Controversial Utah porn, RDA bills signed into law

Ignoring threats of litigation from civil rights and free speech advocates, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. signed legislation Monday meant to protect children from Internet pornography. The Salt Lake Tribune has more. The American Civil Liberties Union and Internet industry representatives warn House Bill 260 violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and the Commerce Clause.

March 23, 2005 by Blake Uncategorized 9

kylere says:

March 23, 2005 at 7:56 pm

Sad thing about states rights
This is going to play out in each state as elections in them draw near, entirely valueless legislation designed to put a lawmakers name in the news. A very similiar law was struck down in PA and I have no doubt it will be struck down in Utah also. On the tech side implementing this requires one of three things:

1) IP-level filtering, which will block non-adult sites on the same hosting services.

2) Transparent proxying, which breaks lots of things, and is relatively easy to circumvent unless even more things are broken.

3) HOSTS file will have to be locally installed by the user or pushed from the ISP, which will be IP based (see 1)

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Walt says:

March 23, 2005 at 10:13 pm

But wait! There’s more!
Seth Finkelstein (on his invaluable Infothought weblog) points out that this wonderful piece of legislation will result in the state becoming a source for a fine, fully-vetted directory of free porn sites.

Now that’s full-service government.

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kylere says:

March 24, 2005 at 1:31 am

Re:But wait! There’s more!
No, full service government is when the list becomes public and all the porn sites are easily indexable as a result 🙂

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Walt says:

March 24, 2005 at 1:38 am

Re:But wait! There’s more!
Ah, but the list will be public, according to Seth’s reading of the legislation… after all, good gummint has to be done in public.

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Redcardlibrarian says:

March 24, 2005 at 2:55 am

Resume
Once again, I am available for job of surfing the net for porn.

Perhaps we could go one step further and catalog it. That way if someone, say, doesn’t mind plain ‘ol vanilla porn, but wants to block S/M porn, they can block only the porn they don’t want. Sounds like a job for a librarian to me.

Or they could contract with LII ( Librarian’s Index to the Internet ). That way, for those of us who are intersted (only for research purposes), could have the list as well.

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Grumpy Librarian says:

March 24, 2005 at 3:26 am

Re:Resume
If you get the job of cataloging the Web’s porn, will you also be holding reference hours?

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Redcardlibrarian says:

March 24, 2005 at 3:58 am

Re:Resume
I don’t see why not. I could even set it up with a 900 number.

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Redcardlibrarian says:

March 24, 2005 at 4:03 am

Re:Resume
Well, to be precise, a either a 1-613 or a 1-306 number: 1-613-dewey-xx or 1-306-OCLC-sex or 1-613-sexxy-LC. I’m sure there are other suggestions out there.

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Anonymous Patron says:

March 25, 2005 at 2:26 am

FOIA
So where can I go to file a FOIA request?

— Ender, Duke_of_URL

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