CP80's Cheryl Preston Suggests "CyberSecurity" Group At ICANN 139
Beezlebub33 writes "A new petition has been filed under the GSNO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) of ICANN to create a new constituency the CyberSafety Constituency. Existing constituencies include 'Commercial and Business,' 'gTLD,' 'Registrars,' 'Non-commercial,' etc. The new proposed one on CyberSafety is in the 'interest of balancing free speech and anonymity with the values of protection and safety in developing Internet policy within ICANN.' If that doesn't raise red flags all by itself, consider that the person submitting it is Cheryl B. Preston. She's listed in the petition with the organization Brigham Young University, but she's part of CP80. She's suggested limiting content on port 80 to the 'right' things, and other stuff can go on other ports, so it can be appropriately filtered by the authorities. Guess who gets to decide what goes on which ports?"
Alternative proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
How about a counter proposal. Leave port 80 just like it is. The people who want a 'cleaned kid friendly Internet' can establish an alternate port where such a thing would be delivered. Do it like this:
Rule one: all servers running on this new port have to be doing https.
Rule two: all certs will use an entirely new chain of trust established by the consortium doing this new safe net. They condition the server keys on a site obeying whatever content rules they put out, revoking the keys of sites who go rogue.
Rule three: A mandatory set of tags describing the content on each page so parents can adjust their browser accordingly to their views. Such a system already exists in IE and could exist in others once someone actually began using the stuff. After all a browser update will probably be required to get the new root certs installed anyway.
Then it is just a matter of blocking port 80 on kids computers. Best done at the AP/router.
Re:Honestly, I'm not threatened. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Do it like this (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a question:
If Cheryl B. Preston is a cunt, does that mean she's not allowed on port 80?
Re:Do it like this (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they should split the ports
Your comment is more realistic than you might have originally intended - many already consider the existing internet worthy of a complete redesign, and in comparison to the various ideas for a new node addressing system and more secure flow control protocols, using the existing internet (IPv6) with instead a more P2P-like content distribution system would solve all sorts of problems, namely net neutrality and load/bandwidth issues.
While I think completely redesigning the internet would be overkill as we already depend on it's legacy design so much (refer to Intel's plan for IA-64 to "eventually" replace x86), at least a move to a more distributed system not completely unlike the newsgroup protocols would be a good move. Keep using the existing IP infrastructure, only use IPv6 so we don't run out of addresses (for a while, at least), but change the upper-level protocols that are starting to introduce more issues.
And if a complete move from HTTP is too much to ask for, how about a secure P2P front-end to distribute the content so the addresses listed in the logs aren't necessarily the real visitors, yet geographically close by for the applications that depend on that data. This, as it would seem, allow us to continue using HTTP only in a more secure and neutral manner, similar to what Tor is doing but encrypted end-to-end and with more shared bandwidth so the loading times aren't ridiculous.
Just place that in the big suggestion box, I guess. Just a thought.
Can I play? (Score:1, Interesting)
We all can agree there are some subjects that we wish our children not to view (XXX, Barney, drugs), and other subjects we do not mind (Disney, Birds, Bees [not together]).
What about the "grey" subjects? Where should breast cancer research be? How about the arts? OMG (Oh My Golly), nude photos?
Should John-Boy see that video on how barn yard animals reproduce?
Who gets to make the call on intelligent design or evolution?
A.C.
Re:Honestly, I'm not threatened. (Score:4, Interesting)
Social conservatives keep demanding laws to regulate everyone because their usual tools of ostracism and shame are only effective within their own communities.
I think if you check current usage, you'll find ostracism and shame are the liberal weapons of choice (environment, sexual preference, and oh! the children). These are techniques they learned from the christians when the christians were liberal.
All this nonsense is christian, not conservative. The christians switched to vote conservative because, faced with a choice between the liberals' anti-christian vitriol and the conservatives' good-humored tolerance, they chose conservative. Can't hardly blame them.
The christians no more define conservatism than the muslims define liberalism; it is in both cases a marriage of convenience. It's odd that no one ever refers to muslims as the religious left, though that is what they are.
Brilliant failure (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a brilliant attempt at a failure.
It is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard of.
