FCC Pitches Free, Bowdlerized Wireless Internet Access 298
Aidtopia writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing auctioning off an unused part of the 25 MHz spectrum on the condition that the winner provide free wireless Internet access. The proposal sets coverage targets that ramp up to 95% of the population within 10 years. The catch: the provider must filter out obscene content." I wonder what definition of "obscene" the FCC would like to use.
Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:3, Insightful)
Thus, about 99% of all media.
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:4, Funny)
Only way to be sure
No defense against ASCII Art! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:5, Funny)
Only the first eight words are used, the last two are used as out-of-bound signaling.
Data is sent three bits at a time, each bit-pattern denoted by one of the remaining eight words as described in the table below:
000 word1
001 word2
010 word3
011 word4
100 word5
101 word6
110 word7
111 word8
As long as there are any bits flowing, _any_ bit can be transmitted.
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:4, Funny)
Aaaaaaaaaand, cue Peter Griffin's 'Freakin FCC' song!
They will clean up all your talking in a menace such as this
They will make you take a tinkle when you want to take a p*ss
And they'll make you call fellatio a trouser-friendly kiss
It's the plain situation!
There's no negiotiation!
With the fellows at the freakin FCC!
They're as stuffy as the stuffiest of the special interest groups...
Make a joke about your bowels and they order in the troops
Any baby with a brain could tell them everybody poops!
Take a tip, take a lesson!
You'll never win by messin'
With the fellas at the freakin' FCC
And if you find yourself with some you sexy thing
You're gonna have to do her with your ding-a-ling
Cause you can't say penis!
So they sent this little warning they're prepared to do the worst
And they stuck it in your mailbox hoping you could be co-erced
I can think of quite another place they should have stuck it first!
They may just be neurotic
Or possible psychotic
They're the fellas at the freakin FCC!
FCC FU! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ok, but that's pretty much the same, isn't it? A private company has to follow their guidelines as if they provided the service themselves.
Good question. I can only imagine one scenario which would work for both sides: The buyer injects ads into the normal http stream and gains money by doi
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Didn't Pax discover there wasn't much of a market for a safe ISP. I suppose that would be aided by the free part....
hehe yup, PAX (paxway.com) gave up and refers you to someone else that only offers a filtered dial-up for $16.95+up per month.
Still don't see how one would actually run it for free. Would have to be saturated with ads i imagine
Altho if you filter the porn and presumably the stolen content maybe you don't need more than 5
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Well no shit, Sherlock! If the government was provided directly then it would be an obvious and flagrant violation of the First Amendment. This way, it's a scheming, tricky, underhanded violation instead.
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Obscenity isn't protected speech. Obscenity doesn't mean a curseword or a breast. It has to have no artistic or political merit. It has to shock the average person. 2 girls 1 cup is obscene. "Fuck the fucking fuckers" (in reference to some identifiable group, so it is an opinion and not a line) is pro
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Fuck you, fascist! It's people like you who are letting this country become totalitarian, because of your sheer fucking stupidity. Let me ask you one question, and let's see if it enlightens you: who gets to decide which speech is obscene, and which is protected?
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So?
A wireless internet connection cannot in any way be described as a broadcast - the packets have a single destination which is well defined. Add some simle encryption, and not even the Holy Packet Sniffers of the Latter Day AllSaints are liable to be offended by this 'broadcast' porn.
Just because it's wireless doesn't mean it's broadcast.
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Bad things are created by bad producers, who will only ever produce bad things. Good things are created by good producers, who will only ever produce good things.
True. Slashdotters tend to be a cynical folk. In the end though banning obscene material can be very good for society; there will be no inadvertent or harmful attempts to look at or download religious materials for example and children will no longer be exposed to Fox News articles or anything said or written by Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh.
Hopefully the new rules will only allow content to be viewed that has sex as the major theme, because sex brings joy to the world. Among those primates whose primary
Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot needs a say what? mod option.
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On a more serious note, it may be a slippery slope towards great-wall style filtering. But, of course, there'll always be ways around it. Filtering is a silly idea.
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Re:Obscene is easy, its called fun (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Encryption is mandatory over such a network
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It would be almost useless due to noise at 25 MHz frequency..
