March 19, 2002

8:52 PM

Does this actually throw any more responsibility onto ISPs? In PA they are now mandated to block child pornography. But only the kiddy porn the government already knows about. Which apparently anyone can get around, anyway. Noble attempt at eradicating a social scourge or pointless burdensome do-nothing legislation?
posted by umberto (5 comments total)

I guess my real question here is whether there any real value in making even the noblest of laws regarding a subject that no one really disputes if that law requires significant, ongoing work to remain in compliance and is --in essence-- wholly ineffective?
posted by umberto at 8:53 PM on March 19, 2002

I heard that people sometimes drive to places to get child pornography. I think we should make dealing with child pornography the responsibility of the DMV.
posted by hob at 9:58 PM on March 19, 2002

Can anyone guess why pornographic newsgroups are tolerated on USENET? Because people got sick of pornography being posted to regular newsgroups. This will reduce the amount of kiddie porn on USENET by aproximately 0%; they'll just post it to comp.lang.c++.
posted by electro at 10:30 PM on March 19, 2002

So true electro. Every so often you hear a really big rant by people complaining in alt.config about some of the groups and the people in the know will just roll their eyes and tell them there's nothing they can do about it.

If the government knows where these sites are (which is needed to block them), they should just shut them down. This could very quickly make things like gnutella or any other file sharing protocol that can facilitate child porn (maybe even IRC), blocked in PA. This has really opened the floodgates, intentionally or not.
posted by geoff. at 10:44 PM on March 19, 2002

Well, I just got a spam referring me to a kiddy porn site in South Korea. I am doing my best to track down any info I can.
posted by Samizdata at 9:13 AM on March 20, 2002