Kids, WWW and sex
Hubert Halkin
(Elliotte Rusty Harold) wrote:
> ...
> This is a non-issue. Any site can pick and choose what groups it
> wants to get and pass on. If a school doesn't want alt.sex or any alt
> groups it doesn't have to get them. This is exactly how
> Usenet works today.
>
> --
> Elliotte Rusty Harold Department of Mathematics
> elh...@shock.njit.edu New Jersey Institute of Technology
> emh...@hertz.njit.edu Newark, NJ 07102
This is indeed a non-issue as far as Usenet is concerned.
The material coming from a WWW server and accessed via Mosaic is
much harder for a school to handle.
Hubert Halkin
Department of Mathematics
UCSD, La Jolla, CA 92093-0112, USA
George Phillips
Marc Andreessen <ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>The only viable option I see is to block access to offending servers
>at the network level (a selective reverse firewall, I guess). Is such
>a thing difficult to set up?
Lots of routers can do this easily -- they can be told to drop packets
with certain values at certain positions. Simple enough to
drop packets with some IP address in the TCP/IP "to" field. You
could even do it to only specific ports.
You can do this as a kind of an add-on thing. Have a workstation
look at outgoing connections. If it sees one to a bad place, forge
a TCP/IP reset packet and make the caller drop the connection.
I guess you could even have your router distribute bogus routing
information about certain hosts, but that's getting nasty.
So many wonderful things the fascist (or paranoid) network
administrator can do.
Alexsander Totic
>The only viable option I see is to block access to offending servers
>at the network level (a selective reverse firewall, I guess). Is such
>a thing difficult to set up?
No, but that does not solve the problem, because the adult users connected to
the same network want access to those servers :)
Aleks
Albert Lunde
>(Hubert Halkin) writes:
>
> The material coming from a WWW server and accessed via Mosaic is
> much harder for a school to handle.
>
>
>A software-based solution (a list of sites on the client side that
>one's local clients are prohibited from accessing, for example) won't
>cut it, as such things will be fairly easily hacked around by the
>Nintendo Generation, I think.
Someone did this for gopher by adding an extra authentication protocol
and storing user preferences on the server, not in a local file.
I think it was called "The Guide" and was featured in a talk
at the SIGUCCS in San Diego.
Once you give people an unrestricted "Open URL..." or FTP or Telnet
or gopher connection, I agree, there is no way to sanitize the
whole Internet.
K-12 educators can do a reasonable job of damage control by running
their own newsgroups, listservers, gopher and web servers with
content oriented towards their audience and pointing students
there for a start -- but at the same time giving disclaimers
about the net as a whole.
--
Albert Lunde Albert...@nwu.edu
Marc Andreessen
The material coming from a WWW server and accessed via Mosaic is
much harder for a school to handle.
Sigh... it's a rough world out there.
A software-based solution (a list of sites on the client side that
one's local clients are prohibited from accessing, for example) won't
cut it, as such things will be fairly easily hacked around by the
Nintendo Generation, I think.
The only viable option I see is to block access to offending servers
at the network level (a selective reverse firewall, I guess). Is such
a thing difficult to set up?
Marc
--
Marc Andreessen
Enterprise Integration Technologies
Palo Alto, California
ma...@eit.com, ma...@netcom.com
Chuck Shotton
> Marc Andreessen <ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >In article <hhalkin-01...@math174.ucsd.edu> hha...@ucsd.edu
> >(Hubert Halkin) writes:
> >
> > The material coming from a WWW server and accessed via Mosaic is
> > much harder for a school to handle.
> >
> >Sigh... it's a rough world out there.
It's no rougher than giving kids access to cable television or the local
library. I would suspect that there is a lot more stuff that parents would
object to their children seeing in the average community library than is on
the net. People need to understand that there is nothing inherently evil
about the internet, any more than there is with TV, in terms of content.
In terms of a solution, wouldn't the simplest fix be to create a WWW client
that accepts a configurable set hosts that it will connect to? Allow this
information to be configured by an administrator somewhere and locked away.
