Internet Censorship Essay -- Short Stories Technology Papers

Internet Censorship Max walks into the classroom five minutes late, his shirt untucked and hardly buttoned. He sits down a few desks away from Ben who had arrived five minutes early and was waiting patiently for class to start. Although the boys seemed completely opposite, Ben the more conservative and shy one, while Max, a little more rebellious and mischievous, they were best friends and did most everything together. A few weeks into their fifth grade year, the teacher announced that they would begin doing reports on their favorite animal. They knew that this was the first year they were able to use the computer lab in the library and the idea of being able to use the internet excited them. Mrs. Howard sent the class to the library for the next period so they could start researching information about their animals. Some of the kids wandered around the second floor looking for books pertaining to their projects and some chose to start their search on the internet. Max and Ben went to the computer lab, found an open computer and began to browse different search engines looking for information about their animals. Max became bored with this idea and began searching sites of his own interest. Finally he found one that appealed most to him. â€Å"Hey Ben come look at this!† Max said. â€Å"What is it?† Ben rolled his chair over to Max’s computer screen and looked at what Max had pulled up. â€Å"Max, you’re going to get in trouble, you better get that off there.† â€Å"No way man, this is awesome†¦let’s look at some more.† The site that Max had clicked on was a pornographic web page containing many obscene pictures Aof naked women and other adult content. Although Ben felt unco... ...e room they see their 7 year old daughter Katie playing around on the computer. They noticed that the screen had a big caption in the middle stating that the site wasn’t able to be accessed. Curious to know what the blocked site was, Mr. Miller clicked the â€Å"Back† button and saw â€Å"Take a Wild Ride in Barbie Land† in big purple letters. Right away he knew that Barbie wasn’t referring to the actual doll and was relieved to know his daughter would never get to see the contents of that site. He looked at his wife and sighed, â€Å"Thank God we decided to install NetNanny onto our computer. You never know what these kids could have gotten into if we weren’t around.† â€Å"I agree honey. Now all we have to do is convince all those other parents and teachers to feel the same way about installing them at school. Hopefully we can get our plan to work.†