The pitfalls of Net Neutrality

The pitfalls of Net Neutrality in a Christian country with mostly Christian legislators and legislatures

Idols and craven images in the modern world

The Sins of our Forefathers Bear Bitter Fruit

Net Neutrality seems like such a simple feature to preserve in the infrastructure of a constitutionally free country like the United States of America. However, we do have to remember that the country was founded by Puritans and a puritanical streak a mile wide sweeps down through the ages and colors every law or policy that is created by our government. It is built into our laws, like the death penalty; blue laws about what commerce can happen on the Sabbath; laws about who can marry whom and who cannot marry; and laws that interdict medical procedures that violate current perceptions of Biblical prohibitions (abortions, death with dignity, and the provision of even information about birth control and family planning). Another area of long standing Puritanical suppression in this country is the suppression of specific sexual practices and the control of publication of images of the body or those sexual practices. And it is specifically this control of publication of images of the body or those sexual practices that collides with the notion of net neutrality.

Setting the Stage

Kugel has introduced a marvelous image gallery and display application that goes under the name of gauginweb. This includes the Galleries and the Gaugin App and the downloadable Gaugin 3 picture management application. All this is currently free and, when you set up your gallery, you get 1 Gig space free for your images. I have currently documented our garden and flower development cycle from frost to frost, and have some bird pictures and still lifes in my gallery. However, one soon tires of looking at the pictures one has produced. In response to a Smithsonian Magazine article about the Cahaba Lilly and river of the same name, I entered Cahaba Lilly as the search term in the search box, and got a marvelous slideshow about the rafting the Cahaba river to see the lilies. I went on to view slideshows of meadow larks (Did you know that there is a Peruvian meadow lark with a red breast and no V?), bobolinks, ravens, meerkats, tapers, gnu’s, wildebeasts, lemurs, and okapi. Sadly, chipmunks did not appear, so one can be disappointed. The search term “Flowers that bloom in the spring” produces a long series, and was initially headed by one of my own pictures. Now, it is only 8th in the series. It seems that one is limited only by one’s ability to dream up search terms that capture the collective name for objects, animals, and plants. “Autumn Leaves” led me to one of my favorites: http://gauginweb.kugel.com/PatCrosby/AutumnLeavesExtravaganzaCatskillMountainsNY#5253732166178708242
But there is more to the Gauginweb gallery navigation. Once you find an image you like, you can click on the owner’s icon in the right pane and open up their gallery and see what albums them have in addition to the picture you have discovered. Further, there may be a list of galleries, to which the owner has established links, and you can navigate to them and see what they contain. So, a search of some bird brought up an image by Michelle St.Sauveur, whose album “Best of the Best” (http://gauginweb.kugel.com/michellelynnsts/BestOfTheBest# ) is truly stunning, and she has links to other naturalists who do equally fine work. And, if you are looking for whimsy, then this album is for you: http://gauginweb.kugel.com/yarving/JvhcND# .
The only problem with Gaugin navigation is that, once you have traversed the galleries to a point where there are no more linked galleries, you can’t get back to the first one so that you can try a different leg. For completeness, I include my list of great galleries here:

Goodness and light links:

I think of these as the goodness and light of the gaugin web world and will refer to it hereafter as the “Baby”.

The Dark Side of the Gaugin Web World

One sort of stumbles into the Dark Side of GWW. Having lived in California, I did a search on Redondo Beach, but the images there were mostly of empty beaches, people seemingly far off, and images of the main drag through the beach front. Boring. So then I thought about Muscle Beach in Santa Monica. But that search showed images of empty beach, a building with a façade like a barbell, outdoor exercise areas, and 98-pound weaklings making strange poses with crooked arms. Again boring. So I tried “muscle men” as a search term. That produced, in addition to ordinary men in strange poses, images of men with advanced upper body development, and mostly by three photographers—Chris, Jim, and See-ming Lee. These proved to be galleries of a large number of albums with hundreds of images in each album. They were all clothed, though many were in skimpy bathing suits, or underwear, and many were pulled down partially exposing pubic hair, or displaying erections under the garment. They were all suitable for inclusion in the many print magazines that one can find in newspaper and magazine shops. These collections are huge—well beyond the 1 gigabyte that Kugel provides free. Ergo, they were advertizing; but it was unclear how they directed the viewers to the paying sites to generate a revenue stream. Then I started noticing URLs imbedded in the pictures, and the album owner often included URLs in captions, or other information areas on the album page. The following is a comment I found in one album:

“If you like my pictures, shop at Amazon from this link and let me earn a small commision:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/derekrocom-20
Or, browse my personal website for more hot deals:
http://www.DerekRosen.com
Also, add my blog to your Favorites
http://meboilover.blogspot.com/ “

But these images, while suggestive, were no smoking guns, and I started looking for them. First, I looked at the tail end of the image set produced by the muscle men search term. (The supposedly contains 7783 images, but I was never able to get gaugin web to show me anything past the 1000th entry. At page 6, images from muscleaeron started showing up. These were images of professionals in the body building contests. The first image of frontal male nudity, unobscured, now shows up at position 386, and there are two or three more by the 550th image. These are certainly the smoking guns that will set off Christian calls for censorship in America. But they were all from muscleaeron, who is clearly a European photographer and does not have the same restrictions and taboos as American photographers. Turns out, the best search term, that restricts the chaff somewhat, is “nude muscle men”. But the most efficient way to find these images is to open the gallery at: http://gauginweb.kugel.com/lord.aeron1234

