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calvoiper
join:2003-03-31
Belvedere Tiburon, CA
| reply to emptywig
Re: No Free Speech on Free Wi-Fi
The question of what traverses a Wi-Fi network and what images a person may or may not display in a public are really separate questions.
While I agree that people shouldn't gratuitously display porn in public, this applies whether you're looking at a PC screen or you're looking at a dirty magazine.
Since there are plenty of "private" places where people will be able to surf a "public" Wi-Fi network, there isn't the legal justification to block the whole network just to prevent some perv from sitting in a coffee shop and displaying dirty pictures. Heck, if that is really his goal, then it's easy enough for him to download the images beforehand and then display them off disk. Whether or not the perv has Wi-Fi, public or private, in the coffee shop really doesn't matter.
Saying you must filter porn on any Wi-Fi network to prevent "public display" is like saying you must search every piece of carry-on luggage for porn to prevent the "public display" of dirty pictures on an airplane. In each situation, it's not the existence, transmission, or possession of the porn that is the problem--it's the gratuitous display of it that is the problem. That needs to be addressed directly, not indirectly by blocking information transfer.
calvoiper
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emptywig
Huh? What?
Premium
join:2002-08-05
Pasadena, TX
| True true. All true. I agree with everything you said.
And I still think it's ok to filter the porn.
The problem is, there's no real way to address, directly, the problem of gratuitous (or even inadvertant) display. There's no way to keep people from looking over a shoulder. Its hard to hide the contents of a 15" bright color display (or the bad porn music  )
There's no porn on cable or broadcast (I don't mean PPV-just regular cable).
I think that ultimately, this is just a matter of personal feeling. Like I said above, I agree with you on all your points, and if I were fifteen years younger (not commenting on your age - just mine  ) I would probably be against filtering the porn. But experience tells me that we don't need to be servicing someone's porn jones on a public network. Let them get it from a private provider. I'm fine with that.
Reasonable folks can disagree. 
Cheers,
wig | |
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