This way, the problem is solved locally in the client without impacting low
level stuff like routers or hacks to the IP stack on a host. The client
will simply refuse to open URLs with offending hosts in them.
I would thing this would be a trivial addition to any WWW client and is
analogous to locking out certain channels on the cable TV box. Didn't pay
for the Playboy channel? Well, don't pull the plug for the entire
neighborhood, just cut off the signal to *your* TV.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Shotton
csho...@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu "I am NOT here."
Frank Teusink
You seem to be looking at mechanisms that allow you to ban certain kinds
of articles from your local WWW browser. You might be interested at looking
at the interpedia newsgroup. One think they are (thinking of) implementing
are SOAP's (Signs Of APproval); annotations to articles that people
(organizations) can attach to articles. Among others, SOAP's could be used
to label articles as child-save. I think this might turn out to be the
solution to your problem (somewhere in the future).
Frank Teusink
Olaf Titz
In article <MARCA.94M...@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>,
Marc Andreessen <ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> In article <hhalkin-01...@math174.ucsd.edu> hha...@ucsd.edu
> (Hubert Halkin) writes:
>
> The material coming from a WWW server and accessed via Mosaic is
> much harder for a school to handle.
There is exactly one solution to this "problem", but it may be a
really hard one, as it involves breaking such taboos as admitting that
not every mention of sex is dangerous to under-18-year-olds.
Even if you disagree, you should see that this is not a technical, but
a political problem and as such requires other than technical
solutions.
> The only viable option I see is to block access to offending servers
> at the network level (a selective reverse firewall, I guess). Is such
> a thing difficult to set up?
It is far *too* easy - vendors are supplying devices exactly designed
for crippling networks in this way. Mostly they are deployed where
unnecessary.
Olaf
--
olaf titz o ol...@bigred.ka.sub.org praetorius@irc
comp.sc.student _>\ _ s_t...@ira.uka.de LINUX - the choice
karlsruhe germany (_)<(_) uk...@dkauni2.bitnet of a GNU generation
what good is a photograph of you? everytime i look at it it makes me feel blue
Chris Houck
> [marca sez:]
> >Sigh... it's a rough world out there.
>
>that accepts a configurable set hosts that it will connect to? Allow this
>information to be configured by an administrator somewhere and locked away.
>This way, the problem is solved locally in the client without impacting low
>level stuff like routers or hacks to the IP stack on a host. The client
>will simply refuse to open URLs with offending hosts in them.
Yup, but then someone could just use the installed crippled
client to download a real one and you are back at square one.
Or the kids could bring in a real client on their own disk
and use that rather than the installed client.
Or...
-Chris
John Ockerbloom
doesn't want its users to see a Web server with material with sexual
content (or violent content, or content teaching that evolution might be
true, or content upholding patriarchal Eurocentric values) is to have
the site admin write to the server maintainer and ask them to deny
HTTP requests from their school's domain. NCSA httpd and other
servers can easily do this with their access control technology,
if the server maintainer's willing to set up the appropriate files.
Of course, someone at the school has to take the trouble of finding
out where these dangerous sites are. And some kids might still be
able to connect using hosts outside the school, but at that point
I can't see how this would be the school's problem.
I do agree with earlier posters, though, that this is really
a social and political issue, rather than a technical one.
John Ockerbloom
--
==========================================================================
ocker...@cs.cmu.edu 4209 Murray Ave., Pittsburgh PA 15217
Patrick Atoon
>Yup, but then someone could just use the installed crippled
>client to download a real one and you are back at square one.
>
>Or the kids could bring in a real client on their own disk
>and use that rather than the installed client.
When kids can do that, they are probably also old enough to know
everything about sex. ;-)
>-Chris
Greetings,
Patrick
Fled Fairlane
This seems like a much more viable solution than trying to lock out
*every* host that has objectionable material on it. Who would keep track
off all of the hosts that fall into this catagory... Maybe Scott Yanoff
could start a new list "Yanoff's list for Paranoid Parent's and
Institutions".
