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."
Always amusing... (Score:4, Interesting)
...to read why showing a nipple on US TV is immoral, while executing the said owner of the nipple and selling the nipple is a good deed.
Re:Lieberman (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps if there was a gradation similar to the one used by the ESRB, different locales with their different mores could set different thresholds.
Re:Free-Speech Zones (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I cynical, enlightened, disillusioned, or just fed up with being pushed around by Washington bureaucrats? If I want to look at pr0n then, by doggammit, I'm going to. If GW Bush doesn't want me to look at pr0n then perhaps he should donate one of his daughters to my harem. For cripes' sakes. I'm 28, in good physical condition, educated, I have a libido like any other man on this planet, and I have standards which say I'm not going to screw the town nasty-mattress just to get off.
If they don't want to deal with my spooge then figure out a way to hook me up with a woman who will. It's hardly my fault that I have to spend my life locked up at work just to pay taxes so that they can continue to propagate this kind of useless b_llsh_t which costs me money even though I voted against it.
If the police state that we live in is so doggone perfect then quit hassling me about not having a suitable mate.
Re:Lieberman (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Lieberman (Score:3, Interesting)
I think attempts to apply technological "solutions" to the "problem" of obscenity just helps mask what the concept of "obscenity" is. In the past, it's been a segment of society deciding what the whole of society can and cannot do IN PUBLIC (or, more accurately, at private businesses that are open to the public). Now, it's tipping dangerously toward deciding what society can do IN PRIVATE (that is, in front of your computer covered in hot grits).
Potential for mischief (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, some person bent on mischief registers a ".com" domain name that points to my website.
Am I in trouble here? Who committed the offence?
Now, imagine, I pay some person in Nigeria cash to set up domain names in ".com" that point to my website and continue to do so as each domain name is taken down.
So much potential for abuse by or against adult webmasters.
Re:Lieberman (Score:2, Interesting)
Poop. Pfiffle. Poppycock. Any plan that depends on self-rating may as well pack up and go home. You're ignoring human nature and the reach of legislation if you think otherwise.
One name: goatse.cx
There will always be someone who doesn't care, who wants to shock, who wants to reach the most eyeballs. And there will always be somewhere they can host.
Multiple rating services can cope with this, but of course that ignores the problem of looking up ratings on one or more remote databases for every URI you process including linked images and forwards. And nobody (not even google) has them all. Do you cut off the unknown URLs? Browse at 1 page a day? Pfiffle. Maybe for unsupervised browsing by a minor, but if that's the goal, why not send the kid to the library? They're less likely to run into trouble there, and the library probably has more resources than any service is likely to (accurately) rate.
I'd be for .sex (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I also think it's unlikely to happen. The UK and US governments seem to think that there is something wrong with sex -- especially the non-procreative varieties -- but prefer to deal with it by pretending it doesn't exist. Creating a special domain for pornography and then taking action to ensure it is used properly would mean having to admit that people do enjoy sex.
And that's something I really can't imagine the authorities ever agreeing to, given the way the USA reacted to a lady's chest being shown on TV, and the fact that until recently, you weren't even allowed to depict a hard-on in Britain. The only way it would ever gain any sort of approval would be if someone else started it off. But in countries where sex is seen as just being something people do, they probably would not see the need for a separate place on the Internet.
I could be wrong. I'd like to be wrong. But it's going to require a pretty major attitude shift somewhere.
Think of the routers!! (Score:3, Interesting)
As the RFC points out, if you create 'adult and non-adult' TLDs, how do you decide (on a global scale) what it means to be 'adult' or 'non-adult' when countries, religions and communities have such incredibly divergent views of what they should be? For any answer to work, it -must- take this into consideration, and provide a mechanism for different communities to select different filtering criteria.
The persecution of people accessing some adult TLD is potentially a serious issue, or perhaps not, but it's the technical issues that make adult TLDs not only pointless, but inherently dangerous.
The owner of a computer has **NO CONTROL** over what DNS names are pointed at their IP address. That means that there is no way you can prosecute an adult-themed site for being referred to by a non-adult TLD, or prevent an adult TLD from being pointed at a non-adult site for DoS purposes.
Re:Lieberman (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, seriously... what kind of bs is that.
Maybe they should set up a
A community ought to be able to have standards, after all...
Damn, that shoe feels good on the other foot!
Re:Parents (Score:2, Interesting)
Not trolling, honestly curious here: just how exactly do you explain that?
Does Anyone Think??? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. I don't think there is a kids and porn problem. Raise your hand if you viewed porn at one time when you were a kid. Now keep your hand up if you turned into a social deviant. Not many, eh! Speaking from personal experience, the people I knew growing up who turned into social misfits and freaks are the ones who were shielded all of their lives (see home schooled and religious fanatics).
