web filtering-debate

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Evidence, Please?


Oh, really?

Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 8:19 pm. Post subject: Computers > LINK TO POST <

One of your two statements is a lie. Which is it?


Then you must learn to follow, or go somewhere that has neither leaders nor followers.

Besides, this whole "debate" is moot. You are not in a position to change anything, even if you post a juvenile rant on every website on the Internet.

Sure, there is no problem in disagreeing with the law, as long as you continue to obey it.

As far as web filtering being victimless (it is not a crime, by the way, even in Ireland), why are you and Joe acting like victims?

Evidence, Please?


Oh, really?

Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 8:19 pm. Post subject: Computers > LINK TO POST <

One of your two statements is a lie. Which is it?


Then you must learn to follow, or go somewhere that has neither leaders nor followers.

Besides, this whole "debate" is moot. You are not in a position to change anything, even if you post a juvenile rant on every website on the Internet.

Sure, there is no problem in disagreeing with the law, as long as you continue to obey it.

Things just aren't that black and white.

The principle you state cannot be extended to all laws created by all governments. If people view a law as unjust they can and will defy it, facing the consequences of their actions. If people had not taken a stand against certain laws there would still be slavery, no equal rights for women and America would still be a British colony.

Let me make that clearer, BYPASSING filters is a victimless crime...

Society is the victim of the erosion of our rights (ie. web filtering)...

Either the laws are enacted by the government - which make the government the victim when those laws are broken - or they are rules covered under a user's agreement - which makes the ISP the victim.


Then since you seem to be the self-appointed defender of society's rights, I suggest that you take your case to the governmental body that enacted the laws that either directly prescribe web filtering, or that allow ISPs to decide for themselves what they will filter.

Better yet, just switch to another ISP to access the websites filtered by the school and its ISP! Whining about one facility filtering web content when other ISPs that do no such filtering are available simply makes no sense at all.

Things just aren't that black and white.

The principle you state cannot be extended to all laws created by all governments. If people view a law as unjust they can and will defy it, facing the consequences of their actions. If people had not taken a stand against certain laws there would still be slavery, no equal rights for women and America would still be a British colony.

Good point. Look again at the part that I've highlighted in bold. One of the consequences of defying (i.e., bypassing) an ISPs web filter is to lose the priveledge of using that ISP. Thus, if a school has in place a web filter, and a child is caught attempting to bypass said filter, then the school is well within its rights as a victim to ban the child from accessing the Internet while on school property and/or with school equipment.

Banned users get no sympathy from me.

The government does not count to be the victim, as far as I'm concerned.

How does it affect ANYONE that a teenager bypasses a filter to check their Bebo page?

The school chooses that, not me.

You are but one person, and you do not set the standards or make the laws. Thus, your concerns make little, if any, difference in this matter.


It means that the money spent on maintaining the school's system (network, terminals, et cetera) is being misappropriated - stolen, if you will - for personal use.


It seems that you want to act as if the rules do not apply to you. I hope that you are prepared to deal with the consequences of your actions.

You are but one person, and you do not set the standards or make the laws. Thus, your concerns make little, if any, difference in this matter.

It seems that you want to act as if the rules do not apply to you. I hope that you are prepared to deal with the consequences of your actions.

Good point. Look again at the part that I've highlighted in bold. One of the consequences of defying (i.e., bypassing) an ISPs web filter is to lose the priveledge of using that ISP. Thus, if a school has in place a web filter, and a child is caught attempting to bypass said filter, then the school is well within its rights as a victim to ban the child from accessing the Internet while on school property and/or with school equipment.

Some folks just don't like being told, "No."

Even a 15-year old self-proclaimed "Computer Genius" must learn to follow the rules ... and the law!

Either change the law, learn to live under it, or go somewhere that the law has no effect.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow <barlow@eff.org>

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

The Hacker Manifesto

by
+++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...

Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world...

Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

Doesn't banning web filters require a government action?