OLPC Used to Browse Porn 338
youthoftoday writes "The OLPC project to bring the internet to third world has worked well — too well, it seems. Yahoo reports that Nigerian Children are already using the OLPC to browse for porn." This is why as kids we couldn't look at National Geographic issues without being supervised. A rep from OLPC said, understandably, that the laptops would now be fitted with filters.
big deal (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Analyst are in agreement that the sun will almost certainly rise again probably once each day for the next few weeks.
Also: filters? get a fucking clue.
How about instead we just use these internets to send the offending officials some biology texts so that can learn about human sexuality and stop trying to stifle it.
No way! (Score:5, Insightful)
Understandably? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, sorry, I do not understand. There's nothing evil about porn and those filter won't work anyway.
Re:Porn is inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
If they truly only blocked porn, then maybe it would be a matter of discussion, but certain filters' habit of censoring all sorts of irrelevant contents, political and otherwise really makes porn the lesser of the two evils.
understandably? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, morality is relative.
Think of the children!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Porn is inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
If you start blocking porn because of its content (porn) then the people who have the power will demand other things be blocked too which leads to the Great Firewall of China problem... Except this one would be in Nigeria.
The internet was supposed to free everyone and allow them to think for themselves. Naturally those in power decide to try and force it into a tool for control just like everything else from Income Taxes to Drivers Licenses.
Therapy (Score:3, Insightful)
I think they should also send out therapists. Those children will clearly be traumatised by viewing evil images of naked women.
Re:understandably? (Score:4, Insightful)
Relative to what?
Reality isn't very relative. A system of values ("morality") that's grounded in reality and reason is fairly straightforward. People can (and of course, do) certainly dream up philosophical frameworks based on all-powerful invisible friends that still dole out the occasional case of childhood cancer just to keep us all on our toes, and operate as if some magic representation of your firing synapses are going to keep echoing through time after the meat computer that allowed them to come up with that bit of whimsy in the first place is being eaten by worms... but certain moral decisions that are anchored in imaginary consequences (or the lack of them) aren't "relative" - they're wrong. They may frequently overlap with a framework based on reason and reality, but they're going to suffer the rot of mixed premises, and the symptoms of that are the attempts by their holders to act in accordance with contradictions... which can't exist, and which produce sometimes tragic results.
Censorship in this case is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
A question to ask: Does porn help promote AIDS with viewers or help to demote it?
Perhaps there is an age of threshold but that is something that should be determined by the current living environment.
So what is an indicator of that threshold? What gave the kids the idea of looking for porn on the internet in the first place? Seems to me the threshold was already passed before they looked for it on the internet.
I'm almost 50 years old and my email is filtered, not by my choice, such that I still get the porn promotion emails but the urls are changed to be random character strings. Whether or not I would access such sites is not the issue.
The issue is of censorship of what is in fact a part of human nature.
If you make something as natural as sex bad then you'll guarantee the typical rebellious teen age person will find a way. And maybe that way is such an act as to spread disease and unwanted pregnancies.
What can porn teach? proper safe sex? It can perhaps remove some level of curiosity
But porn or not, there is the natural human sex drive. Deny it and you'll have problems develop from ignorance and un-natural guilt. Such acts as rape included.
And how about the history of porn? What can it teach? The dangers of AIDs and other STDs?
If kids already know to look for porn on the internet, maybe its time the subject matter be properly addressed instead of being swept under the rug filter.
The biggest problem, the biggest contributing factor with the spread of AIDs in Africa, is ignorance.
Wait a minute, I live in Atlanta, I'm white...
Forget everything I said above.....
is that it ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comcast cashing in on porn [sfgate.com]
AT&T porn channel challenged by religious investors [theregister.co.uk]
All we need now is OLPC contributes to a) terrorism, b) money laundering and c) contributes to third world poverty. Scratch the last one, its the GPL that does that [techworld.com], according to Jonathan Schwartz.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:huh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Then it is true (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let them learn about every kind of sex, stop treating sex and masturbation like freakish taboo abnoramalities and let them have open honest dialogue about sex. That will bring HIV rates down. Alot of guys in porns wear condoms. Nobody every got AIDS from masturbating. If (while they actually stay monogamous) they can close their eyes and fantasize about some porn starlet and that fulfills their natural male desire for a variety of partners, then that too will help control the spread of STDs. Maybe some men there will learn to appreciate women who have orgasims, and the practice of female circumcision will stop. All in all this will probably be a good thing.
Re:understandably? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that autism working out for ya?
PS The idea that morality is timeless and external to the human race pretty much died out with Kant.
Re:419 training not going as expected? (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything, they are a better target for the OLPC, because these children can now get a better education to change their own government when their generation grows up.