It also wouldn't seem fair to lock out a whole host just because
of some of the material on it. There may be some very
educational/worthwhile material on it as well. Imagine locking out nsca
or even rtfm.mit.edu [the alt.sex.* FAQ's], etc.
I have a question for Frank - what about articles that have not
been assigned any form of SOAP. Would you have to *only* allow articles
with SOAP's?
=O.| fled
=O
Andrew M. Ross
censor for sexually-explicit FTP sites... usually, once the site becomes
known, it is flooded with connect requests so fast that it has to be shut
down. I don't see why it would be any different for WWW sites...
Of course, once technology improves, this will change.
--
Andrew Ross, ros...@dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu
Alexsander Totic
> When kids can do that, they are probably also old enough to know
> everything about sex. ;-)
>Kids who *can't* do that probably aren't old enough to be interested
>in sex in the first place. (Girls, yuck, I always said. Little did
>*I* know...)
I just find it very curious how today's kids are portrayed as not very smart
when it comes knowing any classical subjects, and as wizards when it comes
to using computers.
I would really like to change the Followup-To: line to something more
appropriate, but can't think of anything appropriate.(eff?)
Aleks
Mike Meyer
> This is indeed a non-issue as far as Usenet is concerned.
> The material coming from a WWW server and accessed via Mosaic is
> much harder for a school to handle.
It's only a non-issue for usenet if you don't install any of the
NNTP-based news readers, and don't allow your students to install
software (the latter is a good trick). There are any number of
promiscuous news servers that offer the entire netnews tree.
Personally, I see it as a non-problem. If they're reading
alt.sex.bondage, they're not watching TV. In the US, the violence in
the ads in an hour of "family TV" is much more offense than a days
worth of postings to alt.sex.bondage. So this is clearly a case of a
lesser evil being the better alternative.
<mike
Marc Andreessen
csho...@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Chuck Shotton) writes:
In terms of a solution, wouldn't the simplest fix be to create a
WWW client that accepts a configurable set hosts that it will
connect to? Allow this information to be configured by an
administrator somewhere and locked away.
They'd hack around that so fast it'd make your head spin.
I would thing this would be a trivial addition to any WWW client
and is analogous to locking out certain channels on the cable TV
box. Didn't pay for the Playboy channel? Well, don't pull the plug
for the entire neighborhood, just cut off the signal to *your* TV.
It isn't analogous because of the differences in the technology
involved.
Marc Andreessen
writes:
>Yup, but then someone could just use the installed crippled
>client to download a real one and you are back at square one.
>
>Or the kids could bring in a real client on their own disk
>and use that rather than the installed client.
When kids can do that, they are probably also old enough to know
everything about sex. ;-)
Kids who *can't* do that probably aren't old enough to be interested
in sex in the first place. (Girls, yuck, I always said. Little did
*I* know...)
Marc
Marc Andreessen
writes:
>One think they are (thinking of) implementing are SOAP's (Signs Of
>APproval); annotations to articles that people (organizations) can
>attach to articles. Among others, SOAP's could be used to label
>articles as child-save. I think this might turn out to be the
>solution to your problem (somewhere in the future).
Until some smart arse forges a SOAP for alt.sex.binaries.staff.room and
all the other dodgy stuff you're trying to keep away from the kids. And
if there's one thing you can almost totally guarantee from a bunch of
school children its that there is some really bright smart arse whose
just waiting for a challenge like this.
Oh yeah -- in fact, you can practically guarantee that a significant
percentage of them will be up to the challenge, these days.
Erik Selberg
Frank> articles as child-save. I think this might turn out to be
Frank> the solution to your problem (somewhere in the future).
It seems to me that these kinds of SOAPs will be
(a) culturally subjective
(b) difficult to implement
(a) One of the big plusses of WWW is the first W --- World. People
from outside North America usually have a much more liberal view of
what "child-safe" means.
(b) I suspect that SOAPs will be automated, as most people can't be
persuaded to put any headers besides Subject: in their posts nowadays.
