[9081] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Naughty Bits
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (J. Wilson)
Thu Dec 16 00:24:46 1993
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 21:23:22 -0800
From: jwilson@netcom.com (J. Wilson)
To: com-priv@lists.psi.com
Cc: jwilson@netcom.com
thosstew@aol.com writes:
>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...
>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?...
I'd like to make a couple of comments about that.
First, I'd really rather my email to my (hypothetical) nephew didn't get
"marked for special attention" for viewing by a responsible adult, simply
because I talk about my pet cockatiel in my letter.
Second, whenever someone wants to talk about certain frowned-upon topics
on the Net without getting noted by some goverment scanbot, they simply
mistype certain words, i.e. "En Ess Ay" for NSA, "hac|<er" for hacker, and
so on... similar tactics can be employed in email messages to avoid keyword
scans.
I realize both of these points are pretty obvious; I can only hope
that I prevented some well-intentioned online service provider from saying,
"hey! keyword scanning's a good idea!" and implementing it. :)
(Actually, didn't Prodigy once have their software set up to autoremove
postings with "dirty words" in them?)
--
J. Wilson
jwilson@netcom.com
