Censorship or Offensiveness? Acceptable Use

Tom Kelliher, CS29

Sept. 29, 1997

Announcements

Discussion of censorship next time. Please share relevant materials.

Assignment

Read:

1. Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyperspace Burning?
   (http://www.aclu.org/issues/cyber/burning.html)

2. Child Safety on the Information Highway
   (http://www.larrysworld.com/child_safety.html)

Outline:

1. Censorship.

2. Offensiveness.

3. Acceptable use.

Censorship

Real life examples:

1. ``Condom Country'' link in Other Sites of Interest.

2. Cross-dressing link on a home page.

3. Link from home page to page of an alumnus. Alumnus' page has pornographic image.

4. Disk quotas.

5. Student home pages on ``official'' server.

Offensiveness

1. Is anything from the previous section offensive? To whom?

2. Is this offensive?

3. What about this ?

4. The ``MUD flame'' incident. Retaliation: access denied to entire College.

Questions: Who is the audience? Who judges? Who decides? Who patrols?

Acceptable Use

1. Use guidelines .

2. Account sharing.

3. Anonymizers. Hidden identity/responsibility.

4. Breaking into systems.

5. Sniffing network traffic.

6. Browsing others files. Editing.

7. Firewalls --- protection vs. access.

8. Inadvertent denial of service attacks (mail forwarders).

9. Viruses.

10. Quota circumvention.

11. Commercial use.