New RFC Considers .sex TLD Dangerous 421
netcentric writes "A post on CircleID has reported about an RFC prepared by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd and Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com's Washington D.C. correspondent, analyzing proposals from various parties to mandate the use of special top level domain names (such as .sex or .xxx) or an IP address bit to flag 'adult' or 'unsafe' material or the like. The analysis explains why these ideas are dangerous and ill considered from legal, philosophical, and technical points of view. Here is the post to this report on CircleID along with some commentaries and link to the entire RFC 3675."
Once again... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lieberman (Score:5, Insightful)
At least the ICRA content rating model put the value judgement in the hands of the viewer.
I can see xxx.us working (kind of), and maybe xxx.randomcountry. Personally I'd rather there was a reliable register of adult URLs rather than a bunch of companies all trying to make sure they alone own the filter lists. ".xxx" is addressing that problem but the wrong way IMHO.
categorization leads to censorship (Score:1, Insightful)
Voluntary vs. Forced (Score:5, Insightful)
Free-Speech Zones (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to register... (Score:2, Insightful)
And then sell the domain to that loser for hefty sum.
Of course it wouldn't work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Both, of course.
I mean, why wouldn't you?
This is extreme and misguided. (Score:3, Insightful)
If it doesn't take, maybe then we can discuss this mandate.
Essentially, give them the freagging tool and see if they take to it before forcing them to use it. What ever happened to the "graded-approach?"
It's not just "think of the children" (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people just don't like being inundated by porn when they use the Internet. Period.
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some porn -- or reference to porn -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever. Half the spam you receive -- and you can't help receiving it -- falls under most people's definition of porn.
So why is that? We don't put up with it in the rest of our day to day lives.
Most communities regulate porn theaters, porn magazines, etc., very strictly. Even if you, personally, like and consume porn in the privacy of your own home, if you leased an office building, you probably wouldn't want a porn theater opening up on either side of you. If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving porn there. Very few people would vote to let their city accept advertising from porn companies on park benches and bus stops.
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing porn. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
It seems to me that the porn industry has a lot of money, and they're willing to pay it to people to get their advertising and their products out there to where people will pay to consume them. If that's the root of the problem, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose possible ways of regulating the way the porn industry does business. The
Not the best one, perhaps, but a legitimate one nonetheless.
Re:Lieberman (Score:5, Insightful)
But could this mean, for example, that a website such as this which is providing a forum to the public will have to more vigorously scrub the content of its users in order to remain visible or within the law? I fear that this wave of neopuritanism in the U.S. would wield a domain such as .xxx as a club against websites that are not deliberately providing prurient content yet manage to provide offense (much like a radio show that accepts calls from listeners and is forced to block their obscenity or face steep fines.)
Far better to determine a system like the ICRA to leave it up to the viewer, as you say. We've got mandated V-chips in our television sets that permit the set owner to restrict programming to a particular standard which is apparently broadcast with the TV signal, but the broadcasters still censor their content. A .xxx domain will not satisfy the vocal minority that has been responsible for pushing censorship in movies, music, or radio because they are not content to control what they consume, but what we all consume.
Re:ddd? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spreading porn is a serious part of the work the Internet does. The best way to change the societies in the middle east whose screwed up 'religious' bigottries lead to terrorism is with mountains of porn.
Yep I am 100% serious here.
I believe in cultural relativism, Whahabi 'islam' is barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards. Women are treated at best as second class citizens and at worst as mere property.
It takes powerful forces to break down that type of prejudice. Pornography is a very powerful force. That is why the Saudi and Iranian mullahs fear it so much.
The fundamentalist christianity that spawned David Koralishen, the anti-abortion assasisnation squads, Timothy McVeigh are not too great either. The answer is more porn.
Watching people having sex does not break down many social barriers, but the idea that religious authorities don't have to run a society does.
Re:Lieberman (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is inherently intractable, when viewed from the top like that. There will always be a large, single-minded group intent on writing its taxonomy onto everyone's sky. And, where there's one group, there's many.
The only approach that's even theoretically workable is from the other end, via opt-in domains, e.g. '.angel' or '.moral'. Then, every sect that finds itself blessed with the One True View could spawn its own hallowed domain, and guard it with the vigilance of Rottweilers.
