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Congress Discovers Peer-to-Peer Porn
Posted by
michael
on Fri Jul 27, 2001 06:06 PM
from the gnutella-decency-act-in-the-works dept.
from the gnutella-decency-act-in-the-works dept.
imipak writes: "The
BBC report that a Congressional Report on file sharing software has wheeled in that trusty old warhorse that always seems to turn up in government attempts to restrict freedom: children and pr0n. Apparently, "search for the word 'porn' on BearShare results in more than 25,000 entries, many of them video files." Who'd a'thunk it?" Don't miss the actual report, which makes for amusing reading, especially the carefully blotted-out screenshots.
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Congress Discovers Peer-to-Peer Porn
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Re:Perhaps a ploy by MPAA/RIAA? (Score:4)
But there are a lot of people that don't want their ten-year-olds exposed to explicit sex acts, especially of the degrading types which are prevalent in pornography. And there are valid concerns there.
So before everyone on
So either present compelling evidence that ten-year-olds seeing some underage and probably illegally compelled porn acress getting anally raped by twenty guys isn't damaging his/her attitudes towards themselves and the opposite sex. And have that evidence be compelling enough to persuade some typical suburban parents.
Or present a compelling solution to the problem, since censorware is so universally reviled, and generally ineffective anyway. And no, neither "watch your kids 24 hours a day" or "teach your children about sex and pornography at an early age" are compelling enough. 24-hour surveillance is never possible with kids (especially since they'll probably be far more competent on the computer than their parents) and no matter how much you teach them, their views on the world will still be influences by the world around them.
Or make the consequences of shutting them down be so horrible that it's worth having a nation of sex perverts. 'Cause right now, most people assume that the conquences are no more free porn and free music, which don't really sound all that terrible to most people.
Otherwise, those in charge are going to feel perfectly justified in shutting things like this down, and it will be hard to blame them. And the more people come up with workarounds around the issues, the more the noose will be tightened.
Meta-data problem (Score:4)
Furthermore, people generally don't want to stick their porn in other people's faces; they want to let people get it, and may even care more about availablity than avoidability, but the only people who get anything out of unwilling parties seeing sex are flashers. So it follows that, so long as it is not blocked from people who should be able to see it, providers want porn marked as such, and consumers want to only get porn if they're looking for it.
Perhaps the standard clients should insert into the query "and not 'porn'" unless 'porn' is in the query, and porn should have that keyword.
Re:But what about BearShare? (Score:3)
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ [lavasoftusa.com]
Bearshare filter, missing data (Score:5)
Interesting fact from the PDF (page ii): The number of children using file sharing programs is unknown but believed to be high. Great! For a study on children's access to file sharing, couldn't they at least have tried to collect some data on this?
Finally! (Score:4)
Re:The four horsemen of the infocalypse ride again (Score:4)
< David Spade voice >
It's called punctuation. Look into it.
<
Secondly, looking at your comment, I count the word they 3 times. (4 if you meant to say they in the first sentence, instead of the)
The truly sad part about this discussion is that the majority of people informed on technological issues view the government that way. As some entity, totally separate from themselves, which they have no control over.
What you say has merit. The same excuses are used over and over to limit freedoms. It is not limited to technological matters, though. The phrase "Think of the children!" has been used throughout history as a way of reducing freedoms. The beauty of the US government system is that if enough people can be convinced that the argument is just BS, the people using it will have to stop. Or get tossed out of govt altogether.
All I am saying is that in the US the government still directly answers to the voters, at least once every two years. We need to not view these laws as things being made in a void, by people we have no control over. We need instead to actually put our money where are mouth is, so to speak, and actually vote.
I would guess that a large portion of /. readers did not vote in the last national election. (A large portion of those who were legally able to vote, I mean) The government continues to make laws targetted to please those who are middle income and above. More often than not, the laws are targetted at parents in that group. Why? Because that demographic has a very high voter turnout.
