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)
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!
Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Funny)
Well Utah USED TO control the world, until IBM stole it!
Re:I believe I speak for all of us here ... (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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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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
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Um, I believe RFC3514 is probably a joke.
Yeah, just check the date on the RFC: 1 April 2003
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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.
Re:Enforceable? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Agreed.
If only the writers of the tcp/ip rfc had had as much forsight as you when they were including the porn bit in the headers.
Damn, only leaves 192 other countries! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Enforceable? (Score:4, Insightful)
The average Internet surfer is like a dirty sailor, and pr*n is like a prostitute.
dotXXX (Score:4, Insightful)
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What do I mean by a safe haven? Things like:
Re:dotXXX (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:dotXXX (Score:4, Informative)
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.
the difference ... (Score:2)
With this one, someone has to actually set up a box to tunnel the traffic to the alternate port.
However, in both cases, we have legistatures who think that the know what's best for the entire world, and that there's a universal definition of 'offensive' or 'pornography' that works for all societies connected to the internet -- if we were to implement a ban on websites with offensive content, would w
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Unless they get more insane and mandate that the pr0nmasters can't use HTML and come up with some sort of evil language that can't be handled by Internet Explorer...
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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All that means is that his circles will be smaller?
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My guess is both.
-Eric
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More importantly, it's a toaster that comprises a series of tubes... an international series of tubes.
Even if it passes, and doesn't get smacked down by the Supreme Court, it is unenforcable anywhere but in the US. I suppose these congressbastards think they OWN the whole Interweb?!?
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
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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
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These Utahians are, on the other hand, quite obviously perverts.
Look at it this way... theres lots of ways to divide up the world. You can say "there are black people and white people"... then you broke up the world on skin color. You can say "there are good days and bad" then you have broken up days based on how you feel about them.
These people in Utah want to sort the entire content of the internet, based on sex. I say, putting such an incredibl
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this moron thinks that he can legislate morality.
this mormon thinks that he can legislate morality.
There, corrected that for you.
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No - it doesn't organize squat. It's like an environmental law to cut down on CO2 by mandating that people breathe more slowly. The compliance to this law will be exactly ZERO. If they start trying to enforce it in the US, porn sites will simply move out of the US. So what purpose does an unenforceable law serve? It makes the proponet(s) feel good about themselves. Period. Problem is this is happening on the public bankroll, with public funds.
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Um.... no
Those things are illegal because they put individual and publi
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Second, you ask why adultery and lying are legal despite the fact that they are usually considered immoral. Of course, you remain misinformed--adultery has traditionally been illegal and is still illegal in many states. It has not, however been dutifully enforced. And lying is illegal in a great many contexts--f
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Of course greedy ass hat corporations don't really like that idea because inherently there will be a full range of restrictions on what is and is not suitable to be advertised to children, which is why a SCO weasel appears in the mix ie. absolutely no junk food advertising o
Probably not (Score:2)
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I disagree.
Look at this from a broadband-provider point of view. Let's say that this measure passes, and somehow can be enforced. (That's a whole different impracticality.) The (insanely well funded) powers that be behind the lobbying for this measure will start to demand that their ISPs make use of this restriction to protect their children from the
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.
The REAL goal (Score:3)
ISP: So, you want to see porn on the internet? You dirty bastard, that's an extra $50 a month and we'll unblock that port for you.
Of course this would never work since it requires the cooperation of the whole world. As far as I know most online porn sites aren't based in Utah. When will they learn...?
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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.
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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?
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Congress shall make no law... (Score:2)
That's an Amendment to the Constitution, better known as the First Amendment. The Constitution, folks, was written to restrict government's reach -- it was not written to protect our rights or to restict people.
Our Federal government has absolutely zero power to regulate the Internet. The Interstate Commerce Act has been stretched to give Congress power, but the Act was not intended to
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You talk of censorship. But is it censorship to regulate the purchasing of porn to adults? Should children be able to walk into Joe's Adult Superstore and buy "Anal Masters 6"?
Your post is completely irrelevant to the article because speech is not being regulated. What is being regulated is a technical issue. Specifically, what kind of data is available on what ports of TCP/IP.
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"The founders' understanding of the word "commerce" is unclear. Although commerce means economic activity today, it had non-economic meanings in late eighteenth century English. For example, in 18th century writing one finds expressions such as "the free and easy commerce of social
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Thanks for the enlightening description of the eighteenth century usage of the word "commerce". I'll just add this earlier example of usage from the diaries of Samuel Pepys [wikipedia.org]:
Friday 12th: Attended to affairs in the heart of the city, thence to commerce with the free and easy Miss MacTavish, a charming wench I may add.
Censorship? (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless of that, I don't see how this can be enforced, since only a fraction of
Dan East
Re:Censorship? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Is it considered censorship that adult movies can't be rated G?
