War on Pornography: Another Failed War In The Works.

[Edi]

So you believe that because you weren't harmed by it, it can't be harmful to anyone at all? Did you read the generous amount of scientific sources provided by Crown?

Did you read the thread? I did, and almost all of those sources cite unspecified studies by unspecified experts who use unspecified methodology, hence they are nothing but appeals to authority. Try again, Hartman.

The major problem with children (age<12) viewing porn is that it often depicts women in a degrading manner, sometimes even enjoying rape. It can distort the views of reality of someone who has almost no other input on sex. It teaches kids that women enjoy being dominated and abused, that they enjoy pain and degradation.
No parent in their right mind would tolerate their kid viewing hardcore porpgraphy, so I think it is out of question that children shouldn't be able to view porn.

Which is why public sex education in school is a very good idea. It can point out that sex in porn is unrealistic and has nothing to do with the real world. No different from Tom Clancy's fiction in this sense.

There certainly are methods of restricting cildren's access to porn without affecting adults too badly. Maybe ISPs could provide an alternative dial-up line where pornography isn't available, or they could offer the possibility of filling out forms for different local user accounts, where customers can state what they want to have blocked. Filtering will probably never be perfect, but it will be better than doing nothing.

Impossible due to the technical nature of the internet, which is an open system with public access. You would need to redesign the whole network technology from the ground up to implement that. The real solution is for companies that offer porn to implement some kind of age screening system (and they do) and ISPs to prohibit upload of such materials to their servers in their T&Cs (which almost every ISP here in Finland does anyway). This means that anybody hosting such material will have to own the server they use, and it is up to them to implement the age screening system. Outright ban of porn is not just going to work, despite pie in the sky wishes.

Edi

[General Zod]

The major problem with children (age<12) viewing porn is that it often depicts women in a degrading manner, sometimes even enjoying rape. It can distort the views of reality of someone who has almost no other input on sex. It teaches kids that women enjoy being dominated and abused, that they enjoy pain and degradation.
No parent in their right mind would tolerate their kid viewing hardcore porpgraphy, so I think it is out of question that children shouldn't be able to view porn.

that's why it's the parents fucking job to monitor their kids internet activity. not the government's. If the parent's too lazy to monitor what their kids are doing online then of course they're going to come across shit like that.

There certainly are methods of restricting cildren's access to porn without affecting adults too badly. Maybe ISPs could provide an alternative dial-up line where pornography isn't available, or they could offer the possibility of filling out forms for different local user accounts, where customers can state what they want to have blocked. Filtering will probably never be perfect, but it will be better than doing nothing.

or the parents could simply take some fucking responsibility and monitor their children's internet activity more closely so they don't come across porn. what you're proposing is not realistically feasible due to the problematic nature of filters.

[GySgt. Hartman]

Did you read the thread? I did, and almost all of those sources cite unspecified studies by unspecified experts who use unspecified methodology, hence they are nothing but appeals to authority. Try again, Hartman.

Did you click the links? Since you obviously cannot be bothered to, here are some facts (emphasis mine):

The main possible effects of televised pornography that must concern us as clinicians, educators, and parents are modeling and imitation of language heard and behaviors observed in televised pornography; negative interference with children's normal sexual development; emotional reactions such as nightmares and feelings of anxiety, guilt, confusion, and/or shame; stimulation of premature sexual activity; development of unrealistic, misleading, and/or harmful attitudes toward sex and adult male-female relationships; and undermining of family values with resultant conflict between parents and children.

Most children escape almost uninjured from visualization of pornography. However some are either traumatized, or precipitated in a strict perversion. The consequences on adolescents are similar, though more complex. The hypersexualization of teenagers may become complicated by addiction (so called internet addiction disorder: IAD), isolation, and perversion.

[...]No parent in their right mind would tolerate their kid viewing hardcore porpgraphy, so I think it is out of question that children shouldn't be able to view porn.

Which is why public sex education in school is a very good idea. It can point out that sex in porn is unrealistic and has nothing to do with the real world. No different from Tom Clancy's fiction in this sense.

So if you had children you would allow them to watch porn, as long as they know it's not realistic? If not, why not?

