos making secret deals to end fun, freedom, and geekdom as we know it.:) Especially if we can blame AOLTW or MS in the process. Or both -- double bonus points for that.
According to the TMDA FAQ, you can use both TMDA and on the client side, Eudora 5.1.1. (http://www.eudora.com/)
Using Eudora, attachments don't open up automatically, but they DO appear at the bottom of a message as icons. Clicking to open them is intuitive even for users without much technical skill. Really. If my Dad can do it, your wife can too.:)
Eudora also has amazingly flexible and easy to configure mail filtering possibilities, so you could set up folders for e-mail from you and from other of your wife's friends & family members. You could then discourage her from opening anything in the "inbox" unless she knew from whence it came.
I love Eudora. The only bad thing about my new job is that I can't use it at work. In my last job I refused to adapt, but now I'm in the corporate world and resistance was futile.
The Gobbler was torn down??? I'm heartbroken! I lived in Madison for 6 years, and it was one of my favorite landmarks on the drive back and forth to Milwaukee.
Tragic. Just tragic. Tell me that The House on the Rock is still going strong!!!
Oddly enough, the answer to that question depends not on the library or librarian in question, but on the SOURCE OF FEDERAL FUNDING the library receives. Really.
In most cases, where the libraries receive "E-Rate" funding, the library is specifically prohibited from turning off the filters if a minor (under 17 in this law) is using the computer.
If the library only receives funding from the Library Services & Technology Act, the librarian may turn off the filters if a patron is engaged in "bona fide research or other lawful purposes."
And if a library gets both kinds of funding, the E-Rate rules apply.
A PDF of the law is available here: http://www.cdt.org/legislation/106th/speech/001218 cipa.pdf
The LSTA language is on page 7, and the E-Rate language is on page 15. Because CIPA amended a large number of different statutory areas (Dept of Ed, LSTA, FCC), I recommend this version rather than mucking around in findlaw.
Those pictures are hysterical. I especially like the sword-wielding penguin on the mall escalator. But I have to admit, I can't actually imagine it drawing women. The kids in the other pictures, yes. Post-puberty women...harder to imagine.
The author of the CNN article must not have read the bill yet.
It also includes a requirement that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) develop a "mark" that would be somehow affixed to the subject line of all sexually explicit advertising e-mail. Failure to use this mark would result in a prison term -- a longer one if the recipient of the e-mail was a minor.
No one seems to have the bill up online yet. Are they all out at CFP? Eventually the text of the bill should be available on Thomas. The bill number will be S. 2137, I'm told.
Sure, this ruling can be used as a reference for cases in the US or UK, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
The real question that you were asking is will anyone in a US court (or elsewhere) listen.
That is far less likely. Especially in the US. Elsewhere in the world, courts are more likely to look at examples of how other countries have grappled with a legal issue and craft laws carefully to ensure the same or a different result. But this happens very seldom in the US.
You *can* cite to international precedent in a US court, just like in court in Kansas you *can* cite examples of what courts in California did under similar circumstances or with similar laws. And if you are really in new ground and the laws really are similar, they might decide to do the same thing. Or they might decide that Those People Over There have nothing to do with Us so who cares what they did or think?
What will also be interesting is to watch how this case and its international implications and developments compare to the Yahoo/LICRA case moving forward in parallel in France and in California.
The key things to include are YOUR name and address.
Send something to YOUR representatives. A blast-faxed generic letter to someone you cannot vote for is NOT taken seriously AT ALL.
If you can't remember who represents you, you can double-check using the geographical search tool on House of Representatives web site.
It will have MORE weight if you also customize it by articulating why YOU think XYZ, the impact it will have on YOU and your family/friends/neighbors, and if you are both polite and not patronizing.
BTW, for great examples of the negative impact of some Digital Rights Management technologies on ordinary non-techie people, check out Joe Kraus's very funny testimony about his parents' use of technology. This was presented before the Senate Judiciary committee a couple of weeks ago.
