One of the unique challenges to regulating or settling on the appropriate way to regulate is that there is no concrete definition of pornography. While law enforcement bodies such as the police, prosecutors and judges, are accustomed to dealing with issues that are exclusive to the United States, the Internet is a worldwide community with servers and members coming from hundreds of countries. Defining “pornographic content” on a global level has not been easy because of different moral and legal variations. In the United States one type of act may be defined as being “hard-core porn”, however, another country could see this act as much less offensive. So while the United States may try to regulate one level of pornography, a person could go find it on a website launched from another country. This is one the problems that is being acknowledged when trying to find a way of dealing with the pornography on the Internet.
There are two real issues at stake when looking at this controversial topic. The first issue is finding a way to protect our children from potentially damaging material. There are advocates to censoring the Internet and removing this type of material because it will help shelter our children from this type of content. On the other hand, Free Speech advocates believe that it is the individual citizens right to have access to this typ…
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…nt and Civil Liberties groups, no one seems to be making much headway in determining where the line should be drawn when it comes to pornography. The positive is that child pornography is being acknowledged as a real problem, but law enforcement officials are still having a great deal of difficulty fighting it. The United States is taking steps toward implementing a multi-layered approach to governance, which will allow adults their freedom and protect children at the same time, but as of right now we are a long way from a solution.
Sources
www.netparents.org Teaches parents to be safe with their children
www.wam.umd.edu List of filtering devices
www.aclu.org Homepage for the ACLU
www.pedowatch.com Up to date info in the quest to eliminate child pornography
www.thecpac.com/stop-it.html Provides a list of wanted pedopjiles on the Internet
Essay on Internet Privacy – Cookies and Internet Privacy
Cookies and Internet Privacy
Student José Amador likes to use his email account at yahoo.com. “I find paper so obsolete,” he says. Amador is not worried about the privacy of this account. Perhaps he and the many other people that use yahoo email should be concerned, however. All users of Yahoo mail are having their actions tracked.
Yahoo monitors the actions of users, in part, by using “cookies.” Cookies are small files that record visits to web pages. When you open up a cookie dispensing web page, the web server sends one or more of these files to your browser. The cookies will usually contain a number that is unique to that browser. Then the next time that this browser opens that particular page, the web site will both send a new cookie and retrieve the old one. This makes it possible, for sites to compile lists of how often visitors go to a particular page as well as when they visit it.
By themselves, cookies cannot reveal the identity of the user. All these files can do is store information about domain names and the rough location of the visitor. That said, if the site requires registration and a sign in -as is the case with yahoo email, for example- then site administrators can combine the two streams of data with ease. Cookies also cannot send viruses. They are only text files thus preventing that danger. Readers who want to view the cookies stored on their browser should search for a file called on cookies.txt on PCs or a file called MagicCookie on Macs.
The first browser that could handle cookies was Netscape Navigator 1.0. Cookies have become commonplace on the web since that browser first came out in 1995. By one account, 26 of the top 100 web sites utilize these files. Sites that use cookies include AltaVista, all pages on the GeoCities domain, and the web version of the New York Times. The New York Times is a lot like Yahoo mail in that the acceptance of cookies is required. Most sites, however, do not require browsers to accept cookies.
Web site administrators say that the primary purpose of cookies is not to track Internet surfing habits. Rather they argue that cookies allow users to customize their experiences on the web. Services like My Yahoo would not work nearly as smoothly without cookies.