Posted on 06/20/2009 4:46:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
Pornography is no longer a poison creeping into the crevices of our popular culture. It is part of the very fabric. One sensation at a recent Apple conference for new and developing applications in San Francisco was the "iPorn bikini girls" advertising free X-rated films for your iPhone. It sounds like a whole new reason to fear people using their mobile phones while they drive.
Free porn sites are all over the Internet now, with zero restrictions or minimal electronic barriers against curious children who might be in for a very crude shock within seconds, just with the still photos on the home page. Even the most mainstream of video sites are inundated with pornography and its promoters. YouTube touts itself as the world's most popular portal for Internet videos. It has become so big it's even promoting a new technology called YouTube XL to put its videos directly on your big-screen TV.
A new study by Matthew Philbin and Dan Gainor of the Culture and Media Institute (CMI) found that YouTube is stuffed with porn videos. But a search for the word "porn" found more than 330,000 results. Out of the 157 "porn" clips that received more than 1 million views, almost two-thirds (101) advertised themselves to be actual pornography. Those 101 videos had 438,318,147 combined views -- or 1.38 views for every man, woman and child in the United States.
YouTube claims it's "not for pornography or sexually explicit content." It's just not against it, either.
Pornographers of all kinds exploit YouTube to drive traffic to their sites and products. Twelve percent of those 101 videos mentioned porn stars by name or were obvious clips from porn movies. In addition, there were thousands of videos and repeated comments that served only as advertisements for hardcore-porn sites, "dating" and escort services, and phone sex lines.
Particularly troubling are animated videos listed under "porn." Several videos put profanity and sex talk over classic Disney cartoons, like one called "Aladdin Porn." (Disney ought to be the first powerful player putting a stop to that.) Fans of Japanese anime cartoons can find the animated porn called "hentai," and skip over the 18-plus barrier or gravitate to hard-core sites the same way they could access live-action sex clips.
CMI also found that gay content, including pornography and ads for gay escort services, are rampant. There are 11,900 gay channels on YouTube, including 459 "gay porn" channels. A search for "gay porn" returns 52,700 individual videos. YouTube even promotes homosexuality on the home page. On the night of June 17, one featured video was a promo for a cheesy new British movie called "Lesbian Vampire Killers."
YouTube tells parents that its site is not appropriate for children under 13, but few videos are age-restricted. Some objectionable videos are flagged by users as adults-only. But all that's required is to register and state that you're over 18. That's not encouraging when nearly half of boys and a third of girls ages 13-17 name YouTube as one of their top three favorite websites, and they can watch it anywhere on laptop computers and cellular phones with Web browsers. Computers are commonplace in public schools and libraries that may not have much adult supervision.
Besides, is YouTube seriously suggesting that porn is inappropriate for 13-year-old children but it's okey-dokey for them at age 14?
After the Parents Television Council complained last December, YouTube implemented some reforms. Take profanity. Without parental supervision, every imaginable obscenity, including graphic sexual language, is rampant on the site. The F-word alone appeared in the titles of some 169,000 individual videos. YouTube recently offered parents a tool for filtering out dirty words (and even hiding all comments on video clips), but that protection only comes when vigilant parents look for it.
Last year, the search an innocent child would make for Disney Channel pop stars like Hannah Montana drew not only profane comments but inappropriate advertisements for horror movies. A search for Hannah Montana today finds only advertisements for J.C. Penney and other Disney child stars, so that's an improvement.
But as the CMI study insists, YouTube must construct "a far more formidable barrier" than its easily entered 18-plus category to protect children from graphic sexual content that parents wouldn't want their children to view. Just as a parent wouldn't let their child wander through a seedy neighborhood of sex shops, it's now impossible for parents to avoid watching their children carefully negotiate the Internet. Isn't there anyone in the corporate power structure at YouTube who worries about what their own children can find on their creation?
I understand that John Scherer can help in this situation. "Try my product."
Requiring ID from users --may-- reduce sexual content,
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Is it Nanny State or Mommy State?
I always get them confused.