Therefore, you could have a low of confusion, especially in followups
to and from various newsgroups. Also, the SOAP isn't enforcing --- I
could easily post a non-child-safe message, include the SOAP, and
OOPS! Children grow up a bit faster today.
-Erik
Erik Selberg
Chuck> or the local library. I would suspect that there is a lot
Chuck> more stuff that parents would object to their children
Chuck> seeing in the average community library than is on the
Chuck> net. People need to understand that there is nothing
Chuck> inherently evil about the internet, any more than there is
Chuck> with TV, in terms of content.
Right... but most parents are (slightly) comforted that the average
kid doesn't read Lady Chatterly's Lover, especially when Batman #553
is out.
Chuck> In terms of a solution, wouldn't the simplest fix be to
Chuck> create a WWW client that accepts a configurable set hosts
Chuck> that it will connect to? Allow this information to be
Chuck> configured by an administrator somewhere and locked away.
I suspect this is what will happen; however, this will probably cut
the site off from 99% of the world. It would be a waste to have access
to the World Wide Web and only use a limited access Virtual Tourist
and the NOAA Weather site.
Chuck> This way, the problem is solved locally in the client
Chuck> without impacting low level stuff like routers or hacks to
Chuck> the IP stack on a host. The client will simply refuse to
Chuck> open URLs with offending hosts in them.
But that's such an enourmous task... you have new hosts springing up
every day. Never underestimate the power of a kid to go surfing,
especially with a tool as easy to use as Mosaic. How quickly do you
think they'll find CNAM? Or other less-thrilling servers in other
places in Europe?
Chuck> I would thing this would be a trivial addition to any WWW
Chuck> client and is analogous to locking out certain channels on
Chuck> the cable TV box. Didn't pay for the Playboy channel? Well,
Chuck> don't pull the plug for the entire neighborhood, just cut
Chuck> off the signal to *your* TV.
One final thing to mention. The average K-12 school teacher is far
less knowledgable about the machine than the students. For example, my
mom is currently working with a weather tracking system in her 5th
grade class --- just a PC with some software and a modem hooked up to
a dish on the roof. While my mom knows enough about Macs, she's only
slowly getting up to speed with things like COPY and DIR. Telnet and
FTP are staggering. Some (not all) of her kids are constantly playing
with it while she's busy with the rest of the class, and they're
becoming much more adept at the system than she is.
The point: WWW / Mosaic is like a big Pandora's Box. The teachers are
probably going to be the ones playing sysadmin, and I suspect the
majority won't have the knowledge to do a great job with regards to
security. Once they let their kids play with WWW, I suspect some will
start surfing all over the place and get into places their parents may
or may not desire. I really doubt teachers (and even sysadmins) can
stop this.
I'll just stop here and say I think this is entirely a social issue,
and I doubt that any solution brought up in this discussion will scale
to the entire network when mainstream America hooks up (interesting
how I really don't consider mainstream Anywhere Else to be much of a
threat to free speech and gifs... :)
-Erik
Pascal DEGIOVANNI
this subject. Someone said it's a social problem. I agree with that. Does anybody
on the Net really thinks it's consistent to worry about the morality of WWW servers
while unemployment and precarity are concerning more and more people in some
industrilized country?? In my opinion, one should try to fight those problems
wich are the real origin of violence in some industrialized countries instead of
starting endless debates on morally correct versus morally incorrect WWW servers.
Regards, Pascal Degiovanni.
Paul Crowley
> Until some smart arse forges a SOAP for alt.sex.binaries.staff.room and
> all the other dodgy stuff you're trying to keep away from the kids.
>Oh yeah -- in fact, you can practically guarantee that a significant
>percentage of them will be up to the challenge, these days.
Not necessarily. Suppose the SOAPs are authenticated with public key
signatures. Supposing the kid's account is on a machine running a
capability-based operating system like Mach, and s/he doesn't have a
capability for arbitrary internet connections. Supposing the only
capability s/he has is for a local proxy server which will only serve
documents with SOAPs that check out. Forging the SOAPs becomes
effectively impossible, and building Mosaic locally does you no good
because you won't be able to connect to anywhere without using the
restricted proxy server.
