I will grant you the “social order” part (and it should be clear I see change in this, at least in the US, as a GOOD thing) but you never once made a case for your other points – some of which seems based on very misinformed premises.

It is entirely possible to take action based on “packet type” – this is the basis of many QoS applications. For example, some ISPs block certain ports that prohibit their customers from running their own SMTP servers. Other applications – such as the one running on my (completely Free) router – allocate bandwidth to various protocols on the fly so as to prevent (say) incoming NNTP traffic from interfering with web surfing.

Of course, none of that is possible if someone simply opens a VPN to a proxy somewhere. Then it’s just one big glop of encrypted traffic. Impossible to block, that is, unless you just block all encrypted traffic. Given your comments, it seems almost as if you think that would be a good thing.

Well, at least it would rid the net of the tidal wave of e-commerce in a hurry…

Exploitation has become one of those coopted phrases abused by the politically correct. Indeed, here you are again proving the point I made before about losing sight of the ideals that (allagedly) founded this country: Exploitation isn’t a crime. Exploiting children is. That’s because “exploiting children” in this discussion implies “in a sexual way”, which absolutely is a crime in the United States and many other countries.

How does taking nude pictures of children, living in a society where nudity is not demonized, “exploiting children in a sexual way?” People used to read National Geographic for the very same reason. Meanwhile, children are still photographed and their images used “in a sexual way.” The Olsen Twins, for example, didn’t become Billionaires just because they appealed to little girls. This was even acknowledged by the fellow who ran the company those years before they were of age to run it themselves.

So we protect the Olsen twins because they espouse “american ideals” like mass consumerism and tithing to the church of celebrity, but we bar from the table those who need most to eat – the kids who are left with no one to fend for them but themselves! Mary-kate won’t miss that twenty dollar DVD sale – how many bowls of soup would that twenty bucks buy Nadya?

Nadya will never know, because she doesn’t have the celebrity machine to help her sell herself online. All she has is her twelve year old beauty and an admirer with a digital camera – but if someone is selling the “full monty” of Nadya online how is poor Mary-Kate going to compete?

Does it not make more sense to remove the cultural taboos that foster these “perversions?” In Germany they sell to teens magazines that would get the publishers arrested in the US because they feature not only nude (mid)teens, but 14 and 15 year olds in sexually provocative situations. This also includes various instructions and reviews of birth control methods, AIDS prevention, venereal disease education, etc. Is it a coincidence that the nations most opposed to this sort of material also have the highest teenage pregnancy and STD disease rates among the (again, allegedly) “civilized world?”

Doesn’t it make more sense to break down these social barriers? If women walked around topless would it really be a big deal if some pop star has a “costume malfunction?”

Of course not. But it is perversion that greases the wheels of capitalism, so this perversion must be maintained. Children are sexually exploited in large number in this country, but taboos and laws conspire to discourage any meaningful discussion of the problem. Willing participants are cast as victims, victims are made to feel shame, and so the cycle is sustained in a cloak of public ignorance. Who is protected? Not the vicitms, but those who profit most from an unwitting public’s puritannical perversion.

The pipes must be plugged. We cannot risk those socialists from the east mucking up the wheels of capitalism!

ex·ploi·ta·tion: an act or instance of exploiting
ex·ploit: to make use of meanly or unjustly for one’s own advantage

So it’s not a strange distortion of exploitation.

Exploitation is not a crime. Look it up – exploitation means to utilize. When I heat my house in the winter I am exploiting the natural resources (wood) made available to me in this area. When I go to work at a 9-5 job I am exploiting my experience and knowledge. But for some reason this english speaking culture has made it a taboo to exploit one’s beauty (or at least overtly, since we all know beauty cannot be denied).

“Crime” is what society deems unacceptable. In China it is ideals of liberty and freedom; in the US it is ideals of youth and sensuality.

Thus proving the point again: the “end to end architecture” is a liability because, in the end, most folks simply need to demonize other cultures. having an open pipe to cultures that do not share our beliefs is a liability, not a “feature” – not only to the governments who rely on fears and bigotry to control their subjects, but by those very same unwashed masses too lazy to think.

a stupid network is not entirely beneficial to innovation Alan De Smet. in many ways, it has been a giant step backwards.

like the grass covered public square, the internet is not infinite. bandwidth – particularly at the subscriber connection – is an exhaustible resource. all digital subscriber lines terminate into a DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer) which concentrates the traffic onto a high-capacity carrier.

the DSLAM is one chokepoint: a DSL line (such as a radio signal over the telephone wires) can easily carry 10Mbit, but most users are promised no more than 1M because of multiplexing. even 1Mbit is a statistical promise. the available connection speed can – even over brief intervals – vary considerably.

subscriber line multiplexing is only one of many network delays. a fundamental principle of TCP/IP is that it routes packets individually: each can arrive at the destination address with a different delay. this is a strength and beauty, but it is also a substantial weakness. audio codecs do not like it when too many frames are delayed and you can only buffer so much before the audio delays become noticeable.

VoIP is an oft-cited “innovation” attributable to DARPA’s sage selection of an end-to-end architecture, but VoIP is in reality a huge, innovation crushing, step backwards from VoATM.

in the old days of the dinosaurs, the telecom companies (who never invented anything because they were not innovative) “discovered” something called ATM (asynchronous transport mode.) ATM was an semi-smart packet switched network that could differentiate between different connection types and provide bandwidth accordingly. as a transport network, ATM is far more efficient than TCP/IP for mixed media connections – which is, of course, the direction in which the internet is evolving.

