response 38 of 78:

Nov 12 17:08 UTC 1998

CDA type legislations all deals with drawing lines between decency and
indecency, lines that become extremely complicated, jagged, and undefinable.
The lines shoudn't be drawn in the first place.

response 40 of 78:

Nov 12 17:18 UTC 1998

Rane, I'm referring to lines drawn by the law.  The country is not in 
the position to say "this is decent but this isn't."  I've written 
extensive thoughts on this before.  The minute the government becomes a 
"value judge," it has gone over the line.  Legislation like the CDA 
proposals draws such lines and makes it the government's responsibility 
to enforce them.  That is blatantly wrong.

response 42 of 78:

Nov 12 17:31 UTC 1998

Who draws these optional lines?

response 44 of 78:

Nov 12 17:49 UTC 1998

re #27, 32: The CDA bills are large in part because they are popular 
enough to carry other legislation.  The press keeps reporting it as 
protection for children and pro-child and all that, despite considerable  
self-interest on their own part to ward off any barriers for anyone to 
publish anything, because that's how most people see these things.

re #33: 'Exploitation of children' isn't just pictures of nude 
children, or even access to sexual content on the WWW.  Teenagers can 
easily be encouraged to call sex chat lines, pay lots of money for 
access to on-line pornography sites, and for sexually explicit materials 
to be sent to their homes.

also: The CDA II was passed and signed into law.  I don't know when it 
takes effect, but it's probably around the start of the year.

I agree that it is a better solution to take charge of your kids 
yourself, but many people have more important things to do with their 
time, such as make money and watch TV.

response 46 of 78:

Nov 13 03:12 UTC 1998

Given an easy-to-filter .SEX domain (or something equivalent), how much
incentive is there for porn providers to bypass the filter?  Given a 
bypass problem, does it have enough well-financed enemies to create a
healthy market for the moral equivalent of anti-virus software?  (Most
employers don't want their workers doing any smut surfing on company
time - what will they pay for effective blocking?)

response 48 of 78:

Nov 13 07:36 UTC 1998

  re #46:  Some sex sites deliberately masquerade as popular sites,
  choosing names that are like those sites to get people who slip up
  when entering their URLs..  (for example, there is (or was) a site
  called "www.whitehouse.com" which was set up to catch people headed
  for "www.whitehouse.gov".  Since many people are conditioned to 
  assume URLs end in ".com" I'm sure they got a lot of accidental hits.)
  Such a site is not going to want to clearly distinguish itself as a
  sex site.

  I'm not very fond of most of the filtering options proposed so far but
  I think that what we'll eventually wind up with is some sort of self-
  rating system where material "harmful to children" can be posted freely
  on the net so long as those providing it marked it as adult material,
  with substantial penalties for deliberately misrepresenting harmful
  material..  Sites wanting to avoid the issue completely could just mark
  everything on their site as "adult", making it unavailable to children
  but keeping them safe from legal difficulties, at least those of the
  CDA sort..  I suspect that there will be a problem with a "chilling effect"
  where some sites with material appropriate to children might nevertheless
  mark it off limits just to be on the safe side but it seems that such a
  scheme would at least be better than the ham-handed regulatory solutions
  we've been offered so far..

response 50 of 78:

Nov 13 14:02 UTC 1998

Re 48: Yeah, right when there was a lot of interest in the Mars Pathfinder,
a lot of people mistakenly hit "http://www.nasa.com". Which, yes, was
exploration of *sorts*...
 
I'm still unconvinced about the feasibility of web filtering. There was a
school system in England that put up one of the popular smut traps. It looked
for various naughty combinations of letters, and if it found any of them, it
wouldn't let the page through.
 
Apparently people in Scunthorpe only made the connection after their kids
couldn't find a single bit of information about their town.

response 52 of 78:

Nov 14 21:03 UTC 1998

Obviously you have no idea of what you speak.

