[9058] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: sleaze
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Deutsch)
Wed Dec 15 13:38:23 1993
From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 13:28:38 -0500
In-Reply-To: John [Francis] Stracke's message as of Dec 15, 10:11
To: francis@avalle.insoft.com (John [Francis] Stracke), com-priv@psi.com
[ You wrote: ]
> [ Peter Deutsch wrote: ]
. . .
> >First, you'd have to get an awful lot of people to change
> >an awful lot of software, and I just don't see everyone
>
> You could establish a parallel news system, Authenticated News, that
> would send to standard news systems but not accept from them. . . .
. . .
> Now the people who don't want to see smut (and the people who don't
> want to pay for delivery of megabytes of blonde copyright violations)
> can then restrict themselves, and their children, to Authenticated
> News and its policed zones.
I'm certainly not suggesting that it would be impossible
to build a closed system that sits atop the Internet.
This is realistically the only way you will be able to
limit access where that's desired and there's probably
going to be a nice market for such things as the net
grows.
Of course, if you install a nice sanitized news and email
system onto your SCHOOLnet's PC lab machines, which only
exchanges messages with other school board machines, and
the lab has TCP/IP capability, you're going to find out
eventually that some smart hackers are handing out
floppies with the needed software to allow full telnet and
ftp. At that point they're off to the races. Sure you can
look at blocking certain port numbers, limiting your
routing and all the other technical stuff you will end up
doing. But these are not the answer, in and of themselves.
Now, in reality we can assume that the lab monitors can
keep an eye on things most of the time and there are
techincal solutions that allow some limitation and control,
but that's really the whole point. This is not a problem
(if we agree that there's a problem) that will be solved
by requiring access providers to do something, anything to
protect our children from the site of human skin (or more
to the point, graphic violence, to me _that_ the real
pornography). It seems to me that the Internet is trying
to tell us that we should be keeping an eye on our kids
and not trying to rely on the technical cheap fix.
- peterd
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