You Americans Are Fucked Up (Score:5, Insightful)
So now the underlying protocols that drive communications for the entire world need to have bits to designate "sexual content", just to appease the ridiculously puritanical Amercians.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened to your priorities. You'll go to war and kill 1000s of people to find WMD (which it seems never existed). You'll televise your murderous rampage to the world in all its horrifying brutality. Yet if a woman shows a breast on television then there's a "moral" outcry. Whose morals? It seems your society's morals are those of a prudish spinster.
The incredible thing is that in the area of morals and censorship, America shares more in common with religious regimes like the Taleban than with any other group. I can only think of two regions in the world that are so ridiculously out of touch with their human nature: the USA and the religious nutcases in the Middle East.
It'd be so easy to dismiss this rant as a troll or flamebait. Sure, it's easier to ignore that which you wish wasn't true, but you know that I'm making you uncomfortable because I'm telling the truth. There's a serious problem with morals in America right now. Your laws are repressing a natural part of the human existence, imposing an incredibly puritanical view of humanity onto millions of people, yet your same lawmakers allow a 10 year old child to see a man murdered on television. What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
Re:Lieberman (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no way the porn industry would restrict themselves to a separate TLD, if for no other reason than it would make it far too easy to screen that domain and prevent access on any system.
The reason self-regulation has worked (to some extent - retailers need to get better about giving some support in terms of enforcement) in the video game industry is that they have a vested interest in alleviating parental concerns. If they ignore the concerns of parents, many of those adults are less likely to buy ANY video game for children, which constitutes a large part of their market. In the porn industry, they care less about the concerns of conservative parents because that's not their audience.
Re:It's not just "think of the children" (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people just don't like being inundated by black people when they use the Internet. Period.
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some black person -- or reference to black people -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever. Half the spam you receive -- and you can't help receiving it -- falls under most people's definition of black culture.
So why is that? We don't put up with it in the rest of our day to day lives.
Most communities regulate who's allowed in it, housing prices, etc. very strictly. In fact, in the South there are still many towns that do not have a single black person. Even if you, personally, like and talk to black people in the privacy of your own home, if you leased an office building, you probably wouldn't want a black person moving in on either side of you. If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving a rap magazine there. Very few people would vote to let their city accept advertising from Gangster Rap labels on park benches and bus stops.
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing black culture. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
It seems to me that the NAACP has a lot of money, and they're willing to pay it to people to get their advertising and their agenda out there to where people will pay to consume them. If that's the root of the problem, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose possible ways of regulating the way the NAACP industry does business. The
Not the best one, perhaps, but a legitimate one nonetheless.
Note: It's amazing how quickly a s/porn/black/g can demonstrate how unreasonable you're actually being.
Re:You Americans Are Fucked Up (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not to say your rant is completely invalid, but I do take objection to your painting a group of several hundred million people with a single broad stroke. Your beef is with "the religious nutcases in the USA", not "the USA."
No, YOU RTFA. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the point. What's your problem with .sex? That the kids will now ahve (even) liess problems finding the porn? Well if their finding and viewing the porn RIGHT NOW, and you don't like it, what are you doing about it RIGHT NOW? There is no down side to .sex at all. As far as the kiddies locating pron, they will find a way, .sex or not. It is left to YOU as a parent to be involved with your childrens Internet viewing to address this issue. If you MUST depend on The Government to raise your kids, perhaps you should not have had any.
Re:Voluntary vs. Forced (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it's time for someone to start thinking about registering goatse.xxx.
How about .PRUDE? (Score:5, Insightful)
Advantages: the evangelicals are happy because they can be pure and clean without having to actually make any moral choices, and the rest of us can use this thing called "free will", which allows people to view and avoid whatever content they desire.
Re:No, YOU RTFA. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parents (Score:5, Insightful)
Dummy up you parents, start taking back control of your kids lives instead of letting MTV and the internet be in control.
Re:ddd? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:You Americans Are Fucked Up (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's not just "think of the children" (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey, I commend you, you got modded +5 for it.
P.S. That arguement always falls apart when it can be shown to be "applicable" to anything including murder, rape, property theft or well anything you want. Clearly we have some laws and these exist for some valid reason. One doesn't have to agree with the grandparent post to see how ignorant your statement was.
Let's try it:
We should have laws against murder, people could be killed.
We should have laws against being black, people could be killed.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Re:It's not just "think of the children" (Score:4, Insightful)
new: replace the operative word with "freakishly tall librarian" and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn't -- congratulations, this issue isn't black and white!
we call them cliches because they didn't die when they stopped being useful.