You don't neee to spend any money to find sex sites on the net, very gaphic
sites as a matter of fact.  And while they may sell time on there sites, they
do offer a wide variety of pictures to lure you in for free.

response 54 of 78:

Nov 16 15:24 UTC 1998

re #51: I think you misread my message, just as you did my loginid.  (-:

response 56 of 78:

Nov 18 04:49 UTC 1998

The original CDA certainly did spill over into areas it wasn't "intended" to
cover, in that it both used such a vague definition of what it banned that
it banned almost anything that could possibly be objectionable, and it also
held operators of systems responsible for content posted to those systems by
their users.  To take a system like Grex, for example, as long as all the
discussion stayed "decent", we would have been fine.  However, if somebody
posted something objectionable, Grex would have been liable for what was
posted.  The problem with that is that, even if we were to accept that
everything the law said was bad was stuff we didn't want on our system, we
still couldn't enforce that without getting rid of our open access policies.
The choices would have been to shut Grex down, or to have the Grex staff read
every response before it gets posted to the conferences, and preread
everything said in party, or to ban minors from the system.  That didn't just
affect Grex, but would affect everywhere on the Net that allows the general
public to post content.  It was worse, too, at least in some versions.  I'm
not sure what finally got passed, but early versions of the bill would have
held operators of mail servers liable for the content of their users' e-mail,
even though it's generally not legal for a service provider to read a
customer's e-mail, and some early versions of it would have even held Internet
backbone providers responsible for data that flowed through their networks,
even if the originator of the data wasn't even a customer of theirs.

The current bill is vastly different, and as such probably should not be
referred to as CDA II.  It holds only originators of content liable for
content, and has a much stricter definition of what content it bans.  The
content that it bans follows what if I understand correctly is pretty much
the usual definition of what constitutes obscene material, except that they've
said it has to be obscene with respect to minors seeing it, instead of taking
the straight definition of obscenity, which is illegal anyway.  The legal
issue, then, is whether adults on the Net wanting anonymous access to content
should be allowed to access content that it's not legal for minors to be given
access to, or whether restricting what adults can do anonymously to the same
level as what kids are allowed to do is legal.  In the case of the original
CDA, one of the Court's objections to the bill was that it was restricting
minors in ways that it was not legal to restrict adults, and then holding
adults to the same regulations, so it seems likely that the courts will have
the same objection to this one as well.

In the practical matter, of what content does this law ban, yes, it's mostly
porn.  As such, while I agree that this is a free speech issue and it's
probably therefore bad legislation, I find it somewhat hard to get extremely
worked up against it.  However, given a still somewhat vague definition of
what got banned, overzealous prosecutors could proabbly use this against some
stuff that isn't porn as well.

response 58 of 78:

Nov 18 08:43 UTC 1998

Perhaps the people who drafted CDA II thought it was only aimed at
"originators", but the language of the bill is worded much broader and
isn't nearly so specific.  I'm sure someone who merely forwarded
material deemed harmful would be considered just as liable under the
law.  In usenet, the moderators of certain newsgroups could almost
certainly also be held liable.  If these interpretations of the law
survive the courts, then I would expect the prosecutors will next try to
go after some adult BBS operator (if there are any left that have any
sort of open registration system, or if the prosecutors are able to show
that whatever registration system is in use is somehow inadequate.)

If *those* court cases pass muster, then I would expect grex to be at
serious and direct risk.  When CDA passed, about half of the grex board
expressed *very* cold feet about assuming such a risk on behalf of grex.
It would be a very good thing to ask the current board candidates how
they would feel about grex if this should come to pass.

I would also expect prosecutors will also be interested in somehow
"controlling" the unmoderated newsgroups that contain material that was
found "harmful" in other court cases.  I don't know who the prosecutors
will go after there, but I suspect ISPs that offer unrestricted news
access will find it harder to keep these newsgroups.

response 60 of 78:

Nov 19 03:22 UTC 1998

Gotta agree with Rane on this one. I don't much care for porn myself -
B-O-R-i-n-g! But I oppose such stuff as CDA I and II on general principles
of minimum do's and don'ts.

What is so damn special about sex and "porn", anyways? And just how does
looking at a picture of a naked woman, or even people screwing, manage to
cause harm to a "minor" or anyone else? I note that at least one "minor" -
responded above - does not seem to feel the need for such "protection". And
that a lot of legislation passed in the name of "protecting children" pushes
children around more than anyone else.