-G
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At 25 Mhz with a bandwidth of, what? 1 Mhz throughput will be 1 megabit per second shared with hundreds of users. Free wifi in the gigahertz range is already a joke. This system won't have the throughput for (decent) porn, encrypted or not.
That makes it faster than 802.11b!
802.11b only uses 21mhz of the 2.4ghz spectrum.
This auction is for 25mhz worth of the 2.1ghz spectrum, which is More bandwidth, AND in a less crowded portion of the spectrum, which should mean less interference. Ok, granted, I don't know what else uses 2.1ghz currently, but I *do* know how much crap spews out in the 2.4ghz range, and I think its a safe bet to say 2.1ghz won't be as crowded.
If 10mbps isn't fast enough for porn, perhaps you should look to DVDs or magazines
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eww (Score:4, Informative)
Fixed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Would this be closer to what you're looking for?
Re:Fixed (Score:5, Informative)
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I'll bet it's more frequently used for sed (i.e., ed for streams) [die.net] nowadays, since that's more friendly for scripting.
Misspelled (Score:2, Funny)
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No, he misspelled Bowdlerized [wikipedia.org].
For example, your original potty-mouthed post might be offensive to sensitive ears, and I've therefore taken the liberty...
Either that, or I missed the ironic possibility of your post; that you, like me, regard the act of bowdlerization as an even greater offense than the use o
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Bowlderize: To censor or alter an earlier writer's work.
Bastardize: Change something so that its value declines.
[-1 Redundant] Would be a more accurate moderation, most people know what bastardize means, not as many know what bowlderize means. Although bastardize is more ambiguous.
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Possible power grab? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Possible power grab? (Score:4, Funny)
note: regular Fox, not Fox News.
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They already do this. You can't broadcast obscene material on ABC, either. They even take it *beyond* obscenity there. Drawing the line at obscenity is a *liberalization* of current practice.
50 kHz spectrum at 25 MHz? (Score:2)
Re:50 kHz spectrum at 25 MHz? (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with your concern. If we assume an S/N ratio of 20db (about 3 S units on my HF rig or noise at S6 and signal at S9 which I consider a good copy) then Shannon-Hartley's theorem says that they will get at best 333kbps. I used the example calculation #1 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem [wikipedia.org] and just substituted 50kc for 4kc to get this.
Anyone disagree?
Re:50 kHz spectrum at 25 MHz? (Score:5, Informative)
Definition of "obscene" (Score:5, Insightful)
Some obscenity suggestions for filtering out (Score:3, Insightful)
Leave it to the Republicans (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Leave it to the Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd agree, but to be fair, the FCC is required to mandate "decency" standards on the public airwaves, so extending that mandate/philosophy to a proposed public wireless system sounds like a reasonable argument.
The difficulty is that the internet, at least for the forseeable future, isn't at all similar to broadcast television or radio.
I wouldn't mind this! (Score:3)
Re:I wouldn't mind this! (Score:5, Funny)
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Obscenity has a clear meaning (Score:5, Interesting)
In the US, 'obscene' has a clear legal meaning: material that meets the three-pronged (I said 'prong,' huhuuhuh) test established in Miller v. California:
1. 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
2. the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law
3. the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Such material isn't protected speech. I think it should be, but there you go: it's hardly surprising that the FCC doesn't want it on a freely-accessible broadcast network. It's an infinitely more reasonable position for them to take than if they were demanding that providers filter "indecent" material, which is a) protected speech and b) has no strict legal definition.
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so no Bible then? tempting....
Re:Obscenity has a clear meaning (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Obscenity has a clear meaning (Score:4, Informative)
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I find this offensive.
I also find that atheists are significantly more compassionate than Christians; while being less judgmental to boot.
Before you say a word, or come up with level of rationalization or logical deduction regarding the other major world re
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What's interesting is that, by obscenity laws, porn would be fine. It really would not be hard for a provider to say "When we're made aware of material that's clearly obscene or illegal, we'll take technological steps to filter it."
But like pirate radio, they will never be able to stop it.
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No, it's not. Note that pornography is entirely legal and protected speech. For something to be obscene, it has to meet all three of those criteria, not just one. Sex is certainly not obscene, and most depictions of sex are also not obscene.
