Jeff Weinstein writes:
I predict that 6 months after the first internet rating system is widely deployed, the largest use of search engines such as altavista will be to look for pages with the most "naughty" ratings. Perhaps such services will allow text searches for free, but charge for searches based on the rating tag...
Not much crypto relevance, but the CDA has had much more effect than we may realize at first. I regularly read about 25 newsgroups with an extremely wide range of subject matter, and over the last few weeks I have seen literally hundreds of people with things in their .sigs like, "Please excuse this CDA- required obscenity: FUCK." Victimless crime laws (more accurately, "consensual crime laws") have this as their primary effect, I've found, especially when the "crime" in question is especially petty or harmless to others. When the public is treated like a child, it will start acting more like one. The greater the penalty for any transgressions, the more people will start transgressing. Naturally, this doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot in the big picture -- as James Donald has said, if just one out of a hundred tax serfs picked up their gun and said, "I ain't payin'," the IRS would collapse. This hasn't happened because most people aren't into civil disobedience -- or rather, NOT WHEN THEY FEEL THE RISK IS TOO GREAT. But if they perceive little or no risk, they will happily break the law regularly and openly, making no attempt to conceal their activities. Childish, because there are far more meaningful laws they could be ignoring. But the first reaction of a child when it's told it can't do something is to go out and do it. Obviously, very few people feel truly threatened by CDA penalties. -- http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~frogfarm ...for the best in unapproved information Tell your friends 'n neighbors you read this on the evil pornographic Internet "Where one burns books, one will also burn people eventually." -Heinrich Heine People and books aren't for burning. No more Alexandrias, Auschwitzs or Wacos.