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SCO Chair's Anti-Porn Act Advances In Utah
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 15, 2007 08:51 AM
from the set-the-evil-bit dept.
from the set-the-evil-bit dept.
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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Enforceable? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Enforceable? (Score:4, Funny)
Pah! All you have to do is see if the 'porn' bit is set in the headers.
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Re:Enforceable? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Damn, only leaves 192 other countries! (Score:5, Insightful)
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dotXXX (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:dotXXX (Score:5, Insightful)
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Gah, get your definition straight! (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid legislators. It's not a fricking toaster, that's rediculous.
It's a series of tubes.
I thought we got that straight a few months ago!
So relieved to find out the internet is a toaster (Score:4, Funny)
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please leave it alone (Score:5, Interesting)
Please leave the internet alone. It works well. People smarter than you created it. It has revolutionized our world. Parents need to take care of their kids, not you. The more changes you make, the more likely you are to break something. Here's a deal. You don't need to get in the news to get my vote. Stay out of the news for a year, and I'll vote for you.
Protocol != Content (Score:5, Interesting)
What these guys really want is to mandate that all IPv6 packets have a TOTC(Think of the children) bit. Defaulted to 1, for "unsafe content". They then pass legislation banning ISPs from handling anything with a TOTC bit of 1. The only way to get a TOTC bit of zero, without breaking the law, is to apply for an extremely expensive licence and audit, available to only the largest corporations.
Entirely coincidentally, the Chinese government's UFTP(Unsafe for the People) bit will occupy exactly the same position in their altered version of the IPv6 protocol, ensuring that the new, saer net will be fully interoperable.
Farfetched? Well, which is more likely? This or competant government that's for the people?
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!!!
There is no "Internet porn problem" (Score:5, Interesting)
What Internet Porn problem? [straightdope.com] Nevermind the silly thought of the 'Net being a toaster.
Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody else would laugh - how the hell do they think that they can make this work, when most of the people in that industry AREN'T IN UTAH!
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Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Funny)
Well Utah USED TO control the world, until IBM stole it!
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Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're talking about content. And, to be honest, a voluntary system for identifying "adult material" would probably be adhered to. Because it's in the porn industry's best interest.
The porn sites are in business to make money. Period. And they're well aware of negative image that they give the rest of the industry, and that there's a lot of heat on them. Frankly, it helps them a lot to be able to say "look, we provide technical means to allow parents to filter this out for their children." Now they can do business in peace, without the hue and cry of "Think of the Children! We must protect them from teh interwebs!"
Is it possible to circumvent this system? Absolutely. Will some people fail to adhere to it? Without doubt. But most of the "legit" porn industry would probably be relieved to have a system that lets them say they're acting in good faith as responsible citizens.
The problem here is the implementation, not the concept. Segregating content by internet port is just silly. And the underlying concept is somewhat disturbing--I think the notion here is like broadcast and basic TV, and FCC decency standards could be enforced on port 80. Frankly, that has a LOT of negative implications that have nothing to do with porn.
Simpler to implement solutions that would achieve the same effect: Add a new TLD for porn (though IMO the proliferation of TLD's in also flawed, but that's a different rant), adding a specific meta-tag (just as we do today for robots), adding a new attribute to the tag to classify certain images as adult-only, etc. I'm sure there are better ideas than mine out there.
At some point, people who are ACTUALLY concerned about children are going to stop trying to figure out how to somehow outlaw porn and work with the industry to put voluntary controls in place.
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Re:Port 69 (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately port 69 is already assigned. From my /etc/services:
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].
Parent
More information... (Score:5, Informative)
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:
Also, unlike their proposed port breakage, it can easily be turned off if you don't care about it.
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Port Suggestions (Score:4, Funny)
(I know it's not valid. It's a joke, son. Laugh.)
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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.
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Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:shouldn't that read... (Score:5, Funny)
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