The internet offers a huge wealth of information both good and bad,unfortunately the vary nature of the internet makes policing this new domainpractically impossible. The internet began as a small university network in theUnited States and has blossomed into a vast telecommunications network spanningthe globe. Today the internet is ruled by no governing body and it is an opensociety for ideas to be developed and shared in. Unfortunately every society hasits seedy underside and the internet is no exception.
To fully understand themany layers to this problem, an understanding of net history is required. Somethirty years ago the RAND corporation, Americas first and foremost Cold Warthink-tank faced a strange strategic problem. The cold war had spawnedtechnologies that allowed countries with nuclear capability to target multiplecities with one missile fired from the other side of the world. Post-nuclearAmerica would need a command and control network, linked from city to city,state to state and base to base. No matter how thoroughly that network wasarmored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to theimpact of atomic bombs. A nuclear bombardment would reduce any network totatters.
Any central authority would be an obvious and immediate target forenemy missiles. The center of a network would be the first place to go. So RANDmulled over this puzzle in deep military secrecy and arrived at their solution.In 1964 their proposed ideas became public. Their network would have no centralauthority, and it would be designed from the beginning to operate while intatters.
All the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all othernodes, each node having its own authority to originate, pass and receivemessages. The messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packetseparately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node andend at some other specified destination node. The particular route that thepacket took would be unimportant, only the final results counted.
Each packetwould be tossed around like a hot potato from node to node, more or less in thedirection of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If bigchunks of the network were blown away, which wouldn't matter, the packets wouldstill stay airborne, moving across the field by whatever nodes happened tosurvive. This system was efficient in any means (especially when compared to thephone system), but it was extremely tough. In the 1960's this concept was thrownaround by RAND, MIT and UCLA. In 1969 the first such node was installed in UCLA.
By December of 69, there were four nodes on the network, which was calledARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The nodes of the network were high-speedsupercomputers. (supercomputers at the time, desktop machines now) Thanks toAPRANET scientists and researchers could share one another's computer facilitiesover long-distances. By the second year of its operation however, APRANET'susers had warped the high cost, computer sharing network into a dedicated,high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post office. The main bulk oftraffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing, it was news and personalmessages.
The incredibly expensive network using the fastest computers on theplanet was a message base for gossip and schmooze. Throughout the 70s this veryfact made the network grow, its software allowed many different types ofcomputers to become part of the network. Since the network was decentralized itwas difficult to stop people from barging in and linking up. In fact nobodywanted to stop them from joining up and this branching complex of networks cameto be known as the internet.
In 1984 the National Science Foundation got intothe act, and the new NSFNET set a blistering pace for technical advancement,linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers through thicker, faster links.ARPANET formally expired in 1989, a victim of its own success, but its usersscarcely noticed as ARPANET's functions not only continued but improved. In 1971only four nodes existed, today tens of thousands of nodes make up the networkand 35 million of users make up the internet community. The internet is andinstitution that resists institutionalization. The internet community, belongingto everyone yet no-one, resembles our own community in many ways, and issusceptible to many of the same pressures. Business people want the internet puton sounder financial footing.
Government people want the Internet more fullyregulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research.Military people want it spyproof and secure. All these sources of conflictremain in a stumbling balance and so far the internet remains in a thrivinglyanarchial condition. This however is a mixed blessing. Today people pay ISP's orInternet Service Providers for internet access.
ISP's usually have fastcomputers with dedicated connections to the internet. ISP's now more than everare becoming the backbone of the internet. The average netcitizen uses theircomputer to call and ISP, and the netcitizens computer temporarily becomes apart of the internet. The user is free to browse or transfer information withothers.
Most ISP's even allow their users to set up permanent homepages on theISP's computer for the whole internet community to view. This is where manyethical and moral questions arise regarding the internet. Not every user wantshis homepage to deal with the spin rates of atoms or the airspeed of SouthAfrican swallows. Some users wish to display "objectionable" materialon their homepages. This may have started out as a prank to some, but now net-porn is an offshoot industry on the information superhighway. Companies likePlayboy and Hustler run their own servers that are permanent parts of theinternet, and on their pages they charge user to view Playboy and Hustler typematerial.
What makes matters worse is evolution of the internet newsgroupsystem. USENET in its infancy was ARPANET's news and message component. TodayUSENET is a huge database with thousands of newsgroups that all internet usershave access to. Millions use groups like alt.comp.
disscussion.games to shareideas, and millions use groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.
teen to shareideas and pictures that are less family oriented. Average users can also set uphomepages on ISP's. In fact, most packages ISP's offer usually include space foryour own homepage. They are easy to create and the ISP's maintain them for freeso the entire online community can see what you have to say.
Unfortunately noteveryone wants to set up homepages dealing with the spin rates of atoms or theairspeeds of South American swallows. Most ISP's are more than willing to set uphomepages dealing with the most gratuitous of acts aimed at very specializedaudiences. This is where the problem of net censorship arises. It is true thatthere is a wealth of pornography and other indecent material online for all tosee. All that a person has to do is to type in an "indecent" word andmodern search engines will point to sites where the word crops up.
Typing in apopular for letter expletive into two of the most popular search engines yielded17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine.However both of these engines have over 60 million cataloged web pages. Althoughthis material makes up less that 1% of all messages on USENET or pages on theworld-wide-web, that is still a staggering number as there are millions ofmessages and web-pages on the internet. Most of this material is extremely hardto access as advanced knowledge of computers is required, however it is theyouth in most families that know how to use the computer best. Problems arisewhen minors left alone on the computer are free to browse some of the mostgraphic pictures ever taken, or to learn the easy way to make a pipe bomb fromhouse-hold ingredients.