Re:ddd? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happens if the loonies get their way? Nobody is allowed to see or discuss sex, but the sexual drive doesn't go away - it just comes out again in another form - possibly a very desctructive one.
Re:Voluntary vs. Forced (Score:2, Insightful)
A sex domain would do three things. It would give kids a centralized location to look for porn. This may be a good thing. It would save bandwidth as the would be less likely to download content that have nothing to do with naked people having sex.
Second, it would create any number of security risks. Spammers would likely register their domains in the .sex tld to provide validity to their claim that the user will receive pornography or sex drugs instead of just malware. It may also be that some otherwise innocent websites might include link to .sex sites, which may cause embarrassment to innocent people.
Third, due to the fact that these newer domains cost more that the original set, the registrars might be tempted to make any volunteer program mandatory. Also, there is adult content that is not pornography, and other content that some might consider adult but other would not. It is likely that the .sex tld will be blocked at all public terminals and most homes with children. This means that the content will be unavailable to children. Under the current system, such content is not universally block. It would seem probable that those religious fundamentalist that consider ignorant children to be the blessed ideal would try to force all remotely adult content to the .sex domain to keep any content opposed by the fundamentalist away from all kids.
Re:Of course it wouldn't work... (Score:2, Insightful)
But ok, let's say that we commit to
Re:It's not just "think of the children" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's not just "think of the children" (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like you just took the word pornography and replaced it with a random politically correct word in a vain hope to try to associate the struggle to sell pornography with the struggle for equal rights. That, sir, spits on the grave of anyone who ever tried to stick up for their rights.
Maybe next time somebody posts some anti-spam rant, maybe I should replace the word spammer with the word black to show how those poor spammers are only trying to struggle for equal rights. Maybe I'll even get moderated up to +5. But seeing as how most
Mark the content by port number. (Score:4, Insightful)
69 - SEXplicit Cunni-lingus Movies. ( Trivial File Transfer Protocol will have to be moved to 6969, drat! that's the orgy number. )
80 - Innocuous censored stuff.
81 - Computer Cracking.
82 - Sex Education.
83 - Free Software Source Code. ( Like your new neighbours? )
84 - SEXplicit Copulation Movies.
85 - Commercial Software Advocacy.
86 - Racial Supremacy Advocacy.
87 - Currently taken by ttylink.
88 - ditto kerberos.
89 - Artistic Nudes. ( High quality print ready
Then there are also literally dozens of high number ports available if needed. Never happen of course, because of the huge financial interests of the network nannies, but it could create a new industry called the Net Content Classification Tribunal. The whole exercise could be run by the UN and suck up billions of dollars.
.xxx is backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
- DOD employees including uniformed military (the expression 'curse like a sailor' comes to mind, although jarheads, grunts, and flyboys hold their own)
- DOD contractors in industry
- researches at universities and technical institutes.
But demanding that adult sites label themselves as adult is the wrong way to go, and mandating a particular filtering scheme for everyone is worse yet. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided the it was important for schools to be connected to the Internet. And now they're shocked, shocked! at what they've found. It's as if a teacher took a bunch of grade-school kids on a field trip to a titty bar and then demanded that the authorities shut it down.If someone wants to create a TLD like .kids, and make whatever rules they want for their piece of cyberspace, more power to them. Net Nanny and its ilk can whitelist the 'safe' sites, blacklist the 'unsafe' ones, and parents who want their kids subjected to such filters may choose to employ them.
As a father (and grandfather!) I have always figured that if my children want to look at something really perverted, it's their desire to look at it that's the problem, so me putting up filters really won't accomplish much other than protecting them against fat-fingering an URL (or forgetting that the White House is part of the .governmnent
Re:You Americans Are Fucked Up (Score:1, Insightful)
When your government is lead by religious nutcases - they represent you - and they go killing in YOUR name, stars, stripes, and M1 abrams blazing. Maybe you should think about that - and maybe think about the fact those "religious nutcases", have their fingers on the buttons that end life on this planet.
The american government is not doing very attractive things when viewed externally. History will judge if those actions were justified, who knows.. the real party hasn't even started. Wait for an oil shortage.
Re:No, YOU RTFA. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of course it wouldn't work... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not all of us are (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not productive. What would be productive is sharing with those who agree with you, and working to change it. Every culture has it's dissidents, man, including America. Dog knows we need it right now...our government is going batshit crazy...but support for the people who don't agree with it would be nice, generalization about how all americans think that way isn't.
