Sunday, September 09, 2007

GoodBadNews: Boybastos.com Down, website "operator" arrested

First of all, I want to make it clear that I am a father of a 7-year-old kid. With that out of the way, here I go with my post

A few days ago, I noticed a news item on a local news website about how a locally operated website aptly called www.boybastos.com was singled out by Senator Loren Legarda. This is what the good senator has to say about boybastos.com (Boy Bastos literally means "rude boy").

“This is by far the filthiest Internet site we’ve come across that offers open and unlimited access to some of the most obscene videos and photographs of Filipino women and girls… Our biggest worry here is free access. Other adult sites at least require prior user registration and credit card details, which somehow help to screen or discourage minors.” said the senator. Legarda authored Senate Bill 1375, which seeks to punish peddlers of online pron and indecent materials with up to six years in prison and a fine of P500,000.

My question to the good senator: what are you doing about the online video of the Abu Sayyaf that is soliciting support for their "cause". Let's get to the real world here: what have you done lately to alleviate the plight of the poor? At least 75% of Filipinos (a conservative estimate) has no access to the internet, heck, almost the same number has to be count themselves lucky if they have three square meals a day! To date, there are hundreds of unsolved murder and kidnapping cases in the hands of the law enforcement agencies.

The point I'm driving here is "is it prudent to spend that much effort to shutdown a "filthy" website when the resourced that is used to do that can do a lot more to solve more pressing national problems? " I'm not saying to totally ignore websites like boybastos. As a parent, I can do a lot of things to prevent my kid from accessing such websites... there are tools out there that can filter out these types of websites, most of them free, so that my kid can't access them.

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4 comments:

ExcedenteDeForça said...

maybe it has to do with the impact of the media, you see, I think that closing that website is something that they can do! so that shows to the people a nice image of the government, that theyre working, imagine they tackle the problem of famine, they wont be able to solve it, they know it, so it wont make headlines in the news, no news showing a proactive government equals to no votes next ellection...its just politics.(crappy ones)


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Anonymous said...

The gov't only goes after the easiest targets, it takes a lot of effort to track down criminals, terrorists and their corrupt fellow public officials, but easy to go after someone who is out in public. There are many other pinoy websites that offer our fellow countrymen in the throws of passion, all for free too. If Boybastos is all she can find, well she's not trying very hard is she?

Anonymous said...

a new boybastos2.com would be cool, they must at least show some provision like other site's do, such as registration/membership accounts to access the site. when it comes to 'filthiest' boybastos isn't the only one, but i'm gonna miss the site, hope it would be up again soon.

Char Assnable said...

a new boybastos2.com would be cool, they must at least show some provision like other site's do, such as registration/membership accounts to access the site. when it comes to 'filthiest' boybastos isn't the only one, but i'm gonna miss the site, hope it would be up again soon.