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."
I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:3, Insightful)
dotXXX (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reaction necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
Leaving alone the obvious impracticality of implementation and enforcement (ask Australia about that), this moron thinks that he can legislate morality.
My morality doesn't agree with his. I resent having moral decisions made for me, and I bet the majority of Americans feel the same way. If I want to look at porn, I should be able to look at porn. If someone else doesn't want to look at porn, they don't have to. What exactly is the problem here that requires legislative intervention?
Re:The only reaction necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn, only leaves 192 other countries! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:2, Insightful)
In you installing a filter on your home network, you're taking some pro-active steps. That's good. Companies that make filters are always improving them so your job becomes less difficult. That's good, too. And neither of those things required laws to be written.
Maybe the real lesson is that people who make content filtering software should lobby the legislature like other companies do.
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, you could send your kid into Toys backwards-"R" Us alone without him finding porn (although if your kid is very young you should be going into the damn store with him,) but can you say the same of the Library of Congress? They have naughty books there. The Internet is much more an all-encompassing library than it is a kiddie-friendly toy shop, and it is nobody's responsibility but yours to monitor what your kid does with it.
Re:The only reaction necessary (Score:1, Insightful)
Who's the moron?
First, I don't see how this is legislating morality. This proposal does not in any way block pornogrophy. It just organizes it better; that way it can be more easily blocked by parents or employers. If you are your own administrator at your house, then I assume you won't have the ports in question blocked.
Second, believe it or not you will not find a single legislator in any country at any time that does not believe their purpose is to legislate morality. I believe that one of their main purposes is to legislate morality. An believe it or not--you'd be lying if you say you don't either. Allow me to explain: why is murder illegal? Because it's immoral. Why is it illegal for a 25 year old to have sex with a 6 year old? Because it's immoral. The reasons why it is immoral may vary--for example, murder is immoral because it is generally wrong to take another's life. And statutory rape is illegal because a 6 year old can't realistically consent. And there are people that disagree with the reasons why these things are illegal--but they will never be legislators because they are so far from the norm that they could not possibly be elected to public office.
In conclusion, you are a moron for trying to make use of the "don't legislate morality" line that is so overused (and I don't even understand why it is still around).
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The REAL goal (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course it won't work. But that's not the point. SCO is trying to generate good press for itself, and so are the legislators. It's all about PR for the non-IT educated masses. The fact that it will and could never work is irrelevant.
Like many laws oriented towards social issues, this is about symbolism. Substance be damned.
Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:1, Insightful)
I had to laugh when I read the part about all packets coming from NATs to be marked evil, and then further when it recommends that all firewalls simply drop evil packets. This action would bring a halt to much of the home use of the internet, I imagine.
Reading over the RFC made me laugh.
Re:dotXXX (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The only reaction necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of them. Most laws legislate behavior; morality only falls into law where there is no set definition of a concept or the definition is vague and subject to interpretation by a person's moral/ethical self. To take the most heated example, the law states that currently it is legal for a doctor to perform an abortion; the morality of the issue is a matter for the individual. If you believe it morally wrong, you do not have to participate, i.e. have an abortion. I personally think that abortion is morally reprehensible but I also realize that mine is just an opinion, and that I have no right to impose it on others who do not share my belief.
So in the end, as many have said, while this sounds like a good idea, it's not. Content is what content is -- just as kids have been discovering dirty magazines under their parents' beds, they will discover dirty pictures on-line, and it is up to parents to handle that problem, not the legal system.
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you characterize what is adult material and what isn't? Is that porn or is it art? I personally feel there is a difference - I know porn when I see it and I know art when I see it, but my standards aren't the same as everyone else. Lets assume there aren't going to be the inevitable court battles over "is it or isn't it" and I have complete dictatorial control over "is it or isn't it". Are you as a parent comfortable with me making those decisions for you? I view proposals like this as ways power is being taken out of you (the parents) hands and put in the hands of a less capable bureaucrat.
At the end of the day, it will still have to be up to you to make the decisions on what is or isn't appropriate for your children. And while I do feel that filtering software is a good tool (I use privoxy/squid to filter out malware on my own network), you will still have to sit and teach good browsing habits.
Re:dotXXX (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:3, Insightful)
You won't find much porn at www.toysrus.com either. AFAIK they don't sell "adult toys" at all.
Re:Damn, only leaves 192 other countries! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not perfect (Score:3, Insightful)
Making alcohol and cigarettes illegal for minors does not keep all kids from drinking and smoking, but it does keep lots of kids from doing things that can be harmful to them.
Moving most porn content to an easily identifiable place would help simplify filtering for those of us who want to filter. Perfect? No. Better than current state? Yes.
FWIW, my kids have never been to Toys R Us without me, and I do know exactly what they are doing on line. I love them, and it's my job to look out for them.
and In Absurdium (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Make it acceptable for an ISP to block an entire port,
3) Pass more legislation forcing some services onto certain ports (and allowing ownership of other ports (just like tv))
4) Buy up ports and force ISPs to pay to use those.
5) Both profit AND control of file sharing.
STOP THIS LAW!!!