A lot of Americans are pissed off at the idiocy here. Why do you paint us as all being a lot of greedy, grasping nutcases? From a personal standpoint, Fuck You. I've spent nearly twenty years fighting against the idiocy in our government. You know what? It's a losing fight - which I know goddamned well that a lot of Europeans are familiar with - so why are you so busy flaming rather than helping out?
I don't know whether we can stop these out-of-control powergrabs. I don't know if there any real solutions short of violent revolution. But it'd be nice if the Rest of The World would realize that we're not all a lot of greedy morons. You know, we just might need your support if it comes to stopping this shit. We certainly don't need more hatred.
Goddamn. I am seeing way too much of this on slashdot recently. Some of it is justified. Some of it isn't. We're losing the fight here, hey, and we could use all the support we can get! If we lose this fight, the world is probably going to be pretty fucked up. So quit flaming us and help out, godammit. Any way you can.
I'm sorry for the rant, but I also get the impression that a lot of the world doesn't understand the agony in the US these days. For some reason, it reminds me of the international reactions to the craziness that was going on in Germany in the 30s. Don't know why.
Sheeezus.
SB
To nathanh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ddd? (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that that is one of the most breath-taking oxymorons I've ever seen uttered on Slashdot? If you're willing to label a culture "barbaric relative to any acceptable moral standards", then you are not a relativist. You believe that there are absolute standards applicable to all cultures and that there can therefore be cultures in violation of those standards.
(Many, if not most, people who think they are cultural relativists aren't for precisely this reason. It's all relative this and you can't judge me because relative that, until they are faced with women getting the clitorises cut off at birth, and wham, in come in the concrete standards and out goes the relativism. Thank goodness; I just wish more people were more honest and internalized that they are not relativists and thus using "it's all relative" as a defense for anything is fairly hypocritical, unless they are indeed willing to admit that brutal mutilation of children or the degradation of women are morally acceptable in certain cultures. (Bringing up the question of, why not also here?))
Re:Lieberman (Score:2, Insightful)
Come back when you've reached puberty...
Re:It's not just "think of the children" (Score:3, Insightful)
What sites are you visiting? I can go for months without coming across a site more adult-oriented than anything on primetime network TV.
This is NOT a troll (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is, some people find pornography offensive. I, for one, do not--at least, not the kind of porn I like to look at. I find absolutely nothing disturbing or offensive about the human form, even when (*especially* when) it is engaged in the act of procreation.
Some people find black people/black culture offensive. I, for one, do not.
Many people find Judeo-Christian-Islamic dogma inspiring. I, for one, do not. At the very least, I find it annoying. Often, it is quite offensive and/or disturbing to me. (This is NOT an exaggeration--I was recently forced to listen to several hours of fire and brimstone lectures via Christian radio, and I can assure you that I felt no better than a nun would if she were trapped in a XXX video store.)
As distastful as this is to me, it is completely unfair to ask the religious world to segregate itself so that I don't have to listen to their offensive (to me) statements. It's not fair to them, and it's not smart for me, either--whether I like it or not, these people exist in the world, and if I have legitimate issues with their beliefs and actions, I should be endevoring to explain my beliefs to them, not plugging my ears and singing "lalalalalala" whenever they open their mouths.
Minority vs. majority should NOT play a part here. The majority shouldn't have the right to censor or segregate the minority anymore than the minority has the right to censor or segragate the majority.
Hell, let's get back to the analogy at hand: a few decades ago, the majority of people in the south would have found the image of a black man and a white woman kissing highly offensive. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches, too, were probably quite offensive to many people. Maybe the mass media should have segregated these controversial things, put them all in one newspaper that you had to go out of your way to find, a newspaper that no *respectable* white person would ever read. After all, people have the right not to be offended... right?
Wrong. This guy's analogy was spot on. You are responsible for your OWN level of offended-ness, and if you desire censorship, you should censor your own eyes (or your children's eyes) yourself. If you can't, then maybe you'd better wise up to the fact that there's shit in this world you don't like, and it's best to just suck it up and move on.
Yeah, it sucks, but if you want ANY sort of progress to happen in this country, you must accept the fact that sooner or later, eveyone is gonna get offended by something or another.
Hell, I find it offensive that some people find the human body and/or sex offensive. Does that mean we need a
Re:Just a thought (Score:2, Insightful)
And just who is "they"? And how are "they" going to control "all porn sites" - in the whole world?
Furrfu, people who can't be bothered to think even for a millisecond before making some dumb statement (and obviously without RingTFA) just piss me off sometimes.