Re:Obscenity has a clear meaning (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes. A work must meet *all three* criteria, not just one, which means obscene material is few and far between. There was one case where a store owner was on trial for selling obscene movies, until the store's receipts showed that most of the customers were people in the local community, which meant that what he was selling no longer met criteria #1.
Again, obscenity isn't protected speech. The FCC gets to regulate broadcast networks. You *already* can't broadcast obscene material on r
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Yes. Again, *all fucking three criteria* must be met. Taken as a whole, all together, there's hardly anything that qualifies.
Who decides what has or lacks serious artistic value?
Um...the court does, just like the court decides the other facts that are brought before it.
Does Mein Kampf? Does Catcher in the Rye? What about the US Constitution?
That's a big, obvious, you-can't-possible-be-serious "no" to all three.
Oblig. Family Guy (Score:3, Funny)
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BTW, If I ahdn't read it in an earlier post, I woudn't ahve known what the hell you were talking about.
Now onto another subject...naw, that will take to long to type so:
Bananas
Hook
Penis
I think I had the same reaction as everyone had.. (Score:2, Interesting)
At first, reading the title, there was amazement! An FCC chairman, pitching FREE internet?!?!
Then there came reality: no 'obscene' content.
What the fuck is this, 1953? Hey, while we're at it, why don't we go beat up some Commies and re-segregate the South, then fine anyone who says dirty words on these gosh darn 'radios'??
Thats like giving someone a car with no wheels, engine, gas tank, doors, windows, seats or seat belts, and wondering why nobody wants your gift.
Essentially this amounts to severe p
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Thats like giving someone a car with no wheels, engine, gas tank, doors, windows, seats or seat belts, and wondering why nobody wants your gift.
Bullshit. It's like giving someone a car with no knobs on the radio so they can't turn it on unless they use some pliers. Pretty much everyone on this forum could easily bypass the restrictions placed on this network, so what's the big deal? Let the restrictions comfort the old folks and help parents protect their children from content they don't want them to see. For those people who think that parents shouldn't shield their children, fine, but let the parents who want to shield their children do it as lo
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Hah! I never thought I'd see a 'Protect the CHILDREN, think of the CHILDREN!' argument on Slashdot!
Obscene material is a joke. The FCC tried to regulate 'bad language' as obscene on the radio. Then they tried to do it on TV. They fail, and fail, and fail, yet they try again.
What you essentially posted is that the Government can't back free speech because free speech contains obscenity. The constitution has something to say about that.
Why do you want the government raising your children? Why don't you w
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Obscene material is a joke. The FCC tried to regulate 'bad language' as obscene on the radio. Then they tried to do it on TV. They fail, and fail, and fail, yet they try again.
Do we define failure the same way? One definition, perhaps the most broadly accepted one is "what happens when you do not succeed".
I turn on broadcast TV and radio today, and I note that I still can't hear any "bad language". I even learn that the FCC is slapping massive fines on anybody who utters such "bad language".
Failed? Really? Wouldn't that imply 'not successful'?
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The foreigners we gotta beat up now are terrrists. Which are a lot like obscenity now that I think of it, cause ive no idea what the hell a terrrrist is, but I know one when I see one.
Re:I think I had the same reaction as everyone had (Score:2)
Defined. (Score:5, Funny)
The good the bad, and the ugly (Score:2)
The Good: Free Internet access over an add supported public channel - at what should be fairly good speed - that alone is a significant move in the right direction toward improving access for rural areas, and reducing the broadband divide
The Ugly: One Company - gets to try to make this work. I find this troubling only for one reason - it is clear now that ISP's have no problem filtering the internet not just for obscene content,
Oh America (Score:2)
TITTIES??!! We've got to do something! Call the press! Notify the local authorities! LOOK OUT! IT'S A VAGINA! NOOOOOoooooooooo.....
Boulderize? (Score:2)
Email the FCC! (Score:3, Informative)
On the FCC front page, there is a link to all the members of the board, and their emails.
I say we email them.
Lets turn the ./ effect upon our government, and see if maybe, just maybe, we can convince them not to make the same dumb ass mistakes they make every 30 years trying to censor new formats.
Wrong Wrong Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong (Score:4, Funny)
G.
