July 27, 2001

8:09 PM

Oh my god, the internet has porn on it! (Again.) The U.S. Congress makes their annual re-discovery that not everything on the internet is child-friendly. This time they noticed the Gnutella network. (Yes, I got the link from Slashdot - but I like discussing things here rather than there.)
posted by RylandDotNet (31 comments total)

Doh! This is the link I meant to post. Sorry.
posted by RylandDotNet at 8:15 PM on July 27, 2001

What I really want to know is where you really got the link, and where you really prefer to discuss it?
posted by chaz at 8:21 PM on July 27, 2001

I got the link from a friend on IRC, who got it from Slashdot. I like discussing it here, because the signal/noise ratio here is (usually) lower here than on Slashdot.
posted by RylandDotNet at 8:27 PM on July 27, 2001

why is there *always* some congresscritter from oklahoma involved in this?

geez.
posted by lescour at 8:36 PM on July 27, 2001

We Texans have an old, old joke about Oklahoma... "Why doesn't Texas fall into the Gulf of Mexico? Because Oklahoma sucks."

It just amazes me that every year about this time, politicians remember that there's porn somewhere that a child could get to it. Is it seasonal?
posted by RylandDotNet at 9:00 PM on July 27, 2001

There's porn? On the Internet?
posted by zempf at 9:02 PM on July 27, 2001

what's the internet?
posted by heather at 9:04 PM on July 27, 2001

what's the internet?

It's kinda like AOL.
posted by RylandDotNet at 9:14 PM on July 27, 2001

because the signal/noise ratio here is (usually) lower here than on Slashdot.

Why would you want to discuss it where the signal-to-noise is worse? ;)
posted by kindall at 9:16 PM on July 27, 2001

cool, i hear they have that on computers now.
posted by heather at 9:17 PM on July 27, 2001

Rep. Steve Largent happens to represent me (well, my district anyway). This porn obsession is one of his pet issues, along with 'sending a message to our kids that drugs are BAAAD' and assorted other issues that involve imposing his morality on the rest of us in the Theocratic Christian Homeland of America.

He has his head up his ass, as well as an utter contempt for the Bill of Rights.

He will also most likely end up being the next governor of our state.

*sigh*
posted by Dirjy at 9:41 PM on July 27, 2001

I remember watching Largent give the GOP response to the State of the Union speech a few years ago and throwing things at the television. I keep hoping he'll get caught banging an intern.
posted by swerve at 10:34 PM on July 27, 2001

Why would you want to discuss it where the signal-to-noise is worse?

Er, yes, quite right, I wouldn't. You were paying attention and passed my little test.

*cough*
posted by RylandDotNet at 10:40 PM on July 27, 2001

I keep hoping he'll get caught banging an intern.

I wouldn't count on it. He may be a pious tightass, but I don't think anyone has ever heard anything about him being a hypocrite in the 'family values' area. He apparently does 'walk the walk' -- my problem with him begins when he wants to force everybody else to live the same way.

I have heard that he won't even have a private meeting with a woman (besides his wife) without at least one other staffer present, because he doesn't want to have even the appearance of impropriety anywhere around him.
posted by Dirjy at 11:22 PM on July 27, 2001

He does have his ass up his head. I'd say there's enough room on the Internet for far more porn.
Free, please
posted by fooljay at 11:39 PM on July 27, 2001

It's those Godless, Communist mp3 networks. Of course they're having sex--and outside wedlock to boot! (nice word, wedlock)

And Children & Pornography have become the New ReasonsofNationalSecurity, the New Menace which will excuse all manner of invasive, policestate weirdness.

Nah. You're 50 years too late, Congressman Largent.
posted by aflakete at 1:09 AM on July 28, 2001

And Children & Pornography have become the New ReasonsofNationalSecurity, the New Menace which will excuse all manner of invasive, policestate weirdness.

Exactly. In the 50s, if someone was trying to sell you something, it was like "It's to fight the commies. You wanna fight commies, don't you?" And now it's "It's to protect the children. You want to protect Our Precious Children, don't you?" If you disagree, you're automatically giving aid and comfort to the Enemy.
posted by RylandDotNet at 1:49 AM on July 28, 2001

I personally think that children seeing porn on the internet is a good thing. The first time I saw a woman naked was my mom getting out of the shower. I could have sworn that she was wearing wool panties. It disturbed me for years.

