[9080] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Naughty Bits on the Net
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (thosstew@aol.com)
Wed Dec 15 23:13:57 1993
Errors-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
Errors-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
From: thosstew@aol.com
Errors-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
Reply-To: <thosstew@aol.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 23:09:11 EST
It seems to me that there are two ways to get pornography from the net. One
is to find it. The other is to be sent it. It also seems to me that there is
a large moral difference between the two. That is, if a 10-year-old receives
feelthy peectures in the mail, the sender is more culpable than the producer
of the self-same pictures if the child goes out and finds them, or even
inadvertently stumbles upon them.
If that's the case, then one might want to consider looking for ways to
inhibit the _sending_ rather than the mere _posting_ of what our British
cousins call the naughty bits, where minors are involved. The neat thing
about the naughty bits is, if they're truly naughty, they tend to use the
same small set of words of one syllable. Some of these words are also used
in marvelous literature and everyday discourse, even among the self-same
10-year-old children, granted, but that is irrelevant for our purposes here.
This being the case, at least where text is concerned, why not make available
some simple keyword search software that would automatically spot messages
employing these words and lock 'em up till Mom or Dad or some other key-owner
was able to vet them? More difficult with GIFs, but it ought to be possible
to put a lock on aGIF conversion software, too, so that the kids would see
only gibberish unless an adult unlocked the converter.
If Johnny or Janie is enterprising enough to prowl the net and find the
goodies on his or her own, that's not my moral problem, or even the poster's.
And, hey, at least till the net has a user-friendly interface, if the tykes
manage to find alt.sex.bestiality.barney on their own, more power to them.
