History Didn't Foresee Cyber Sleaze

"Suppose someone asked you to explain the Internet to the framers of the Constitution. What would you say? You're talking to men from the era of broadsheets and pamphlets. And you're trying to get them to understand an invisible network that beams music, news and advertisements for lower interest rates all over the world. How would you do it?"

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you'd find it a tad difficult, if not downright impossible. Those men would not have the context, nor even the vocabulary, to properly comprehend the Net.

Yet we are required to regulate it according to rules they wrote. That gives you some sense of the difficulty Congress faces in its repeated efforts to craft laws protecting children from cyber sleaze. Three times, legislators have legislated, three times judges have slapped them down, ruling that their efforts ran afoul of the Constitution....

If, as has often been said, the genius of the Constitution is its adaptability to changing times, then the Internet is testing that adaptability as few things ever have before. Cyberspace recognizes no national borders. It encompasses multiple billions of Web sites. Anyone with a server and a registration fee can set up shop. With its mixture of ubiquity and anonymity, the Internet has rendered laws in many areas -- copyright, libel and obscenity, to name a few -- more difficult to enforce if not downright obsolete. Should we really respond by making new laws?...

Legislating cyberspace is like trying to legislate rain. Granted, the framers of the Constitution had no way of knowing this.

But Congress has no excuse." [Mercury News, via Library Stuff]

The only thing I would dispute in this article is the suggestion that minors can be restricted to filtered computers in the children's section. While I'm a parent myself and I applaud efforts to protect children from pornography, filters usually block sites that are even tangentially related to abortion, contraception, alcoholism, drug use, homosexuality, and other subjective categories that have nothing to do with porn.

If kids (teens in particular) can't access resources about these kinds of subjects, they're not going to find what could be potentially valuable information as they make their own choices. The filters block sites about abstinence as well as contraception, so either way the sanitized funnel of information fails them. And what kid is going to ask a librarian to unblock a site about marijuana, abortion, or gay rights (even if the library allows for this circumstance)? I find it difficult to justify denying kids access to the empowering sense of community that you and I have discovered online, especially when that community can help them through that wonderfully difficult stage known as adolescence.

I don't have an answer. I wish I did. Laws by an uninformed Congress aren't it, though.

Having said all of this, I think the most thought-provoking idea in this editorial is the question asking how you would explain the internet to an 18th Century person. Now there's a subject worthy of discussion! I'm going to be thinking about that one for days....

Have Geocache, Will Travel

" 'N 40° 47.920 W 073° 57.384' marks the spot.

Actually, those coordinates mark just one of the thousands of special spots in a high-tech worldwide scavenger hunt known as geocaching.

The rules of the game are simple: Someone creates and hides a cache -- usually a weatherproof container holding a stash of inexpensive goodies -- and then posts coded clues and the cache's latitude and longitude coordinates on one of the many websites devoted to the sport.

Anyone can then attempt to find the cache.

"It's a game where you are the search engine," explained Jeremy Irish, who maintains a popular geocaching website.

In January 2001 there were just a few hundred caches in the world. There are now around 25,000 caches in 122 countries. Some are easy to find: Just plug the location coordinates into a global positioning system device and follow the trail.

But locating others requires a major investment of thought and physical effort....

Stone enjoys brain-busting caches like one he designed called "Graveyard Grumble." The navigational clues are birth and death dates on tombstones at the cemetery where the cache is hidden.

Player Nick Gerald, a website designer from New York, likes caches that lead him directly to the person who hid them." [Wired News]

Where has Wired been? I've been including geocaching in my presentations since 2000 (mostly to make the point that if you're a librarian sitting at a reference desk and you think you're going to just sit there and wait for people to come in to your building to ask you questions, then you haven't checked in with reality lately).

My favorite geocache trend is easily the traveling cache, in which an item (such as a Mr. Potato Head) travels across the country from cache to cache.

On a tangentially-related side note, ZDNet Anchordesk notes the use of kiosks for maps-on-demand printing:

"National Geographic has set up map kiosks in outdoor retailers like REI, where you can have customized maps printed onto waterproof paper in full color. This is a boon to people who don't like laminating the standard USGS topo maps or who happen to need an area that spans several maps. The special paper is also available for sale, allowing you to print maps (or other documents) at home."

It would be a stretch to call this book-publishing-on-demand, but maybe it's a baby step towards that end. I wonder how much it would cost to put one of these in a public library?

Drat! This is the program I wanted to do for our next Tech Summit at SLS (in concept, at least). Unfortunately, I won't make it to the  ALA Conference (in Atlanta) this year, so if you attend this session and you feel like sharing notes, please contact me!

"Pirates on the Commons: Legal and Political Assaults on Information
Access by the Expanding Domain of Copyright
ALA Annual Conference - Atlanta
Sunday June 16  9:30 - 12:00 in the Hilton Ballroom A

Find out about the politics of copyright and fair use from the experts.  Learn how current legal trends could have a profoundly negative effect on libraries, teaching and scholarship.  Hear about alternatives to copyright and the growth of the commons movement.  Find out what ALA is doing and what you can do to get involved.

Speakers:  L. Ray Patterson, Pope Brock Professor of Law, University of Georgia;
David Bollier, Senior Fellow USC Annenberg  Center for Communications, Norman Lear Center;
Mary M. Case,  Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication, ARL;
Carrie Russell, Copyright Specialist, ALA"

Is it too much to hope that this will be an ALA Streaming Webcast? It's certainly an important enough topic. I'd still like to do something similar at SLS, so please also feel free to send along any suggestions for speakers.

Other cool things about this year's conference:

• "The ALA Annual Conference Event Planner is now Active! Click on the Event Planner link in the upper left hand corner to access a complete listing of all events and exhibitors for the 2002 ALA Annual Conference, and to plan your own agenda. You must be a registered attendee to use the agenda function."
   
• The Indigo Girls will be performing at the ALA/ProQuest Scholarship Bash (the last one I went to was the Neville Brothers in New Orleans!).
   
• There's an Interactive Atlanta Map and Exhibit Floor Map! (all done in Flash).

Websense - Free Sex Sites and "Blacklist Wars"

"Websense, a censorware company, is now distributing daily lists of sex sites supposedly not blacklisted by other censorware companies. This is hilarious. I am not making this up....

So, a person will find "This is not as hot a party as I had anticipated". But still, you might get lucky. Websense is certainly giving sex-site seekers a head start, and plenty of ideas. Fresh leads every day....

I can hardly imagine how censorware critics would be pilloried if they pulled a stunt like this. Think of the children!" [kuro5hin.org]

Next thing you know, censorware proponents will be arguing that we need filters in libraries because the companies that make the software put their lists online. Oy vey.