There certainly are methods of restricting cildren's access to porn without affecting adults too badly. Maybe ISPs could provide an alternative dial-up line where pornography isn't available, or they could offer the possibility of filling out forms for different local user accounts, where customers can state what they want to have blocked. Filtering will probably never be perfect, but it will be better than doing nothing.

Impossible due to the technical nature of the internet, which is an open system with public access. You would need to redesign the whole network technology from the ground up to implement that. The real solution is for companies that offer porn to implement some kind of age screening system (and they do) and ISPs to prohibit upload of such materials to their servers in their T&Cs (which almost every ISP here in Finland does anyway). This means that anybody hosting such material will have to own the server they use, and it is up to them to implement the age screening system. Outright ban of porn is not just going to work, despite pie in the sky wishes.

[emphasis added]
Now where did I talk about banning porn? I was talking about giving cosumers a choice and helping parents protect their children.
Do you call clicking on the "Yes I am 18"-Button age screening? Do I really have to post dozens of links to sites that don't even have that much "protection"? Come on.
Do you really claim that for technical reasons it is impossible for ISPs to filter the content of the data they are sending to a particular user if the user wants them to? That you would have to redesign the internet in order to prevent children from accessing porn? You obviously have a very limited grasp of the technical nature of the internet, since I happen to know a working example (a statewide university network that functions as an ISP for various schools and filters content based on what proxy they use).

[sketerpot]

Do you really claim that for technical reasons it is impossible for ISPs to filter the content of the data they are sending to a particular user if the user wants them to? That you would have to redesign the internet in order to prevent children from accessing porn? You obviously have a very limited grasp of the technical nature of the internet, since I happen to know a working example (a statewide university network that functions as an ISP for various schools and filters content based on what proxy they use).

It's possible for ISPs to filter the data they send to particular users, of course. But how is a computer supposed to block porn? Use a blacklist? They can never block all the porn, and it's not going to be too hard to find some. I speak from personal experience behind filters here. Whitelists? That may be able to block porn, but they suck donkey balls since they block so many legitimate sites---or they don't block porn effectively. Fancy URL tricks, keywords, maybe some fancy Bayesian thing? Still far too error prone to call "effective", though they would certainly be sufficient to block erotic stories that aren't stored in a ZIP file (unless you block those too, which will inconvenience people even more). Block all images (easy; just a matter of blocking anything with the major MIME type of "image")? Sure, that's workable, and I'd say it's the best of the lot. We don't need images, and it would put some pressure on web site authors to make their sites accessible to deaf, blind, or protected people. I could actually go for that in conjunction with the Bayesian thing; that would be the best possible filter I can dream up. It still sucks; for some reason I don't think a lot of people are going to want to de-picturize the web. I can hear the whining of the children, and it isn't a pretty sound.

If you can think of a filtering scheme that is actually that effective at filtering porn, please tell me. I'd be happy to spread the word to my astonished friends. If you need me, I'll be sitting over in the corner muttering under my breath about "parental responsibility", "puritanism", and "lawn gnomes". Thank you.

[GySgt. Hartman]

Alright, let's get down to the tech, although that wasn't my main point. I don't have enough experience with web filtering to develop one right now out of my head, but here are some ideas:
-Since small children shuold be supervised all the time anyway, we don't need to worry about them; if we need to implement a filter for them, it would probably be a whitelist of 100% safe sites.
-Older children will find a way to use the computer alone, but the older they get, the less damaging some lone false negatives (porn slipping through the filter) will be. In addition to a blacklist of explicit sites (since filtering is done by the ISP, they could afford some well-done lists) we could use a word filter (since porn sites often use very explicit words to describe their content). In addition, porn producers don't have to worry about losing their main target group, adults, because they will use unfiltered channels - so they don't have a lot of incentive to really try to circumvent the filters in order to get to the kids. If morality doesn't help, it might very well be illegal to try to circumvent filters designed to protect children, like allowing minors to go into the adult section of a video store.

[Stark]

The practical implications reminded me of something; windows doesn't require logon, so there's no default user-level security. If (say) I had kids, and I was(say) a total moron, my kids could concievably raid my server for porn.


