Aug 28 2006
Rules and Regulations
The Internet has more rules and regulations than real life and I can see why. Our own sites have to deal with a hack attempt of one form or another every other day. Since we do not store credit card information on our server, there is little to be found here from a criminal point of view.
Most of these hacking attempts are quite harmless. They help me detect security flaws to effectively patch them.
It is the Wild West out there; the chances to be caught while injecting malicious code into a high traffic server are small, so I can see why most Internet service providers have strict rules. If one would remove all the Disclaimers and User Policies on web sites the Internet would shrink with one third, I guess.
The last few years the scare of terrorism has reached levels that have no connection whatsoever with the actual danger of getting hit by a bomb. Still the hype is resulting in more rules and regulations.
The official reason: It is better to be safe than sorry. I can see that.
At the same time however rules and regulations are expanding in areas that have nothing to do with terrorism. The list of forbidden content on websites used to be a short list: No child pornography, no bestiality, no selling of human organs or controlled substances.
Child pornography really stirs the masses. A friend of mine who is no great admirer of digital publishing once asked me after a few beers if things were really that bad with child pornography on the web and I tried to come up with a solid answer, but I just couldn’t. In ten years of using the Internet for information and entertainment I have ran into child pornography twice. Once in 1996 on Usenet and two years ago on my own site. I had a lengthy discussion with the visitors about these 400 year old pictures that came from Chinese bridal books. These were illustrations of a married couple having sex, while the children were in the room. I would hardly call that child pornography since the Chinese had other habits back then, but for your average Joe in the US that is cp. What puzzled me was that this particular series drew so many extra visitors. Traffic to that page increased with 800%.
My friend commented that he could imagine a lot of things, but he found it hard to understand what was so interesting about child pornography. Like me he preferred maturity. I had no clue either but after my fourth beer I suggested that it might have something to do with ‘the youth cult’ that our society has been promoting since the 1950s. Women are told to look young and buy the products designed to prevent normal skin decay and are even urged to engage in plastic surgery to live up to our ideal of youth. Men are not spared from this either.
We went on about this, as people tend to do on certain subjects while consuming alcohol. I desperately wanted to give him an answer. ‘Could it be so,’ I suggested, ‘that in this society parents have to be more focused on their jobs and have little time to spend with their children; forcing them to put their loved ones in the care of others who are mostly unknown to them? That must create a sense of danger and most of all guilt.’ I was thinking about all these stories on TV about children who were sent to these nice older men for weekend trips to return sexually molested, while their parents finally enjoyed that long awaited ‘free’ weekend.
He did not answer but ordered two more beers.
In my view child pornography equals sexual abuse. To supply paedophiles with photos or videos, children are being conned or forced into situations that will damage their lives forever. Being an old man who was sexually abused for a longer period of time between age 11 and 13 – not by my parents or their friends, but by people of the medical profession during a stay in a orthopaedic clinic – I am very much aware of the damage done to the abilities to accept intimacy; even of those you love dearly, forget about the recurring nightmares for a moment which tend to get worse once you grow older.
So, it seemed a logical thought to me that highly realistic 3D animated movies and pictures would be a solution. The demand is there. Very few people have the strength to change their sexual preferences, so let us give them what they want and spare the children their nightmares – hoping that it would help paedophiles to resist the urge, like prostitution under specific circumstances can reduce chances of women being raped.
The first time a childless, female judge in the Netherlands was confronted with digitally mastered ‘child pornography’ — meaning that the pictures involved no participation of actual children — she sentenced the distributor as though he had distributed the real thing. What a pity. Child pornography is so interesting to distribute for criminals because of its high market value. Producing synthesized cp would really make those prices drop, resulting in less interest to produce that kind of material.
My friend was very enthusiastic about my theory and went home to a town not far away from Amsterdam and tested this theory in his neighbourhood café. Two days later he was almost tarred and feathered for being the town paedophile. In a phone call he assured me that he would no longer air my theories in his own surroundings.
This morning I received a newsletter from an interesting 3D site renderotica.com informing us that they were being blackmailed by one of their service providers over content. To avoid confusion: these people have refused cp and bestiality from the start just like 99.0 % of all erotic art content providers have done.
From this day on, they are not allowed to show the following:
BDSM (sadism, masochism and bondage), urination, defecation or menstruation.
All of the above can be shown on any other (access restricted) medium, whether it is your cup of tea or not.
If it wasn’t so sad for these people who pioneer in an erotic art form that seems to belong to the future, I would have choked laughing. Menstruation forbidden! Now, where does that come from?
I know most desert people, like Muslims and Jews, had good reasons to have strict rules about menstruation that became part of their religion. Where there is little water around these rules make sense. The same goes for circumcision of males.
No, what we are probably dealing with here (again) are corporate maggots who want all sex off the web because it competes with their sales of products which are also available in the shop around the corner – at a lower price. (Instead of being billed for shipping costs you get a nice breath of fresh air as a bonus.)
One good thing though, if we go on like this with our rules and regulations we might eventually live up to the high moral and religious standards of Muslim extremists and by doing so end a war that has been going on for ages.