No Porn Please, We're Studying

The computers in the general access room at the University of Freiburg come with a health warning of sorts. Pictograms on the computers, which show two copulating matchstick figures which a line through the middle, send out a single, stark message: "View porn here and you are history."

The new warnings are the brainchild of the school's students' committee, which has started a campaign to fight the flood of erotic Internet sites interfering with the academic lives of their contemporaries.

The signs were put up to show that the use "of pornographic sites is forbidden and that the board of directors reserves the right to see the user's transcript in future." In short, those surfing for smut on computers with the "no porn" signs could be exposed by university chaperones who will be checking which sites have been accessed and by whom.

In a further bid to stop the so-called non-academic searches, the student representatives are also looking into the possibility of using filter software, perhaps believing that the urge to view porn on campus may not be dampened by a few threatening signs.

"We want to examine what is technically feasible without simply closing everything down which contains the word 'sex,'" said Mark Weinrich, a member of the students' committee board of directors.

Stud is short for student

However, this has proved to be problematic in the past. Students at the University of Hanover recently found out that their electronic correspondence with American colleges was getting stymied. It turned out that the institutions in the United States had very strict sex filters on their computers and the e-mail addresses of the Hanover students were being picked off by the sharp-eyed electronic nannies. The problem was that all the email addresses followed the same pattern: [email protected]. Perceiving the inclusion of "stud" to mean "randy stallion" instead of an abbreviation of "student," the U.S. filters believed they were stopping hardcore material coming their way.