NY’s Top Child Porn
In the quaint old days of the internet, before forums and mailing lists and yahoogroups, was a place called usenet. It is still around today, but due to an encoding method that changes video and audio files into text and back again, it is now home mostly to people swaping pirated movies and songs.
Well thatss all getting shut down by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (damn those evil right fundementalists) in an effort to ‘fight child porn’. Ya see, along with all the pirated movies and songs, usenet file swaping can also be used to send child porn images.
The most trouble thing about this move, for me at least, is that the blocking is being done at the global ISP level. AT&T, AOL, Verizon, TimeWarner, Sprint. They have all signed on. So if someone in california tries to upload pirated music to a computer-server in Texas, a New York law would block that action.
This is nothing new. Back in 2002 in my home state of Pennsylvania, a similar thing happened. A law as passed requiring ISPs to block child porn websites. Again, this was at the ISP level, so someone in Alabama trying to access a website hosted on a computer in New Hampshire would be blocked by the Pennsylvania law. But wait, it gets weirder. The government refused to list the websites that were required to be blocked. So ISPs had to block websites without knowing what websites they were required to block.
I remember when I first heard of this law, I tried to call it to the attention of my local group. They were operating a mailing list at the time and I voiced my concern there that ISPs would be forced into a ‘kill em all and let god sort it out’ situation in order to try and comply with this law. I asked if this would create the risk of any kink websites being unfairly targeted. The conversation fell on deff ears however because the mailing list was in the middle of a hot debate arguing the difrence between ’subbie’ and ’submisive’ and asking if the word ’subbie’ was derogotary …… Gotta have your priorties I guess.
In the end it didn’t matter anyway, the law was struck down as overly broad.
Now the same thing is starting up all over again in new york. It kind of makes me wonder if politicians write bad law on purpose with the goal of having it struck down. That way you could preserve the status quo yet still claim ‘I voted to stop child porn’ in yoru campaign ads.
But you woudl think they could of at least picked a better domain name for this. The New York Atorny Generals office just launched the website www.nystopchildporn.com for news and information on their campaign. Is that “nys top child porn” or is that “ny stop child porn”? This one has got to rank right up there with www.penisland.net