As much fun as it would be to represent/. on the city council, we're not your constituency. It doesn't matter what we think, and looking at the penetration of linux into government agencies, I'm guessing our messaging skills are about as bad as geek communications reputation would suggest.
Go ask your neighbors! First, talk to a couple of people you trust to be honest with you. Tell them you think this is an important issue that people should care about, and then explain why. Ask them if you've convinced them. Ask them what arguments were convincing and which seemed irrelevant to them. Then go talk to your neighbors.
Try to get a feel for which arguments work with them and which made them think you were a crazy geek. Use the arguments that work!
BTW, people might not care. You might not be able to get them to care. And you'll be more likely to be elected if you listen to the things people in your community care about, and offer ideas for how to deal with those things. You can obsess about open source issues when you get there.:)
You might want to work with someone who has done community organizing in your area, especially consumer-oriented groups.
Let me see if I got this -- Adam was *threatened* with a lawsuit, therefore truth is not a complete defense against libel?
Um. First, it's pretty easy to sue someone. Anyone watch West Wing last night? It was an old rerun where they talk about lots of lawsuits against the President, from crackpots who want the government to stop letting aliens broadcast through their fillings, to someone blaming the President for the fact their spouse didn't wear a seatbelt and died in a car accident. Lunatic lawsuits are not uncommon. They might lose, or you might give in because hiring a lawyer to defend you is expensive. But in this case, Adam wasn't actually sued.
Second, Adam wrote about a "fictional kid" who masturbates to much and had the personally identifiable information as a real person, who presumably doesn't do what he described the "fictional kid" doing. In other words, truth wouldn't be a defense, because Adam wasn't telling the truth.
Now let's pretend for a moment that the "fictional kid" with a real kid's AIM name really is a compulsive masturbator. Then his story wouldn't be libel, but he still might get sued.
Invasion of privacy, and in particular "public disclosure of private facts" is against the law in most states in the US. The law varies from state to state, but the tort "invasion of privacy" in most places is something like:
One who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of privacy,
if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.
Restatement (Second) of Torts, 652B (emphasis added)
I think in most cases, the publication of a claim that a person is a compulsive masturbator would meet the "highly offensive to a reasonable person" standard.
Truth is a complete defense against libel. But that has nothing to do, as far as I can tell, with Adam's situation. I could be wrong - state law on this varies. But that's how I see it.
It doesn't fit perfectly within your course description, as all three are recently published, but their premise of elementary particles as being original sin is facinating. And they have fantastic communications and other tools that I would love to see develop in the future -- the althiometer, the lodestone reasonator....
These books are also chock full of complex allusions and interesting nuances English majors live for -- think of them as Narnia stories for the modern humanist. Totally readable as stories, but more complex should the reader care to dig in more deeply.
First, I thought Batmanuel was hilarious. I hope Captain Liberty becomes more clearly a right-wing reactionary, because I think that would make her character much more interesting. Yesterday she just seemed like a girl who couldn't say no and mean it -- which wasn't that interesting, IMO.
Second, I first encountered The Tick at a wedding.
It was the best wedding cake-top decoration I have ever seen, and featured The Tick and a Wonder Woman. They were in completely different scales, so The Tick was twice as tall as Wonder Woman, which worked fabulously as the couple getting married were a 6'6" man and a 4'11" woman. The Tick, of course, was in his regular uniform, but they managed to glue a tiny tulle veil onto Wonder Woman's head.
That when the CIA is "well-staffed/well-funded" they have too much time and money and in order to justify it, have to think up amazingly stupid and expensive projects? Maybe keeping them a little short on cash will help them set better priorities than borg-ifying cats.
This isn't funny. "ryanwright" stalked this woman, giving her legitimate reason to think she was in danger. He was the only person who knew she wasn't--how the hell would she have known otherwise?
And he says it was worth it to see the expression on her face? I worry for other women ryanwright might want to see freaked out and scared. I just wish she would have called campus security on him.
