Okay so first off, I know this post is long overdue... what like 7 months I've let down my small but faithful readership? :) seriously I have written 3 previous posts that haven't made it out of draft (2 were about my trip to Vegas.. sigh...)
So I will try something different. I needed more space then I could get with FB but am going to try an shelve "Mr. Perfectionist" and just try to get my point across as coherently and quickly as possible.
I overheard some co-workers talking about some new American Bill that related to the Internet today, and although it is likely old news to most I had not yet heard of it and had to find out more.
The Bill is titled "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011" and is suppose to help fight child pornography. First thoughts are of course Bravo!. I'm all for fighting such abhorrent acts/perversions that have unfortunately been able to take advantage of the "Internets" (sorry I've taken too many calls about the Internet and Internets being down, that I can't help but use that name sometimes) to proliferate.
So I read a couple of articles about it and boy now I'm getting all "Big Brother" scared. ISP's must now keep and preserve data of all our Internet activities for 18 months including banking information, credit card information, browsing history etcetera... I first start wondering what my banking information has to do with child pornography? (oh and yes I am highly concerned that this posting could cause me to disappear in the middle of the night because of all the keywords).
So I read this article and then this article. Seemed like the story and information were pretty much the same. But as I read some of the comments, one person who I have to applaud akacrasher who asked in his comment where it stated that ISP's had to log anything more then IP assignments and then gave the link to the Bill (You can use the linked title to get to the Library of Congress' posting of the bill).
So I went and read it. And I was amazed that the only line about data retention was "`(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).'."
So how can it be that at least 2 news sources are so wrong in their reporting (and I saw plenty more hits when I did a google search that seemed to have the same slant). Is it straight plagiarism? Fear mongering? Or am I reading the Bill wrong?
I know that historically journalist have always fought to keep their "sources" identity secret and what, but in a case like this, should online news not be force to quote the text they are talking about? CNET at least provided a link to the Bill but that still doesn't tell how they got here from there?
well there it is... 20 minutes instead of several days. Hopefully it is somewhat coherent!
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