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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 78 responses total. |
valerie
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response 14 of 78:
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Oct 26 13:33 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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steve
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response 15 of 78:
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Oct 26 16:12 UTC 1998 |
They aren't thinking. Thats the entire problem. If they were and
applied their "concern" on a consistent basis, you'd block children
from all but the kid's section in every library in the country.
I still don't see how this affects Grex. It states that this
applies to commercial entities, doesn't it? Grex isn't commercial,
is it? Perhaps I'm being foolish here, but I don't see how this
particular piece of idiocy affects Grex. What bothers me far more
is the possibility of the net-censorship forces using this as a
first law, and trying to pass successively more restrictive laws
as the need "arises".
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scg
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response 16 of 78:
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Oct 26 18:28 UTC 1998 |
Yeah, from what I've read this one is vastly different than the last one, and
its Congressional backers have been claiming that it takes care of the
Constitutional problems the last one had. The Clinton Administration, on the
other hand, publicly supported the last one but is saying that this one is
likely unconstitutional.
A large part of the problem here is that most of the congress people don't
have much control over whether to vote for these things. Rather than letting
it rise or fall on its merits, People pushing legislation like these generally
push them into much larger bills that have to pass, which they can do in small
committees rather than in the whole Congress. The original CDA was stuck into
the Telecommunications Act, which has been really important legislation for
lots of other reasons. In this legislation that basically reworked the rules
for the entire US telecommunications industry, the CDA was a really tiny part.
This latest legislation got slipped into the Federal Budget, if I remember
correctly, tacked onto a provision that provided some money for Internet
access for schools, or something like that. Congress was not likely to sink
the entire Federal Budget to vote against this, nor was Clinton likely to veto
the Budget over this, especially if they felt that it was going to get thrown
out in court anyway.
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remmers
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response 17 of 78:
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Oct 26 18:31 UTC 1998 |
A blue ribbon on the main web page is fine with me. We did that for
the first CDA.
To address raven's concern about apathy, I think the comparative
lack of online discussion of CDA II, compared to CDA I, is due to
a combination of factors:
(a) Burnout. ("Do we have to go through this *again*?") I'm not
defending this, but I think it's a factor.
(b) Lack of apparent applicability to Grex (as STeve notes).
(c) By their response to CDA I, the courts have shown that they
will uphold the First Amendment. Therefore, the danger seems
less than the first time around, when we didn't have a clear
idea what the courts would do.
I don't think that the lack of response means that we're a bunch of
indifferent slackers or worse.
The same groups that fought CDA I in the courts have initiated a
challenge to CDA II, by the way.
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remmers
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response 18 of 78:
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Oct 26 18:33 UTC 1998 |
Scg's #16 slipped in. Yep, CDA II is a "rider". A pernicious practice,
but it's done all the time.
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raven
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response 19 of 78:
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Oct 26 20:09 UTC 1998 |
re #14 & #18 Thanks for the support for the blue ribbon idea.
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cyklone
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response 20 of 78:
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Oct 27 00:36 UTC 1998 |
Re #15: Actually, they are "thinking", like politicians that is. Few if any
have ever lost an election by coming down in favor of "protecting children."
And few have the courage to oppose something on principal if an opponent could
later point to the vote as being "against protecting children." Nowadays, I
honestly believe a majority of the electorate would vote away the Constitution
if the debate was phrased in terms of "protecting children."
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scg
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response 21 of 78:
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Oct 27 00:46 UTC 1998 |
And indeed, if our Constitution really were harming children, it would be
worth changing. However, saying that something is "to protect children," and
actually doing things to protect children, are different things entirely.
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mcnally
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response 22 of 78:
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Oct 27 01:10 UTC 1998 |
In the real world they're different.
In the world of the 10-second sound bite who can tell?
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other
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response 23 of 78:
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Oct 27 05:34 UTC 1998 |
steve, your hypothetical is a very subjective standard...
the constitution *does* harm children, in the minds of those who want to
change it because they believe it harms children. that doesn't mean *I* think
that it harms children, or that i want it changed...
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scg
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response 24 of 78:
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Oct 27 06:08 UTC 1998 |
Right. I don't think the Constitution is harming children, at least to the
extent that changes to it wouldn't in general do more harm, so I support
leaving it alone. If there were a provision in the Constitution that I felt
were harming children, I would think the Constitution needed to be changed.
But, the US is the World's second largest democracy (India being the largest).
The US Constitution is ammendable, but intentionally it was made rather
difficult to ammend. If I felt the Constitution were harming children, I
couldn't just go out and ammend it; I would have to convince a really large
number of other people that it was worth ammending. Likewise, those who now
feel that free speech harms children would have to convince a lot of other
people that it was worth changing the constitution to get rid of freedom of
speech, to protect the children. It's one thing to push a rider on the budget
bill through Congress, but I don't see the CDA making it as a Constitutional
ammendment any time soon. That sort of thing tends to get much closer
examination.
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morpheus
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response 25 of 78:
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Nov 11 07:37 UTC 1998 |
well, i care about this issue a lot. i have had something about this on
my website for about 6 months now. i suppose it is time to update it,
now that this got passed (that, and I could remove the marquee asking
for pledges for the June 8th Ecology Center Bik-a-thon, though I
suppose that, much like Christmas lights, i could just leave it up for
NEXT year ;-). I imagine that a fair number of people care about it far
more than they have expressed in this conference. It is probably good
to assume that for every 1 person who said something about this, 10
have heard about it.
Of course, these numbers are still low, so I urge everyone to go send
an e-mail / fax right now. F'real. Take the initiative NOW please.
As far as having an electorate that doesn't care about the
constitution, they are only representing American interests. Americans,
as a general rule, don't care about the constitution either, as they
are too lazy to find out what is going on in their government, and
presumably think that what they hear on the evening news is "correct"
and "complete." If people would take the initiative to find out what is
happening in their government, we wouldn't be facing this problem right
now. The fact of the matter is, most of the time the only people who
are aware of the governments workings are the Christian right and other
politically-organized and politically polarized action groups, who
don't typically represent the views of the average American.
When the average american hears on the news that the government is
cracking down on kiddie porn with a new bill, however, they are pretty
likely to think it is a really bitchin' thing, without realizing that
what is actually being cracked down on is personal freedom and privacy.
The long and short is, in order for this current state of affairs to
stop, more Americans need to TAKE THE INITIATIVE to find out what their
government is REALLY doing. This is the only way to prevent more CDA's
and prayer in schools bills from being produced in the future.
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jep
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response 26 of 78:
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Nov 11 14:18 UTC 1998 |
The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people want it. Just as
with motorcycle helmets, seatbelt laws, TV/movie/music rating systems,
and laws about smoking, drinking and drugs, they want someone to make
choices for their neighbors. No one, of course, needs regulation
himself, but everyone else around does.
It isn't driven by just a few people. It's driven by most people. The
CDA was a popular law. The president held his nose when he signed it,
(and so did a lot of senators and congressmen as they passed it) but he
signed it -- he had to. People wanted it. The CDA II will be even more
popular, because it more directly targets the 'protection of children'.
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mcnally
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response 27 of 78:
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Nov 11 20:14 UTC 1998 |
#26
If that's true, then why have both bills (the original CDA and "CDA II")
had to be tacked on to large measures that were passed based on the
support for the large measures and in spite of opposition to the CDAs?
(the first CDA was tacked onto a huge telecommunications bill that was
basically guaranteed to pass and the second one was added to this year's
last-minute budget compromise. In a way, the full Congress has never
voted on either CDA, only on the proposition "you can have this other
thing that you really want only if you'll also accept this CDA.")
As far as the popularity of the bills go, that's in large part a
function of how they're described. If you ask people if they're in
favor of laws to protect children from pornography you're going to get
a lot of positive responses. Ask them, though, if they're in favor of
censorship and the response is going to change considerably.
Unfortunately a lot of the press coverage that these bills get
uncritically uses the descriptions provided by the pro-CDA folks without
also raising the censorship issue. If you ask me, that's a pretty
significant omission for our nation's supposedly vigilant free press to
be making.
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aruba
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response 28 of 78:
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Nov 11 20:38 UTC 1998 |
Well put, Mike - I agree with that whole response.
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mdw
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response 29 of 78:
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Nov 11 21:56 UTC 1998 |
Actually, congress did vote on the original CDA. It lost.
There is a significant and powerful *minority* that supports CDA and its
ilk. They are the conservative right, the same people who want to
outlaw abortion, legalize school prayer, and all that. I've never seen
anything to suggest these people command an absolute majority of popular
opinion. (Otherwise, I imagine we'd be voting in Pat Robertson's 3rd
presidential term in the next election). Besides the conservative
right, CDA and its ilk also enjoy a certain amount of support on the
left, from "femninists" who are against "exploitation" of the female
body in any form.
It should be noted that while there are a *lot* of commercial oriented
pornography sites out there, there are also a significant number of
sites oriented around "erotic art" (some of which are commercial, and
some of which are not), as well a significant number of sites that
contain what I guess you could describe as "sexually explicit" amateur
material (mostly stories). I don't think many people will shed tears if
the commercial oriented pornography sites were to disappear (especially
as they seem to generate a significant amount of spam). On the other
hand, I suspect CDA II would also apply to most, if not all, of these
other sites, and it is likely to have a dampening effect on many other
sites as well.