It isn't clear to me what he did was criminal, but it almost certainly violated campus anti-harassment policies. (And in the 1990s, many states passed anti-stalking laws, so it very well might be full bore illegal now, depending on where you live.)
As far as I'm concerned, ryanwright ripped her off, taking a significant portion of her educational options, because she LEARNED DIRECTLY FROM THE POSTER that the CS lab was a totally unsafe place to be. Maybe she never would have been a CS major, but there's no real way to know that, is there?
What I got out of this post was a much better understanding of why the gender poll showed that/. is only 5% female.
Liza
ps The right answer to the question, "Damnit. What does a guy have to do to get a reaction around here?" is act like a human being, not a stalker. Want to meet her? Say hello. In person. What to play practical jokes? Stick to playing them on your friends. No friends? At least stick to people you already know. And when they freak out, TELL THEM IT WAS YOU, and that you were just trying to be funny. DO THIS RIGHT AWAY WHEN THEY FREAK OUT. Letting that woman leave, never to return to the CS lab was a complete asshole thing to do.
I read the article, to see whether the poster or the author got their facts wrong. Looks like the poster. I was actually at the IRCA press event on Tuesday, so I saw how VERY CLEAR the speakers were that this labeling & rating system is NOT being proposed to Congress.
Bob Corn-Revere was one of the speakers at the ICRA press event. He is the noted First Amendment lawyer who represented Playboy before the Supreme Court and helped establish the legal idea that tools -- like filters or like cable boxes that limit signal bleed -- available for voluntary use are a "less restrictive means" of protecting children from "harmful to minors" material than making the material illegal.
Bob particularly reminded the press and attendees that there is a tendency in Washington to think that if something is a good idea under some circumstances, it should be made mandatory -- like CIPA made filtering mandatory for schools & libraries taking certain types of federal funding.
ICRA and the people who support it as one tool parents may want to use -- are not asking Congress to make it mandatory. They ARE however, working with the Congressional "bully pulpit" available to them since Jennifer Dunn & others are supporting their efforts, labelling their own sites, and asking others to do the same. But that's a far cry from compelling speech via use of these labels -- which would, IMO, be unconstitutional.
On PICS -- ICRA *is* a labeling system that uses PICS. It isn't trying to be the only labeling system, and the icra.org site is rated using the old RSACi and SafeSurf labels as well as the new ICRA labels. (They demonstrated this at the launch event.) Of course IRCA wants everyone to use their sites, and if they aren't reasonably successful, they aren't going to be relevent. But getting a commitment from AOLTW, MSN & Yahoo seems like a strong start.
As always always always, these are only my opinions. I don't speak for ICRA or anyone else.
The most important thing to remember when writing or calling your Members of Congress is the old Keep It Simple, Stupid rule. One issue or bill per letter or phone call. If you call, ask the receptionist who in the office works on , and then ask if they are available. That staffer probably doesn't work on the rest of the issues you're thinking about.
Members of Congress and their staff are extremely busy. On issues where they are not taking a leadership role, they probably won't decide how to vote on particular bills until VERY shortly before the vote.
Think about it. The anti-terrorism bill the Senate voted on yesterday was S.1510. That means that since January, there have been at least 1510 bills introduced in the Senate; there are probably more in the House.
Most of those will never be voted on, even in a subcommittee, much less by the entire body. It would be a waste of time for anyone to try to read and form an opinion about all of them. So they prioritize, with "do I need to decide this right now?" as the top issue to be considered.
(Also, lots of bills are extremely long. Maybe someone supports hiring hundreds of new Sky Marshalls and opposes the definition of a computer trespasser. How do they answer your question about whether or not they support a bill including both?)
Also remember that just because they listen to you doesn't mean you're right.:)
I have to say, I think The Onion deserved the webby. While other nominees are also funny, The Onion has been consistently fresh since long before they had the brilliant idea to hire Web staff and go online. Staying power and entertainment -- what more could we ask for?
Right now, paying for content is a pain. And it requires giving up some degree of privacy in an envrionment with probably-fine-but-not-certain security.