If we truly want anything to be done about this parade of misinformation spewing forth from Washinton, we need to vote every chance we get, for the most informed representative we can get.
Re:Wrong. (Score:5)
No, it doesn't, because people misunderstand what it is that they want to prevent from happening.
Prohibitionist thinking runs something like this: "Alcohol abuse is bad. If we ban drinking, there will be less drinking. Therefore there will be less alcohol abuse." True, true, and false.
For all x, prohibition of x just about eliminates responsible use of x - and the social structures that support that responsible use - and does jack shit to prevent abuse of x - and leads to economic and social structures that support that abuse. (For example, we're still dealing with the social after-effects of the way Prohibition brought alcohol use home.)
Then, outside of the effects of x abuse, come the violent effects of the black market in x, and the abuse of police power in the effort to stomp out that black market.
It takes a very twisted defintion to consider these results as "working".
Considering the duration of a crack high vs. that of a good drunk, as well as their completely different effects on the central nervous system, you're comparing pharmacological apples and oranges.
A more relevant question is: is one more likely to be shot in a gun battle between crack dealers or liquor store owners?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The report will soon be gnutella's highest DL (Score:5)
One hour later, the report has been downloaded 14 times. I wonder if those lusers knew what they were getting just by grabbing a random 1.7Mb pdf file with the word PORN in the title.
Its late, enough fucking with pornmeister's minds for the moment.
the AC
Prove to me that its bad! (Score:3)
Where X can be everything from seat belts to parts-per-trillion of arsenic in drinking water. The most that can be said is that it has no known negative effects. (but, a any imaginable number of potential effects.)
Such questions are asked to make a statement, to push forward a point of view. They cannot be answered.
By that same token, there is not and can be no proof that playing quake is safe, or even that reading is safe.
Whether or not it was done on purpose, your request ``So either present compelling evidence that ten-year-olds seeing
What can be proven is the opposite, that it is harmful. Take a bunch of kids and show them those images and see what they say and do.
Amusingly enough, I'd claim that there's far more evidence about the harmful effects of religion than porn. I know personally and have heard of many people who have had religion destroy their lives, from Heavens Gate, to destruction of their self esteem.
Given that there's no way to show that either of them is safe, IE, not harmful. Well, we have our culture curbing porn, but allowing religions, when the evidence shows that the reverse would be better.
I'll let you have the job of convincing suburbian parents that they have to look at the problem logically, not emotionally, and realize that some things can never be known for certain.
If it is, it's subtle (Score:5)
Did you actually read through the report and Rep. Waxman's statement? There is no real focus on the legality of file sharing or copyright violations. If anything, the reports seem to have carefully avoided the subject because it would distract from their main point. Further I could find no recommendations for the use of legislation to control the technology, the usual congressional reaction to this sort of thing.
Instead they provided tips to parents on how to protect their children and pointed out the flaws in content filtering software. Isn't this the sort of thing
Granted, the whole thing could just be a small part of a vast plan to sweep in apocalyptic thought control to the Internet, carefully disguised as recommendations and information for parents, but I think that would be giving the US government too much credit.
Number 11 query? (Score:5)
And "Steely Dan" beating "Rage Against The" ?? Wow, I never would have guessed...
What This Would Have Been Forty Years Ago (Score:5)
Recent studies have shown that some unsure high percentage (but we know that it's high) of U.S. homes have trees in their backyards. With the decline of the "Drugstore Soda Fountain", young people trying to escape the authority of their parents are constructing said "treehouses" in their backyards. These "treehouses" unfortunately have no centralized controls in place.
Children, especially male children approaching adolescence, can be exposed the peer-to-peer sharing of pornographic materials in these "treehouses." Even a simple querying of the peers to see if they want to play the card games "Poker" or "Go Fish!" can result in the display of pornographic material.
