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The .XXX Saga Continues in Wellington
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Mar 26, 2006 08:42 PM
from the site-your-sights-on-pr0n dept.
from the site-your-sights-on-pr0n dept.
netrover writes "CircleID is reporting on the latest developments on the .XXX top-level domain as the related ICANN meeting is currently underway in Welligton, New Zealand. From the article: 'The .XXX TLD was widely expected to receive its final approval at the ICANN's last meeting held in Vancouver about 4 months earlier but the discussion was unexpectedly delayed as the organization and governments requested more time to review the merits of setting up such a domain.' But as it has been reported, it appears the discussions at ICANN Wellington are in limbo once again."
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Is It Time For .tel? 292 comments
Vitaly Friedman writes "ICANN, the body responsible for creating top-level domains, is considering a new one. Conceived as a way to easily manage contact information in an age where many people have numerous contact numbers, the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location. Companies would get companyname.tel while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel." This idea has been kicked around for quite a while; one of the question is the whole name-space collision issue. For instance, there's me and then there's other me. Lemme tell how strange it is getting fan mail for country music stars.
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Politics: ICANN Finally Rejects .xxx Domain 245 comments
stalebread writes "Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, the Internet's key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the Internet." From the article: "In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain. The .xxx registry application has been the focus of enormous political pressure on ICANN for the past six months and was used at one point as a political football in a wider tussle for power within the internet."
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Awww, they fixed the typo (Score:2, Funny)
More Appropriate Name? (Score:3, Funny)
Like ICANT.
Re:More Appropriate Name? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19980509 [userfriendly.org]
Parent
Re:More Appropriate Name? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Think again. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Think again. (Score:3, Funny)
Is this necessary? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
There is plenty, plenty of freely available pornography on the Internet. Enough to last the addict his whole life and result in chronic pain from over-masturbation. The first place pornography spread on the Internet, the alt.binaries.* hierarchy on Usenet, has always been free. Unless you just discovered the Internet yesterday, I fail to understand how you don't already know this.
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:2)
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be amazed, AMAZED if even 1/5 of the content on P2P networks was not porn.
Do you know what found it's way onto the original Napster (what a great service) fast? Porn. Napster could only share MP3s, or so they thought. It quickly occurred to people that you could just rename your file to .MP3 and then it could be shared. Napster didn't care if your MP3 was 1 meg or 1 gig. You would search for some song and find files named "something about porn or content (change extension to avi).mp3".
Plus there is what is on news groups (NNTP), the web, FTP sites, and who knows where else.
Music is what made P2P famous in the press, but I'm sure it would be just as big and popular if MP3s never existed. Porn ends up driving just about every technology, like it or not.
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
My company pays a lot of money for filtering software. On top of that, we fire dozens of employees a year for doing shit they shouldn't online. Most of those are porn-related. It would be so nice if I could just block everything, then allow
There should be a better catagorization of the internet. We should purge all
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
Should Microsoft be allowed a
Should Slashdot?
How about me? Should I be allowed to run a
Once he started selling ads, should he
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:4, Interesting)
Whereas most would agree that the current TLD system has been totally abused (I count myself as one of the guilty people, having several
Back to the topic in hand.
Of course those of us who like and enjoy pr0n on a regular basis, wont be affected by the
Personally, I get my pr0n from usenet, it's free
-Jar.
* I know
** I once worked for a UK broadcast company (one of the big-five) and they had a whole dept dedicated to maintaining their own pr0n sites.
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it really wouldn't. The trouble with black or white-listing based on TLD is that the implications don't hold up. if/when
Both of these implications would be totally untrue. With
Also, there will always be fringe cases that don't neatly fit into a category.
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
That does not nescessarily follow. The only thing one could assume should a
>>With
Hence the need for a controlled domain. If one tried to register a
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, .safe.us, .safe.au? Because otherwise, who gets to decide the criteria? Europe, where you regularly have full frontal female and male nudity on free to air TV, or the US, where on most channels they bleep out even the word 'ass'?
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gimme a break
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:2, Interesting)
It just occurred to me that the domain system has similar flaws as the DOS/Windows drive letter system. The top-level
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:2)
Which is of course the origin.
When this started the biggest domain on the net was .mil. Most of .mil was not visible to the rest of the I
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:2)
Why shouldn't companies have the right to block XXX sites? And wouldn't parents like to block XXX websites? They pay for the internet connection, shouldn't they be able to filter obscene content?
You can't get into them unless you pay anyway. Is it better for categorization? All the other sites are in 2-3 TLDs. I just don't see what this would help.
That is not true. Lots of porn is freely available in the .com wo
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
But what it really means is one thing: money. You run the big "joebob.com" porn site? (made that up, no idea what it is). Well now you have two choices. You can either buy "joebob.xxx" (how much? Lets say a few hundred bucks) or you can not buy it. If you DON'T buy it then your competitor ("pornking.net" or wha
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't the issue. Can ICANN get it into the US Government controlled root servers, THAT'S the issue.
They can't.
Here's what really happened.
Wellll, turns out a right wing group who had the ear of Bush had trundled into Karl Rove's offifce about that time and had three "action items": 1) No gay marriage, 2) No stem cell research and 3) no
Rove read the list and said "anout that third one", made a phone call and the newly appointed head of DoC stepped on it.
ICANN bullshitted and suggested it needed fruther study by world governments.
Because as everybody knows, the naming of hosts on the network has to be ratified if all the worlds governments. Never mind the DNS apparantly worked ok for over a decade without any world governments knowing the network even existed.
ICANN is a very expensive single-point-of-failure. A choke-hold on the entire net. And now you're watching it in action. Or inaction.
The US governemnt will never let go of it's control of the root, ever. When it came dangerously close to looking like the warring facitons of the DNS wars of 1996 would actually agree to settle their differences and cooperate, that movement was torpedod by the man who would later be the head of ICANN. Old military officers never really retire it seems.
You might ask why the US government still has control of the Internet domain name system. Good question.
Recall that it was the genius of Steve Wolff that the NSF backbone was turned over to private industry and the commercial internet was born. I did ask him why he didn't do the DNS and IP space as well. "I forgot about that; it didn't seem important at the time" was the answer.
It's long been joked that the seventh layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack is the "political layer" and it's no longer a joke. The technical administration of Internet names and numbers should not have any politicians in the loop.
They have the laws of their own countried to do what they want - Jon Postel recognized this, hence the requirement that a cctld administrator be a resident of that country - but ICANN made a deal with the devil, in a nutshell "if we recognize you and your government will you recognize us as authoritative over the internet" an that was it, Pandoras box was opened. And now the goverments of the world hold the internet by the nuts.
My day in the sun was as the formation of the DNSO within ICANN in Berlin way back when. It was suggested by the ICANN board that a "Government Advisoty Baord" (GAC) was needed by consensus. When I got my 2.5 minutes at the mike I asked for a show of hands for who thought this was a good idea. Thirteen people (out of about 800) put their hands up and the ones I could see were all government poeple. There is a realvideo (sic) archive of this at the Berkman Centre for Law and Technology site.
The irony is ICANN is not supposed to set policy, it's supposed to measure "community consensus" and make recommendations. But, the way they change the bylaws to suit themselves that may not even be true any more.
Parent
Re:Is this necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
Who would be responsible for determining which domain sites would belong to? Would it be up to the sites themselves?
In a sane system, yes.
It doesn't seem like such an opt-in approach would do much to segregate pornography away from less potentially objectionable content.
But it would. Difficult as this is for anti-porn crusaders to comprehend, the people selling porn really have no interest in aiming their products at a) adults that aren't interested in looking at porn (small as a such a group is) and
local blogger at ICANN (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/ [kiwiblog.co.nz]
mixed in with his other stuff of course.
Useful stuff like:
But what is interesting is who else is against the proposal. I had lunch yesterday with the Communications Director of the trade association of the adult entertainment industry. And they are not in favour of
Their fears are the opposite of the US Government. They fear
Go crash his server.
I sure hope this doesn't happen. (Score:3, Insightful)
Two issues (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Define porn. Any definition will have to involve questions of artistic merit, like they deal with in other cases.
2) What do you do with hybrid sites? I mean, wikipedia has several graphic illustrations in the human sexuality articles. Does wikipedia have to move fully to
Re:Two issues (Score:2)
If you can see the hole, it is probably porn. Start there and work backwards. Next, I'd say that any shaved genetalia probably qualify. Anything involving multiple partners touching each other's genetalia is a good candidate as well.
Boobies are not porn. No matter how hard you try, they just aren't. However, if they are being used for a fetish, they probably qualify. Guy eating cereal while lactating woman fills the bowl? Probably porn.
Feet are probably not porn no matter how hard
Two non-issues (Score:3)
1) Define porn. Any definition will have to involve questions of artistic merit, like they deal with in other cases.
Why? Who cares? Sites that consider themselves to be pornographic will buy .xxx domains because it's good for business. Others won't.
In any case, porn isn't that hard to define. Porn is imagery whose primary purpose is sexual arousal. The question of art is irrelevant. Porn can be artistic, but that doesn't make it not porn. Art can be pornographic but that doesn't make it not art.
Much more useful than .info or .biz (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe the people providing porn and their target audience have a reasonable idea of what it is. If you create a
Just skip any stupid legislation trying to pin it down or require sites to use it or to not use it.
I mean when you do a Google search with site:.au you know you are looking for sites linked to or in Australia BUT of course it's not a 100% thing.
Same goes for
So I say it'll be useful to at least more people than it was to
If I were in charge of approving TLDs, I'd approve
The usefulness and novelty of being able to control a jukebox in UK from Turkmenistan wears off after a while. But as long as physical stuff remains important, it will remain useful to be able to address stuff by rough physical context/locality.
