[plug] PORNO and our internet

[David Bastow]

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Leon Brooks wrote:

> > Is it??? Can you tell us where there is child porn on the net? I think
> > its all a bit of a myth.
> 
> Click on browser, search... buckets of it. Oddly enough, the best
> protection (aside from a few "preview" pix) appears to be that without
> exception you require a credit card to see more than two or three shots
> of the so-called "good" stuff at each site! Who would ever have thought
> that the purveyors of this stuff would be the best filters?
> 

I think that this is a very good point, that the government seems to have
missed...  `most' adult businesses are more than happy to restrict content
to those over the age of 18, unfortunately there is no easy way to do
this.  I think the best thing the government could have done to limit the
availability of porno to the children would be simply to set up some kind
of government controlled age check and decree by law that all Australian
porno sites MUST use it.

It seems the thing that is getting our friend Senator Harridine most upset
is the fact that you do a perfectly inoccent web-search for `breast
cancer' and end up with a result-set brimming with porn.  Once again most
of this comes from commercial sites with meta-tags approaching 1k or more
of often very loosely related keywords.  

I think the government should at least _try_ some sort of `honour' scheme
before they bring bar everyone from one of the great benifits of the
internet (No I don't mean porn, I mean the ability for _anyone_ to have
their say).

And now that I have...

   David Bastow