I don't really understand the arguments here. No one is saying that child porn is good, or that kids meeting paedophiles in chatrooms is good, but that isn't the fucking point. You *can't* control the medium (the internet), and you *shouldn't* infringe the rights of others while trying. I think this comes back to the 'children are drooling idiots' argument; I remember when I was five and being told by school not to get into strangers cars (lets forget that kids are usually raped by their families, no internet/car required) and little 5yo me said 'no shit, sherlock'. Do parents not raise their children to look after themselves? Are these the same parents who let their little kids use mIRC unsupervised? The problem here is *not* the internet.

[White Haven]

Maybe I've got too big a dose of Darwin in me, I dunno. I hate the idea of protecting people from themselves, more often than not. Children can be a bit of a different story, but as has been said so many times, that's a parenting problem. Becomes even more a parenting and less a legislation problem if we roll back the legal age a bit so parents who decide their kiddies are ready don't have to worry about violating laws, but eh, that's neither here nor there. And for the record, I'm 20, so this ain't some cheap cop-out to get to the porn

[Edi]

Did you read the thread? I did, and almost all of those sources cite unspecified studies by unspecified experts who use unspecified methodology, hence they are nothing but appeals to authority. Try again, Hartman.

Did you click the links? Since you obviously cannot be bothered to, here are some facts (emphasis mine):

The main possible effects of televised pornography that must concern us as clinicians, educators, and parents are modeling and imitation of language heard and behaviors observed in televised pornography; negative interference with children's normal sexual development; emotional reactions such as nightmares and feelings of anxiety, guilt, confusion, and/or shame; stimulation of premature sexual activity; development of unrealistic, misleading, and/or harmful attitudes toward sex and adult male-female relationships; and undermining of family values with resultant conflict between parents and children.

Possible effects yes, but by no means guaranteed, and if a kid is watching televised pornography, then the reason is parental failure in the first place. The vague reference to family values is completely meaningless and smacks to me of political pandering, and the feelings of guilt and shame alluded to there can be dealt with by having a talk with the kid and setting limits. You still haven't provided a single good reason for why porn should be completely censored.

Most children escape almost uninjured from visualization of pornography. However some are either traumatized, or precipitated in a strict perversion. The consequences on adolescents are similar, though more complex. The hypersexualization of teenagers may become complicated by addiction (so called internet addiction disorder: IAD), isolation, and perversion.

This just supports the position Mike has taken and that I share: No sufficient demonstration of harm to warrant blanket censorship. There are always a few mentally unstable people in any given sample (as we've seen on SDnet itself in the past). I had a couple of classmates back in elementary and high school who were unstable and went from bad to worse without being pushed into it by external stimuli. Becoming a pervert just by viewing porn needs some underlying predisposition toward perversion anyway, and isolation and IAD shouldn't be a problem if a kid has anything like a normal social life and friends to do stuff with rather than just sitting alone in his room in front of the screen.

[...]No parent in their right mind would tolerate their kid viewing hardcore porpgraphy, so I think it is out of question that children shouldn't be able to view porn.

Which is why public sex education in school is a very good idea. It can point out that sex in porn is unrealistic and has nothing to do with the real world. No different from Tom Clancy's fiction in this sense.

So if you had children you would allow them to watch porn, as long as they know it's not realistic? If not, why not?[/quote]
That's a nice little strawman there. The discussion centers on the complete censorship of porn with the protection of children excuse, or started out that way. I would not let my kids watch porn because children are not emotionally mature enough to grasp all the consequences of what is happening on screen even if they intellectually know what sex is. However, with my children, it would be my responsibility to see to this issue. It is not for the state to censor what I may watch on the assumption that I'm going to be an irresponsible parent. What the fuck happened to the concept of parental responsibility? Everyone on your side is acting as if nobody is going to take any responsibility as parents just because some idiots don't.

Now where did I talk about banning porn? I was talking about giving cosumers a choice and helping parents protect their children.

Fair enough, I just interpreted your words differently, given the context of the debate between Crown and Mike that our conversation spun out of.

Do you call clicking on the "Yes I am 18"-Button age screening? Do I really have to post dozens of links to sites that don't even have that much "protection"? Come on.

