Trouble: Into every life, some rain must fall
Pornography
Is this a boon or bane? It depends on your attitude, ideology and location.
Obviously, it's a boon: The public wants sex. It wants more sex than it's getting. Therefore, it wants pornography to help ease the sexless life. Sadly, computer programmers don't tend to get the attention they deserve from the opposite sex <frown>.
Obviously, it's a bane: Certain members of the public are against sex. They want to eliminate sexual material of all kinds, from talk about condoms to explicit pictures and such. The existance of the CDA, CDA II, and other attempts to reign in the online world shows that, alas, these nice folks have power and resources.
So, you may wonder, why does this depend on your location? The answer is the Miller standard: Pornography, to be illegal, must be contrary to the community standards of your area. A typical jury must find it without redeeming value. Obviously, here in Southern California, it's unlikely that much of anything would be found sufficiently offensive to put its creator in jail for ten years. But in the Bible Belt, there are battles over Playboy magazine.
So this issue probably doesn't affect you at all if you're in a liberal jurisdiction, but if you happen to be in Oklahoma, home of the infamous Paul Cardin and his (now apparently deadish) NCCIP, or the legendary Bob Anderson of OCAF, you're bound to be worrying.
I've written a detailed essay on this subject, albiet a little dated, which is still worth reading.
Recently, a free web hosting service was held responsible by a French court for infringing content on its server. This led to the closure of the service and serious financial damage to its founder. France has always danced to a different drummer on cases of this sort, so I'm not sure if it would apply in the US. My suspicion is that it wouldn't, but we'll have to wait until the court case to find out. Certainly Yahoo, who owns GeoCities, is bound to be more capable of funding a spirited defense than the founder of the French service.
Of course this doesn't prevent me from being completely appalled by the decision.
Blocking Software
This is a very interesting and controversial subject.
The idea behind blocking software is simple: There are "bad" sites we don't want kids to see. We can determine whether a site is "bad" based on what the content offered is. We can also use self-assigned ratings to determine what is "bad". This should be especially easy in the case of many adult sites, which have a legal obligation to at least appear to prevent minors from accessing them.
Blocking software would be great if two things were true:
As it happens, neither of these are true. censorware.org, the anti-blocking software site, found highly embarassing examples of sites blocked by the "felony load" version of X-Stop, a program that was advertised as blocking only the most egregious, illegal sites. Among the blocked sites were Godiva Chocolates, a maker of educational kid's toys, numerous sites with text content on gay rights and activism, and so on.
This is but the most recent report from this anti-censorship group; before it was formed, the individual members dissected such products as CyberPatrol, CyberSitter, Net Nanny and others. None of them had block lists that could stand up under scrutiny.
So, what can we do about parents who want to "protect" their children from what's out there? Sadly, the real truth is that there is no way to protect anyone from the problems of the outside world. Kids are exposed to adult feelings and desires at school, in the music they play, the books they read and the TV shows they watch. To say that they can be "protected" is, in my view, naive and foolish. Far better to arm them against hazards through good parenting then to trust TV networks, radio stations or - for that matter - computer programs - to do it for you.
A number of ISPs have tried the proxy-based blocking service Bess, the Internet Retriever. Reports from Inet-Access show that sites that try and use Bess as a marketing tool or an extra-charge value-added service face very weak demand. I have no data as to the quality of the blocking done by Bess; it has not yet been studied by the censorware.org people. However, I would expect it to be neither better nor worse than any other filter. It does have the advantage that the block list can be changed on a continuous online basis, instead of through software updates.
Pornography and USENET News
For information on Paul Cardin's crusade to make USENET a cleaner, duller place, see my essay on his efforts. Be warned that this material may be somewhat dated - but so is Paul; I haven't heard a peep out of him lately.