Library Lawsuit

[TMGB]

No need to worry about filters here comes the FTC:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_display/0,3440,2109415,00.html

>From the article Sources:FTC report to target kid's privacy
by Maria Seminerio, ZDNN
June 3, 1998

"With speculation running rampant that Thursday's Federal Trade Commission
report on Internet privacy will recommend legislation to protect children in
cyberspace, and possibly even call for broader privacy laws, some experts said
the industry only has itself to blame if the Web's growth is stunted as a
result."

By the way, helping a student search for information on Bonnie and Clyde,
Dillenger , and Capone, we first pulled up a German web page Bonnie and Clyde
a picture of a guy with a gun and a picture of a girl with a gun.  Then the
JAVA Applet started that began a slideshow of graphics.  The second picture
had Bonnie and Clyde in bed with the covers pulled up to their chins.  By this
time I was already grabbing the mouse trying to hit the back button quickly.
I told the student "There's no telling what you will find on an internet
search".  It seems that there were several links to this German porn site
referencing the "series" of Bonnie and Clyde.  Even a clever play on words
isn't necessary to get porn sites.  Ever check the source code for one of
these pages.  How are you going to filter a site that sets keywords half a
page long of unrelated words that the search sites pick up automatically with
robots?

mtcw
Thomas


hyman at sjrlc.org wrote:

> Thank you, Ann. I used to do a little slide demo of how hard it was to get
> porn to just "pop out at you" on the Net. I stopped doing it because it
> was no longer accurate for the reason Ann describes as well as the
> increasingly aggressive marketing/technical practices of porn sites. Even
> when sites don't exactly pop up, they aren't nearly as difficult to
> stumble upon (especially if you're a kid who doesn't pick up on a clever
> play on words) or to arrive in the middle of through a search engine.
>
> All of that aside, it is a surefire mistake to get involved in guessing
> children's motives and blaming parents or children.  Parents are a large
> and traditionally supportive group and blaming them is a place we don't
> want to go. The reality is that this is a challenging time for parents and
> librarians and the stuff on the Net is way more graphic than anything that
> a naturally curious kid (like we were, remember) could find on the adult
> shelves in the library or in the magazine rack at the  7-11. A parent
> who is shocked and dismayed by this stuff doesn't have to be a right wing
> nutcase and their kid doesn't have to be a "behavior problem".
>
> Karen Hyman, Executive Director
> South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative
> 10 Foster Avenue, Suite F-3
> Gibbsboro, NJ 08026
> Phone: 609 346-1222
> Fax:     609 346-2839
> Email: hyman at sjrlc.org
>
> On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Ann S. Owens wrote:
>
> > > > Ah, the files and trash didn't just pop up in front of the child.
> >
> > I've been following this thread, and, after reading this, I just had to
> > add my two cents: files and trash *can* just pop up in front of the
> > child, and has, in my library, when the child used the machine after an
> > adult.  It happened while the child was sitting at the terminal with his
> > mother, with the librarian looking on.  I do not believe filtering is
> > the answer; it would be nice, though, if there was some way of erasing
> > the history automatically after each user.
> > --
> > Ann S. Owens
> > (asowens at ix.netcom.com)
> >



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Thomas McMillan Grant Bennett           Appalachian State University
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