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The Hotsex picture archive contains "over 5,000 high quality sizzling hot images." At Phone Sex, the women "have wild times chatting with guys from around the world." At Adult Sex Entertainment, there is even an optional, "Showgirls Sex Line."
Because of the easy accessibility of pornographic material on the Internet, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act which would ban all "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" material on the Internet.
As soon as President Clinton signed the bill, many organizations teamed up to fight it including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group created to protect civil liberties and the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition, which is comprised of more than 40,000 Internet users.
On June 12, the three-judge panel in Philadelphia, Pa. ruled that the CDA would unconstitutionally censor Internet speech and granted a preliminary injunction.
Senator J.J. Exon (D-NE), who proposed the CDA showed his disappointment saying, "The court has taken the American Civil Liberties Union line that anything goes on the Internet, even though that overlooks well-established laws protecting children from pornography in other areas."
Jerry Berman, a co-founder of the CIEC praised the verdict saying, "This is a victory for the Internet and for everyone who values free speech."
Judge Steward J. Dalzell, one of three judges who presided over the case wrote, "We should expect such speech (unfiltered, unconventional, indecent) to occur in a medium in which citizens from all walks of life have a voice. We should also protect the autonomy that such a medium confers to ordinary people as well as media magnates."
For parents who want to block sexually explicit material on the Internet, there are several options. Many online services have parental controls to block material on the Net.
America Online has their own built-in parental controls. Within the AOL environment, a parent can block instant messages from other users block e-mail and limit downloading.
Despite AOL's parental controls, children still have access to pornography.
"It's easy to get pornos on AOL," said Minder Singh, a junior at Sacred Heart Cathedral. "Just go into the porno chat rooms and ask for pornos or GIFs." GIFs are file extensions for computer graphics and pictures which can be sent electronically.
SurfWatch, created by SurfWatch Software Inc of Los Altos, Calif., was the first product to help parents filter the Internet.
The program has a list of blocked sites and it also prevents users from starting a search for certain material on Web search engines.
SurfWatch hires college students to search the Web to find new offensive sites. Many Web creators making pornographic sites call SurfWatch warning of a new site and users can e-mail SurfWatch if they find any new sites.
Users of SurfWatch can get a subscription from SurfWatch which would update the user's home list of unwanted sites. This costs $5.95 a month. The software costs $49.95.
Another software option for parents is a program called Cyber Patrol. Cyber Patrol was created by Microsystems Inc., located in Framingham, Mass.
Cyber Patrol blocks sites similarly to SurfWatch. However, Cyber Patrol's team includes parents, teachers, and ministers who constantly surf the Net to find sites which are adult oriented. Also, the staff uses a program which helps them to determine whether a webpage is a breast cancer site or Mama Jug's Fantasy Forum.
Cyber Patrol puts these sites on their "CyberNOTS List." Every week users get updates e-mailed to them.
Parents are also able to customize the settings for each child. For example, parents can limit their 7-year-old child's online time to two hours or make that time five hours for their 16-year-old.
Cyber Patrol costs $34.95 and comes with three months of free weekly updates. For home users it will cost $34.95 for 12 months of weekly updates. Annual subscription renewals will cost $5.00 per computer. Users of CompuServe can use Cyber Patrol for free