Because of this, I am a strong supporter of the plethora of shaven beaver pictures online.
posted by ttrendel at 2:52 AM on July 28, 2001

> Rep. Steve Largent happens to represent me
> (well, my district anyway).

He's a retired football star (he has footballs on his official web site!), a retired marketing boy, and a former cover boy for World, a fundamentalist organ published by God's World News. Just the sort of gigantic brain you would want to focus on a society's problems.

"It gives our kids access to incredibly lewd, filthy... the worst imaginable type of graphic violence and sex that you can imagine," said Steve Largent, one of the Republican Congressmen who ordered the investigation.

How do I access this Gnutella network? No, maybe I don't want to know. The article says that the third-most popular Gnutella search is (children, avert your eyes) "Star Trek Voyager."

> The first time I saw a woman naked was my mom...

I've forwarded this link to your mother. You two need to talk this one out.
posted by pracowity at 5:40 AM on July 28, 2001

I mean, I'm not saying we should show our 6 year olds Bukakke videos (that's really an "8 and up" thing)

ah! first dong_resin, now you...
posted by lotsofno at 6:26 AM on July 28, 2001

on one of the news programs last night, some reporters were trying to show how you can get pornography over a program called BearShare. they said,

"we typed in 'Britney Spears' and nearly 70% of everything we found was pornographic."

and i am thinking to myself, as i download BearShare to install on my computer, just what better way there could be to get people to use gnutella.
posted by moz at 8:19 AM on July 28, 2001

Italics gone.
posted by gd779 at 9:54 AM on July 28, 2001

Peer-to-peer networks are the devil!
posted by Ptrin at 12:12 PM on July 28, 2001

For example, the Special Investigations
Division used the file-sharing program Aimster to conduct a search for “Britney Spears” videos
on July 24. This is the type of search that a teenage girl might conduct to access music videos of
one of her favorite artists. Aimster, which limits results, returned 100 files. Over 70% of these
results were videos with pornographic titles.

But they didn't download it, did they? Of course not! Just because an XXX name pops up in a search does not mean the kiddies are forced to watch it. There's such a thing as avoidance. Now I realize that a very small percentage of videos/whatever have incorrect titles. But if the teenage girl was "innocently" looking for Britney Spears videos, it would be so easy to just ignore the bad results!

If i get a search result I don't like, then I don't download it. If I do download it, then it's *my fault* for looking at it. Noone was propping open my eyelids with toothpicks and forcing me to see something I didn't want to see.

These government people need to get a life; how about giving me some of my tax money back instead of spending on these st00pid studies.
posted by Maxor at 12:39 PM on July 28, 2001

"The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography."

Hell, most every communication invention in the last 100 100 years world was made popular because of it's facilitation of porn.

But they didn't download it, did they? Of course not! Just because an XXX name pops up in a search does not mean the kiddies are forced to watch it. There's such a thing as avoidance.

But how can they avoid it when they don't know the meaning of XXX? We protect our children from that sort of thing, you know... :-)
posted by fooljay at 1:48 PM on July 28, 2001

Internet? Can I download that?

"The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography."

Yeah, it could be looked at that way. Or it could be looked at realistically. Like the reason computer science provides more ways for the efficient storage, transportation, etc. of porn is because porn on computers is in files, just like... oh... all other data.
posted by DyRE at 4:50 PM on July 29, 2001

"we typed in 'Britney Spears' and nearly 70% of everything we found was pornographic."

There's something about Britney Spears that isn't pornographic? Her "legitimate" "music" videos where she prances around in her schoolgirl outfit? What?
posted by dagnyscott at 8:48 AM on July 30, 2001

HitMeBabyOneMoreTime
posted by fullerine at 10:53 AM on July 30, 2001

This story finally prompted me to download BearShare and see what all the fuss was about.

I was certainly able to find porn, but strangely none of the porn keywords I tried produced any results. "Porn" didn't even produce anything. Sex, xxx, cunt, cock, etc. Nada.

Is there some secret gnutella code used to hide this stuff? The only way I found porn was to search specific names.

Also, I couldn't help but note that any spoof song will eventually be attributed to Weird Al.
posted by obfusciatrist at 11:11 AM on July 30, 2001