What I find interesting is that people have been willing to pay for some content online -- the porn folks made a good bit of money, even if it appears that they're feeling the economic pinch now. And that required giving up more privacy and security than I suspect I would be giving to Salon.com today.
But then, the demographic that was paying for that content may have been highly motivated.;-)
I just don't see how anti-spam laws survive a First Amendment challenge. A major point of the First Amendment is to protect *unpopular* speech.
That fact, combined with the global nature of the Internet -- which pretty much ensures that an Internet bulk mailing company can begin with offshore servers and still reach the Americans in the target audience -- means that a *legal* solution just won't work.
That is not the same as saying "you can't do anything about spam, so give up."
The market has provided a number of anti-spam tools. The blackhole list, brightmail, and good e-mail filtering tools like Eudora leap to mind. If you really hate the stuff, make sure your ISP uses those tools, and filter the mail you WANT into organized folders. (I love Eudora. I can ignore listservs until I have time, but always catch mail from Mom or from a client.)
Federal Trade Commission enforcement of e-mail fraud is also a constitutional way to go after bad actors in the e-mail universe.
But what I really don't get is why people get so mad about spam--and I'm really not trying to troll here. It's just a piece of e-mail. Look at your inbox and delete the obvious crap before even opening it. It takes about 10 seconds a day for me, maybe 15 seconds on the days I check my AOL accounts, because I've mysteriously managed to land on some silly diet spam lists. But I get around 200 e-mail messages per day, and deleting spam is just not that awful of an ordeal.
Librarians have strong feelings about fair use AND about protecting copyright. Plus they're generally public service oriented, so taking a Saturday to go talk to HOBY students is likely to seem natural. And I know there are a few law school in Indiana, so it would be fairly inexpensive. I'd call the law library number and start by asking questions of whoever you reach -- just tell them what you're looking for.
That was an earlier version of CIPA, which only passed the Senate. That is NOT the version actually signed into law, which can be found in the originally referenced ALA web page, or at here at CDT. (Or on Thomas, but that's hard to use for this, because CIPA was part of a very very long spending bill.)
To answer your question about ICRA, I don't think it's clear. Do the ICRA ratings match up with the law? If you blocked all unrated sites, maybe, maybe not. But that blocks a lot of sites. (Is/. rated? How can a user-content driven site rate accurately from day to day?)
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed in reading the comments that people seem to have confused COPA, the Children's Online Protection Act, which seeks to restrict content posted by web site owners, and CIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act, which seeks to require schools and libraries to use Internet filters to block access to sexually explicit material.
;) Don't forget COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and CPPA, the so-called "virtual child porn" law.
7 48-2002May31.html
I can't believe you can't keep these laws straight!
Short & sweet VERY GOOD article explaining which law is which, and their current status (if, like COPA and CIPA, currently being challenged in the courts): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39
Liza
But where's the consipriracy fun in that? /. would rather imagine a cabal of CEOs and politicos making secret deals to end fun, freedom, and geekdom as we know it. :) Especially if we can blame AOLTW or MS in the process. Or both -- double bonus points for that.
Liza
According to the TMDA FAQ, you can use both TMDA and on the client side, Eudora 5.1.1. (http://www.eudora.com/)
:)
Using Eudora, attachments don't open up automatically, but they DO appear at the bottom of a message as icons. Clicking to open them is intuitive even for users without much technical skill. Really. If my Dad can do it, your wife can too.
Eudora also has amazingly flexible and easy to configure mail filtering possibilities, so you could set up folders for e-mail from you and from other of your wife's friends & family members. You could then discourage her from opening anything in the "inbox" unless she knew from whence it came.
I love Eudora. The only bad thing about my new job is that I can't use it at work. In my last job I refused to adapt, but now I'm in the corporate world and resistance was futile.
Liza
The Gobbler was torn down??? I'm heartbroken! I lived in Madison for 6 years, and it was one of my favorite landmarks on the drive back and forth to Milwaukee.
Tragic. Just tragic. Tell me that The House on the Rock is still going strong!!!
Liza
Oddly enough, the answer to that question depends not on the library or librarian in question, but on the SOURCE OF FEDERAL FUNDING the library receives. Really.
8 cipa.pdf
In most cases, where the libraries receive "E-Rate" funding, the library is specifically prohibited from turning off the filters if a minor (under 17 in this law) is using the computer.
If the library only receives funding from the Library Services & Technology Act, the librarian may turn off the filters if a patron is engaged in "bona fide research or other lawful purposes."
And if a library gets both kinds of funding, the E-Rate rules apply.
A PDF of the law is available here: http://www.cdt.org/legislation/106th/speech/00121
The LSTA language is on page 7, and the E-Rate language is on page 15. Because CIPA amended a large number of different statutory areas (Dept of Ed, LSTA, FCC), I recommend this version rather than mucking around in findlaw.
Liza
Liza
The author of the CNN article must not have read the bill yet.
It also includes a requirement that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) develop a "mark" that would be somehow affixed to the subject line of all sexually explicit advertising e-mail. Failure to use this mark would result in a prison term -- a longer one if the recipient of the e-mail was a minor.
No one seems to have the bill up online yet. Are they all out at CFP? Eventually the text of the bill should be available on Thomas. The bill number will be S. 2137, I'm told.
As always always always, my opinions are my own.
Liza
Sure, this ruling can be used as a reference for cases in the US or UK, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
The real question that you were asking is will anyone in a US court (or elsewhere) listen.
That is far less likely. Especially in the US. Elsewhere in the world, courts are more likely to look at examples of how other countries have grappled with a legal issue and craft laws carefully to ensure the same or a different result. But this happens very seldom in the US.
You *can* cite to international precedent in a US court, just like in court in Kansas you *can* cite examples of what courts in California did under similar circumstances or with similar laws. And if you are really in new ground and the laws really are similar, they might decide to do the same thing. Or they might decide that Those People Over There have nothing to do with Us so who cares what they did or think?
What will also be interesting is to watch how this case and its international implications and developments compare to the Yahoo/LICRA case moving forward in parallel in France and in California.
Liza
The key things to include are YOUR name and address.
Send something to YOUR representatives. A blast-faxed generic letter to someone you cannot vote for is NOT taken seriously AT ALL.
If you can't remember who represents you, you can double-check using the geographical search tool on House of Representatives web site.
It will have MORE weight if you also customize it by articulating why YOU think XYZ, the impact it will have on YOU and your family/friends/neighbors, and if you are both polite and not patronizing.
BTW, for great examples of the negative impact of some Digital Rights Management technologies on ordinary non-techie people, check out Joe Kraus's very funny testimony about his parents' use of technology. This was presented before the Senate Judiciary committee a couple of weeks ago.
Liza
As much fun as it would be to represent /. on the city council, we're not your constituency. It doesn't matter what we think, and looking at the penetration of linux into government agencies, I'm guessing our messaging skills are about as bad as geek communications reputation would suggest.
:)
Go ask your neighbors! First, talk to a couple of people you trust to be honest with you. Tell them you think this is an important issue that people should care about, and then explain why. Ask them if you've convinced them. Ask them what arguments were convincing and which seemed irrelevant to them. Then go talk to your neighbors.
Try to get a feel for which arguments work with them and which made them think you were a crazy geek. Use the arguments that work!
BTW, people might not care. You might not be able to get them to care. And you'll be more likely to be elected if you listen to the things people in your community care about, and offer ideas for how to deal with those things. You can obsess about open source issues when you get there.
You might want to work with someone who has done community organizing in your area, especially consumer-oriented groups.
Um. First, it's pretty easy to sue someone. Anyone watch West Wing last night? It was an old rerun where they talk about lots of lawsuits against the President, from crackpots who want the government to stop letting aliens broadcast through their fillings, to someone blaming the President for the fact their spouse didn't wear a seatbelt and died in a car accident. Lunatic lawsuits are not uncommon. They might lose, or you might give in because hiring a lawyer to defend you is expensive. But in this case, Adam wasn't actually sued.
