Internet

CHIEF JUDGE DOLORES K. SLOVITER I conclude inexorably from the foregoing that the [Communications Decency Act] reaches speech subject to the full protection of the First Amendment, at least for adults. In questions of the witnesses and in colloquy with the government attorneys, it became evident that even if "indecent" is read as parallel to "patently offensive," the terms would cover a broad range of material from contemporary films, plays and books showing or describing sexual activities to controversial contemporary art and photographs.

A 43-year-old Upper Darby man charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy after soliciting the teen on the Internet waived his preliminary hearing yesterday. Joseph A. Kohler will be formally arraigned in Chester County Court on Oct. 28. His attorney, Marc Gelman, made no motion to have his client's $100,000 cash bail reduced at the hearing in Chester County District Justice Clarence F. Darlington's courtroom. "I have no comment on the investigation or on what my client's plea will be," Gelman said yesterday.

Do you share the feeling that the Internet, the Web and all that cyber stuff are really more trouble than they're worth? Admittedly, the technology is stupendous. E-mail is nifty, and the ability, for example, to search a library from a home screen is purely miraculous. But communication was not so bad before e-mail, and after fiddling a bit with the astounding search and retrieval capabilities of the Internet, many people reasonably conclude that they're a wow, but who needs it?

To thwart sexual predators, Pennsylvania Attorney General Thomas Corbett warned parents and guardians yesterday to keep computers out of their children's bedrooms. "You might as well have that person sitting on the bed next to them," Corbett said, referring to an Internet predator. Corbett spoke at a news conference at the Russell C. Struble Elementary School in Bensalem, Bucks County, to introduce a statewide program to educate children and their caregivers about the perils of the Internet.

They concede they don't know how to find their way on the World Wide Web without their secretaries' help, but the Montgomery County commissioners have agreed to establish an official Montgomery County home page. The page, which should be posted in six weeks on the World Wide Web, the graphical portion of the Internet, will initially have only the most mundane information: the commissioners' biographies and photos, phone numbers for various county departments, times of meetings and press releases.

The Clinton administration proposed yesterday that a nonprofit corporation be set up to manage the booming Internet, replacing government oversight of the global computer network. The administration hopes to establish the enterprise as early as September as part of a continuing effort to remove the government from what began as a Defense Department project in the 1960s. While lots of Internet fundamentals are likely to change in coming months - from new address "domain" names to a new system for management - the goal is to keep the system simple for most users while avoiding chaos on the increasingly complex network.

As we try to make sense of the school massacre in Littleton, Colo., we are swept up in a national debate about whether the Internet, with its dazzling array of interactive mayhem and violence, is partly to blame. Should the Internet be available to anyone, of any age, with a computer and a telephone connection? Many who have long wanted to muzzle the Internet are making symbols of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who used the Internet to play violent computer games and promote their racist views.

As the father of two teenagers who love to surf the Internet, Jim Tyrrell admits he sometimes feels like he could use some technology-oriented parenting advice. Meeting with other parents last week at the Haverford Township Free Library, Tyrrell said some of his children's chat room conversations seemed very trivial. He also has caught his children flipping between computer screens when he entered a room and wondered just what they were viewing only minutes earlier. "Our computer is near a window which is next to a tree," Tyrrell said.

A Delaware County unit investigating Internet crimes against children screened 600 tips last year and participated in the arrests of 85 people across the state, District Attorney Michael Green said yesterday. Green provided the data at a news conference to mark $650,000 in new federal funding for the program, the latest in a series of grants dating to 1999. With millions of teens online daily, one in 33 reported being "aggressively solicited" to meet in person or by telephone, according to a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

'TUBES' from H10 plug in a socket. Again and again we share Blum's surprise and pleasure in learning that, rather than being "everywhere," the Internet has hookups in very specific places. Indeed, in his attempt to peek behind the curtain, Blum sometimes gets bogged down in the physical details, the plod from one place to another, and one wonders why he waits until the book's end to get to the good Google gossip. Readers will appreciate the book's clear explanations of complicated processes, though some will enjoy it simply for Blum's sense of wonderment; if sheer magnitude is your thing, you won't be let down.