New at Reason

Jacob Sullum raises a glass to the demise of COPA.

Comments

stuartl | March 28, 2007, 8:54am | #

Filtering software, by contrast, is easy and cheap (often free) to use, and it can be close to 100 percent effective at blocking porn, whether it originates in the U.S. or abroad. Even the worst-performing programs, Reed found, block around 90 percent of sexually explicit material.

What planet is he from? In the real world, the kids just find the sites that tell them how to disable the filters.

From a computer science perspective it is educational, it teaches children how to manipulate the registry of their computers.

Xmas | March 28, 2007, 9:20am | #

From my experiences in Tech Support at an ISP: If your filtering software blocks kids from sending out your your last name or phone number, don't use your last name or phone number in the filtering software's password.

martin | March 28, 2007, 9:56am | #

Absent from most of the discussion, absent even from Jacob's article, is the surest, but not the most convenient method of keeping all kinds of stuff away from the little lambies: Parents, know what thy kids are up to.
Inconvenient and therin lies the root to the calls for the Gubmint to do the raising.

I'm still waiting for the time when the definition for "kids" gets a revision from all-ages-are-the-same to a more realistic subdividing in "little kids" and "half grown-ups", i.e. the realisation that a 6-yo and a 16-yo are worlds apart. Fat chance, with all the various Nanny groups that have staked their fortunes on the save-the-innocent-children bandwagon to push their anal-retentive world views.

jb | March 28, 2007, 10:12am | #

It's a human tendency to pass laws to make a statement ("this is bad") rather than to achieve a result ("this will be stopped").

Anti-porn laws fall very strongly in this category.

Timothy | March 28, 2007, 10:23am | #

What about the cabana?

wsdave | March 28, 2007, 4:15pm | #

Way late to the party, but here's the ONLY solution that might actually work:

Instead of forcing porn sites to .xxx, we should create a .kid, and prosecute any websites that put un-kid friendly stuff on .kid.

Perfect? Hardly. There will be abuses, but it still is the best answer.