censorship
The internet offers a huge wealth of information both good and bad, unfortunately the vary nature of the internet makes policing this new domain practically impossible. The internet began as a small university network in the United States and has blossomed into a vast telecommunications network spanning the globe. Today the internet is ruled by no governing body and it is an open society for ideas to be developed and shared in. Unfortunately every society has its seedy underside and the internet is no exception. To fully understand the many layers to this problem, an understanding of net history is required. Some thirty years ago the RAND corporation, Americas first and foremost Cold War think-tank faced a strange strategic problem. The cold war had spawned technologies that allowed countries with nuclear capability to target multiple cities with one missile fired from the other side of the world. Post-nuclear America 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 was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear bombardment would reduce any network to tatters. Any centr
pired in 1989, a victim of its own success, but its users scarcely noticed as ARPANET's functions not only continued but improved. In 1971 only four nodes existed, today tens of thousands of nodes make up the network and 35 million of users make up the internet community. The internet is and institution that resists institutionalization. The internet community, belonging to everyone yet no-one, resembles our own community in many ways, and is susceptible to many of the same pressures. Business people want the internet put on sounder financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated. Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people want it spyproof and secure. All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance and so far the internet remains in a thrivingly anarchial condition. This however is a mixed blessing. Today people pay ISP's or Internet Service Providers for internet access. ISP's usually have fast comput! censorship arises. It is true that there is a wealth of pornography and other indecent material online for all to see. All that a person has to do is to type in an "indecent" word and modern search engines will point to sites where the word crops up. Typing in a popular for letter expletive into two of the most popular search engines yielded 17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine. However both of these engines have over 60 million cataloged web pages. Although this material makes up less that 1% of all messages on USENET or pages on the world-wide-web, that is still a staggering number as there are millions of messages and web-pages on the internet. Most of this material is extremely hard to access as advanced knowledge of computers is required, however it is the youth in most families that know how to use the computer best. Problems arise when minors left alone on the computer are free to browse some of the most graphic pictures ever ta! e material. What makes matters worse is evolution of the internet newsgroup system. USENET in its infancy was ARPANET's news and message component. Today USENET is a huge database with thousands of newsgroups that all internet users have access to. Millions use groups like alt.comp.disscussion.games to share ideas, and millions use groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen to share ideas and pictures that are less family oriented. Average users can also set up homepages on ISP's. In fact, most packages ISP's offer usually include space for your own homepage. They are easy to create and the ISP's maintain them for free so the entire online community can see what you have to say. Unfortunately not everyone wants to set up homepages dealing with the spin rates of atoms or the airspeeds of South American swallows. Most ISP's are more than willing to set up homepages dealing with the most gratuitous of acts aimed at very specialized audiences. This is where the problem of net ! on the USENET newsgroups are pornographic. A more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent less than one- half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet. Other critics point out that it is impossible to count the number of times those files are downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented with the opportunity to download, not how many actually do. Rimm has developed his own credibility problems. When interviewed by Time for the cover story, he refused to answer questions about his life on the grounds that it would shift attention away from his findings. But quite a bit of detail has emerged, much of it gathered by computer users on the Internet. It turns out that Rimm is no stranger to controversy. In 198
Some common words found in the essay are:
Post-nuclear America, South American, Carnegie Mellon, Science Foundation, Playboy Hustler, Thanks APRANET, Service Providers, United Code, , Decency Act, nodes network, carnegie mellon, cover story, rimm study, internet community, information superhighway, set homepages, set homepages dealing, users internet, material makes, decency act, spin rates atoms, communications decency act,
Approximate Word count = 2498
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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