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 cdruGo ColtsPremium,MVM
join:2003-05-14
Fort Wayne, IN
kudos:5
 ·Frontier FiOS
| reply to J E F F
Re: In this day and age it's amazing... said by J E F F:True, no one should expect the RIAA or movie studio's to do anything about child pornography, however, since the ISP's are involved in weeding out the criminals for downloading the latest Britney Spears single, they should also be able to block stuff clearly labelled as child porn. " 6 year old gives blow job to 17 year old boy " in the decription makes it pretty clear How exactly do you block an attachment based off of a subject line of a post? How do you differentiate between a image of, from your example, a child performing oral sex from say a PDF of a news article with the same subject? Computers are still extremely dumb. It's basically impossible to deterministically decide what's obscene/illegal/etc and what's not.
I don't recall ever seeing a single ISP that has gone after one of their customers for downloading something illegal. Just like the RIAA isn't in the child porn biz, ISPs aren't in the music and movie biz. They just don't care. It's not their fight.
ISPs however are in the business of making money. And if something costs them extra money and they don't have a chance to recover it, then they aren't going to allow it. This is why many are looking at caps. It's not WHAT people are downloading. It's how MUCH they are downloading.
ISPs are also going to minimize their liability when it comes to over-reaching attorney generals. There is a real simple formula businesses usually follow when talking about liability. If the benefit of service (aka profit) is less than the cost of offering the service + potential legal costs of offering service, then they aren't going to offer it.
With the current NY AG fight to "stop" child porn by going after Usenet, the ISPs simply decided that the cost + legal was greater then the profit. Usenet doesn't make money. It only costs it. The .000001% of customers that might leave their ISP because they no longer provide Usenet access are simply absorbed as normal churn and won't be felt in the pocket book. In some cases, it actually could make the pocketbook grow thicker as the cost of providing the service is not minimal. Those that must have Usenet will just go to Giganew, Easynews, et al and continue downloading away.
If/when Mr. Cuomo goes after Usenet providers like Giganews or Easynews, expect much more of a fight. These companies do make money off the service so the legal portion of the above formula can be much higher before it tips the scales. They also "get it" and won't be so willing to implement or block something that obviously won't change anything. | |
| said by cdru:How exactly do you block an attachment based off of a subject line of a post? How do you differentiate between a image of, from your example, a child performing oral sex from say a PDF of a news article with the same subject? And going even further, let's say your computer spots a post with an image attachment called "Susie at the beach.jpg" Now is that a kid having fun at the beach (innocent image)? Child porn? An adult at the beach (also innocent image)? Or perhaps adult porn (legal, even if distasteful to some people).
The only way to know is for a human to open it up and even then it can be vague. What looks like an innocent child building a sand castle at the beach to us might be a turn on for someone into child porn. You might have to look at the context of the group, of the poster's previous images, etc. That's not something that computers can reasonably do yet.
All Andrew Cuomo is doing is grabbing some quick and easy good PR. "Hey! Look at me! I'm fighting child porn! Aren't I such a great guy?"
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-Jason Levine
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