The cultural dependance of what's OK isn't a problem either---you just
choose a "child-safe" SOAP issuer whose idea of what is child-safe
agrees with yours.
__ _____
\/ o\ Paul Crowley p...@dcs.ed.ac.uk \\ // 42A47697 54144EA4 BACFA9FD C9433347
/\__/ Trust me. I know what I'm doing. \X/ WWW: http://tardis.ed.ac.uk/~pdc/
Peter Flynn
Unconvinced. The movie of a horse and a woman posted in one of the
alt.binaries groups is probably way stronger than anything my kids
could watch on cable.
///Peter
Frank Teusink
> Frank> articles. Among others, SOAP's could be used to label
> Frank> articles as child-save. I think this might turn out to be
> Frank> the solution to your problem (somewhere in the future).
>It seems to me that these kinds of SOAPs will be
> (a) culturally subjective
Definitely. For instance, I live in The Netherlands: the Sodom *and*
Gomorra of the Western World ;-)
> (b) difficult to implement
I don't even want to think of it. ;-)
>(a) One of the big plusses of WWW is the first W --- World. People
>from outside North America usually have a much more liberal view of
>what "child-safe" means.
I agree. But I suspect that would be the nice thing about these SOAP's.
Some people could insist that every article their children read should
have a SOAP of the North American Association Against Moral Degeneration,
while the children of Us Enlightened Europeans would probably use that
same SOAP as an indication that that article is boring ;-)
>(b) I suspect that SOAPs will be automated, as most people can't be
>persuaded to put any headers besides Subject: in their posts nowadays.
>Therefore, you could have a low of confusion, especially in followups
>to and from various newsgroups. Also, the SOAP isn't enforcing --- I
>could easily post a non-child-safe message, include the SOAP, and
>OOPS! Children grow up a bit faster today.
I guess that's the big point. These SOAP's are only interresting if you
have some way of making sure that they are authentic. How to do that? I
have no idea (I hope others are smarter than me ;-) ). But clearly
authentification is *the* essential ingredient of this SOAP idea.
Frank Teusink
Dan Busarow
: I have a question for Frank - what about articles that have not
: with SOAP's?
The Interpedia is just in the formative stages and we do not have any
hard answers for this question. Using SOAPs to restrict access is
problematic in that we envision a SOAPs use as being under the direct
control of the end user. An Interpedia client will need to allow
the user to change their retreival criteria, including SOAPs to look for
and rating values, on the fly in order to be useful for in depth research.
You would need to cripple the client side in order to prevent this and that
is no more desirable (or likely to work) than crippling your WWW client.
Frank's suggestion to join in the discussion on comp.infosystems.interpedia
is the best bet. We may want to add some logic to the servers, which are
"safe", so that a "K12SAFE" SOAP is required if the request is coming from
a domain which has requested such a restriction. The restriction request
would need to be processed off line via email, paper mail and phone and is
very much a political issue, not technical.
Dan
--
Dan Busarow d...@dpcsys.com uunet!cedb!dan
DPC SYSTEMS Monrovia, CA (818) 305-5733
Marinella Callow
Am I the only person in the whole wide world that was exposed to Oui,
Hustler and "sicker" publications when I was 12, with no obvious harm done?
Kids have *always* found ways around our taboo against letting them know
anything but the most sanitized view of adult sexual life. In fact, it's
probably part of normal human development to do so . . .
SuperFlyBri
Matt Ranney
Also, cops shouldn't give out speeding tickets. And why bother to
comb your hair? The time you save could be better spent fighting the
problems which are the real origin of violence.
--
Matt Ranney - m...@syl.dl.nec.com
"You know, I don't think theres a man, woman, or child alive today
who doesn't enjoy a lovely beverage." -DL
Marc Andreessen
writes:
Suppose the SOAPs are authenticated with public key signatures.