2. Aside from border problems, HOW DO WE CATEGORIZE PORN?!!!!! Do art websites qualify? What if I model a naked woman in Maya and put that on the web? Or is it just 'real' photos and video we're concerned with. What about dirty letters? What if I run a site with pictures of a clitoris? Now what if I put info about women's health on that website? Whether or not I'm creating a site for commercial purposes is irrelevant to me. The fact is as someone who puts content on the web and views content, porn or whatever, I don't want censorship. If you don't like it, set the BIOS password on your computer and try PARENTING your child, instead of giving them the internet as a babysitter.
3. Does anyone realize how quickly content would be eliminated from the web if this were to go into effect? Do you think AOL or Earthlink will allow access to those sites when parents groups protest? This is not making it easier to identify this type of material, it's aimed at eliminating it.
That's my three bits. Take it with a grain of salt. Disclaimer-I run a website for profit (about $25 per month profit, but I just got it going). It has adult material on it. It's at http://www.aliengoods.com/ and I sell bondage furniture. And guess what? I have a disclaimer page that most content filters should catch and block. I don't care because I don't sell to children (let's not get into a public library filters debate - they anger me).
Re:Lieberman (Score:1, Interesting)
Ever heard of in vitro fertilization. Last time I checked, it didn't require losing one's virginity.
Pretty ironic that a "virgin birth" has been SCIENTIFICALLY proven.
To quote you, "Damn, that shoe feels good on the other foot!
Re:Lieberman (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Lieberman (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the people spamming and installing malicious pop-up-ware aren't the content providers, but rather advertisers who get paid by driving people to the site. I think the adult webmasters would be really interested in changing this paradigm a bit, and instead have a system by which these people don't drive the masses in general to their sites, but rather those (and only those) they can actually sell to. It's called targetted marketing, and it really does work in almost every discipline.
So from the content providers perspective a
Re:Lieberman (Score:3, Interesting)
After you've cleaned out your eyes tell me that goatse is gone.
Abolish the non-country TLDs (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is entirely possible when there's a locality involved. The theatre is in a known place and the magazines are tangible objects. The applicable community standard is that of the community in which the theatre or magazine is found. How does a politician in the USofA regulate a web server in Russia? If a teen in Oklahoma visits debbie.does.donkeys.da.ru where does the offense take place? Sure, YOU can create a .xxx domain, but what happens if Ivan-the-donkey-owner is a nationalist and takes pride in hosting in the .ru domain?
One answer is to abolish all TLDs other than country codes and make it illegal for citizens of your country to "fly under a foreign flag". That way your government can censor its citizens without bothering the rest of us simply by black-listing the two-letter codes of countries that refuse to bow down to the White House.
If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving porn there.
In my company the stuff tends to end up in the male washrooms (whether for practical or ethical reasons).
summary: (Score:3, Interesting)
always with the crack smoking (Score:4, Interesting)
Lastly, if a kid is too young to risk seeing anything dodgy, then they are probably too young to even gain anything from using the internet as a whole for education. Think about the (educational) things you use it for, do younger kids need that?
Re:RTFA (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know if DNS is the right place for it (meta tags or HTTP headers might be more appropriate?), and the Internet as an unregulated medium will always be open to abuse, but to have a simple, widely-established RFC in place for content indication and rating seems like a Good Idea.
I do have a lot of sympathy for the liberal, kids-should-see-what they want point of view, but hey - let M$ implement this, then let the kids figure out how to hax0r it - that'd be almost as educational as the porn itself...
Legally-mandated META tags are backwards too (Score:3, Interesting)
I support it being illegal to fraudulently use a META tag to claim that a site is age-appropriate, based on whatever standard of age-appropriateness you're talking about. But fraud is already illegal, so we don't need any special new law to make it so (although one that codifies penalties for certain kinds of fraud wouldn't raise my hackles awfully much.)
If you want META, I think you ought to write up an RFC codifying a standard. Something like
That's a pretty lightweight protocol, which allows sites to certify compliance with whatever authority's standards you might care about. The filtering software can use various criteria of your choosing to whitelist safe sites, including allowing you to add certain sites or even entire domains to your own whitelist, while only making it illegal to take the deliberate action of declaring compliance falsely, and allowing every existing web page to remain legal (because none of them contain these META tags in the first place).Keep your kids off the Internet if you don't like it the way it is. The people who built it never for one moment claimed it was built for children, and it's wrong to impose a law at this date that places such a positive obligation upon webmasters.