Re:understandably? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Porn is inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
You are making a fundamental assumption - that these children are able to think for themselves. Face it, they are not. They can be *influenced* by things, rather than influence them, either passively, or actively. This is (also obviously) because they aren't adults yet. Parents' education, school, etc. influences you in a way when you are little, as well.
And for the other posts that mention that filters are "censorship"... you're misguided. If these computers are meant for schooling, they are meant for schooling, not for porn. Kind of like not using a cell phone in a class at school: it is a matter of education. But I forgot, education as a concept died in 1968 in favor of unrestricted (as in not thinking things out, doing stuff just because you're able to) "freedom"...
Re:Porn is inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought starting early was exactly how political indoctrination usually works. It's very hard to indoctrinate adults that have learned about whatever you want to keep from them, but if you get them while they are young and easy to affect, they won't know what they're missing out on.
Re:Understandably? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parents (Score:3, Insightful)
Its my right to teach my child what i feel is right and wrong, not his.
Fantasies and Facts (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not against nudity or teaching kids about sex, but it should be a balanced education about the facts and not just about some male fantasies.
Greets
MadMike
Re:They are not allowed to. (Score:2, Insightful)
Porn is not a substitute for sex ed (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with porn, and I don't have a problem with children learning about sex, but I don't think porn is a healthy way for children to learn about sex. There's all sorts of porn out there, and a good deal of it presents unrealistic scenarios out of context. Particularly those that deal with how women should be treated.
Porn should come after proper sex education, not in its stead.
Re:understandably? (Score:4, Insightful)
I call double nonsense. Asserting a truism doesn't validate an argument, unless you are arguing for the truism, in which case you aren't really making an argument.
Relativism simply means that our values are to be judged by how well they serve society. Absolutism means that those values are an integral part of external reality (independent of observers/participants in that reality), and therefore requires that people serve the value system instead of the other way around. Reality is what reality is, but that in no way implies that values are objective.
Re:Then it is true (Score:3, Insightful)
Association with porn harms development goals (Score:4, Insightful)
In every society there are people there are people with stricter-than-average standards of morality with regard to matters of sexuality and there are people with less strict standards. Here, with "standards of morality" I mean the pricinples according to which the people actually conduct their lives, I'm not talking about moral rules that people claim to uphold without actually living accordingly.
It can not be denied that for long-term economic development the key group of people to reach are those which who have sufficiently high standards of morality that they are able to have stable families in which the children are supported and empowered so that there is a good chance of them making significant positive contributions to the future of their community, region and/or country.
In every society, there is segmentation: Parents who work hard on empowering their children to be really successful will generally desire for their children to associate with the children of other parents who do the same. This is easy to understand economically. After all, in every society, knowing the right people is a key success factor.
Now what you absolutely don't want to happen in a project with development goals is for the key segments of society (with the people whom you really need to reach) to become unenthusiastic about the project because it gets associated with blatant porn in ways which are considered totally unacceptable in those segments of society.
"evil" and "porn" (Score:2, Insightful)
However, much of the behavior of the people who make porn is evil. Most people who make US-oriented porn refuse to see that their actions degrade women and teach men unhealthy and ultimately unsatisfying habits for how to relate sexually to other people. Unfortuantely, electronic filters can't distinguish healthy behaviors in erotic material from unhealthy behaviors. It can't disinguish art from teaching domination or aggression.
For these things you need healthy communities of people who talk to one another, face to face and teach by example the best ways to interact.
Re:understandably? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's true, but I don't think that supports your original assertion, namely:
A system of values ("morality") that's grounded in reality and reason is fairly straightforward.
Reason cannot ground a morality. Reason is a tool that doesn't provide goals. It gets us from point A to point B -- that is, it allows us to achieve the goals we've set for ourselves. It cannot tell us what those goals should be, and it's precisely this 'should' that grounds any moral system. So, for example, if my ethnically related compatriots and I want to kill our ethnically different neighbors -- because they make us uncomfortable, because we're short on land and water and they have plenty of both, because their beliefs offend us, whatever -- reason can tell us many things. It can tell us that we can't get away with what we want to do because someone with a big stick (another neighboring group, say) will come and kill us in turn; or that the people we want to kill are too strong for us to assault; or perhaps that nothing stands in our way of accomplishing our desire. If the latter, reason can tell us how to best go about killing our enemies -- what tactics to use, what timeline to follow to achieve the best results, how to hide our actions from outside observers until we've succeeded, etc.
What reason cannot tell us is that we should not kill our neighbors in any absolute sense. It can tell us that we should not try to kill them because we cannot handle the consequences of trying. Or it can tell us that we should because we can get away with it. But it can never tell us that we shouldn't because it would be morally wrong to do so. Reason doesn't dictate what we should or shouldn't want -- only how to get where we want to be.
