It’d be interesting to see how they word such a law given that many companies use them to secure access to their systems.
Every attempt to legislate tech ever.
I was wondering that very same thing!
Maybe the legislation in question will give your enterprise a pass if you can demonstrate that your employees won’t be able to access any of that naughty NSF content from either the workplace or company-supplied gear.
My eyes have rolled so far back in my head I can see behind me.
From the linked article:
Wisconsin’s bill defines “harmful to minors” much more broadly. It applies to materials that merely describe sex or feature descriptions/depictions of human anatomy. This definition would likely encompass a wide range of literature, music, television, and films that are protected under the First Amendment for both adults and young people, not to mention basic scientific and medical content.
Or a decent chunk of the art on display in museums, one might add.
Note to legislators: your attempt to regulate away bawdiness will fail, one way or another. Work-arounds will emerge about five minutes after your bill passes. We humans have been festooning our spaces with, ahem, erotic imagery for millennia, and that includes Stone Age cave paintings, sculptures, and petroglyphs.
I haven’t read the Wisconsin bill, but a group of six Michigan house members have crafted a bill (The Anticorruption of Public Morals Act) that explicitly bans the online distribution of pornography (to anyone, not just minors) as well as the “circumvention tools” that might be used to get around the ban. Excluded from “prohibited material” is 1) “Material to be used for scientific and medical research or instruction” and 2) “Peer-reviewed academic content.” Were this bill to pass (and I’m guessing it’s going nowhere), I suspect we’d see the birth of a whole new industry producing spicy “peer-reviewed academic content.”
The Bill’s enumeration things that would be considered “prohibited material” is quite detailed and extensive—it suggests the lawmakers have really done their research. 