Re: Child Porn (was: Re: [freenet-chat] Thoughts about Freenet)

[Sam Joseph]

David McNab wrote: > Freenet also provides an anonymous means for people to expose *proven* child > abusers. > Such exposure may not be effective, though, unless it is backed up by > evidence. > Also, such exposure would have best effect if it compassionately called upon > abusers to seek healing. > If child abusers are exposed with convincing evidence, they will be left > with little option but to seek healing. > It would only take a few abusers going public about their healing to start > to really turn society around. > Imagine, say, a book called "Confessions: A Rock-Spider's Healing Journey", > written by a reformed abuser. > Many people reading such a book would cringe, because they would recognise > in themselves many of the ingredients that can culminate in child abuse. > But it would pull the whole issue out into the open. Okay. So I'm all for pulling the issue out into the open. We can agree that we want people to seek healing. Now I know that we don't necessarily have an effective mechanism to block images on Freenet over text, but let's say for the sake of argument that we did. Just hypothetically. Does anything that you're saying actually require that images of child pornography need to be widely available on Freenet. Could not the *proven* (whatever that means) child abusers be exposed on Freenet through the use of text and not images? The book you mention "Confessions: A Rock-Spider's Healing Journey" could be published on our hypothetical text only freenet and have the same effect right? What I'm trying to get at is that it seems to me that we only need the anonymous text publishing ability to accomplish all this, right? Images could still be published through non-anonymous means, but people who were just publishing child pornography for consumption by others might be stopped (assuming that we wanted to stop them, which people on this list may or may not agree with). The argument may be pointless in as much as we can't distinguish text from images on freenet (although i'm guessing there would be statistical methods that achieved this), but I know that I don't want to run a Freenet node on my computer because I don't want to be distributing child porn, and I know that I'm not the only person who feels that way. If the objective is to make Freenet larger and more widespread, then a *hypothetical* text-only version might be something that would encourage its spread because it would reduce people's fears about child porn. One might say that people who think that are stupid or wrong, but there would be nothing to prevent both a free-for-all Freenet and a text-only freenet existing side by side. This is all speculative of course, but I am guessing that alot of people might take up the text-only freenet where they wouldn't run free-for-all nodes. So my question to you David, is do we actually need the ability to _anonymously_ distribute images to achieve any of the things you are talking about? Or would _anonymous_ distribution of text do just as well? CHEERS> SAM _______________________________________________ Chat mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/chat