response 176 of 382:

Jan 7 10:03 UTC 1996

Here I am.  Tear me apart.  I finally finished reading what everyone
has said.  As a temporary fix, you will all, it seems, be relieved
that 'Brandi' is gone.  I removed it as soon as I got email from
several of you.  I am very sorry to have created such a bandwidth
problem.  As far as I know, the page was never advertised anywhere.
It seems clear that at some point this changed.  I regret that I
was not available to remove this load on the system sooner.  The
bandwidth argument (and it's clear demonstration) have convinced
me that nothing like this will be 'safe' in my page again.  

As to the legal and moral issues involved.  I felt at the time I
added this section that my clearly worded disclaimer and warning
were sufficient to put us on firm (and safe) legal ground.  I still
feel this way, but less strongly after reading some of the carefully
constructed counter arguements Telecomm Decency act not withstanding.

I regret having caused problems for grex, and having made some people
uncomfortable, but I have the satisfaction of bringing a delicate
and complex matter into a (more or less) focused discussion.  I 
would like to see a policy devised to make future problems easily
solvable.  The bandwidth policy shouldn't be too hard.  A certain
average data rate over a small time period, such as two days.  The
legal and moral issues are stickier.  Given the current legal system,
laws, and precidents, legally you can be found guilty or innocent
of almost anything regardless of evidence or law.  So a decision,
once reached must be adhered to.  Morally, since Grex is on the net
and therefore is in every community.  Who is the community?  Each
person is, so each person is responsible for himself.  From this
springs what we call community in a similar fashion to the free
market springing from each persons selfish fiscal behavior.  We
can never hope to meet the 'community standards' of all communities
that might have access to the net.  We must do what we can and
trust others to do the same.  Idealism has to come from somewhere,
but I think I have been much more idealistic than some of you
would like in my trust that people finding 'Brandi' will follow
their community and personal standards and laws before trying to
actually view it.  Maybe I will be less idealistic in the future.
I doubt it, but I will have to find other outlets and venues to
keep grex running.

Charles

response 178 of 382:

Jan 7 17:51 UTC 1996

Charles, you are hardly going to be torn apart here. Most of the people 
posting opinions here have defended your right to put that content on Grex's
WWW server (bandwidth conditions aside). Some others, including me, disagree,
but apparently not too many.

I agree that it was an excellent response. I never contacted Charles to ask
for the page's removal, so I think he has nothing to apologize for to me. 
I am grateful to Charles for providing us the cause to discuss our policies.

I am not certain that the data rate was quite up to a level we would find 
intolerable, although it was much higher than the other pages. Grex has 
no policy on this question and I felt it would be *wrong* of me to ask 
him to remove it under a bandwidth policy, if no such policy exists. I 
think that we probably need one, but I do not like to reward success with
"the boot". Rather I'd hope that a page which is valuable can be relocated to 
a server that can stand the strain. 

I did not ask Charles to remove it under the guise of any morality policy,
because, as you all know, we do not have one. I still think we need one.

Yes, I am now more comfortable because it is gone, but I am still worried
that Grex will ignore community standards by its permissiveness. This will
all be revisited shortly when Exon passes.

Exon would clearly have covered the brandi story, but goes well beyond that, 
into areas that are ludicrous to me. However, as with the arguments I was 
making under present law, ludicrous or not, we will be operating subject to 
those rules. I don't look forward to it. In the grand scheme of things 
this Exonic overreaction can be blamed (in my opinion) on the thousands of 
big and little sites like Grex, all around the internet, which refused to 
believe that they had any need  to be responsible to the community by 
limiting access of lewd and pornographic material to minors.

response 180 of 382:

Jan 7 22:45 UTC 1996

I was being sarcastic when I said 'tear me apart'.  :)  I read all of
your discusion before making my response.  It is true that at no time
was I asked to remove the file, but Grex is shared by us all, and I
did not feel right in taking so much of our limited resources for
myself.  I do hope that the board and staff are able to arrive at a
reasonable and workable policy.

Charles

response 182 of 382:

Jan 8 22:06 UTC 1996

So do your local Federal prosecutors. Whew!

response 184 of 382:

Jan 9 06:34 UTC 1996

It's depressing to note that of all the users on that list,
only arthurp is a member.

response 186 of 382:

Jan 11 05:54 UTC 1996

Exactly. The 1518 is an average, which is computed by taking the total of the
period and dividing by the number of days in the period. 

The 2412 is the total number over the entire period (roughly 7 days) of
*unique* machines that requested and received documents from our web server.
It is not meaningful to compute the latter number as an average per day.

response 188 of 382:

Jan 17 06:39 UTC 1996

Morality is policed all the time.  Thou shalt not steal.  Thou shalt not kill.

response 190 of 382:

Jan 17 11:18 UTC 1996

Heh. While we debate and dither others are busy passing laws to define the
"words" for us. Nice arguments, but there are holes in the hull. Freedom
is not the equivalent of license.

response 192 of 382:

Jan 17 14:28 UTC 1996

Right! And others. These are hard problems and the solutions are
anything but simplistic. 

response 194 of 382:

Jan 17 17:43 UTC 1996

Well sure. Eliminate lynchings, concentration camps, random violence,
witch burnings, car-bombings, true-believers, and irrational thinking.
Problem solved. How easy! Now if we could just figure out how. In the
meantime innocents are are risk -- what do we tell them? Life is tough?
I think failing to deal with this is a cop-out and does not address
the realities faced by people every day. Every society has certain limits
and defines, somehow, acts and ommissions that are beyond the pale. Not
fun, not easy, not neat and ordered allways, but necessary for some
semblance of order. I say again, freedom is not license.

response 196 of 382:

Jan 17 21:19 UTC 1996

s /verb/very

response 198 of 382:

Jan 18 00:00 UTC 1996

Rane, I am not that far from what you state so well. While I agree that
"Congress" (extend that to the states) should not be the arbiter of 
ideas, that does not mean I will work to provide a system that harbors
hate-mongers.  And I don't mean to imply that you would. What I am trying
to say, with some dificulty, is that this is not a situation where we
can just sit back and say "anything goes" because that is "free-speech".
It seems to me that we (those exercising judgment over these systems) have
some responsibility beyond just saying "have at it!". I confess I don't have
a pat answer about how to do this but I think we owe it to the community
to try. I guess I am not sure we are really communicating on the concept of
"liberty". Just what is it? We are (as far as adbarr can feel) starting to
get down to "gut level" feelings. The lawbooks don't help here. They follow
what we lead.