As well, these "treehouses" operate in a subdomain space removed from parental control. Sophisticated access control measures such as "the Secret Knock" or "pulling up the ladder" or saying "Careful, your old man's approaching!" effectively allow unrestricted trading and viewing of uncensored pornographic material. Even a restrictive active filtering system such as the Tattle-Tale Sister will not stop peer-to-peer sharing in these domains as this system is restricted by the security controls in this subdomain. The pornographic material is also hidden from an outside search by an obfuscation system known as "the hidden box under the loose panel in the floor."
As a parent, and a grandparent, and a great-grandparent, and a complete old fart, I am deeply jealous that the young people of today may have access to things that they enjoy that I was denied. The "treehouse" was used for... er... intellectual conversation... when I was young, and for peer-pressuring colleagues into smoking cigarettes.
Parental Tips
- Don't permit "the hidden box under the floor panel"
- Enforce access of Tattle-Tale Sister to all subdomains
- Root access is not good enough. "Treehouses" are never built at the roots. Ladders should be permanently affixed.
Not always (Score:5)
____________________
Blotched out Pictures are Hilarious (Score:5)
Ha, ha, ha, ha...Those pictures are absolutely hilarious
1. Young Lolita ---- in the --- by huge ---- 78M
1. Young Lolita hugged in the bus station by huge father before she leaves for college ? 78M
Yup, I didn't see any porn in those pictures at all
It's About Time! (Score:5)
I feel it is my right as a citizen of the US to have my pirated net porn delivered in a fast and reliable manner. Every time I use BearShare to snag a 50 or 100 meg pr0n video, it takes at least 5 or 10 tries, and often at slower speeds than my connection should be getting.
I hope you're listening, Senators and Representatives! I demand that you improve the quality and accessibility of my free internet pr0n!!
The four horsemen of the infocalypse ride again (Score:3)
The report is correct (Score:5)
I opened up the page with the report fully expecting to read another congressional report about how The Internet/Rap/Movies/TV is Corrupting Our Children. I had expected to find a diatribe about how government regulation was necessary to control the new "scourge of our children".
Boy, was I surprised at what I found instead.
This report is completely factually correct.
While most Slashdot readers probably know precisely how the P2P filesharing scene has changed over the past year, the fact is that most people outside our little clique don't have a clue about this stuff. All this report does is take the knowledge that we already have about these technologies and translate it into a form accessible to non-techies. And it does that extremely well by basically setting out the facts that every parent should probably know about file sharing software before allowing their kid to go online.
In summary, the report says:
(a) Since Napster's demise, new filesharing technologies have taken its place.
(b) Most of these new technologies are decentralized, unlike Napster.
(c) The technologies are not limited to music files.
(d) Porn is one of the top items searched for and is highly available on the systems.
(e) Parental control software is not incredibly effective for these new P2P systems.
(f) Because of the logistics of these systems, don't expect legislation to solve problems for parents; the parents should be more proactive.
While all the above seems obvious to us, if you were a parent who felt overwhelmed by your kid's computer knowledge, wouldn't you minimally want to have this information? Most of the posters here take the libertarian point of view that government should stay out of the regulation business. Making parents aware of their own responsibility to be aware of their children's internet activities seems the best way to deal with this.
Re: Congress Discovers Peer-to-Peer Porn (Score:5)
Peer-to-peer porn? I always thought that when porn was peer-to-peer, it was called "intercourse".
And how does congress fit into all this?
Hmmmm...
good (Score:5)
1) They'll learn about anatomy, and will do better in class in their older years.
2) They'll learn geometry, by trying to figure out what kind of body parts can fit into the goats' ear.
3) They'll learn organizational skills, by creating a collection of celbrity porn, indexed by type of celebrity, last name, and real or fake.
and it just goes on....
i knew it, the government just doesn't want us to learn. Let's go on strike!
Re:Number 11 query? (Score:3)
According to them the current top queries are 1. "neuroticfish no instruments" 2. "lester flatt, earl scruggs &" and 3. "divx"
Most notible is that the top searches garner a whole .3 percent of the queries.
Find ? Dont you mean Admit!?@? (Score:3)
The Lottery: