Taipei City councilors yesterday demonstrated the ease with which pornographic Internet content could be accessed through online chat rooms and called for better measures to protect youngsters against adult content.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) and Lee Chien-chan (李建昌) demonstrated at a press conference how easy it was to get hundreds of millions of results, many of which contained adult content, by entering seemingly innocent keywords such as “chat room” into search engines.
“Although the Web sites indicate that the site contains adult content and requires the user to click a button, saying ‘I am over 18,’ if children want to access the site, they will click it anyway,” Hsu said.
The councilors showed that even when filling out an online form to register for an account, there are no methods to verify whether the person is aged 18 or over.
Hsu said that many sites allow users to purchase online points to have one-on-one online chats with young, scantily clad women who take off their clothes and perform sexual acts in front of a Web cam.
“This is not only harmful to young people’s morals, but puts a strain on their financial condition as well, because each minute [in the adult chat room] can cost as much as NT$50,” she said.
Some people have also been victims of sexual assault or fraud as a result of meeting “online friends” in real life, the city councilors said.
“Current laws are unable to penalize adult content providers if their Web sites are set up in other countries,” Lee said.
Coupled with the Web’s nature of anonymity and difficulty in determining whether the user is indeed an adult, there are too many ways for young people to be exposed to adult content, he said.
Lin Chun-yi (林浚奕), a chief at the Criminal Investigation Division of the Taipei City Police Department, told the press conference: “If the IP address is in a foreign country, it is difficult for us to investigate.”
The city councilors urged the government and schools to increase education efforts aimed at teaching students how to appropriately use the Internet, as well as for parents to install software to filter inappropriate content and require their children to use the Internet in open areas where parents can see.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching