Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id HAA18845; Tue, 17 Dec 1996 07:45:02 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 07:45:02 -0500 (EST) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199612171245.HAA18845@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #666 TELECOM Digest Tue, 17 Dec 96 07:45:00 EST Volume 16 : Issue 666 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (Clive Feather) Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (Matt Landry) Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (C. Cramer) Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (H. Gorman) Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (W. Leatherock) Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News (Dave Hultberg) Kid-Safe ISPs (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: Post Office Box 4621 Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 847-329-0571 Fax: 847-329-0572 ** Article submission address: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Our archives are located at mirror.lcs.mit.edu. The URL is: http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives They can also be accessed using anonymous ftp: ftp mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives A third method is the Telecom Email Information Service: Send a note to tel-archives@mirror.lcs.mit.edu to receive a help file for using this method or write me and ask for a copy of the help file for the Telecom Archives. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 13:00:12 +0000 From: Clive D.W. Feather Reply-To: clive@demon.net Subject: Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News Organization: Clive's laptop (part of Demon Internet Ltd.) Pat writes: > instead, try the appproach suggested by > mcs.net here in Chicago, which they are publicizing widely in their > advertising: they do not carry newsgroups which *on their face* are > intended as ways to exploit children; ie the newsgroups which by their > title suggest advocacy of pedophilia. The recent advertisement by > mcs.net lists about a dozen newsgroups. Part of the problem with this is determining which newsgroups actually do and don't carry illegal material (which is all, in my opinion, ISPs should worry about). Even a title like "alt.sex.pedophilia" doesn't tell you much - the group is supposed to be about supporting and helping people so that they *don't* abuse children. Cutting it off would, I am told, do more harm than good. > As mcs.net pointed out in its > advertisement, a survey of a few dozen ISPs found that about half > said they never 'censor' newsgroups in any way, shape or form. But > you say, not at this site. Go elsewhere. That is the stance mcs.net > has adopted. I don't have a problem with individual ISPs taking this attitude. So long as there is no coercion involved. > Common rebuttal: if deprived of mass circulation of their newsgroup, > 'those people' will start posting in other groups. Okay, so what? > That's not your problem. Let them deal with the flame war sure to > result when they post in some totally unrelated group. Firstly, there have been several examples of this happening - it's not just a theoretical problem. Secondly, the people doing these postings just ignore the flame wars. They want to get their stuff out to a specific audience, and are using Usenet to do so. Both senders and readers will ignore everything else. Thirdly, experience shows that the stuff tends to end up in totally unsuitable newsgroups, like alt.disney. The result is that children are *more* likely, not less, to come across the material. > Kids don't have to go in taverns -- where they are forbidden by law > to be -- in order to find some beer to drink. They don't have to go > to an adult bookstore in order to find a 'friendly' adult willing to > explain the facts of life to them. But that is not the problem of > the tavern owner or the bookstore manager who work to keep those > situations from occuring *on their own premises, in situations under > their direct control*. Not a good analogy. A better one is the one that a policeman once gave to me: every now and then, there are complaints about begging or prostitution in an area. The police go in, clamp down, and clean up the area. The net result is *not* to improve the environment, but simply to push the beggars and whores to somewhere else. Nothing's been gained - simply a load of police time has been wasted. In the UK this is known as the "displacement theory". There is now universal agreement, from ISPs, police, and government, that banning newsgroups is the wrong way to go. > Am I the only person who knows the purpose of, and how to use .http-access > files in connection with a web page? [...] > For instance, suppose you denied access to '@u18.' wildcard ... meaning > any site that had '.u18' as part of its name was denied viewing. There's a better way to do this. There is a technology called PICS - Platform for Internet Content Selection. This allows all that you suggest, but with a much finer level of detail and without needing to give every