No, I'm not calling that adequate screening, but if that's all that the law requires by way of verification, then there is a different problem. I was talking about big commercial sites that actually offer quality content instead of disjointed snippets like the free sites do

Do you really claim that for technical reasons it is impossible for ISPs to filter the content of the data they are sending to a particular user if the user wants them to? That you would have to redesign the internet in order to prevent children from accessing porn? You obviously have a very limited grasp of the technical nature of the internet, since I happen to know a working example (a statewide university network that functions as an ISP for various schools and filters content based on what proxy they use).

Not quite. We're apparently talking about slightly different things. I interpreted the different channels comment to mean separate networks, because that concept alos came up in this thread somewhere.

I studied computer engineering for several years, with the emphasis of my studies on computer networks, so the concept of filtering is not at all foreign to me. Filtering can work to an extent, but if you want narrow enough filtering, it soon becomes unwieldy and the kind of system you are talking about is also more problematic for commercial ISPs. School networks are supposed to be used as an aid in studying, for research and sending email and other such innocuous things, and are typically single access point systems, very centralized. This makes filtering easy.

Now take a commercial ISP that has customers geographically spread, like from a shotgun, where the network is not a single access point system, but has a wide variety of access points that pretty necessarily are determined by physical location. The customers in those locations might have widely varying desires of what they wish to access, and filtering is going to be a lot more difficult and expensive. It's probably doable (badly), but I wouldn't want to be the person to maintain it, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the hapless helldesk person trying to explain to the users why their internet connection isn't working when some glitch occurs somewhere, because to fix it you typically need information from the user that he is unable to provide due to colossal computer illiteracy.

The cost-benefit analysis of available options compared to the amount of harm prevented by using them and taking into account the harm that adopting them causes to legitimate users renders most of said options useless.

The bottom line is that it comes down to parental responsibility, again, because without that, all the technological safeguards you might want to implement can be circumvented. If it comes right down to it, physical removal of certain components of the computer at home that render the net inaccessible when there are no adults at home will also work wonders and costs nothing but a bit of effort on part of the parent. Bit difficult to access the net without a network cable, for example. With such easy fixes available (others being placing the networked computer where it's easily visible, such as living room corner), there is no need for massive, disproportionate legislative and technological measures.

Edi

[Crown]

Now where did I talk about banning porn? I was talking about giving cosumers a choice and helping parents protect their children.

Fair enough, I just interpreted your words differently, given the context of the debate between Crown and Mike that our conversation spun out of.

I'm so sick of this, evidently you haven't read the thread, since I have never advocated 'banning' porn on the internet;

"BULLSHIT!!! EVIDENCE PLEASE YOU GAPING VAGINA!" ... Sometimes the words of another work out just fine.

And even if it was just your so called 1%, isn't that worrying considering the sheer number of children on the internet?

Not really, you can apply the same logic to just about anything. A lot of countries of driving death tolls far greater then 1%, doesn't mean we should ban cars. There's a fixed percentage of airlines that have crashed into world trade towers, we still allow people to fly. There are percentages of people that get hurt at rock concerts, parties, bars (prohibition has already been tried), there are STD percentages but we don't ban sex. What I'm trying to say is that you can't call something a major problem because a percentage of people getting hurt isn't 0. If we did this would be a particularly boring world.

First; Red Herring/Strawman. Neither the author - nor I - are suggesting a ban of pornography on the internet (I read the article, and his website), all that they appear to be campaigning for is anti-spam legistlation at this point, everything else is vague.

Second; Are you saying the sexual solicitation of 1% of all children that log onto the internet isn't a something that needs to be addressed considering the sheer amount of children that are on the internet?

Third; Your analogies are flawed; because they are based on the 'baning' syndrome that you seem to have pulled in from regions yonder.

And Fourth; How dumb can you be on trying to argue the whole 1% which Einy pulled out his ass anyway?

If I have, then please quote me so that I can retract that comment.

As you can see Spyder through that out there, I flatly pointed out that I have never argued it, a few posts later Mike does the same, I once again flatly argue the opposite, he accepts it, and then here we are again.

[GySgt. Hartman]

Possible effects yes, but by no means guaranteed, and if a kid is watching televised pornography, then the reason is parental failure in the first place. The vague reference to family values is completely meaningless and smacks to me of political pandering, and the feelings of guilt and shame alluded to there can be dealt with by having a talk with the kid and setting limits. You still haven't provided a single good reason for why porn should be completely censored.

