-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, Troy Denkinger wrote:
We have an interesting problem here, though. You say that the government has no right to tell you how to set your filter; no doubt about that, imo. However, most people who use these filters are going to be quite happy to allow some corporate entity the privilege of setting their filters for them and, if the consumer should ask about criteria and such, they are told that that's a trade secret. So, people will be allowing a corporate entity that exists for profit to set their filters for them. This is a very scary thing and perhaps even more frightening than having the government do it. I think that the people on this list tend to maintain a healthy scepticism toward the various TLAs, but we have to remember that a large, multinational corporation has not even got a sense of a greater "national good" or even "national security" to guide it.
However, parents are free not to purchase filtering software that claims that their criteria is a trade secret. I don't see this as a threat at all. The parents who refuse to buy this software don't have to worry about the filtering software preventing little Johnny from visiting a site that has information on homosexuality or subscribing to a computer science mailing list (which are apparently blocked by some filtering software for some reason). - -- Mark PGP encrypted mail prefered Key fingerprint = d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348 http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBMe/8b7Zc+sv5siulAQGerAP+IWpgJ6hpbKOZcs1TPZwYLIqQLG+LccPD nOMKVKmgMndzywuqO1lg59+VX2cA2qODwQ6SjQQ+gG2eImD6nPsPpD8Q/7D1hlHW JhpPjp2UFt/xL3FtYG9/g2/4mYHx7Z0xVl51BNPHDiBMnyaskTzdk0yV2Tpo2T/8 EovM30/Lx2Q= =qGzJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----