computer two names. What you do is to go to a rating service and generate a rating for your web pages. For example, the RSACi system rates pages on the level of bad language, nudity, sexual activity, and violence. You then place a string in the HTML source of your page which encodes this rating. When someone comes to view the page, their browser can detect this tag and not display the page if the rating is unacceptable. For example, with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3, you set the maximum acceptable rating and then lock it with a password. IE3 will then refuse to display a page over that rating until the password is entered. You can therefore allow your child to browse without worry, *and*, rather than a simple under/over-18 choice, you can fine-tune the sort of material they can look at. [RSACi has, in my and many other opinions, a number of deficiencies in its rating system. But the principles still apply.] Clive D.W. Feather | Associate Director | Director Tel: +44 181 371 1138 | Demon Internet Ltd. | CityScape Internet Services Ltd. Fax: +44 181 371 1150 | | Written on my laptop - please reply to the Reply-To address ------------------------------ From: mbl@mail.msen.com (Matthew B Landry) Subject: Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News Date: 16 Dec 1996 21:04:31 GMT Organization: Flunkies for the Mike Conspiracy In article TELECOM Digest Editor noted: > even' ... not once did anyone say let's go over and talk to the > man and see what it is exactly he wants and try to find some way "What he wants" is not the issue. He might in fact be a decent guy that I wouldn't too terribly mind having to dinner at my house. That's not the point. No one (well ... no one credible) is attacking Sen. Exon or his cronies as individuals, the internet community is attacking their collective effort to muzzle us all. The fact that a bad law was drafted by OK people with good intentions doesn't mean it isn't a bad law, or that any punches should be pulled in getting it taken back off the books as soon as possible. The groups which pushed for this bill would not be happy with lesser restrictions. The government's defenses to the contrary, the aim of those who pushed hardest for CDA is to silence anyone and everyone who doesn't agree with them. "Indecent" is in that bill for a reason, and that reason is to give prosecutors all the latitude they need to lock up just about anybody. Maybe our representatives in Congress were duped into unknowing collaboration with this agenda, or maybe they actually agreed with it. (Personally, I rather suspect a combination of both.) That also isn't the point ... the point is that the law as written is constitutionally unacceptable. As the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't care if they "meant well", I care that if they get their way a mildly popular and potentially controversial web page could earn me or any other American a longer prison term than that extended to such upstanding citizens as Al Capone, just as long as they can drag together twelve people in the entire united states who are offended by it. CDA's proponents say its purpose is to get the hard-core pornography off the internet. That cannot be reconciled with its actual and easily predictable effect of actively ENCOURAGING commercial pornography (just about the only impenetrable defense against prosecution under the law is that you charge someone's credit card before you show them anything) while stifling controversial free (in both political and economic senses) expression. > Why did no one go to Exxon (again, I am using him as a generic > example) and say something like this ... [See below.] > some of the protections you are looking for. Over a period of > two to three years, we should be able to identify parts of the > net which are adult in nature and pretty well segregate it from No, not really. Not until one can define a _precise_ standard, guaranteed by statute to be good nationwide, for what is "adult oriented". Good luck. > First Amendment hassles -- we will probably begin moving the > kids onto machines which are restricted in the contacts they > can establish. I've done a lot of research on this, and I have yet to encounter a commercial ISP that will allow anyone on without some kind of affirmation that the customer is over 18 or that his/her parents understand the implications of an internet account and accept liability for it. In other words, this change has already happened. The problem is, the kids can lie. I did, when I was 14 and wanted an internet account. And the ISP is still held liable if it's found out that the kids did lie. Moreover, since everyone on the net KNOWS that kids lie to get past these things, there's no way someone faced with a multimillennial prison term could defend himself by saying that he didn't know that minors might be able to access his site. Liquor store owners that accept fake ID get prosecuted pretty regularly. Why should ISPs or web site owners be any different? > Senator, suppose we use the term 'obscenity' instead of 'indecency' > as the