Should the Internet Be Censored?
When the internet was conceived in the last century (boy, that sure makes it seem a lot older than it is, doesn't it?) it began as a free and open exchange of information. The original intent was to connect universities and military installations together to freely exchange data. The invention of the web continued that intention. This is supported by the lack of security in TCP/IP and in the early web specifications.
I know it seems strange now, but there was a time, not too long ago, when there was no pornography on the internet. In fact, all of the hate, pornographic and similar sites are actually rather new (less than half a dozen years in most cases). There was no need or tolerance for this kind of material when the internet was young and of limited distribution. It was not until companies such as AOL, Compuserve, MSN and others succeeded in getting the common man (and woman) on the web that illicit materials began to become available.
This image was selected as a picture of the week o...
Internet!
English: Icon from Nuvola icon theme for KDE 3.x. ...Once this kind of material appeared on the internet, it exploded so quickly that it absolutely boggles the mind. It seemed like one day there were normal educational sites and a few personal home pages, and the next there was pornography everywhere. And I mean everywhere ... I remember not too long ago it was absolutely impossible to perform a search in any search engine without running into hundreds of sex sites. It didn't seem to matter what the search was about, the same kind of sites were returned.
The search engines seemed to have largely solved this problem by making their robots and indexing schemes more intelligent. I've noticed that it appears to be safe to search again without having to sort through bizillions of...