News For Abuse...

[elfs]

In a speech at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Senator Hilary Clinton advocated the implementation of ubiquitous Digital Access Management to Media, but not in the guise of protecting the profits of the recording industry. No, the left wing has now got its own bugaboo about why DRM is a must-have technology and why general-purpose computing is evil:

All across our country, kids today are playing increasingly violent video games while sending instant messages to friends and strangers on-line and listening to music they've downloaded on their I-Pods. How does a parent today who wants to protect their child from violent or explicit content have a chance? Parental responsibility is crucial, but we need to make sure that parents have the tools they need to keep up with this multi-dimensional environment.

Got that? A V-Chip for your iPod, your iRiver, and your Jukebox. The FCC isn't far behind, with a committee whose objective is "giving parents access to the tools needed to protect their children from inappropriate content via wireless devices."

And how much you want to bet, no matter how fire and brimstone explicit it gets, the iPod V-Chip will have no settings for filtering out Godcasts? That's right, you can now get a daily sermon podcast straight to your brain. Lovely, huh? I feel an SFnal moment coming on.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hi, Craig! The pointed nature of my comment was such that there are inherent assumptions in such technology as the V-chip and related functions about what our society wants to filter out of one's worldview. That there is a technological filter for some toxic notion (for example, that sex is inconsequential or that violence resolves intellectual conflict) but that we don't put a technological filter on other toxic notions (such that Scientology is good for you) because they contain "religious content" seems, well, inconsistent to me.