cut-off point. It has already been defined, it has no [Here's the "below" I asked you to "see".] I did in fact speak to Sen. Exon's co-sponsor about this issue. And he specified to me, personally, on the phone, that "indecency" had been used as the standard deliberately. That is, limiting the law to well-defined restrictions had been considered and actively rejected during the drafting stage. That implies to me that they knew what they were getting America into, and did it anyway. It's a lot harder to forgive them when one knows that. > a lot the same with ISPs. No, they are not legally common > carriers, but for all intents and purposes they are. It really Well ... actually ... since Cubby v. Compuserve, ISPs and similar entities have had the content-isolation aspects of common carrier protection availible to them in a legally enforceable manner. > And *we* (yes I mean we, the net) could have participated in > drafting a law which would have been very favorable to us ... We did. Patrick Leahy had a net-friendly alternative ready, and he offered it up for consideration. Congress rejected it, which again makes one wonder where their priorities really are. > if we win, we still lose. Nope. > Because if we win, then they start on the next issue, which I > believe will be copyright. Ah, but the WIPO copyright monstrosity has enemies with a much easier time defending themselves. > same reason I have little business talking about it; I do not own > the computer upon which this is published and very few of you have > any property rights where the network or your local site is concerned. All Americans have the right to freely enter contractual relationships such as commercial internet accounts and positions of employment. No, I cannot compel my ISP of choice to offer me access to the facilities I want on the net. But I can go down the road to their competitors if they refuse. And I can insist upon (and generally receive) explicit guarantees of access as a non-negotiable condition of signing a user agreement. No, I do not have _all_ the priveledges of ownership over the infrastructure of the internet, but a complex web of such contractual relationships gives me all of those priveledges which are relevent to this discussion. > You are there with the blessings of your corporate employer who will > let you talk smart and sassy until he finally gets tired of it and > then fires you. Well, actually I'm here with the knowledge (but not explicit blessings) of my ISP employer, who will completely ignore whatever I say on the net as long as it does not relate to our company, and I include a disclaimer equivalent to the one actually installed in my .sig file. Before I worked here, I posted from the exact same account in my capacity as a customer of this ISP, and at that time they didn't care _at all_ what I had to say. The only change was that I stopped paying for the account, and I had to become a little more careful about talking to people in the company's market area about internet services. > being that a semi-retired prissy old-maid librarian who helps some > child log on to the net only to have the child do a search on > Alta Vista and turn up some string with a four letter combination > in the middle somewhere considered 'indecent' gets sentenced to > life in prison. All the librarians are now frantic. So the soloists Let them be frantic. It'll only last until The Court upholds the injunction. > for the court. What the judges know about computers could be written > on the head of a pin. Actually, given the level of detail in the court's findings of fact, it appears that by the time the ruling was issued, they knew quite well how the internet worked, at least as it relates to this issue. > Being respectful of the First Amendment, they go out of their way to > avoid violating it. This is proper and appropriate behavior for federal judges. Frankly, it's better than I had expected, until I saw the ruling. > how come you did not get Exxon and his buddies straightened out a I can't speak about Exxon as a specific person, but "his buddies" had no interest in being straightened out. They made that more than clear to me on the phone. Matthew Landry Well, yeah. Actually I do sometimes speak for Msen. But not from THIS account. O- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 09:41:36 -0800 From: Clayton E. Cramer Reply-To: cramer@dlcc.com Organization: Diamond Lane Communications Subject: Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News I am in complete agreement with you Pat. There are a lot of people out there who have no idea the damage that exposure to a group like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teens would do to a child. They have become enamored of an extremist point of view about the First Amendment that is contrary to original intent, and have mistakenly applied it to situations where children are present. Clayton E. Cramer Technical Marketing Manager, Diamond Lane Communications email: cramer@dlcc.com web page: http://www.cs.sonoma.edu/~cramerc ------------------------------ From: hillary@netaxs.com (Hillary Gorman) Subject: Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 14:50:36 -0500 Organization: Packet Shredders Anonymous In article , TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > Hillary wants to know what is a poor sysadmin to do? She suggests > hiring ten additional people to 'read everything' in the news every > day. No, not at all ... instead, try the appproach suggested by > mcs.net here in Chicago, which they are publicizing widely in their > advertising: they do not carry newsgroups which *on their face* are > intended as ways to exploit children; ie the newsgroups which by their > title suggest advocacy of pedophilia. The recent advertisement by I did not suggest hiring ten people to read news. I inquired as to what we should do to filter based on content that did NOT involve hiring ten people to read news. We already do not carry the kiddy porn groups, or any other group widely known to carry content in violation of federal law. But, the content is still extant in other groups, and we have no way of controlling what users may for example, scan in, and email to users at other sites. How do you filter on content in a case like that, Pat? Or, a user may put files called biblestudy.jpg and biblestudy.gif on his web page entitled seminary.html. If I grep through my users' web directories for sexual keywords, these files will not show up, but they could very well be pornographic ... > mcs.net lists about a dozen newsgroups. I suppose it would take > Hillary thirty seconds to call up an editor and cut a few lines out > of the system-wide .newsrc file. What you are saying is your site > does not receive those groups and does not pass them along. There is Right, we don't. But what about OTHER "illegal content" - it's not all in newsgroups. Plus, what if the content simply shifts to alt.haha.can't.find.us or some such? We *can't* read every new group that comes by. If informed of illegal content, we can act on it, but beyond that, it's out of my hands. > Common rebuttal: if deprived of mass circulation of their newsgroup, > 'those people' will start posting in other groups. Okay, so what? > That's not your problem. Let them deal with the flame war sure to > result when they post in some totally unrelated group. But they can start their OWN newsgroup, Pat. I have SEEN it. Or they can "take over" an unused existing group, like alt.conspiracy.yeast or something. And what if we don't find out about it until one of our users SUES us because his kid wanted to read about yeast and accidentally downloaded ten gifs of nude porn stars and now they're going to sue us? > Am I the only person who knows the purpose of, and how to use .http-access > files in connection with a web page? The presence of such a file in a > directory causes various things to happen: depending on what you put > in the file, you can deny access to a given user and/or site; you can > deny access to all but a select few users/sites, etc. So Hillary and > other sysadmins, why not teach your web customers how to install and > use .http-access files as a way to control who gets to see their page? - added load on server; - reconfiguring software required; - brains required (not all of every ISP's userbase has those); - can't control it anyway. Are you implying that I tell every customer they must use this, even if they don't have "adult pages"? How am I supposed to know if my users are complying, if only "adult pages" have to do it? View every user webpage? Right ... > For instance, suppose you denied access to '@u18.' wildcard ... meaning > any site that had '.u18' as part of its name was denied viewing. Now > suppose on the flip side of the coin, you (if you even have the > possibility of underage subscribers) take one of your machines and > give it -- in addition to its regular name -- an *alias* of 'u18', and > anytime that machine makes any outbound connection anywhere on the > net it introduces itself as 'u18.the.rest.of.its.name' ... actually > I think you would name the machine 'u18' and its 'alias' would be > the regular name it has had all along, so that your users need not > know anything at all about the 'u18' part ... Wait. You're saying that the users IP addresses should resolve to a hostname including the u18 bit in it, right? Well, dynamic IP addressing is used by most ISPs, and what if there are over 18 and under 18 year old subscribers? You're telling me that I have to limit the accessibility of my service to my users, because instead of having one pool of dynamic IP addresses to assign, now I have to have two ... one which resolves to hostnames including u18 and one which does not. And since I'm using xylogics terminal servers and because of the way we've got everything configured, the pools of IP addresses must be assigned to a specific terminal server. So I'd have to limit which phone number the u18 people could call in on. No way, Pat. I think you're underestimating the technical side of this all in a major way. And as far as the amount of users under age 18 ... we have quite a few. I was in COLLEGE when