The media has a tendency to magnify certain aspects ofreality while completely forgetting about others. The mass media so far has notbeen too kind to the internet. Mainly because television and print magazinesview it as a long-term threat encroaching in on their market. The July 3 1995article of Time magazine featured a cover story labeled "CYBERPORN".Spanning eight pages the article tries to expose the "red lightdistrict" of the information superhighway.
It was the publishing of thisarticle in a high- profile magazine that sparked the whole cyberporn debate.When Time published a cover story on Internet pornography a certain amount ofcontroversy was to be expected. Computer porn, after all, is a subject thatstirs strong passions. So does the question of whether free speech on theInternet should be sharply curtailed, as some Senators and Member of Congresshave proposed. But the "flame war" that ensued on the computernetworks when the story was published soon gave way to a full-blown and highlypolitical conflagration.
The main focus of discontent was a new study,"Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway", purportedlyby a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, which was a centerpieceof Time's story. In the course of the debate, serious questions have been raisedregarding the study's methodology, the ethics by which its data were gatheredand even its true authorship. Marty Rimm, who wrote it while an undergraduate atCarnegie Mellon, grossly exaggerated the extent of pornography on the Internetby conflating findings from private adult-bulletin-board systems that requirecredit cards for payments (and are off limits to minors) with those from thepublic networks (which are not). Many of Rimm's statistics, are eithermisleading or meaningless; for example, the study's now frequently cited claimthat 83.5 percent of the images stored on the USENET newsgroups arepornographic.
A more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent lessthan one- half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet. Othercritics point out that it is impossible to count the number of times those filesare downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented with theopportunity to download, not how many actually do. Rimm has developed his owncredibility problems. When interviewed by Time for the cover story, he refusedto answer questions about his life on the grounds that it would shift attentionaway from his findings. But quite a bit of detail has emerged, much of itgathered by computer users on the Internet.
It turns out that Rimm is nostranger to controversy. In 1981, as a 16-year-old junior at Atlantic City HighSchool, he conducted a survey that purported to show that 64 percent of hisschool's students had illicitly gambled at the city's casinos. Widely publicized(and strongly criticized by the casinos as inaccurate), the survey inspired theNew Jersey legislature to raise the gambling age in casinos from 18 to 21.According to the Press of Atlantic City, his classmates in 1982 voted Rimm mostlikely to be elected President of the U.
S. The next year, perhaps presciently,they voted him most likely to overthrow the government. More damaging to Rimmare two books that he wrote, excerpts of which have begun to circulate on theInternet. One is a salacious privately published novel, An American Playground,based on his experience with casinos. The other, also privately published, istitled "The Pornographer's Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men &Make Lots of Money".
Rimm says it's a satire; others saw it offeringpractical advice to adult-bulletin-board operators about how to marketpornographic images effectively. Neither Carnegie Mellon nor the Georgetown LawJournal has officially backed away from the study (although the university isforming a committee to look into it). Rimm's faculty adviser, Marvin Sirbu, aprofessor of engineering and public policy, continues to support him, saying theresearch has been deliberately mischaracterized by people with a politicalagenda. But Sirbu himself has been attacked by Carnegie Mellon colleagues fornot properly supervising his student and for helping him secretly gather dataabout the pornography-viewing habits of the university's students. Meanwhile,some of the researchers listed as part of Rimm's "team" now say theirinvolvement was minimal; at least one of them had asked Rimm to remove his name.Brian Reid Ph.
D who is the director of the Network System Laboratory at DigitalEquipment Corporation is the author of the network measurement software toolsthat Rimm used to compile his statistics. He had this to say about the Rimmstudy: "I have read a preprint of the Rimm study of pornography and I am sodistressed by its lack scientific credibility that I don't even know where tobegin critiquing it." As a rule, computer-wise citizens of cyberspace tendto be strong civil libertarians and First Amendment absolutists. Some clearlybelieve that Time, by publicizing the Rimm study, was contributing to a mood ofpopular hysteria, sparked by the Christian Coalition and other radical-rightgroups, that might lead to a crackdown.
It would be a shame, however, if thedamaging flaws in Rimm's study obscured the larger and more important debateabout hard-core porn on the Internet. So as a response to the hysteriawide-sweeping legislational machinery was put into motion and Senators Exon andCoats drafted up the infamous Communications Decency Act. Section 502:"Whoever ..
. uses any interactive computer service to display in a manneravailable to a person under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion,proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes,in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,sexual or excretory activities or organs... shall be fined under Title 1, UnitedStates Code, or imprisoned not more than two years.
..." This act outlawsany material deemed "obscene" and imposes fines up to $100 000 andprison terms up to two years on anyone who knowingly makes "indecent"material available to children under 18, as directly quoted from section 502.
The measure had problems from the start. The key issue to senators like Exon iswhether to classify the internet as a print medium like newspapers, or abroadcast medium like television. Unfortunately it is a communications mediumand should be treated as such. If such legislation was passed to controltelephone conversations, many teenagers would get the electric chair at agefifteen.
The Communications Decency Act never passed, but a line in thetelecommunications bill that did pass denounces anything "indecent"being transmitted. The legal ramifications are still being fought over ingovernment as the vague nature of the clause leaves it open to multipleinterpretations. As the issue stands now, there are only two real solutions. Onewould be the adoption of government controls that would infringe on peoplesrights to free speech, but also make the net a safe place to be.
The other wouldfor parents to use filtering software to control what their computer isreceiving.