That could be because I don't advocate complete censoring of porn. Read my fucking post! This is the third time I have to tell you that I do not advocate complete censoring of porn. I hate repeatng myself, but this is what I said from the very beginning:

There certainly are methods of restricting cildren's access to porn without affecting adults too badly.

I don't think there is something like "televised pornography", what you see in TV is only softcore stuff (unless there are certain pay channels in the US, in which case I agree with you that a child accessing them is a parental failure).

This just supports the position Mike has taken and that I share: No sufficient demonstration of harm to warrant blanket censorship. There are always a few mentally unstable people in any given sample (as we've seen on SDnet itself in the past). I had a couple of classmates back in elementary and high school who were unstable and went from bad to worse without being pushed into it by external stimuli. Becoming a pervert just by viewing porn needs some underlying predisposition toward perversion anyway, and isolation and IAD shouldn't be a problem if a kid has anything like a normal social life and friends to do stuff with rather than just sitting alone in his room in front of the screen.

So it is ok if it harms only a few? Is it their fault that they grow up in an unstable environment? Don't they deserve help and protection because they are "unstable"? I say: Porn harms children. That is why they shouldn't be able to access it.

So if you had children you would allow them to watch porn, as long as they know it's not realistic? If not, why not?

That's a nice little strawman there. The discussion centers on the complete censorship of porn with the protection of children excuse, or started out that way. I would not let my kids watch porn because children are not emotionally mature enough to grasp all the consequences of what is happening on screen even if they intellectually know what sex is.

That is no strawman. I had the feeling that you were argueing against my point that porn is harmful to children. Since you wouldn't let you children wath it, I guess we do agree that porn is harmful to kids?

However, with my children, it would be my responsibility to see to this issue. It is not for the state to censor what I may watch on the assumption that I'm going to be an irresponsible parent. What the fuck happened to the concept of parental responsibility? Everyone on your side is acting as if nobody is going to take any responsibility as parents just because some idiots don't.

First, don't put me on any sides and start assuming from there, argue against my points. For children over a certin age, parental responsibility doesn't involve 24/7 monitoring of everything the child does. You have to be able to leave your kid alone for an hour, or you have done something seriously wrong as a parent.
Second, children aren't soldiers; they usually don't follow parent's orders to the word. So as a parent, you have to make sure they can't seriously harm themselves when you are away.

Now where did I talk about banning porn? I was talking about giving cosumers a choice and helping parents protect their children.

Fair enough, I just interpreted your words differently, given the context of the debate between Crown and Mike that our conversation spun out of.

When I say

There certainly are methods of restricting cildren's access to porn without affecting adults too badly.

, there is no room for interpreting "ban all porn" into it.

Do you call clicking on the "Yes I am 18"-Button age screening? Do I really have to post dozens of links to sites that don't even have that much "protection"? Come on.

No, I'm not calling that adequate screening, but if that's all that the law requires by way of verification, then there is a different problem. I was talking about big commercial sites that actually offer quality content instead of disjointed snippets like the free sites do

Well, then the law should require the ISPs to provide "safe" lines, so that a parent can call, ask them that "his internet" be porn-free and is switched to a different proxy.

[...] Now take a commercial ISP that has customers geographically spread, like from a shotgun, where the network is not a single access point system, but has a wide variety of access points that pretty necessarily are determined by physical location. The customers in those locations might have widely varying desires of what they wish to access, and filtering is going to be a lot more difficult and expensive. It's probably doable (badly), but I wouldn't want to be the person to maintain it, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the hapless helldesk person trying to explain to the users why their internet connection isn't working when some glitch occurs somewhere, because to fix it you typically need information from the user that he is unable to provide due to colossal computer illiteracy.

That is exactly why it should be possible for the parents to call the ISP and ask them for help. It should be something easy, like changing the port number of the proxy to a port running a server with a filter and password-protecting the settings, something a helpdesk person can run you through in less than a minute.

The cost-benefit analysis of available options compared to the amount of harm prevented by using them and taking into account the harm that adopting them causes to legitimate users renders most of said options useless.

