roundtable: Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal

roundtable: Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal

Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal

Vadim Antonov (avg@sprint.net)
Mon, 4 Dec 1995 22:50:14 -0500 

Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 22:50:14 -0500
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@sprint.net>
Message-Id: <199512050350.WAA11135@titan.sprintlink.net>
To: avg@sprint.net, michael@memra.com
Subject: Re: Congress Brokers Censorship Deal


Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> wrote:
> 
> > Any massive attempt to ban alt.sex.pictures will only cause the pictures
> > to go all over the place.  The Net is very much self-policing, you don't
> > generally find objectionable material in rec.movies.disney (or whatever).
> 
> This is a good point. But we don't REALLY know if this will happen unless 
> we try it. It seems that a reasonable ISP would cut the alt.sex groups 
> given the current situation. Then if the pictures SPAM out all over other 
> hierarchies and finally settle in a new alt.bin.sex hierarchy, a 
> reasonable ISP could be justified in NOT cutting off those newsgroups 
> because to do so would defeat many of the parental control programs. In 
> fact, even today, a reasonable ISP could point to the floating warez 
> groups a evidence that it is NOT reasonable to cut off the sex 
> newsgroups.

Welcome to the wonderful new world.  As a piece of homegrown civil
disobedience i recently wrote a small piece of shareware to automatically
collect uuencoded files from any number of newsgroups, just for the
heck of it.  Voila.  You can prohibit any USENET group but you won't
harm those who want to send and receive pictures of nekkid girls until
you prohibit USENET completely (and *that* means prohibiting modems, good
luck).

What is next step?  Steganography, of course.  Hiding pictures of the
aforementioned nekkid girls inside the GIFs of political posters and
members of Congress is fairly trivial, although a bit bandwidth-expensive.
Any try to prove in court the intent to send an illegal picture (Sorry,
you honour, i'm a fan of Senator Exxon, so i reposted his picture i
obtained on the Net.  I had no way to know there's something wrong about
it).

--vadim


Vadim Antonov
<avg@sprint.net>

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