Moral systems that invoke reason are thus also relative -- relative to our desires and to all of the assumptions we bring to the table. Whether reality itself is relative to anything, or an absolute framework in which we live, is more or less irrelevant. The benefit of classical systems of ethics -- what gives them their moral force -- is that they are based on unreasonable foundations, such as the sanctity of human life, which reason cannot in any sense provide. We can reject them because they do not, in our view, reflect reality; but we can't replace them with a tool that has no claim to absolute moral truth. If we're to be honest logicians, we must accept the consequences of our conclusions and live in a world that is ultimately far less comfortable and settled and straightforward than the world of our religious forebears.
Re:Actually, I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing inherently, but in the particular case of OLPC I can see why filtering might be reasonable:
1. In a class room situation any web browsing could be disruptive to teaching, but pornography particularly so. It would be pretty weird if at work the guy opposite me in the office was looking at porn all the time!
2. Parents may be reluctant to give children access to OLPC machines if the machines have a reputation as 'porn portals'. Non-adoption would obviously prevent the anticipated educational benefits of OLPC being realised. To put it another way, revolutionising religious views of pornography is not part of OLPC's core aims.
3. Similarly, if looking for government funding in the US, it's probably useful not to have the stigma of pornography hanging over your head - what with all the religion involved in US politics etc.
Just my $0.02
Re:big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Adult supervision? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other news (Score:1, Insightful)
How about instead we just use these internets to send the offending officials some biology texts so that can learn about human sexuality and stop trying to stifle it.
Wow, you need a clue. By applying filters for porn sites, they are not trying to stifle education about human sexuality. You can't learn that from watching porn. Now you could argue the filters may get applied too strictly thus blocking medical websites but that has yet to be seen. So as it stands if you think someone can learn about human sexuality from watching porn I think you may need to see your local area psychologist. What is worse is if there is anyone who thinks anyone (especially kids) *should* learn human sexuality from watching porn. No one under 18 should want porn. It could be argued no one over 18 should watch it either.
Re:They are not allowed to. (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps they were respecting the preferences/culture of each group. Maybe they asked the natives if they wanted such to be done. You don't know the whole story and are jumping to conclusions.
Re:Porn is inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been dealing with exactly this issue for the last 4 years. I work in the developing world, and one of the things I do is assist with the integration of computers into programmes of all kinds. I can tell you that one of the biggest fears (after malware) is the content that people will access.
This may strike some of you as bizarre or even disgusting, but in cultures where sexuality - and women too - have historically been repressed, it's not unusual for a man to sit in his office and wank[*], not stopping when other staff members pass the door. Men can sometimes be surprisingly aggressive about their desire for porn. I remember being told a story about IT staff opening pop ups on a miscreant's computer, saying "We can see what you're doing. Stop it!" He just kept right on going. I myself have sat in the next office to one especially persistent guy, blocking domains the moment he accessed them. In the end I had to use back-channels to get the situation addressed.
[*] Odds are really good that this is the only place he can access the Internet. There's no computer at home, and Internet cafés are too expensive. The compulsion simply becomes to strong to deny.
Everybody asks me to install filters, and I do it, because in this country, pornography is against the law. But I explain to every manager who will listen that the technical measures are simply CYA: They exist so that you can argue in a court of law that you took reasonable measures to curb illegal activity. Ultimately, controlling what staff and/or project stakeholders see on their computers is a basic management issue. If people are properly supervised, they will not stray far. If they do, they must be disciplined.
In short: There's no technical substitute for supervision.
I submit that this contention is just as flawed as the idea that a content filter is the right tool for the job. What you are describing is people allowing a political and social climate that permits this kind of behaviour. The challenge is not a technical one. The means already exist for a complete surveillance state, and we can't un-invent the tools. All we can do is ensure that they are used appropriately. And that problem doesn't have a technical solution. It comes down to human beings showing humanity to one another.
I'll refrain from commenting on any current socio-political trends that might serve as examples. I'm sure we can all find suitable cases in our own back yards.
Re:Porn is inevitable (Score:1, Insightful)
At least, this is the case when geeks are talking about porn, MP3s, and TV shows... When we hear that the CIA is snooping on phone calls or Online-Mega-Mart is selling their customer database, then, quite suddenly, some of those bits are supposed to be less copyable than others.
Re:The end of 419 scams? (Score:3, Insightful)
How does something being obvious make it an oxymoron?
you do KNOW what an oxymoron is, right?
'cos the post to which you refer is not an oxymoron by any standards. Unless you can explain exactly how it is self-contradictory?