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from the going-to-need-lots-of-volunteers-to-build-the-block-list dept.
Rhode Island is the latest US state to discuss mandatory censorship of web content, at first targeting pornography:
Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the [I]nternet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege.
These proposals fly in the face of the observation that automated pornography filters don't work and that even the manual ones are neither practical, reliable, nor scalable.
Source : Rhode Island proposes blocking all online porn and charging $20 to unblock it. Boing Boing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday March 09 2018, @02:57PM (1 child)
Everything, of course. The financial structure is its essentially a tax on internet access accounts for RI residents.
If you assume virtually everyone has internet access and all access will be cutoff unless they pay the tax and document themselves for some interesting purpose. Probably blackmail of public officials. Either you leave the internet entirely OR never take a job or elected position of any sort where headlines like "school teacher views pr0n" could cause job loss.
Its interesting that the summary has little to do with the bill. The specific term is "contain sexual content". Most people understand the Bible, PG-13 TV shows, any instant messaging-type service including plain SMS, biology textbooks, and wikipedia to contain sexual content and thus be blocked, not pr0n.
Also the summary implies its $20 per person, but the bill implies its $20 per access device. Its beyond mysterious how they'd handle devices behind a NAT. I suppose the secondary purpose is to create a "tv license" like taxation scheme where "its only $20, just pay up" but there's something like 60 devices on my LAN at home so thats $1200. Theoretically the raspberry pi that runs my openhab smart house stuff could be SSH'd into and IRC into some sexual content IRC channel, so pay up or become a tax dodging felon. I also have some ESP9266 microcontrollers (many, actually) that connect various sensors to a MQTT broker. There's also the conceptual mystery of I have several virtual images running on a beefy cluster in my basement. So do I need six licenses, or like 20-something? I have an essentially dead nexus 7 tablet in my desk drawer, so pay up $20 and keep it, toss it in the trash and be fined for illegal electronics dumping (electronics not officially allowed in my city trash per muni feel good law, and there are anti-hoarder laws so you can't even stockpile the stuff you can't legally throw away, and there is no electronics recycling collection program, essentially the law exists to arbitrarily punish anyone the police want to punish) The reason this is not a bug but a feature is it'll be nearly impossible for many, maybe most, people to be legal under this tax, so they can find and punish anyone they want.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday March 09 2018, @05:26PM
It sounds like your problem is unsolvable. Maybe you could, instead, plan for your final confrontation with the police. Try to make it newsworthy, like the Branch Davidians, so it brings more attention to the issue.
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