[From Risks Digest 21.81, http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html --DBM] --- Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 15:02:30 +0100 From: Debora Weber-Wulff <weberwu@fhtw-berlin.de> Subject: "Late-night" Internet-porno-ban German officials are apparently attempting to prove that the PISA results (Germany is pretty much at the bottom of the pack in regards to education world-wide) are true and anyone, no matter how ignorant, can be a politician in Germany: The German Federal Government and the State governments have agreed to new measures for protecting youth from pornography on the Internet: according to the "Financial Times Deutschland" (http://www.ftd.de/pw/de/FTDPRAR3MUC.html) all such content is banned from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. No, this is not April Fools' Day. Really. The German government seems to think that when it is 11 p.m. in Germany, it is 11 p.m. everywhere else. And that all those XXX folks on the Internet will happily turn off the sleaze during the German day when the kiddies are awake. This has of course caused an uproar amongst those in the know. Spiegel-on-line wrote an open letter to the guy in charge of publishing this nonsense, Frank-Walter Steinmeier http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,170361,00.html [The sarcastic wit in the letter may not make it through Babelfish intact, but it is quite funny] What a sorry state of affairs. The risks posed by ignorant politicians may yet be far more dangerous that the odd virus and software mistake..... Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, FHTW Berlin, Treskowallee 8, 10313 Berlin +49-30-5019-2320 http://www.f4.fhtw-berlin.de/people/weberwu/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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