(what this means is that the sages at DARPA with their “end-to-end” architecture, failed to predict the evolution of the packet switched network as accurately as the oft-criticised telecoms industry.)

TCP/IP with its egalatarian packet-by-packet transport protocol, cannot (and many say should not) take any action based on the content of the packet, or the type of connection – even if doing so is essential to providing a certain quality of service (QoS). this, it is feared, would lead directly to fascism and the murder of hundreds of millions of innocents.. or something equally unpleasant.

meanwhile others, like poptones, lament over the risks at edges while ignoring the many unarguable instances of child exploitation, fraud, theft, and other crimes that are made possible, or more easy, by the end-to-end architecture. “who me? i’m just a bit pipe. blame someone else.”

we submit that blind adherence to the end-to-end principle and open frontiers is a hinder to technical innovation, economic development, and social order. and we argue again that which is plain to see: for the internet to achieve its full potential as a communications tool, more intelligence MUST (and ultimately will) be built into the network.

Your cowardice makes my point exactly on this, thanks. You see, where these children live it wasn’t a big deal. Those kids would walk around those woods naked anyway, but many of them were too poor to escape the city for the opportunity. go to the beach and you’ll see naked ten year olds wrestling, groping, maybe even fondling and having a grand old time. It’s just not a big deal; even a local priest was fostering an activist group that helped ensure these children were not being unfarily exploited – a sort of “child model union.” The US pressured local politcal officers to shut down this effort because it “sent the message that this sort of thing was OK.” So rather than protect the kids on the street (who were NOT being cared fo by parents, their government, our government or anyone else) the US essentially set up the means by which slavery and prostitution (as opposed to modeling) was essentially their only means of escaping a life sleeping under bridges and in doorways.

You want some sources for that, too? go to Human Rights watch…

Yes. Exploitation of children is bad, but laws criminalizing possession of information (even “pornography” epicting eexploited children) is worse. Not only do such laws foster the vey perversions thay alledge to “protect” society from, they also run counter to every other “incidental benfit” one can name – for example, identifying the children who are being abused. Look at the case of the little girl who was being molested in the case of those infamous “motel pictures” – investigators tried for YEARS to identify her but became so frustrated they finally released the retouched pictures of a motel room where she had been molested in one set of images. Within just a couple of months after they made this release the girl was identified and they discovered she had been out of danger or years – no thanks to the “investigators” who meant to “protect her” by making it a crime for anyone to propogate her images.

Every picture tells a story. By making it ilegal to possess or publish these pictures in the name of “protecting the child” what we do is inflict shame upon the victim. If a child is raped it is not her fault. So which is more important? To prevent her from being raped again (and again, and again) or to hide her in shame? Imagine if it were a crime to film police arrests, or bank robberies, or even wrestling matches. If a child is beaten in the street it is perfectly legal to film it and to possess images of that beating – but if a child is subjected to sexual battery it is suddenly a crime to even distribute images of the crime. How the fuck does this “protect children?” it protects them from shame fostered by the perversion of American Judeo-fascist mores regarding sex, that’s all.

So now the latest law “protecting children” will be used to persecute every pornographer or purveyor of images the do-gooders deem unacceptable. That Constitution is useless when it comes to criminalized behavior and thanks to those “activist judges” we now have the precedent that pretty much any images that sexualize children in any way can be deemed “obscene” by local standards – which means the next laws “protecting children” will depend upon the new precedents being set. All it takes is one narrow verdict in Podunk Iowa (or, closer ot my home, Birmingham, Alabama – where local prosecutors are going after certain businesses and their models with great zeal) and it no business will be safe. Creatos of sexualized images, adults or children, will become subject to government sanctioned persecution.

Sex is evil and the body is filthy (especially those younger bodies!) and so all of society must be “protected.” Screw diversity, perversion must be preserved if we are to maintain control of society. Sex is, after all, the backbone of commerce. Just imagine if those perversions were stripped away, the taboo regarding sex breached… how would we sell music, films, mouthwash and automobiles?

The foundations of Capitalism must be preserved!

I’m confused as to what you mean by that. Do you mean that child pornography laws are bad? I admit, some are overly broad, and may not be the best way (in some instances) of dealing with abused children, but I don’t see anything wrong with laws trying to stop exploitation of children for pornographic purposes. Or were you just referring to “erotica”?

Next, section 2257 (18 USC I 110 � 2257. “Record keeping requirements”) has nothing to do with the types of videos produced, only keeping records of performers in them. I think it was a stupid addendum to the law, personally speaking, and I think it can be abused. I think it will be challenged at some point in the future.

Skipping back:

All I know is the US shut down sites that offered erotic depictions of young girls and boys, which only opened the door to HARDER STUFF. IOW they were so �offended� by the notion of ten year olds posing nude in the woods in exchange for a few american dollars the US managed to politically shut down the sites that offered such material.

Uh…huh. I don’t think this is the time or place to get into a debate on whether children should pose nude in an “erotic” way for the camera and “a few american dollars,” and I actually think that I’m going to end this conversation with you now.