Second, Adam wrote about a "fictional kid" who masturbates to much and had the personally identifiable information as a real person, who presumably doesn't do what he described the "fictional kid" doing. In other words, truth wouldn't be a defense, because Adam wasn't telling the truth.
Now let's pretend for a moment that the "fictional kid" with a real kid's AIM name really is a compulsive masturbator. Then his story wouldn't be libel, but he still might get sued.
Invasion of privacy, and in particular "public disclosure of private facts" is against the law in most states in the US. The law varies from state to state, but the tort "invasion of privacy" in most places is something like:
I think in most cases, the publication of a claim that a person is a compulsive masturbator would meet the "highly offensive to a reasonable person" standard.
Truth is a complete defense against libel. But that has nothing to do, as far as I can tell, with Adam's situation. I could be wrong - state law on this varies. But that's how I see it.
Liza
It doesn't fit perfectly within your course description, as all three are recently published, but their premise of elementary particles as being original sin is facinating. And they have fantastic communications and other tools that I would love to see develop in the future -- the althiometer, the lodestone reasonator....
These books are also chock full of complex allusions and interesting nuances English majors live for -- think of them as Narnia stories for the modern humanist. Totally readable as stories, but more complex should the reader care to dig in more deeply.
Liza
Actually, 2.
First, I thought Batmanuel was hilarious. I hope Captain Liberty becomes more clearly a right-wing reactionary, because I think that would make her character much more interesting. Yesterday she just seemed like a girl who couldn't say no and mean it -- which wasn't that interesting, IMO.
Second, I first encountered The Tick at a wedding.
It was the best wedding cake-top decoration I have ever seen, and featured The Tick and a Wonder Woman. They were in completely different scales, so The Tick was twice as tall as Wonder Woman, which worked fabulously as the couple getting married were a 6'6" man and a 4'11" woman. The Tick, of course, was in his regular uniform, but they managed to glue a tiny tulle veil onto Wonder Woman's head.
Liza
That when the CIA is "well-staffed/well-funded" they have too much time and money and in order to justify it, have to think up amazingly stupid and expensive projects? Maybe keeping them a little short on cash will help them set better priorities than borg-ifying cats.
Liza
This isn't funny. "ryanwright" stalked this woman, giving her legitimate reason to think she was in danger. He was the only person who knew she wasn't--how the hell would she have known otherwise?
/. is only 5% female.
And he says it was worth it to see the expression on her face? I worry for other women ryanwright might want to see freaked out and scared. I just wish she would have called campus security on him.
It isn't clear to me what he did was criminal, but it almost certainly violated campus anti-harassment policies. (And in the 1990s, many states passed anti-stalking laws, so it very well might be full bore illegal now, depending on where you live.)
As far as I'm concerned, ryanwright ripped her off, taking a significant portion of her educational options, because she LEARNED DIRECTLY FROM THE POSTER that the CS lab was a totally unsafe place to be. Maybe she never would have been a CS major, but there's no real way to know that, is there?
What I got out of this post was a much better understanding of why the gender poll showed that
Liza
ps The right answer to the question, "Damnit. What does a guy have to do to get a reaction around here?" is act like a human being, not a stalker. Want to meet her? Say hello. In person. What to play practical jokes? Stick to playing them on your friends. No friends? At least stick to people you already know. And when they freak out, TELL THEM IT WAS YOU, and that you were just trying to be funny. DO THIS RIGHT AWAY WHEN THEY FREAK OUT. Letting that woman leave, never to return to the CS lab was a complete asshole thing to do.
Bob Corn-Revere was one of the speakers at the ICRA press event. He is the noted First Amendment lawyer who represented Playboy before the Supreme Court and helped establish the legal idea that tools -- like filters or like cable boxes that limit signal bleed -- available for voluntary use are a "less restrictive means" of protecting children from "harmful to minors" material than making the material illegal.
