Problems Over Porn On Library Computers

from the emotional-reaction dept

Well, this case fits so well with the fears of those who pushed the Supreme Court to say it's ok to force libraries to put filters on their computers that it almost feels like a set up. Apparently, a library in the Chicago area has turned off a bunch of their computers, after a child found porn on them. The library doesn't use filters, and has a very reasonable explanation for that: the filters don't work. They explain that if they just put these non-working filters on the computers, parents would believe the computers were safe and wouldn't monitor their children - but the children would still see porn. The grandmother of the kid who spotted the porn seems to ignore the important part of that policy, and is convinced it's possible to filter out all porn (probably because AOL tells her so). She says it must be possible because she can block porn out at home. She's even gone so far as to file a report with the police about this. Now, clearly, it's not a good thing that this kid found porn on a computer (in the children's part of the library, no less), but the important point is that filters wouldn't have stopped this. Requiring filters would have just made people even less likely to keep an eye on what people on those computers were doing - and could also block out perfectly legitimate sites.
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  • identicon
    Jeremiah, 21 Nov 2003 @ 8:46am

    pr0n surfing

    Maybe the problem is people that surf pr0n at libraries. Perhaps the solution is to adopt the "peep booth" approach, and set aside special areas where adults can, ahem, "research" otherwise off-limits material.

    I'm all for the concept that people should be free to access whatever "information" they see fit, but that right comes with a responsibility and the assumption that a person can exercise that right with a degree of appropriateness in their actual conduct.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Dave, 21 Nov 2003 @ 9:16am

    Spam filters may not work 100%...

    However, they will help to block maybe 80% of the junk that is out there. So maybe a kid can get to some strange site that I myself may not even know about, but it will stop them from getting to places like www.whitehouse.com.

    Now I don't know where the kid was, but I suspect it wasn't an obscure site. It was probably a site like redlight.com or whitehouse.com. Someplace that the kid may have had what he/she thought was a ligitimate site.

    Now, will filters ever block all sites. No. Or they will wind up blocking legitimate sites that don't have any porn in them. Should parents assume their kids are safe when they have filters on? NO! Parents need to take responsibility for their children and what they see and do. You can't set a child down in front of just about anything and assume they are safe.

    As far as AOL being safe. HA! AOL is probably one of the most dangerous places on the net. Mostly because parents think that when they hear AOL claiming that their service is save it must be true. So they let their kids run anywhere they want on AOL including chatrooms and once a kid goes into a chatroom, no matter what the room, they will start getting IM's, e-mail, etc... and it won't take long before their e-mail box starts filling up with all kinds of unpleasant stuff.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Nov 2003 @ 1:21pm

    More than just a filter issue - bad administration

    Apparently, what really happened here was an adult, using the adult section computers, downloaded a bunch of porn and stored it in the MyDocuments folder on his computer, probably before burning it to disk or onto floppy. But the admins at the library went and linked the MyDocuments folder on all computers (adult and kids) to one giant area on a server. Thus any content in the MyDocuments area was visible at all computers. This was probably done in a misguided effort to optimize diskspace usage or prevent having to clear out each computer individually during maintenance.

    Many libraries in the Chicago area put filters on the kid computers and leave the adult computers unfiltered, but this kind of optimization just provided a workaround to the filters.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    JD, 21 Nov 2003 @ 3:53pm

    Why

    I don't understand why people are so "vehemently" against filters. Even if they only do the job 75% of the time isn't that better than nothing at all? Or, maybe we should just severe the internet cord until this issue can be resolved.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 21 Nov 2003 @ 5:53pm

      Re: Why

      I tend to agree. It's important that parents realize that their kids will see porn on the internet, but we know that it's impossible to expect that kids'll be supervised all the time. I think I'd rather they saw a little porn on filtered computers than a whole lot of porn on unfiltered ones.
      And as to filters blocking access to legitemate sites, I think there's like 77.3 bazillion legitemate sites on the internet. Will anyone miss a couple hundred of them? Or thousand? What's the big deal? Especially since most of the sites that get blocked are legitemate sites that talk about the biology of sex, etc. It's impossible to find those sites anyway even on unfiltered computers, since all you'll get for those searches is porn.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Discopete, 22 Nov 2003 @ 1:41pm

        Re: Why

        A couple of those blocked legit sites are National Geographic, NOW, the CDC, Planned Parenthood and the NRA.
        I wouldn't want my child to not be able to see those sites at the library if necessary.
        Progams like netnanny and cybercop block most non-judeo-christian conservative sites on the web.
        Any site that deals with Homosexuality, Alternative religions, abortion, or any other controvertial subject is normally blocked.

        If I wanted this level of government control over what I or my children can see, I'd move to Bejing.

        link to this | view in chronology ]


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