Broadcast vs. Choice. (Score:2)
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'Some' people would have a problem with paying for their neighbor to do that.
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But you know what will happen... (Score:2, Insightful)
The christians will say: "Not only is this a great product, but free as well. Plus they will filter out all the smut... HOW WONDERFUL!"
1% will say: "Fuck that. Don't tell me how to surf."
And the rest don't give a shit. I give this a better than average chance of going through.
Bandwidth and Propagation (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Bandwidth. 802.11b uses 22Mhz of bandwidth for each of its channels. There is not 22Mhz of unallocated bandwidth at 25Mhz. I'm sure that compression techniques are better now than when 802.11 stuff was defined. However, looking at the FCC allocation chart [doc.gov], there isn't much unassigned bandwidth near 25Mhz. A few Mhz here and there, unless they're considering usurping ham radio and maritime bands and otherwise kicking people off of frequencies. I'm not sure what they're considering "unused". Someone with more knowledge of on data compression via radio techniques might chime in
2) Propagation. 25Mhz is right around 12 Meters, which the hams and DX CB radio folks will know can propagate hundreds and even thousands of miles, depending upon ionospheric conditions. Take the bandwidth problem above, and multiply it by the fact that the precious little slice of bandwidth you get might be stomped on by everyone in the US during peak sunspot activity. This is likely the reason that mobile carriers aren't interested in these frequencies.
I'm pretty sure this is a loser idea. If someone knows more than me, I'd love to learn more about this stuff, though.
Reid
Bowlderized? (Score:3, Funny)
Is this jeopardy? (Score:2)
Obscene Defined (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Obscene Defined (Score:4, Informative)
This would not be a broadband service (Score:2)
No need for a filter (Score:3, Funny)
Why so negative? (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I know that when I'm working from my laptop while waiting at the mechanic, it'd be nice to have ANY cheap / free internet connection. $60/month for unlimited internet through the cellphone networks is too expensive for my needs...
Obscene (Score:2, Flamebait)
Well, I'd start with the Torah, Bible & Koran, and then go from there.
Everyone is bitching about filtering... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm still stuck at the technological hurdle of actually being able to _implement_ such filters in the first place, given that it's an NP-incomplete problem.
It's all well and good to scream "protect the children!" at the top of your lungs, but what technology are you proposing to identify and interdict obscene content?
-- Terry
The Cost Of Obscentity (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably the one they already use to charge violators such as Howard Stern, as well as the violators' station of origin, up to US$250K per incident. I'm not sure where it is in their regs (which I do know are online) but I recall quite clearly the sign in the studio booth at WUVT that reminded me constantly of the sword hanging over me.
What's always bothered me about the regs is the relaxation of the rules after 10 PM. When I was broadcasting, I had simultaneous netcast. After 10 PM where the station is (Blacksburg VA, eastern time) is only after 7 PM on the Left Coast (ie. pacific time). After 10 PM where? Was I simultaneously legal in Virginia but breaking the law in California?
Apply that now to on-demand, statically stored material which may or may not be infringing depending on the material and time of request. It's always before 10 PM someplace, so the owner may be liable according to the location of the requester. You can bet this is the way things would fall, because the alternative is to say 'it's AFTER 10 PM someplace', making the regs moot and removing a potential source of enforcement as well as income.
Oh yeah, and the context of the offending material matters. You can play hip hop and rap on air after 10 PM local and get away with broadcasting 2 "motherfuckers" and 5 "niggers" per minute, but try to say one of either yourself and see what it costs you. In the case of the latter, that may include body parts depending on your own color. The context of your reception can also matter, hence a "researcher" is supposed to be able to access an "obscene" web site for academic purposes without fear of reprisal. Yeah, right.
Personally I prefer Larry Flint's editorialized definition of "obscene" which puts murder and such well before sex in terms of badness. If that were used, you'd never be able to access most commercial news outlets, or much common TV or theatrical material. So sad that killing is not just accepted but expected, and fucking is outlawed.
OOPS, I think I just made it impossible for you to access this in the archives should the regulation of the proposed bandwidth go through. We'll see.
This is obscene (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course the FCC is still scratching its head over why they couldn't get anybody to bid on spectrum that was dedicated for public safety use.
Anybody else think the FCC has lost the plot ?
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