Bob particularly reminded the press and attendees that there is a tendency in Washington to think that if something is a good idea under some circumstances, it should be made mandatory -- like CIPA made filtering mandatory for schools & libraries taking certain types of federal funding.
ICRA and the people who support it as one tool parents may want to use -- are not asking Congress to make it mandatory. They ARE however, working with the Congressional "bully pulpit" available to them since Jennifer Dunn & others are supporting their efforts, labelling their own sites, and asking others to do the same. But that's a far cry from compelling speech via use of these labels -- which would, IMO, be unconstitutional.
On PICS -- ICRA *is* a labeling system that uses PICS. It isn't trying to be the only labeling system, and the icra.org site is rated using the old RSACi and SafeSurf labels as well as the new ICRA labels. (They demonstrated this at the launch event.) Of course IRCA wants everyone to use their sites, and if they aren't reasonably successful, they aren't going to be relevent. But getting a commitment from AOLTW, MSN & Yahoo seems like a strong start.
As always always always, these are only my opinions. I don't speak for ICRA or anyone else.
Liza
Members of Congress and their staff are extremely busy. On issues where they are not taking a leadership role, they probably won't decide how to vote on particular bills until VERY shortly before the vote.
Think about it. The anti-terrorism bill the Senate voted on yesterday was S.1510. That means that since January, there have been at least 1510 bills introduced in the Senate; there are probably more in the House.
Most of those will never be voted on, even in a subcommittee, much less by the entire body. It would be a waste of time for anyone to try to read and form an opinion about all of them. So they prioritize, with "do I need to decide this right now?" as the top issue to be considered.
(Also, lots of bills are extremely long. Maybe someone supports hiring hundreds of new Sky Marshalls and opposes the definition of a computer trespasser. How do they answer your question about whether or not they support a bill including both?)
Also remember that just because they listen to you doesn't mean you're right.
Liza
Liza
What I find interesting is that people have been willing to pay for some content online -- the porn folks made a good bit of money, even if it appears that they're feeling the economic pinch now. And that required giving up more privacy and security than I suspect I would be giving to Salon.com today.
But then, the demographic that was paying for that content may have been highly motivated. ;-)
Liza
Liza
This is a memorial republication of his 1998 interview with them. Sad-but-good stuff.
Liza
I also recommend looking at the bipartisan leadership of the Congressional Internet Caucus: www.netcaucus.org
Liza
I just don't see how anti-spam laws survive a First Amendment challenge. A major point of the First Amendment is to protect *unpopular* speech.
That fact, combined with the global nature of the Internet -- which pretty much ensures that an Internet bulk mailing company can begin with offshore servers and still reach the Americans in the target audience -- means that a *legal* solution just won't work.
That is not the same as saying "you can't do anything about spam, so give up."
The market has provided a number of anti-spam tools. The blackhole list, brightmail, and good e-mail filtering tools like Eudora leap to mind. If you really hate the stuff, make sure your ISP uses those tools, and filter the mail you WANT into organized folders. (I love Eudora. I can ignore listservs until I have time, but always catch mail from Mom or from a client.) Federal Trade Commission enforcement of e-mail fraud is also a constitutional way to go after bad actors in the e-mail universe.
But what I really don't get is why people get so mad about spam--and I'm really not trying to troll here. It's just a piece of e-mail. Look at your inbox and delete the obvious crap before even opening it. It takes about 10 seconds a day for me, maybe 15 seconds on the days I check my AOL accounts, because I've mysteriously managed to land on some silly diet spam lists. But I get around 200 e-mail messages per day, and deleting spam is just not that awful of an ordeal.
Liza
Liza
To answer your question about ICRA, I don't think it's clear. Do the ICRA ratings match up with the law? If you blocked all unrated sites, maybe, maybe not. But that blocks a lot of sites. (Is /. rated? How can a user-content driven site rate accurately from day to day?)
Liza