From an article in the Herald, 16.8.90. ������������������������������������������������Ŀ � The following text was from an article in the ���� � New Zealand Herald on Thursday, August 16 1990 ���� ����������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FORGET HOMEWORK, COMPUTER KIDS DISCOVER ELECTRO-PORN -======================================================- By BEN HILLS writing in the Sydney Morning Herald It is getting on for midnight and the crack of light under young Danny's bedroom door shows he is still up. You walk in, and there he is still tapping away on his Amiga computer. Instead of watching television or hanging out in the streets, he is hard at work on... The screen blacks out, then lights up with a spreadsheet of Australian agricultural exports. Danny swings around on his chair, his finger still on the dump button, and gives an innocent smile:"Sorry, mum,just got carried away with this interesting homework..." "All right, just another 10 minutes." You shut the door, and give an indulgent smile to your spouse. "It's just the best thing we ever bought him." Back in the Bedroom, young Danny reboots his system and the image he was really interested in coalesces on the screen. It is a naked couple - the real thing, not a line drawing or cartoon animation. He takes his computer joystick in hand and manouvers the matching parts into place, watching as his score clicks up for the number of successful penetrations. AD 2001? No way. This is just a sample - and one of the more inoffensive samples at that - of the sort of electronic pornography that is available to now to any half-literate home computer hacker in Sydney. Welcome to lovebytes - the censor's ultimate nightmare. Sale of X-rated videos might be banned everywhere outside the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Imported films without a Censorship Board classification might be illegal. States might have restrictions on the display of explicit material, or its sale to under-18s. But for the cost of a local phone call, anyone with a home computer and a modem can log into any one of hundreds of electronic bulletin boards - preferably one which taps into an overseas network - and obtain a memory-bank-full of material, some of which would bring a blush to the cheek of the Marquis de Sade. Forget about Dungeons and Dragons, Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the hottest games on the Sydney home computer hit parade this winter have names like Party Games, McPlaymate, and Animal House. Twenty years ago, Marshall McLuhan said television would make the world a village. Cheap, user-friendly computers have created the global brothel. Without much trouble, I arranged a meeting with a young man who preferred to be known by his nom-de-modem of Crudd. I was shown a selection which ranged from soft-core shots of Penthouse centrefolds to the latest La Cicciolina movie (The Rise and Fallof a Roman Empress) to Animal House, which features various unspeakable acts with dogs, donkeys and chickens, to "interactive party games" in which the player(s) can compete. Most of the material is taken from an overseas network of bulletin boards - there is much demand for the output of military installation in the American Mid-West where bored computer operators create much of the raunchier electro-porn. But, thanks to a $750 gadget known as a digitiser, a local cottage industry has sprung up in do-it-yourself dirty discs. "There's no control over it at all," says Crudd, who admits to having embarrassed a girlfriend by using computer technology to graft her head on to an explicit Penthouse chassis and transmit it to friends. The technology explosion that made this possible has left regulators floundering in its wake. Most of the state vice squads contacted had not heard of love-bytes - or (when it was explained) did not know whether they were breaking any law. The first move to ban computer porn has come from a member of the ACT Legislative Assembly, a self-styled broadminded former policecman named Dennis Stevenson, leader (and sole member) of the Abolish Self Government Party. Two weeks ago he tried, and failed by one vote, to legislate to ban the booming trade in X-rated videos in Canberra, the national capital's biggest export industry. Mr Stevenson says he was shocked at the material which his staff were able to obtain with a cheap Amiga computer from bulletin boards around Australia and overseas. "I have a couple of printouts on my desk right now, and even though the quality is not that good, you can see they are explicit ... not the sort of stuff you'd want in the hands of 14 or 15-year-olds." He says computer pornography is worse than X-rated videos because:"The kids don't need to use the family video. They can do it in the privacy of their bedrooms ... anyone who knows how to use a computer and a modem can obtain this stuff, and the parents wouldn't have a clue." But the matter of enforcement is, understandably, vague. Police raids on home computers? Tapping the billions of bytes that flow down the phone-lines? Restricting PC sales to those over 18? "The first stept is obviously to make it illegal to sell or distribute this material, and I intend to do this by reintroducingmy bill to ban X-rated videos with a section including computer material. We will just have to see where we go from there," he said.