I was 17, do you think that all university computer labs need to have this u18 bit in their hostnames? Then how on earth will 17 yr old biology students be able to study the explicit portions of the visible man project, prithee tell? As far as marking user web files ... Who designates the files that must contain the wildcard? You're telling me I have to hire a bunch of people to review content for user web pages? Not something I'm about to do. > Now, starting with your next billing cycle, and continuing over a > period of several months with *existing users* and from the start > with *new users* you require your user to certify to the following: > "I am of legal majority age in the state in which I reside". In other > words, the person is 18 years of age or older. With new users, you > might decide to have them submit a photocopy of a driver's license > or birth certificate. With existing users, do something; do not > inconvenience your admins and do not unduly annoy your users. Just > phase them in over a period of time. > Those who do not certify or offer proof, etc get placed on the > 'u18' machine. Those who do get placed elsewhere. Now we no longer What about dynamically assigned slip/ppp users as stated above? It's not this simple, Pat. > have to worry about 'decency bits' or whatever they called them. You > decide which of the web pages on your site should be restricted in the > same way you decide which newsgroups will not be carried: a cursory > glance through the page at the time it is installed. If it appears Pat, users install web pages constantly, update them on the fly. I'm not going to read it every time it gets updated. One of my users updates his web page easily 20 times a day. I'm not going to have time for this ... would YOU? Even if I set up a process to grep for keywords, it wouldn't work. People would know about it and avoid the keywords, or they'd switch providers to someone who didn't do it and I'd be out of business. Any solution which requires the admins to actually load up a graphical browser and look at a user web page before approving it is, IMO, too much of a burden on the ISP. > (1) the web page owners will cheat and not deny access to u18. Of > course some will. There are merchants who sell cigarettes to minors > knowing good and well the kid is not old enough. There are bartenders > who do not bother to check identification. Sometimes they get caught, > sometimes not. That's not your problem. You have set the rules for > your site; you reserve the right to audit your users and drop those This is already the case: I have rules, I reserve the right to enforce them. We don't need some new law -- child pornography is already illegal ... allowing users under 18 to access pornography is already illegal. Why do we need another law which will make me a criminal when I am already exhibiting a desire to comply with the alleged spirit of this law? > Why not try dropping those users who refuse to categorize themselves > as 'adult' when such is the case? ***Note I did not say drop those > who operate adult web pages; I said drop those who refuse to lock > out minors from viewing adult material or who lie to you (the admin) > and claim they are not when you find out they are, etc***. Is the > goodwill of one user worth having the authorities come down on you > and possibly hassle your entire site? I think not. Nobody has ever complained to me about porn being accessible from our server, though I know that some is ... do you seriously think someone's going to complain that a page isn't restricted? No, not until some gov't honcho decides to try to bust someone, then we'll get nailed and it won't be fair ... > (2) not only will the web page owners cheat, the kids will cheat. > See, says Hillary, (and don't take it personally, I am using her > as a generic example), I told you there was nothing we could do > about it! ... > Well gosh then let's drop all the liquor licensing laws and the > laws about being of a certain age to smoke or drive a car or drop > out of school ... after all, clever, mischevious children will > always find work arounds ... Come on, Pat ... It's not the point that people will cheat. The point is, it's not possible to implement except on a purely voluntary basis. When I go to buy liquor there is someone STANDING there to ask for ID. Same thing if I try to sign up for Driver's ed, or buy cigarettes. But if I request a web page from a webserver, there's no one there. If I ftp a file into my web directory - or even if I open up a text editor in my web directory and prepare a file that says "I want to F*** small children" (not that I would) there is no automatic way to check that or to flag it over 18. > a) they'll sign up with false identification ... sure, and kids > never use false id to buy beer do they? You're still basing this on the assumption it is possible to split users into "over 18" and "under 18" pools, which I maintain is a technically NONtrivial matter! > b) they are too clever! They'll find ways to hack right into the > stuff they want to see. Yep, that's right, and