Re: DFI: Proposal to add activelink images -- feedback wanted

Personally I don't understand why we can't have some level of editorial
involvement. Oh, except for the little legal thing about being forced to
be responsible for everything if you take responsibility for anything.
:)

You can't pick and choose sites to link to, because if you did, you'd 
have to exclude anything that might be illegal.

Legally you probably should do exactly that, but I don't know what the
situation is. CofE is very careful with his anonymity, so he can pick
and choose which sites to alink to, although he normally allows links to
all sites. It's just a shame that his index isn't categorized. :)

But the fact remains, if you alink to child porn, *you are inlining
child porn *images* on a page that is ONE CLICK from the Web Interface*.
If you don't see a problem with that, I'll have to oppose your site
being on it. But I suspect you will see the problem.

If I search for "chicken sex", I expect to get chicken sex. That's what
I expect to happen on google. On freenet, if I click on Pornography,
then on Fred's Child Porn Index (hypothetically; I don't know of a
Fred's Child Porn Index but then I haven't looked for one), then I
expect to get a list of child porn sites, possibly with images on the
index itself - or nothing at all, but unfortunately freenet's current
lack of speed means it tends to be used by people who have something to
hide and sadly some of them are probably paedophiles. What I do NOT 
expect to do is to click on "Whoever's Freenet Index", and, without any
warning, find child porn (or bestiality for that matter), possibly 
animated, albeit shrunk, in my browser, my never having asked for it.
Especially if I'm a first time user, who checked Freenet out after
reading about how it was used to distribute the Diebold files, for
example.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 06:21:39PM -0600, Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 15:40:06 -0800, Todd Walton <[email protected]>
> 
> Yes, there are some sites I would just as soon not even exist, but I
> feel a certain responsibility not to allow my personal feelings to
> influence the content of DFI, being that its sole "raison d'?tre", as I
> see it, is to provide as complete and up-to-date an index to freenet's
> content as possible.  It's not my place to "protect" people from
> questionable or potentially offensive content, or even to warn them; it
> should be everyone's right to choose for themselves what they care to
> explore, and to do so without the burden of someone else's value
> judgements weighing on their minds.  In fact, I feel so strongly about
> this that if I were forced to start weeding out the objectionable
> content, or even to merely place warnings or other editorial commentary,
> I would just as soon no longer maintain an index site at all, period.
> 
> The spider and it resulting index, in its current mode of operation, is
> as unbiased and impartial as it can possibly be, neither condemning nor
> recommending any particular material it provides links to.  I believe
> this is as it should be.
> 
> Also, from a legal perspective, I do think it's safer to allow the
> spider to simply do its thing and find what it will, and to
> auto-generate the index with no intervention on my part, for exactly the
> same reason many Usenet news service providers choose to follow a "hands
> off" policy regarding the content of their servers.  Once you adopt a
> policy of "filtering on content", you abandon all semblance of plausible
> deniability and do, in effect, assume responsibility for *knowing* about
> any questionable material you may be providing.  At that point, you may
> as well just hang it up, as it is simply not humanly possible to ensure
> that no objectionable or illegal content can possibly "leak" out from
> your server or site or whatever.
> 
> IANAL, and I could be mistaken on some of the finer points relating to
> the above, but I am reasonably certain that, should I ever find myself
> in the position of having to defend myself in the legal arena, I would
> fare much better as the operator of a completely uncensored index site
> than if I were actively engaged in "editing for content".  Let's just
> hope I never need to find out, or at least that, if I do, I don't
> discover too late that I was dreadfully, horribly wrong.  :-)
> 
> -- 
> Conrad J. Sabatier <[email protected]> -- "In Unix veritas"
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-- 
Matthew J Toseland - toad-EI5O+8PHWbJeeLb3ft/[email protected]
Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/
ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so.

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