[1494] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: So what is the answer?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Sommerfeld)
Thu Oct 10 20:45:37 1991
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 91 20:06:03 EDT
From: sommerfeld@apollo.com (Bill Sommerfeld)
To: edtjda@magic322.chron.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
This is not a new phenomenon -- it's been around for eight or ten
years at least..
Ed seems to want a magic, automatic porno filter which prevents Bad
packets from entering certain "fragile" networks. There ain't ever
gonna be such a thing. Technical solutions to social problems
generally don't work -- and the percieved "problem" of the
transmission of Bad Ideas over the Internet into the Defenseless Minds
of our children is a social problem, not a technical problem.
Students who bring porno into the schools should be disciplined.
Whether they bring it in via magazine, floppy disk, or anonymous FTP
doesn't matter -- if they get caught, they should be disciplined, and
their parents notified if appropriate.
I recall many incidents with computer pornography from my high school
days (1980-1984). There were all sorts of porno computer programs
making the rounds (a graphic "strip poker" game comes to mind), and
many of the BBS systems I spent many an hour dialed up to had
(generally low quality) porno bboards of various sorts.
I also recall an incident where a certain ASCII graphic pinup of a
scantily clad female *somehow* wound up in the login message on our
timesharing system.
Then there was a time when I got into a small amount of hot water when
a junior high student in a introductory BASIC class I was teaching
brought in some porno graphics programs and started showing it off to
his fellow students during the "lab" time of the class. (it was at
that point, I decided that I really *didn't* want to go into
teaching).
What did the People In Charge do? Throw all the Apple II's out of the
school system and only use systems like Commodore PET which didn't
have "high resolution" graphics? Hardly. They just disciplined the
students causing trouble, often letting the parents know just what
kinds of software their kids were trading :-).
Joe, if you don't want your kids exposed to *any* pornography *ever*,
I suggest that you educate them at home in a hermeticly sealed Faraday
cage. The best that can be done is to attempt to avoid these kinds of
incidents through education, react to specific incidents as they
happen, and not refer to them as "sex scandals" or "porno rings".
- Bill
