[9000] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: sleaze
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Bachmann)
Tue Dec 14 16:53:48 1993
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: (Your message of Tue, 14 Dec 93 12:58:25 PST.)
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 93 15:53:06 -0600
From: Dave Bachmann <bachmann@austin.ibm.com>
I don't think deniability of origin is really the issue here. Posting
X-rated GIF's is not illegal (to my knowledge), any more than
publishing X-rated magazines is. It's the issue of access by minors.
Just as minors are not allowed to buy Playboy (I believe), we may see
some restriction on allowing them to have access to racy GIFs, although
that's going to be difficult.
Any kid with a modem can call up any one of thousands of adult BBS's.
If he doesn't know the number of any, he can go to Bookstop and look
them up in the just-released "Cybersex", which I just saw on the
networking shelves during my noontime browse. Interestingly enough, it
doesn't even make any mention of the netnews-accessible stuff, but does
talk a lot about adult BBS's and gives a list of phone numbers by state
in an appendix.
Anybody with a shell prompt can telnet to the NNTP port of a news
server and download GIF's by talking NNTP. So even if you restrict the
newsgroups available to a kids-only account, if they've got telnet,
they've got it all.
Prodigy had a parental-supervision model built into the service. The
owner of the "A" account for a family (presumably an adult) has special
priveleges wrt the other accounts (the children). You can review thier
list of correspondents, and I believe restrict access to certain
services, in this case the for-fee services.
dave