With this, people don't have to change their domain search paths or even have one (for security or other reasons). They might even be able to bookmark standard URLs for setting their favourite airconditioner temperature or something like that.
Cost of enforcement? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property. Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free
The former is reminiscent of "imminent domain" (pun intended), and the latter is a violation of my freedom of speech. The only remaining option I could see would be for them to buy me out, but who would foot the bill?
Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't.
Re:Cost of enforcement? (Score:3, Informative)
You didn't really check then did you because this is false.
" Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free
No.
"Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working o
Fundamental problem for govt's and .XXX (Score:3, Insightful)
It's analogous to the situation in Pennsylvania (and Montgomery County MD, where I live) with "states stores". In order to better regulate the sale of hard liquor (presumably more dangerous than beer), sales are only allowed through government owned stores. But this now makes the government the purveyor of a substance which can have dangerous consequences and bad societal results - alcoholism and drunk driving. And when this is pointed out, and the effectiveness of the "regulation" is called to question, the unspoken truth is that the State of PA and MontgoCo are as addicted to the money from sales as alcoholics are to what is sold.
So Bush doesn't want
Re:Fundamental problem for govt's and .XXX (Score:3, Insightful)
Porn is ALREADY legitimized. Haven't you heard of USC 2257? Also known as "All models depicted or filmed in this website are 18 or older".
Sorry, but I don't buy that legitimization crap.
Drilling down.. (Score:5, Funny)
My personal favotite:
Where to apply? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, when the DNS is used to push for stances a group of people may have, I doubt it's used for the right purposes. It's not a political tool to censor content "unpleasant" to some, it's a tool to build hierarchies.
Re:Touching is crime (Score:2)
Re:If TLD were enforced like they are supposed to (Score:4, Insightful)
What happens when the kid resolves
Would porn sites have to use email@porn.xxx for their emails? How about for their administrative FTP servers?
This is not something you fix in DNS, you fix it elsewhere. Anyone that doesn't recognize this immediately, has *no business* taking part in the discussion.
Parent
Re:If TLD were enforced like they are supposed to (Score:2)
Re:If TLD were enforced... USE reverse DNS (Score:2, Insightful)
Also some filtering program should be able to easily associate IP's with DNS names using other methods.
Re:If TLD were enforced... USE reverse DNS (Score:2)
It's a shitty solution, and a stupid one that will not work. Period.
Easy algorithm (Score:3, Insightful)
On some websites, you get an error page. On the others, this can be worked around.
1. Get domain name for given IP
2. Is
3. Yes, ban the IP.
That's still much easier than analyzing the page content for keywords.
Re:No more new TLDs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Once you understand that ICANN was captured by the trademark communiny it becomes cleat why they picked the absolute lamest of TLDs to go forward. So people like you would come to the conclusion you did. Of course the names they picked were stupid. The good ones still sit there. Oh, no, sorry, they don't according to ICANN they don't exist. Never mind they existed before ICANN did.
ICANN's manda
Plagarized article by a troll. (Score:5, Informative)
The copier may be trying to raise his karma. See his posting history. [slashdot.org]
Parent
Re:It is cowardly to do nothing about pornography (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is cowardly to do nothing about pornography (Score:4, Interesting)
Whose laws? In some places, a topless woman on the main street of town would be arrested or even stoned; other places no-one would pay her any attention. Which of those societies gets to impose their laws on the other?
Feel free to legislate your section of the internet, but keep away from everyone else's.
If there's a strip club on Broadway and Main they have signs to indicate what the content on the inside is going to be like so my kids can't accidently walk inside.
Actually they have those signs up to try to entice adults to go in, not to keep kids out. The bouncers keep kids and other undesirables out, yes, but in the case of the kids it's mostly because
a) they don't have much money
b) the strip joint will lose their licence if they get caught letting kids in too often
It's not like that on the Internet but it should be.
Every single porn site I've ever seen has had a warning along the lines of "Explicit content past this page - if you're too young or offended by this stuff, keep out!". That's analagous to your signs. Most sites also require a valid credit or debit card to gain full entry; that's analagous to your doorman. True, it's no guarantee that a kid can't get in, but then you'll be wanting to ask the parents why they have a credit card (or why the parents weren't careful enough with their own).
Do you have the moral courage to take a stance or are you a coward?
Yes, I have the moral courage to take a stance. As another respondent already said, I have the courage to take a stand for my morals, which are clearly not identical to yours. I'm sorry, but I really don't see anything particularly wrong with graphic depictions of sex. No, I don't want my six year old viewing hardcore porn; that's one of the reasons why I make sure I'm with her when she's using the Internet, so she doesn't accidentally stray from disney.com or nickjr.co.uk on to a porn site. But then I'm odd like that; I take responsibilty for what my kid is exposed to.
Parent
Re:It is cowardly to do nothing about pornography (Score:3, Insightful)
And your "decency" laws only apply to the USA, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a few other theocracies; they don't apply in many European countries. Last time I checked, the internet was a global public spot.