EveryBody's Guide to the Law

a company specializing in restoring data recovery at considerable cost. This goes to show how
important it is to back up your work on floppy disks, zip drives, or other data-saving equipment.
If you have a stand-alone computer that is not connected to the Internet, you do not have
to worry much about viruses. About the only time your computer could be infected by a virus
is by using shareware (free software containing software programs and sometimes viruses). But
if you are connected to the Internet, you must be ever vigilant of viruses hidden in e-mails
with attachments or pictures. If you are not sure who is sending you the e-mail, it is best to
delete it rather than risk opening the attachment or picture only to find a virus lurking inside.
To prevent viruses from infecting your computer, you should have antivirus software
installed in your computer. There are several excellent programs commercially available for
just this purpose. However, you will need to update your antivirus software regularly to protect
it against newly created viruses. Some of the best-selling antivirus programs have a system
whereby each month you can download antivirus programs for new viruses.
Besides a virus, there are other disruptive programs, such as a “bomb,” a “worm,” and a “Trojan
horse.” A bomb is a program that sits silently in a computer’s memory until it is triggered
by a specific condition, such as a date. A worm is a destructive program that replicates itself
over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. A Trojan horse is a malicious program that reproduces
itself over a network, and like a virus must be distributed by diskette or e-mail.
Protecting Minors from Indecent Material
There are at least thirty-thousand adult sites promoting pornography on the World Wide
Web. Parents, educators, librarians, lawmakers, and others are justifiably concerned about the
harmful effect such sites may have on children who innocently or intentionally visit such sites.
Because of this, several laws have been passed in recent years in an attempt to regulate the
content of pornographic websites and protect minors from viewing harmful material. As we
shall see below, however, such attempts to regulate website content basically have failed, the
courts holding that the laws unconstitutionally infringe on the website publisher’s first amendment
guarantee of freedom of speech.
The Communications Decency Act (CDA), passed in 1996, prohibited Internet users from
using the Internet to communicate material that under “contemporary community standards”
(see chapter 20) would be deemed patently offensive to minors under the age of 18. The
United States Supreme Court ruled that the CDA was unconstitutionally vague, as it failed to
define key terms. Additionally, the high court noted that the breadth of the CDA was “wholly
unprecedented” as, for instance, it was not limited to commercial speech or commercial entities,
but rather its open-ended prohibitions embraced all nonprofit entities and individuals
posting indecent material or displaying them on their own computers.
Most troubling to the Supreme Court was the “contemporary community standards” criterion
as applied to the Internet. The Supreme Court found that applying such a test would
effectively mean that because all Internet communication is made available to a worldwide
Computers and the Internet 361