Re:The only reaction necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
this moron thinks that he can legislate morality.
this mormon thinks that he can legislate morality.
There, corrected that for you.
You can't take anyone seriously (Score:1, Insightful)
Your difficulty is that you try to equate real life with the internet and they're not the same thing. There's no "main street", there's no "back alley". It's a flat set of addresses that you can go to for pictures, text, and media. Oh, and to "blog" [snicker]. There's nothing magical about it.
People want to equate the two because they think it's some sort of Gibsonian jump to some future world, and the truth is that while the Internet is important, it's not an evolution for human beings.
All that said, your concern is misplaced. You can do the children a lot more good by making sure we have better standards for child seats. Make sure kids have the right vaccinations. Make sure we spend more time with them. Instead, we think the Internet is the big problem. It's not. This attack on the Internet porn is only because it scares backwards parents because it represents a loss of control. I get that. But in general, if you don't like something, you stop doing it.
I personally find skateboarding dangerous, so my reaction to it is to not do it and not buy a board for my kids. Some people's reaction is to try to ban skateboarding.
Re:It's not perfect (Score:2, Insightful)
And if the gas station guy would come to my house with some gas cans in the middle of the night while I'm asleep, gassing up my car would be a lot easier. And if the waiter would spoon-feed me my soup, I'd have both hands free to read the paper during lunch.
Do you really want the entire way the Internet works to be subverted, and the entire world to somehow cooperate on the matter, and every person of every moral stripe everywhere to somehow agree on what is or isn't unsafe for your kids, just so you can put a little less effort into filtering your kids' web use?
Don't pass laws, create a business incentive (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, it is more likely that businesses will adopt the reverse: Invent a means for sites to advertise that they are safe. A ".kids" top level domain would be much more effective than ".xxx", toy stores and other businesses targeting children would make sure to get their site up in that domain to reach their audience.
For the same reason, a technical mean for sites to optionally advertise the content rating should be considered. The current http header lets the client specify a string of preferred languages, this lets servers redirect a request to the best matching language, or accepted formats.
Similarly, one could add a header in the request accepted content classes. The response header should contain the actual classification returned. Servers not returning a classification should be treated as not-rated and may default to block or pass.
The neat thing about this is that search engines will also get the classification header and a search query can restrict to matching classification. This way children won't find undesired results. Also, it provides more granularity, individual URL's can be classified differently.
Of course, there are two problems:
- It can be spoofed - but question is if there is a business incentive to do so.
- Standardizing classification is very difficult, but at national level should be possible. The class codes could be prefixed by the national codes.
Many sites might just remain non-classified, but if schools and institutions say that they only allow classified content, organizations will adopt this to reach their audience. If laws are passed to hold organizations liable for spoofed classification (but not lack of classification) then this might actually work: Those who have a business incentive will get reliable classification and the rest will simply remain unclassified. And no one have to move their domain and reestablish their name.
Resolution NOT law (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:dotXXX (Score:2, Insightful)
If you sit a kid in front of a particularly single-minded religious TV station for a while, and they believe it's fact and not opinion/faith, you're doing a disservice to them as future, constructive members of society. I don't even believe MY religion is completely infallible; no religion is.
Kids should be taught how to form their own opinions, and probably when and how to express them properly.
Re:2 points (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Enforceable? (Score:4, Insightful)
The average Internet surfer is like a dirty sailor, and pr*n is like a prostitute.
Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Its about choice. "
I want the choice to censor violence in the internet. Oh, and dishonesty. Any website that presents speculation or opinion as fact should send that data on a separate port, so I can firewall it off easily. I don't my children exposed to lies and brutality on the internet. I also want all advertising to be transmitted on a separate port, to protect my children. Oh, and religious stuff. I don't want any websites forcing their religious views on me, thats harmful and should be filtered out. Particularly that horrid stuff about evolution.
Now all we need to do is require sites like Slashdot to make sure that comments are properly sorted, so that they get sent on the appropriate ports. Then, when I get mod points, I can mod people adult, and nobody reading from work will have to see them.
Skipping over the obvious implementation problems, like how much harder it will be when my network game with adult content, pornographic web-browsing, and clearing the porn-spam from my email all can all only be done on port, despite using very different protocols, how will this stop the people who will think it's hilarious to IM, email, or simply post pornographic content, just so you'll be surprised when the firewall doesn't catch it? If you don't think it will happen, go through the slashdot archives for links that point to goatse.
And if all of that doesn't bother you, than please refer to the various posts on here pointing out that the US doesn't rule the internet, so foreign sites wouldn't oblige, and port 80 still wouldn't be very clean.
PS: While there are doubtless many unethical pornographers, there at least as many ethical ones. If you think you can say anything half so nice about politicians, you're either ignorant, stupid, or using judging them according to scales so different that double standard seems scarcely adequate.
Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, I'm online constantly...work and home. I cannot remember the last time I came (no pun intended) across porn unless I was specifically looking for it. I haven't evern accidently hit a porn website in I don't know how long, but, the number of times since about '95 or so would be less than 5 or 6.
I click links from google searches...I hand type URL's....and I never run into porn site. What are people doing that get them to these site without them wanting to be there?