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Censorship Caldera Your Rights Online

SCO Chair's Anti-Porn Act Advances In Utah 421

iptables -A FORWARD writes "Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah reportedly plans to sign a resolution urging Congress to enact the Internet Community Ports Act. The ICPA proposes that online content be divided by port, rather like TVs have channels with adult and family content, so that certain internet ports will be 'clean' — so-called Community Ports — and others will be 'dirty.' Thus, they hope to remove objectionable content from port 80 and require that it be moved elsewhere (port 666 was already taken by Doom, sorry), so that people could more easily block objectionable content, or have their ISPs do the blocking for them. This concept is being pushed by the CP80 group, which is chaired by Ralph Yarro, who also chairs the SCO Group. That probably explains why they didn't choose to adopt RFC 3514, instead."
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SCO Chair's Anti-Porn Act Advances In Utah

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  • Re:Port 69 (Score:5, Informative)

    by PeterBrett ( 780946 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:01AM (#18360641) Homepage

    Unfortunately port 69 is already assigned. From my /etc/services:

    tftp 69/tcp
    tftp 69/udp

    In any case, the concept is fundamentally flawed. Ports are designed to discriminate by protocol, not by service content. This is just another flawed implementation of RFC3514 [ietf.org].

  • More information... (Score:5, Informative)

    by PeterBrett ( 780946 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:21AM (#18360847) Homepage

    More information on this subject, including a detailed discussion of why content segregation is dangerous, can be found in RFC3675 [ietf.org]. It suggests an actual workable solution: PICS tags.

    PICS Labels (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a generalized system for providing "ratings" for Internet accessible material. The PICS documents [w3.org] should be consulted for details. In general, PICS assumes an arbitrarily large number of rating services and rating systems. Each service and system is identified by a URL.

    It would be quite reasonable to have multiple PICS services that, in the aggregate, provided 300 bits of label information or more. There could be a PICS service for every community of interest. This sort of technology is really the only reasonable way to make categorizations or labelings of material available in a diverse and dynamic world.

    While such PICS label services could be used to distribute government promulgated censorship categories, for example, it is not clear how this is any worse than government censorship via national firewalls.

    A PICS rating system is essentially a definition of one or more dimensions and the numeric range of the values that can be assigned in each dimension to a rated object. A service is a source of labels where a label includes actual ratings. Ratings are either specific or generic. A specific rating applies only to the material at a particular URL [RFC 2396 [ietf.org]] and does not cover anything referenced from it, even included image files. A generic rating applies to the specified URL and to all URLs for which the stated URL is a prefix.

    This seems like very much the "right" way of doing it. It:

    1. Doesn't break any existing systems,
    2. Is plenty flexible enough to be used for flagging pr0n as such, but also could be used by services like del.icio.us to suggest similar content to the current page,
    3. And gracefully degrades to support systems that are unaware of it.

    Also, unlike their proposed port breakage, it can easily be turned off if you don't care about it.

  • Re:The REAL goal (Score:3, Informative)

    by wile_e_wonka ( 934864 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:22AM (#18360867)
    This is a proposed federal law being pushed by the governor of Utah. So, although you are correct that the whole world would need to cooperate, and you are correct that Huntsman is generally in charge only of his own state, and you are correct that this whole thing probably wouldn't work, you did get one thing wrong--he's pushing a federal law, which would apply to the entire US, so the content providers would not have to be in Utah for this proposed law to reach them (but they would have to be in the US).
  • by Drantin ( 569921 ) * on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:24AM (#18360879)
    It was an April Fool's joke a few years back... look at the date on it...
  • by BurntNickel ( 841511 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:25AM (#18360889)

    Um, I believe RFC3514 is probably a joke.

    Yeah, just check the date on the RFC: 1 April 2003

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:25AM (#18360891)
    Your analogy is broken.

    This is equivalent to declaring that trucks carrying porn cannot drive on certain roads. It's an attack on infrastructure to solve a political problem.
  • by db32 ( 862117 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:26AM (#18360897) Journal
    I honestly hope you don't think that is a real RFC. I really really hope that this is just a misunderstood attempt at sarcasm. Just in case it's not. Please check the date on that RFC, and then search through all RFCs for that same date...you might get the joke. Or you may just be very angry about the CHIMP protocol...
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:49AM (#18361129)
    See:

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt [ietf.org]

    All of the arguements are there already.

  • Re:Censorship? (Score:4, Informative)

    by SQL Error ( 16383 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @09:54AM (#18361201)

    Is it considered censorship that adult movies can't be rated G?
    If the US government were to do it, then yes, it would be considered censorship, and a breach of the First Amendment.

