[6930] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Rating System for WWW Pages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Sun Dec 4 11:55:26 1994
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 1994 17:29:09 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: goer@mithra-orinst.uchicago.edu
From: goer@mithra-orinst.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
>We had a problem with some people downloading porn stuff with company
>workstations during business hours which was (in political terms) "an
>invalid use of company resources".
There's another issue to consider here, too. In universities there are
often huge numbers of users on a system at any given time, with limited
disk space and CPU cycles. Whether or not downloading porn pictures is
"an invalid use of institution resources" it's just a big fat pain in
the ass. Those pictures use up tremendous amounts of disk space, and
serve no legitimate academic purpose. Many of them violate copyrights.
To me, excluding porn sites (and similar Usenet newsgroups) is no more
censorship than excluding cheap gossip rags from a university library's
list of standing orders.
Let the undergraduate weanies jerk off over magazines they bought them-
selves, and stop wasting everyone else's time and disk space ;-).
Richard Goerwitz
goer@midway.uchicago.edu
