It's one of those workday mornings when even the triple-shot espresso isn't kicking in. And chances are that whenever you accidentally light on an adult site, information about you will be used to load your e-mail with porn spam. Your privacy is invaded, and time, storage and network resources are used up. The immense value of the Internet is being overrun for most of us by smut and spam.
Censorship always seems to be the first call to arms, but it never works.
And it's evident that Internet content-filtering technology, especially attempts to list unsavory sites, can't keep pace with Internet growth. Here's one possibility. Ask the W3C to create a new kind of universal browser cookie. Instead of taking out insurance against lawsuits by employees who might be inadvertently exposed to offensive network content, as some businesses are doing, IT managers could let their employees attach this new cookie to their browsers. The cookie would assert the user's right to conduct research on the Internet free of adult content.