    Is it censorship that pornography is not allowed in the .gov TLD?
    No. The government is not required to host pornography. They are simply not allowed to prevent private individuals from doing so.

    Just because it has to be segregated does't mean it is censored.
    Any abridgement of the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. That includes legislated categorization, which is why movie ratings are created by the film industry, and not by the government.

    This resolution avoids the problem by not actually trying to do anything, but the legislation it calls for would be clearly unconstitutional.

    Then again, so is McCain-Feingold.
  • by garett_spencley ( 193892 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @10:20AM (#18361491) Journal
    Already have it. It's called a PICS label [icra.org].
  • Re:dotXXX (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15, 2007 @10:33AM (#18361663)
    Wrong.

    I run adult web sites and PPC advertising is almost unheard of in the adult world.

    In fact, while I have dabbled in a couple of PPC programs, I've found that they haven't stacked up nearly as well as affiliate programs. I don't promote one single PPC program at the moment and haven't in years.

    The most common PPC programs are dating services. I know a few people who promote them and I've tried them out but they haven't done well on my sites.

    The most common source of revenue for adult webmasters are affiliate programs.

    Because....

    I can make as much as $0.10 / click with some of my better affiliate programs (with the average being around $0.02 / click) but with PPC they pay like $4.00 / 1000 clicks (or $0.004 / click).

    How is that worth it ? A good affiliate program can pay anywhere from $25 - $40 / sign-up or 50% recurring (you get 50% of what the affiliate program makes off of the sale for the entire lifetime of the subscription). So if your traffic is "good" (ie: your surfers like what's on your site and they come from "fresh" sources like search engines, bookmarks, related sites that have "good" traffic as well) then you'll do exponentially better with affiliate programs over PPC.

    So with that said, I don't have anything to gain by having children hit my sites. They just eat up bandwidth. And adult sites, arguably, burn more bandwidth than any other type of site.
  • by Excelcia ( 906188 ) <slashdot@excelcia.ca> on Thursday March 15, 2007 @11:14AM (#18362269) Homepage Journal
    You have to understand, this is not a bid to clean up the internet, this is a bid to clean up Yarro's reputation. Yarro is a mormon, and his reputation in the church has taken a huge beating with his falling out with the Noorda's and the whole SCO debacle. In Utah, members of the church who are businessmen can expect to have other memebers of the church who are businessmen not want to do business with them if they have a tarnished reputation. So... he is engaging in some very high profile activities to try and look as if he is championing moral behavior. He doesn't give a crap whether this actually passes or not, the whole point is just to make noise. In fact, he doesn't even have to have anyone even believe him. Just as long as there is enough "morality" noise that a person who would prospectively do business with him can point to to say "see... I'm not selling out in doing business with him", then he can still access his business network.
  • by dlsmith ( 993896 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @11:47AM (#18362913)
    This is "informative"? As a former BYU student, let me correct your misinformation.

    The LDS church owns an NBC-affiliate TV channel which has chosen not to carry some of NBC's offerings. Even if the leadership of the church has specifically requested that SNL not be carried, how is this a problem? They're a private company. If you don't like what they do with NBC programming, take it up with NBC.

    You're wrong about MTV being "banned" in Provo, and I don't even know what you're talking about. There is no University or city-mandated censorship of the channel, and I personally never noticed it not being available at all (if a cable provider *didn't* want to provide channel, they certainly ought to be free not to do so). I also don't understand why you are bothered by blocking of Web sites within the school's network -- it seems to me to be a pretty common practice within "work" environments like businesses and schools.

    BYU is a private university. Students, when enrolling, agree to an honor code that restricts their behavior on and off campus. You seem to take offense at the fact the someone would make such a voluntary sacrifice.

    There's a fundamental difference between a person voluntarily agreeing to behavior restrictions and a government mandating these restrictions. BYU is "like China" in the same way that making donations to the Red Cross is "like communism."
  • by butlerm ( 3112 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @12:32PM (#18363727)
    That is a very imaginative theory. However, I don't see any reason to suppose that his activities with SCO affect his reputation with Mormons any more than they might affect his reputation with anyone else though.
  • by Excelcia ( 906188 ) <slashdot@excelcia.ca> on Thursday March 15, 2007 @02:26PM (#18365571) Homepage Journal
    It's not so much his activities with SCO per se, but rather his conflict with the Noorda's. His name is mud throughout much of the membership that I know. The shock around Val (Noorda) Kreidel's death hasn't worn off, and I know a lot of people to some or extent or other link that with him.
  • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday March 15, 2007 @02:59PM (#18365941) Journal
    RFC 2549 [ietf.org] provides a specification for IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service.

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