Subject
LolitaWatch
Date
Body
NABOKV-L thanks "Sandy P. Klein" <taxi@flinet.com> for passing along the
(excerpted) gem below.
= = = = =
According to the press release, Nubility Inc. had released
LolitaWatch, a network utility that detects "nubile young teens" online by
checking for the federally mandated "age bit" in TCP/IP packets. But like
the original novel, which parodied an older man's lust for a lascivious
teen, LolitaWatch is a hoax, designed to illustrate the dangers of
attaching age information to this workhorse Internet protocol.
The "age-bit" is the brainchild of Dept. of Justice witness Dan Olsen,
director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
He invented a self-labeling scheme called -L18, for "less than 18." Under it,
every Internet user would have to mark all his Usenet posts, e-mail messages,
chat room conversations, or Web pages with -L18 if the content might be
"inappropriate for minors."
Forty years ago, media hype gave Lolita a reputation as an obscene novel and
prompted the French, Argentine, and New Zealand governments to censor it. But
Vladimir Nabokov's work contained not one explicitly sexual passage. Without
reading the book, customs agents never knew that it was a sad parody of an old
man's fantasy lust for a young girl.
The Net censors seem to have found in the Internet a modern Lolita--which
they understand just about as well as the 1950s customs agents understood
Nabokov.
--Declan McCullagh
For the full text, see http://www.iworld.com/
(excerpted) gem below.
= = = = =
According to the press release, Nubility Inc. had released
LolitaWatch, a network utility that detects "nubile young teens" online by
checking for the federally mandated "age bit" in TCP/IP packets. But like
the original novel, which parodied an older man's lust for a lascivious
teen, LolitaWatch is a hoax, designed to illustrate the dangers of
attaching age information to this workhorse Internet protocol.
The "age-bit" is the brainchild of Dept. of Justice witness Dan Olsen,
director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
He invented a self-labeling scheme called -L18, for "less than 18." Under it,
every Internet user would have to mark all his Usenet posts, e-mail messages,
chat room conversations, or Web pages with -L18 if the content might be
"inappropriate for minors."
Forty years ago, media hype gave Lolita a reputation as an obscene novel and
prompted the French, Argentine, and New Zealand governments to censor it. But
Vladimir Nabokov's work contained not one explicitly sexual passage. Without
reading the book, customs agents never knew that it was a sad parody of an old
man's fantasy lust for a young girl.
The Net censors seem to have found in the Internet a modern Lolita--which
they understand just about as well as the 1950s customs agents understood
Nabokov.
--Declan McCullagh
For the full text, see http://www.iworld.com/