It could well effect grex. If we have a "singles" conference here,
would we be able to buy a commercial internet ISP connection and allow
people on the internet to read that conference? Or would most
commercial ISP's enact stricter regulations on customers to avoid any
possibility of risk?
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scg
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response 30 of 78:
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Nov 12 06:16 UTC 1998 |
ISPs are not responsible for content that they do not originate, according
to this law, so ISPs can't be held accountable for content created by their
customers, or users of their customers' systems.
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mcnally
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response 31 of 78:
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Nov 12 06:38 UTC 1998 |
Except that over-zealous prosecutors in (I believe) New York state
recently seized equipment and shut down temporarily a couple of ISPs
(Dreamscape and Buffnet) for carrying the Usenet newsgroup
alt.binaries.pictures.pre-teen. Even if the CDA protects them or
they are found to be common carriers and not responsible for the
material they carry they will still have suffered considerable hassle
and the actions of the New York Attorney General's office can be
expected to have a chilling effect.
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cyklone
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response 32 of 78:
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Nov 12 13:26 UTC 1998 |
Re #26: You say: "The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people
want it." This demonstrates the error in your logic. People want results
(protecting children from inappropriate sites). They do not necessarily
want the methods that politicians have chosen to achieve those results.
Part of the problem is that the technical aspects of this issue escape
both the general public and the average politician. Its interesting that
there has been almost no discussion of creating new "filterable"
appellations such as ".sex", even though this idea periodically gets
raised. If Grex truly wants to accomplish something, it would be to
educate the public and politicians about the technological alternatives
available to achieve results the public may desire, as well as a
clear-headed discussion of the technological and social implications of
the various alternatives.
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morpheus
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response 33 of 78:
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Nov 12 14:30 UTC 1998 |
Yeah. If people want to stop their kids from being exploited, they
should do something towards looking after them. This doesn't mean
depending on a piece of legislation, because all the legislation will
do is make the people breaking the laws that already exist (and last I
checked, there was a certain legal age that you have to be to be
involved in the production of pornography) a bit more careful.
This is redundant, unneccesary legislation that is being marketed as
being pro children. Of course, every state in the country has an age of
consent, every state has laws against minors making pornography. So,
this law won't really accomplish a whole lot except to annoy ME, an
ardent believer in free speech.
I am not the kind of person who normally subscribes to mass beliefts,
however I used to think that I was a patriot because I felt almost
religiously about the constitution. I feel that newCDA is a violation
of the constition, and if it gets passed, I won't even be able to
believe in our country anymore.
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morpheus
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response 34 of 78:
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Nov 12 14:31 UTC 1998 |
By the way, while were at it, would someone care to define what porn is?
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mta
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response 35 of 78:
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Nov 12 14:42 UTC 1998 |
"Porn is sexually explicit material I don't like; Erotica is sexually
explicit material I do like."
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remmers
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response 36 of 78:
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Nov 12 15:01 UTC 1998 |
Re resp:32 - "The technological alternatives available to achieve
results the public may desire" -- Now that's a thorny area. I don't
think there are any such alternatives, and am pessimistic that there
ever will be. Designing a filtering protocol that's flexible and
actually works -- i.e. gives the user some reasonable degrees of freedom
about what to filter, then correctly filters all such things without
false positives -- is extremely difficult. I'm not at all surprised at
the news stories I read about failures of existing filtering products --
letting through stuff they weren't supposed to, rejecting things they
shouldn't have rejected.
The PICS project (PICS = Platform for Internet Content Selection)is one
very ambitious attempt to provide standards for doing filtering. (See
http://www.w3.org/PICS/ for lots of info.) It provides a flexible
protocol for content labeling, which can then be used as a basis for
intelligent filtering. PICS shows promise of being useful in various
areas, for instance as a basis for intelligent search engines. However,
it requires cooperation among users, rating agencies, and content
providers. If you're using it to screen "content unsuitable for minors",
what do you do about providers who don't cooperate with the standard?
I'm a firm advocate of free speech and support putting a blue ribbon on
Grex's web page (an issue being discussed in another item). But I'm
pessimistic about the prospects of coming up with a technical solution
for something that -- if it's a problem at all -- is a social problem.
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rcurl
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response 37 of 78:
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Nov 12 16:15 UTC 1998 |
Since parents can control (up to a point) what books and magazines are
in their homes (but not in the library), one "fix" would be software
that (even imperfectly) scans for (levels of) "objectionable material"
(using the "contemporary community standards", for example), and then
sends a message to the parents to look at it and decide if they wish
to filter it. [I'm not yet sure that I think this is a *good* idea, but
it is an idea that meets current parental responsibility and rights.]
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senna
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response 38 of 78:
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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.
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