its not your > problem as long as you took reasonable efforts to prevent it. You sound like the mass media, here. Totally irrelevant. Computer crimes are already illegal. > To Hillary, all I can say is we went through this before, you and I. > Get in your system .newsrc file today and go snip-snip here and > snip-snip there. Then forget about it. Just do that little bit to > help, okay? Obviously you aren't understanding me. We already do not carry groups widely known to have illegal traffic. I resent the implication that we would do otherwise, quite frankly. As discussed above, that's the simplest action to take. I maintain that passing a law which it is going to be impossible to comply with is counter productive. It is *already* illegal to allow access to pornography to underage kids in the US. Our users, if we find out they're running porn sites, do have to password protect them. It is *already* to distribute kiddie porn (and pirated software). What happens when one of my users emails pirated software or pictures of naked ladies worshipping Satan to this CDA people? *I'M* in violation of the law ??? I simply think that network administrators should *NOT* be held legally liable for enforcing federal law with reference to what kind of traffic goes through the network unless/until technically feasible methods of doing so exist, which you have not demonstrated to be the case. hillary gorman http://www.hillary.net info@hillary.net "to err is human; to moo, bovine." ------------------------------ From: wes.leatherock@hotelcal.com (Wes Leatherock) Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 15:25:35 GMT Organization: Hotel California BBS Subject: The Opposition Point of View: My Response ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Townson) wrote: [ ... much text deleted ... ] > Remember Senator Exxon? Way back then ... more than two years ago > or so, when all this hullabaloo was first coming up ... the net's > response was to protest, to demonstrate, to throw tantrums, to > mail bomb everyone involved. We were told to turn our web pages > black, all sorts of responses and schemes were devised to 'get > even' ... not once did anyone say let's go over and talk to the > man and see what it is exactly he wants and try to find some way > to appease those people. > Why did no one go to Exxon (again, I am using him as a generic > example) and say something like this ... Pardon me, Pat, but isn't it Senator Exon (one "x")? I must confess that when I came to the second paragraph of the material quoted above (where "Senator" was not prefixed) that I came to a stop and wondered what this much-vilified oil company had done to or about the net. I believe Exxon (the oil company) did research in many languages and databases to make sure their name did not match any existing word (including proper names) they could find. Wes Leatherock wes.leatherock@hotelcal.com wes.leatherock@origins.bbs.uoknor.edu [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Would it help if I said it was a typographical error? Probably not ... PAT] ------------------------------ From: dave.hultberg@paonline.com (Dave Hultberg) Subject: Re: The Opposition Point of View: FRC on Supreme Court News Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 16:32:05 GMT Organization: NAVCOMTELSTA, Pensacola, FL Reply-To: dave.hultberg@paonline.com On Wed, 11 Dec 1996 00:15:00 EST, TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > To John Levine, I agree the way it is written is not very good. So > damned if the court approves it and damned if they don't. You are so > good at teaching things to Dummies (your book was great by the way), > how come you did not get Exxon and his buddies straightened out a > couple years ago? Why didn't you counter him; shall we say match his > bid and raise it? > To Hillary, all I can say is we went through this before, you and I. > Get in your system .newsrc file today and go snip-snip here and > snip-snip there. Then forget about it. Just do that little bit to > help, okay? Pat, While I agree with your moral arguments and your technical points as for as USENET newsgroups, I believe that webservers and other servers present major technical problems that you haven't addressed. Even if you pass some version of CDA, all the purveyors of filth will have to do is move offshore just as the 900 phonesex folks have. There will always be countries that permit this stuff either for the money that it brings in or because their standards of obscenity are different from ours. Sure you can filter out sites with access lists by IP or domain name, but just as soon as you do that, they will change to a new one. Eventually your filter lists will get large enough to impact network performance. What do you do with a site that has "legal" material and smut? It is easy to block something with a name like www.filthysex.com, but if a major provider in Scandinavia, the UK or elsewhere in the world permits smut sites, do we block all of their traffic in order to catch the smut? Do we blacklist entire countries, because they won't go