Looking for American smoking guns, I walked the navigation tree, beginning with Chris and Jim. Eventually, I found this gallery: http://gauginweb.kugel.com/jbukermsp which had an album entitled *** and *** Shots, which would have sent any adolescent into a tight fetal curl of inadequacy. And I found http://gauginweb.kugel.com/rskepek , which contained an album of images of boots for “Working Women”. In the middle of the images of boots, were images of sex acts between various numbers of men and a woman. These images were probably out-takes form a XXX magazine or video, but were surprising to see outside the backroom of video shops and adult magazine shops. However, these images are not in the public albums of that site any longer. There was a point when all my smoking guns disappeared, but they slowly came back. I thought that Kugel had enforced their niceness rules, but muscleaeron came back, and so did the above site; but the *** and *** Shots album has never reappeared, and the XXX images were removed from the boot album. They eventually appeared for a short time in an second album, but have since disappeared.

A final smoking gun that I found is this image: http://gauginweb.kugel.com/meboilover/SexyHotShirtlessGuys15#5373369195693380802 . It shows two youngish teens kissing. This is guaranteed to push the Christian The-gays-are-recruiting-our-young-boys button, even though it should be noted that the two teens in question are roughly the same age, are not being recruited by older men (at least in the image), and no crime is being committed, except against (Christian, Jewish, Islamic) humanity.

Not all of the Christian Dark Side is evil. This image of nude seated man, if done in paint on canvas, could grace the walls of any great museum. (http://gauginweb.kugel.com/lord.aeron1234/MuscleExploration#5228836826936607762 ) And this image of a nude on a beach is such a great composition that you don’t notice that the guy has an erection. (http://gauginweb.kugel.com/lord.aeron1234/MuscleExploration02#5363850280094932258 ) And if you still think “A kiss is just a kiss” that occurs as Time Goes By, you should have seen the YouTube video at the bottom of Muscleaeron’s blog. Alas, and this emphasizes the transitory nature of things in the Gaugin Web World, it was replaced by other material. A search for “The Kiss” on YouTube produced such a long list of search results, you would never find it that way.

The commando site (http://gauginweb.kugel.com/commandodubey ) is probably evil, and, possibly, a terrorist recruitment site. The kugel standards people seem not to have noticed.

All of this stuff in the Dark Side of the Gaugin Web World will be referred to as “the bath water”, which Christian censorship forces would surely want to toss out. However, the materials I have seen are no different from those that have been allowed in the print and video media. The primary difference is that, currently, anyone, of whatever age, can find them. Much of the Bath Water content would only be available in back rooms available only to people over 21, or perhaps 18 in Texas. Kugel, in its Terms of Service, asserts that anyone with a Kugel account has stated that they are able to make a contract with Kugel and that implies meeting all existing age limits. But, I did not generally log into a Kugel account when I searched these galleries. Kugel may have a cookie on my system that gives them that information, but in leu of a specific statement from Kugel, I have my doubts. The Baby is the cover that hides or keeps our eyes from seeing the bath water. However, it is the bath water that pays for the whole facility. People will not pay for viewing images of flowers but they will for the images in the bath water. And Kugel will make its fortune on transmitting those images. This bath water is still in the public view, but we have no knowledge, and access, to what is in the private galleries in the Gaugin Web World. However, Kugel has created a mechanism by which a gallery owner can allow others to access their private galleries. And that is where illegal images will be traded.

The Dark Side URLs

What has all this to do with Net Neutrality?

Kugel wants Net Neutrality to justify its assertion that it is just transmitting 0’s and 1’s and censorship should not be imposed at the transmitter level. An image isn’t an image until an end-user application turns the 0’s and 1’s into pixels. On the other hand, it is assuming that its users of the Gaugin Web World are all adults and is letting any user access to its community image galleries, not to mention blogs and sites for which there is little or no oversight, unless complaints are filed. That stance is right up there with food advertisers saying that they are policing the advertising of sugary cereals to children, while maintaining ads inside children’s social networking sites, interactive game sites, and product placements. The predictable result is the pandemic increase of obesity in children and the long term health effects of future generations of kids. The health costs of these victims will be right up there with the costs of victims of asbestos, and the food industry, like the asbestos industry, is denying all effect and responsibility because nobody is forcing the children to eat the sugary cereals.

Kugel has begun setting up mechanisms by which users can grant collaborative access to “friends” to contribute to and maintain galleries. If this will apply to private galleries, as well as public, then you have the basic network available for exchange of child pornography, while avoiding the necessity of having the images stored on local computers. Current laws make possession of child pornography on local computers illegal, and when the police suspect possession, they get warrants to search the personal computers for such images. If such images are actually stored in the web cloud, and are regularly wiped from the temporary web files immediately after using, then the police lose the proof for which they search. Inevitably, censorship and oversight will move out to the cloud providers, like Kugel and Huhaw, at which point the baby will get tossed out with the bath water.

Published Wed, Nov 4 2009 18:03 by OBTS

Filed under: dotP

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The pitfalls of Net Neutrality