Installing a second server (program) on an aready running machine is not expensive, and not much harder to administer. Other users are unaffected, since nothing changes for them.

The bottom line is that it comes down to parental responsibility, again, because without that, all the technological safeguards you might want to implement can be circumvented. If it comes right down to it, physical removal of certain components of the computer at home that render the net inaccessible when there are no adults at home will also work wonders and costs nothing but a bit of effort on part of the parent. Bit difficult to access the net without a network cable, for example. With such easy fixes available (others being placing the networked computer where it's easily visible, such as living room corner), there is no need for massive, disproportionate legislative and technological measures.

What I am arguing for is giving children a chance to use the net without risking exposure to harmful material, instead of completely denying them access to it. In video stores, the adult section is seperated from the family section to prevent kids from inadvertently stumbling into hardcore videos while looking for Bambi. The same should be dome with the net.

[Edi]

Now where did I talk about banning porn? I was talking about giving cosumers a choice and helping parents protect their children.

Fair enough, I just interpreted your words differently, given the context of the debate between Crown and Mike that our conversation spun out of.

I'm so sick of this, evidently you haven't read the thread, since I have never advocated 'banning' porn on the internet;

Didn't mean to say you were advocating a ban, but the measures you were arguing for would lead to that if implemented.

Edi

[General Zod]

Alright, let's get down to the tech, although that wasn't my main point. I don't have enough experience with web filtering to develop one right now out of my head, but here are some ideas:
-Since small children shuold be supervised all the time anyway, we don't need to worry about them; if we need to implement a filter for them, it would probably be a whitelist of 100% safe sites.
-Older children will find a way to use the computer alone, but the older they get, the less damaging some lone false negatives (porn slipping through the filter) will be. In addition to a blacklist of explicit sites (since filtering is done by the ISP, they could afford some well-done lists) we could use a word filter (since porn sites often use very explicit words to describe their content). In addition, porn producers don't have to worry about losing their main target group, adults, because they will use unfiltered channels - so they don't have a lot of incentive to really try to circumvent the filters in order to get to the kids. If morality doesn't help, it might very well be illegal to try to circumvent filters designed to protect children, like allowing minors to go into the adult section of a video store.

If they're old and smart enough to sneak about their parents in order to look at porn, exactly how is it going to cause them any harm to look at it? If they're smart enough to circumvent blocks and things of that nature, then they're smart enough to be educated about sex and taught how to handle such emotional situations if and when it occurs.

[GySgt. Hartman]

I'm sorry, I don't see any connection between technical skills and emotional maturity. Kids grow up with computers these days.

[General Zod]

I'm sorry, I don't see any connection between technical skills and emotional maturity. Kids grow up with computers these days.

Let me rephrase it this way. If a kid's going out of his way to work around the blocks put up by a parent, he's old enough to likely know about porn already. Educating him about sexuality is not going to cause harm in any fashion whatsoever by the time they're old enough to realize what it is. What other reason would there be to try and get around the blocks, after all?

[GySgt. Hartman]

First, educating about sexuality never causes harm. If a kid is trying to work around the barrier he might just be curious, but not necessarily prepared for what he will see.
Second, the filter will also protect those who aren't trying to get around it, there is also the factor of protection against involuntary or accidental exposure (like someone posting a link in a chatroom).

[The Yosemite Bear]

I mean I know a kid (son of my on and off SO) who is better at passcodes and tech then his mom is. But she has sat him down and clearly explained things. (Mind you her collection is pretty extensibe and growing (she's got me taping cinemax on friday and saturdays for her....)

[Slartibartfast]

Well, if it's any help, studies show that when kids talk to strangers, they're putting themselves in potential danger, and there is a chance that these kids will be abducted and/or raped, or possibly even killed.

I think we clearly should make strangers illegal.

[Morilore]

studies show that when kids talk to strangers, they're putting themselves in potential danger, and there is a chance that these kids will be abducted and/or raped, or possibly even killed.

I think we clearly should make strangers illegal.

Im siggifying that.

[Peregrin Toker]

studies show that when kids talk to strangers, they're putting themselves in potential danger, and there is a chance that these kids will be abducted and/or raped, or possibly even killed.

I think we clearly should make strangers illegal.

Im siggifying that.

I've FUQed it.