along with our concepts of acceptable use of the net? What do we do about internet chat servers? What do you do to prevent someone from telneting to a machine outside of the U.S. and then surfing the nasty sites from that machine? Take a look at the problems Singapore is having trying to keep "unacceptible" internet traffic out of their country. Germany didn't like some Nazi stuff on an XS4ALL server in the Netherlands and told their ISPs to block that server. XS4ALL got around the block by rotating the IP address of the server. Usenet and servers located within US jurisdiction are relatively easy to regulate, but what do we do about all the stuff that originates outside our borders? As a parent I don't trust anyone else to protect my children. Too many people in this country want to abrogate their responsibility to their children to someone else and another group wants to control what you and I do, because they know what is "good for us". I take responsibility for raising my children and Senator Exon and other dogooders can just leave them alone. Dave Hultberg ------------------------------ Subject: Kid-Safe ISPs Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 00:56:28 PST From: rishab@dxm.org (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) Reply-To: rishab@dxm.org Pat, Once you say that the CDA should have been about 'obscenity' and not 'indecency' the rest of your comments, however well-reasoned, become irrelevant. Obscenity has always been illegal on the Net under US law. Indeed it is under existing obscenity statutes that BBS sysops (AABBS) were prosecuted. The analysis of the CDA by the EFF and others right from the beginning was NOT about protecting adults' right to view porn, but about their right to read about breast cancer or breeding horses, among the things classified as indecent but not obscene. If obscenity were Sen Exon's goal, there would be no need for new legislation - except something minor to clarify on the 'local standards' clause given that the Net's not local anywhere. Of course the Senator's goal was political mileage more than anything else, so there had to be a bill. The stuff you wrote about - child pornography etc - is completely illegal in the US, even for adults. There have been arrests in some cases, and many investigations. No _new_ law is necessary there either. So, you may ask, why's all the dirty stuff still around? Pat, when was the last time you visited alt.sex.pedophilia? If you think spammers are inventing newer ways of sending untraceable mail, you should see the posters of pictures in these groups. The headers on one post I tried to trace terminated with some unnamed IP machine (that couldn't be pinged) after going through half the countries in Europe. If it's next to impossible to trace _one_ of these posts within the US, it IS impossible to trace hundreds or thousands every day, going around the world. Again, there is no need for a new law. Existing laws apply. If you followed the Teal-Homolka mess in Canada, you should know that it's far better to keep unwanted content in one newsgroup - or a handful of them - than to have it spread elsewhere and ruin the Net. Now at least only people interested in porn must be flooded with it; those interested in telecom can get on with life. BTW don't talk of 'flaming' posters of porn to comp.* - these posters don't need return addresses of _any_ kind, so flaming will probably not work. The final stupidity of the CDA is that it applies to the US only, of course, so it's irrelevant to the Net. Porn sites are already moving off the US into Europe and Japan, and you can't prevent access to them. I believe in free market solutions. There are signs one is already found. Most porn web sites now ask you to confirm your adulthood through one of several membership/validation schemes (adultcheck, adultpass etc) which charge a few dollars a year. Furthermore, although 'family-oriented' Prodigy didn't do very well, there's certainly an increasing market for 'family' ISPs that can say they'll try to be kid-safe. To Hillary and the other ISP owners out there - you can do this by setting up a proxy server with one of those nanny programs, as well as killing many of the nastier newsgroups. You're providing an extra service, so you can charge for it. I don't agree with Pat that it's every ISPs duty to make their systems kid-safe. Some will want to address that market, others need not. It's probably better that way, because those who want unrestricted access will know where to go - maybe eventually adult ISPs will be the more expensive - and not clutter previously kid-safe newsgroups. First Monday - The Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet http://www.firstmonday.dk/ Munksgaard International Publishers, Copenhagen International Editor - Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (ghosh@firstmonday.dk) Mobile +91 11 98110 14574; Fax +91 11 2209608; Tel +91 11 2454717 A4/204 Ekta Apts., 9 Indraprastha Extn, New Delhi 110092 INDIA ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V16 #666 ******************************