I used to work in adult entertainment. One of the big (BIG) things is availability to customers. Regardless if it's mainstream or not, most customers (readers here excluded) are barely functional on the Internet. They have a hard time trying to even go to a site. I'm amazed at how many people have to go to their home page, which happens to be a search engine, to type the url into the search box to get the site. They can't grasp that you enter it in the address bar. If httpp (http for porn) is put on port 81? We're suppose to believe that they can type http://porn.example.com81/ [porn.example.com81] or httpp://porn.example.com?? It'll never happen.
At times, I tried to move things off to other ports. You'd be amazed how many people couldn't grasp the concept. Even putting a mail server web client on http://mail.example.com:8080/ [example.com] completely throws them, even though you write it down for them, and it's right in front of them when they try to go there.
Other options have been attempted over the years. The meta tag pics-label was suppose to show what kind of content you were serving up. On very rare occasions, I see it used. Usually I don't.
There were other site rating tags that came and went. They weren't generally used by the browsers. They weren't implemented very frequently on web sites. In the end, they died. If someone was running an adult web site, they honestly wouldn't want to run the risk of having their content blocked by the provider, when the customer did want to view it. So, nothing identifying to say "porn".
Even the .xxx TLD was a spiffy keen idea, but that didn't have a prayer. "Please move all of your domains to the .xxx TLD. Ya, right. First problem. You may have different ownership of porn.com and porn.net. They'd both have to complete for that new position. Then you have to tell all of your viewers, "Go to porn.xxx, we're shutting down porn.com in 30 days". Some clients would only view every few months, or even every few years. They wouldn't have seen the memo, and would then be out of luck. No one, regardless of the business they're in, wants to lose their customer base because they had to move. That's why when you see a physical storefront move, you'll usually see a note taped in the front window saying "We've moved to 14 main street, 3 blocks over. Come visit us there!" those moves are usually unavoidable. It's better for a business to expand to a second location, than to ever shut down their first one. Frequently, it's a death sentence.
I know killing off the adult entertainment industry is a motive in wanting to force them to move. It won't work, but it'll really shake up the industry. New companies will get lucky and make more money. Old companies will be very very upset that they went from multi-million dollar empires, down to nothing. In the end, sites will still pop up as .com's on port 80, and they'll make good money by avoiding the new found filters.
If it wasn't an idea that would hurt things, why not move the mainstream sites over to a new "safer" place?
It then brings up the question, what's "safe". What's safe for my kid may not be safe for your kid. I run a news site. We carry news. What if you didn't want your kid to know about wars, or famine, rape, murder, drugs, or gay/lesbian/bi sexual preferences? Better not let them read the news.
Is a woman showing cleavage acceptable? How about in a bikini? Lingerie? Topless? Full frontal nudity? Implied sexual intercourse? Obvious and visual sexual intercourse? You may not want a 10 year old seeing too much cleveage, so should that be in the porn domain? Now you've moved things in
Re:Alternative proposal (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mormon Bashing (Score:1, Interesting)
The term for this attitude is "statism" and it is rampant in America. Got a problem? Make a law! Instead of recognizing that the world is imperfect (and the legal system even more so), make a law any time something bothers you!
That is so true. I remember watching a news report about someone whose son was killed when he drove his truck into a tree because he was talking on his cellphone.
The father's response? To campaign for stricter laws against cellphone use while driving.
Ignoring, of course, that there ALREADY are laws against using the cellphone while driving. Which the father claimed his son knew about. And he claimed that he repeatedly told his son not to drive while talking on the cellphone. His son was too stupid or too arrogant to pay attention to the lesson of not using the cellphone while driving.
Sadly, the full story is even stupider. He was talking on his cellphone, dropped it, and then leaned down to pick it up. Needless to say, when ducking under the dash, it's hard to see the road.
Re:Already filtering port 80... (Score:3, Interesting)
In case this isn't clear, this is an attempt to try and keep people from running web servers (on port 80) off of a "personal" DSL line. I have ample examples of the various Bots (Google, Yahoo, MS, etc.) browsing my web site on port 8080, but that never took place when I only had port 80 open. Most presumably because Verizon blocked the traffic.
Now of course Verizon could resort to blocking all incoming/outgoing http traffic but this would require more CPU intensive time on their routers.
And then of course we would respond with entirely encrypted protocol transfers. Thus leading to an impass where services we are paying for are disallowed because they cannot be interpreted as "right" or "wrong" services. Welcome to England where it appears that big brother will always be watching you.