Censorship

 Approximately a dozen newsgroups continue to be censored at Carnegie Mellon due to a rash, ill-considered response by the administration to the fears of a single individual who has long desired to censor sexually explicit material from the bboards. (Note: the Computer Science Department no longer censors the banned bboards on their server.)

After the initial censorship, a Bboard Censorship Committee was created to investigate the issues and to recommend what bboards should remain on the censored list. They spent months not learning very much. Here is the Final Report from the bboard censorship committee at CMU in which they recommend to President Mehrabian the continued censorship of the following newsgroups:

  1. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica
  2. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality
  3. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bondage
  4. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female
  5. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male
  6. alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen.male
  7. alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless
Thus far the administration has not acted on the report and it appears that they are going to stonewall this issue for up to a year.

Carnegie Mellon Screws Itself

From the moment the Rimm study was published Carnegie Mellon began acting as if it endorsed the study. Copies of the study were made freely available to any CMU faculty or staff member who requested one. Vice Provost Erwin Steinberg went on Nightline with Marty Rimm to talk about the "the Carnegie Mellon study". Carnegie Mellon's "8 1/2 x 11 News" also referred to the study as Carnegie Mellon's. It was not until the afternoon of July 14 that Carnegie Mellon started to get worried about ethical questions that were being raised about the study (e.g., Jim Thomas' paper "The Ethics of Carnegie Mellon's 'Cyber-Porn' Study") and began backing away from whole-hearted endorsement of it.

CAFE is a group of students, faculty, staff and alumni who are working to protect freedom of expression at Carnegie Mellon.

Banned Newsgroups at CMU

 The following newsgroups are among those currently being banned on CMU's Andrew system. You may read them if you like, even from CMU, since they are readily available via the network from other servers, including a few at CMU.

If you are using Mosaic on a Unix system, set the NNTPSERVER environment variable before starting Mosaic in order to be able to access the following newsgroups. If you are using Netscape 1.0N on a Macintosh, go to the Options menu, select Preferences, and then Directories, Applications and News from the pop-up menu. With Unix Netscape 1.1N, select Mail and News in the Preferences pop-up window. There is a slot at the bottom of that window where you can enter your News (NNTP) Server. You will, of course, have to Choose a Server that carries these groups. You may have trouble finding a single server that carries them all.

  1. Alt Binaries Pictures Erotica
  2. A.B.P.E. Amateur D (discussion group)
  3. A.B.P.E. Amateur Male
  4. A.B.P.E. Anime
  5. A.B.P.E. Bestiality
  6. A.B.P.E. Bestiality Hamster Duct-Tape
  7. A.B.P.E. Blond
  8. A.B.P.E. Blondes
  9. A.B.P.E. Bondage
  10. A.B.P.E. Cartoons
  11. A.B.P.E. D (discussion group)
  12. A.B.P.E. Female
  13. A.B.P.E. Furry
  14. A.B.P.E. Male
  15. A.B.P.E. Orientals
  16. Alt Binaries Pictures Tasteless
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Copyright © 1996 Duane T. Williams. All rights reserved.
Last edited on 11 Feb 1996.