Thursday, October 17, 2013
Wordpress does offer a voluntary age verification scheme that is COPA-like
I’ve notice that Wordpress does offer an age-verification
plug-in, although it appears to require honesty on the part of the viewer. The plugin would ask the visitor to verify
her age before viewing content. This
would not have completely satisfied the requirements of COPA (Child Online
Protection Act) had it been upheld, because it probably can’t verify age
fully. But even credit card or driver’s
license verification is far from foolproof anyway.
The link on Wordpress is here.
It’s a good idea to keep track of the capabilities of
service providers to provide voluntary verification and filtering schemes,
anyway. All very libertarian.
Friday, October 11, 2013
UK requires ISP's to default to filtering adult content, a curious recollection of COPA in the US
Britain, with heavy pressure from the Prime Minister David
Cameron, has been requiring ISP’s to turn on porn filtering or adult content
filtering as a default option. Parents
have to deliberately turn it off if they want to watch adult material themselves. This could obviously annoy people who do not
have children.
The British independent newspaper reported it here July 22,
2013.
The concept is interesting, because the effectiveness of
filters was an important concept in the COPA trial in the United States (in
Philadelphia) in the fall of 2006.
Friday, October 04, 2013
C.P. concerns can lead to cases where hyperlinks are illegal even without content display
Could linking to a website known to be likely to host child
pornography, or particularly linking to a url known to load an illegal image,
itself be a crime?
Of course, if one has viewed the image, then one has “possessed”
the illegal content and already broken the law.
But what if someone linked to such a url on advice of someone else
without ever viewing or loading it? It
sounds like a legally perplexing question, although maybe morally abhorrent
behavior. But many states would probably interpret this as "knowingly" distributing illegal content/
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Sometimes opening "phishing" emails could result in prosecution for possession of child pornography
On September 23, 2013 I wrote about a Webroot report on the
BKA Trojan that can put child pornography through “drive by” on a user’s home
computer, creating a possible legal bind.
Recently, I’ve received repeated spam with spoofed senders
saying “You should take a look at this picture” as subject line and
attachments. To open such an attachment
(maybe even the email itself with HTML enabled) would possibly create a legal
risk of falling under the interpretation of “knowing” possession of c.p., at
least as the law might be interpreted in many states, because there is enhanced
reasonable suspicion that this is what the content will be. At the very least, if an “illegal” image
appeared (and could get backed up in the user’s Cloud quickly), the user might
have to completely destroy the computer or erase the hard drive and all
backups.
Such emails should be marked as spam and not opened. They stopped, and are not even appearing in
the spam folder. Maybe AOL is screening
them before they get to my account and sending them of to NCMEC.
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