Supposing the kid's account is on a machine running a
capability-based operating system like Mach, and s/he doesn't have
a capability for arbitrary internet connections. Supposing the
only capability s/he has is for a local proxy server which will
only serve documents with SOAPs that check out.
Those are three awfully big suppositions.
Marc Andreessen
mar...@iserver.onyx-pharm.com (Marinella Callow) writes:
Am I the only person in the whole wide world that was exposed to
Oui, Hustler and "sicker" publications when I was 12, with no
obvious harm done?
I think so -- I myself was twisted for life. What a cross to have to
bear... (or, in the immortal words of jonm, a dirty mind is a terrible
thing to waste).
Olaf Titz
> The cultural dependance of what's OK isn't a problem either---you just
> choose a "child-safe" SOAP issuer whose idea of what is child-safe
> agrees with yours.
This is in fact the biggest problem. Given the many, many divergent
opinions on the Internet, you'll never find someone who absolutely
agrees with you in that regard, *and* whom you can trust enough to not
fool you.
Unless, perhaps, you're an absolute hard-liner wrt. filtering out
everything that could look like a nasty word. :-)
Olaf Titz
Mike Meyer <m...@contessa.phone.net> wrote:
> It's only a non-issue for usenet if you don't install any of the
> NNTP-based news readers, and don't allow your students to install
> software (the latter is a good trick). There are any number of
> promiscuous news servers that offer the entire netnews tree.
And are accessible without any newsreader software just with a simple
telnet command. (DO NOT assume that your kids aren't smart enough to
learn using raw NNTP in less than an hour.)
Paul Chamberlain
>This is in fact the biggest problem. Given the many, many divergent
>opinions on the Internet, you'll never find someone who absolutely
>agrees with you in that regard, *and* whom you can trust enough to not
>fool you.
No more a problem than some *one guy* at the TV network that
decides a little titty can't be shown but it's okay to show
people getting their brains blown up. .. Sorry, this peeve
clearly doesn't belong here.
--
Paul Chamberlain | <I do NOT speak for IBM!> | UNIX: t...@austin.ibm.com
IBM AWS, I/O Dev | 512/838-3759, IBM T/L 678 | IBM-VNET: TIF AT AUSTIN
Jesse Montrose
: In article <marinel-03...@ets.onyx-pharm.com>
: mar...@iserver.onyx-pharm.com (Marinella Callow) writes:
: Am I the only person in the whole wide world that was exposed to
: Oui, Hustler and "sicker" publications when I was 12, with no
: obvious harm done?
: I think so -- I myself was twisted for life. What a cross to have to
: bear... (or, in the immortal words of jonm, a dirty mind is a terrible
: thing to waste).
Aint it the truth, hardly a day goes by when I don't curse my
"sneaking looks at magazines" childhood. If only I'd grown up pure and
clean, I might not be the drooling maniac I am today.
I don't have children, but plan to someday, and I'm going to make
for damned sure that they never see a naked Member Of The Opposite Sex until
they're at least 35. I'll make them watch edited network television, where
actors holler "Flip you!" at each other in strangely mismatched voices
before they shoot other actors in the head.
(Jesse sighs and wanders off)
--
_____________________________________________________________________________
Jesse Montrose je...@netcom.com je...@xoastools.com ftp.netcom.com:/pub/jesse
World Wide Web information with ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/jesse/html/home.html
Alan J Flavell
t...@austin.ibm.com (Paul Chamberlain) writes:
{Yet another posting that has only tenuous connections with WWW
deleted. Nothing against you personally, please understand}
Sigh. Just as this discussion was finally dying out on yet another
irrelevant newsgroup, it goes and starts up here. Can't you see that
this is has to do with network policy in general, and not specifically
concerned with WWW? This topic has probably been done to death
already on the relevant newsgroups. Aren't you(-all) willing to take a
look, and join in the cut and thrust (woops, perhaps a poor choice of
phrase in such a context) over there???
What do you hope to gain by raising it here? Or are you all afraid
to expose your argument to specialists in that field?