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I don't care if I am the last person standing but soft porn is as bad as "hard" porn....I put them all in the same category.....immoral,unethical,unChristian, UnGodly, inhumane.....anything from Hooters to the S/M crap....it all panders to the lowest common denominator, and what we are finding is that the old lows are nothing compared to the new lows in human behaviour....
many people can rationalize about the Playboys and the Hooters or the "kids being kids" nonsense.....but it all come from one rotten cauldron of stew......it encourages girls and women to be whores or act like whores and it encourages boys and men to act like animals.....
and people that engage any of it are condoning it and passing this on to our children....
quote that I came across that I like....
"Silence in the face of evil is in itself, evil...God will not hold us guiltless...Not to speak is to speak..Not of act is to act."
Popman: :)
Thanks, guys.
The reason we did what we did is that the commercial software that allows you to blacklist sites just wasn’t good enough. I was paying $30 per computer for the software, and the children were still able to get through without even trying.
One day, one of my sons just typed “baseball” in a Google search and you wouldn’t believe what appeared. A lot of web sites just don’t bother to tell the monitoring software anything about their content.
That was the end of that. I installed the Linux firewall and proxy, using Dansguardian. Rather than a blacklist that you have to continually update, Dansguardian has a whitelist that is a list of sites that are allowed.
The only time I have to update that list is if somebody sends a link to one of my children in their email. I get to check it out first, and if I think it’s ok, I’ll put it in the whitelist.
One of my preteen daughters was sending email to a boy I did not want her to contact. Her siblings ratted her out. So I installed Squid on the Linux gateway. Now, all email transactions are copied to my account.
Needless to say, there are no web-based mail servers in the Dansguardian whitelist.
We’ve made our mistakes, and that’s why we tightened it everything up so much.
Oh, and all the Linux software was free. The computer that we installed it on was an old Dell box that my brother-in-law wasn’t using anymore. So our whole gateway-firewall-netproxy-mailserver was free.
This is Netmilsmoms, Husband:
OK, so I replace my Linksys firewall with the Dansguardian Linux firewall. Squid is a web cache package for Apache, I don’t quite understand how installing Squid has anything at all to do with SMTP.
Didn’t you have to register an MX record to enable email on your Dansguardian Linux box or do you have it as a forwarder / SPAM filter only?
Thanks,
To get an idea how to set squid up to handle email clients in a local network, have a look at this.
http://www.unix.com/ip-networking/29730-squid-email-client.html
Enjoy!
:)
If the filter is on the computer itself, then yea. The filter needs to be on the gateway to the internet. White Lists, and or black lists. Most modern "home" routers have such capability. They can even restrict hours of internet activity for the kids IP.
You should be proud of his searching skills. I just tried the baseball query (with SafeSearch turned off) and saw nothing unexpected in the first 30 results. Plenty of M-L-B but no M-I-L-F.
Generally, I find it quite rare to run into porn on the internet by mistake and easy to find it deliberately. Also, I use GMail, so I never see spam unless I look in the Spam folder. Even whitehouse.com is gone as a joke to play on people. It used to be a porn site. Now it's some sort of media site.
> I just tried the baseball query (with SafeSearch turned
> off) and saw nothing unexpected in the first 30 results.
> Plenty of M-L-B but no M-I-L-F.
This was over a year ago, and at least that’s what he told me. Was he lying? Can’t say for sure. I do know that his access is limited to the whitelist now.
What are M-L-B and M-I-L-F?
> Also, I use GMail,
No external mail servers for the children. We need to know who they’re talking to.
We see everything, even their spam. Interestingly, they don’t seem to get much spam at all.
MLB is Major League Baseball. Google will be pleased to decode the other acronym for you.
Whatever.
There’s pornography on the Internet?
Congratulations for taking appropriate steps to 1. guard
you and yours from the “dark side” of the ‘Net (and ‘Web)
and 2. tell us about it, with specifics.
Even in the pre-Warren Court era, when regulation of such
material was allowed (in states and local jurisdictions, BTW)
parents did take care and review all matter brought into
the home. The need for that oversight cannot ever be
completely delegated, ever.
bump your post for later viewing.
And our means of online survival is Darwinist.
> And our means of online survival is Darwinist.
I disagree. Online survival requires purposeful, deliberate, applied intelligence.
But I LOVE your tagline!
:)
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