No, because the rating system is done by private entities. If you want to make an unrated movie... go ahead. The MPAA is private, and can give you their 'seal of approval' if they like, or not... same thing like consumer reports. The point is, they aren't the government, and it isn't required
Is it censorship that pornography is not allowed in the
I'm going to plead ignorance on t
'stumbling' across it? (Score:2)
And as far as seeking it out, at least google and such have 'family filters' which actually seem to work pretty well, along with there being personal proxying products that you can use as well. Not that that is a perfect solution, but there *are* already solutions out there for parents/etc who feel the need to block things they don't want their children or themselves to see.
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Something to remember is that many home users will type something in the URL and hit enter. That can have all kinds of fun effects.
that will work .. let me set the evil bit (Score:2)
Life imitates comedy which imitates life or something like that. Where is my evil bit anyway? I know I have it stored around here somewere.
dp
Why not HTML tags? (Score:2)
It is something that could be implemented readily in content creation, be very open as a standard and filtered with much simpler methods then many of the other ones. I think sometimes we are putting too much though into it, maybe the MPAA with nthier broadcast flag/copy bit has us all messed
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The icon should be updated. (Score:2)
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!!!
I for one (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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.
A bid for church reputation (Score:4, Informative)
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].
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.
Re:More information... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're going to try to set up a "child-safe" browsing experience, you're probably going to check the box that forbids access to unrated sites. Ratings can act as a whitelist just as easily as they can a blacklist.
Porn sites that explicitly label their sites as non-porn sites are acting with malicious intent, and this is a different problem that has a different solution. (PICS ratings bureaus can also require that the rating be digitally signed, or require that the browser ask the bureau for guidance rather than trusting what the site provided.)
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Port 69 is reserved for TFTP, although maybe we could just backronym that to something like "Tends For Teh Pr0n".
Re:Port 69 (Score:4, Funny)
While we're at it, TCP stands for "Tube Carrying Porn", and IP is "Internet Porn", which goes to prove that the internet is founded on porn.
ant.
Port Suggestions (Score:4, Funny)
(I know it's not valid. It's a joke, son. Laugh.)
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As MANY have pointed out, this gives no more protection than the
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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 th
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.
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 m
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
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You have no right to force my content or product into some seedy store, anymore than I can demand my smut be sold at Toys R Us.
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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.
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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
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You won't find much porn at www.toysrus.com either. AFAIK they don't sell "adult toys" at all.
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You mean like that Wii thing? It's named after the penis, for *'s sake!
*religious figure removed for purposes of thinking of the children
Re:Sounds like a good idea to me (Score:4, Interesting)
See the problem? Ports are for services. Porn is not a service, it's content of a service.
Maybe we should set hijack the Content-disposition header and set it to "Content-disposition: nasty". Sure, it'll break attachments, at least as far as there's overlap between attachments and porn, but who cares? Your children are safe from your lack of supervision while the rest of us work around your concerns.
When I was a child, I was told what to do and what not to do. If my parents weren't in the room with me the entire time, they checked in on me often enough that they'd catch me doing things I wasn't supposed to do, or at least make me reasonably afraid they would. When I got caught, I lost access to things like computers. When I was in real trouble, I got the belt.
Maybe that's what the Internet needs -- it needs parents who discipline their children for doing things children shouldn't do.
Come on everybody, we've got to stop the proliferation of unsupervised, spoiled, undisciplined children! Think of the Internet!
Not looking for it? (Score:2)
Explain to me why the acronym NSFW was created.
You never get unsolicited emails that have porn photos?
I'd love to have a child-safe internet channel where content was intentionally restricted.
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My nine year old daughter doesn't do many google searches, and she's found porn by accident.
I don't advocate this solution, though. How would you handle something like Wikipedia, on which my son looked up Simon Bolivar on last night, but where fairly explicit images are also available? Instead, something like ICRA, and good browser support for it, is probably the best solution. Those who want to help parents and others con
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It's stupid, and it shows a huge lack of understanding about what ports are for, and how content is directed to specific ports, and it depends wholly on the ability to separate content by its content, which is extraordinarily difficult to do with image/video data. Might as well just block port 80.
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Oh, wait....
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Re:shouldn't that read... (Score:5, Funny)
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Wait a minute... supposing we leave 22 for non-porn ssh, 25 for non-porn smtp, and 80 for non-porn http.... that only leaves 65533 ports for porn. Is that enough? I don't think it's enough.
But wait! What other protocols have you forgotten about which you use on a daily basis?
The list goes on and on. In fact, my /etc/services contains 4596 ports registered for TCP protocols.
Clearly the legislation should be amended to declare the MSB of the port number to be the "evil bit" similar to that specified in RFC3514 [ietf.org].
Better, they could use a less broken solution such as a URL tagging system like PICS.
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