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These guys are definitely the devil's advocates; but http://www.cp80.org/ is a creepy pressure group, largely composed of slimy mormons(some of them with SCO ties...), advocating a very similar scheme. Everything on port 80 would have to be PG, with material that makes republican jesus cry relegated to other ports for easy blocking.

Reagan was a prick; but DSHEA was signed in 1994, at which point Clinton was in office, and Reagan was barely sentient.

If you want a real villain of the piece, look no further than Orrin Hatch (R) Utah. He is a pretty lovable guy to begin with, being the guy who actually suggested, in seriousness, amending the computer fraud and abuse act to allow copyright holders to destroy the computers of suspected infringers. He is also said to be a friend of SCO Group Uberslime Ralph Yarro III's "CP80" mormon moralist pressure group.

It was his lobbying on behalf of the nutritional supplements industry(a generous donor and big local industry) that was instrumental in getting the bill passed.

He'll probably just get a cushy job with his buddy Mr. Yarrow's merry band of censorship enthusiasts.

Notice that CP80's "Get Involved" discussions page is 404?

It suggests, to me, that her (organization's) larger goal is to neutralize the pornography industry, not just to limit it to adults.

That explains their other office in Arlington, VA. Invest in America - buy a congressman!

In August, the Attorney General's Office quietly hired private attorney Brent Hatch, who had been defending Unspam Technologies and its money-making interests in Utah's Child Protection Registry. So far, Hatch has been paid $100,000 - half of what his contract allows, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said.

CP80 is good enough to list their corporate contribution partners right here: http://cp80.org/content/sponsors-partners/contribu tion-partners. If you are a customer of any of these, why not write them a letter expressing your displeasure with the flawed implementation of this idea...

This is only one of many bad ideas. The CP80 Internet Channel Initiative proposes what amounts to a "two-internet" system - a set of ports restricted to kid-friendly content, and another set where anything goes. I can think of problems that would arise if they simply wanted to designate a new set of ports as "safe" ports, but I get the impression they would rather keep the current scheme and relegate anything inappropriate to a new set of ports. There may be some political support building for this right now, although the idea has been around for a while now and hopefully is a non-starter.

What I see in a lot of discussions (even here) is a focus solely on the pornography industry. However, the people who want to make these things law don't care about just the pornography industry. They want to regulate anything sexually explicit. So places like blogs and slashdot where people have discussions of a sexual nature (or post explicit ascii art) would be regulated by these laws.

They are definitely wrong; 20 MHz really isn't any good for the type of bandwidth they want, unless they took a huge swath of spectrum.

It's an interesting band as well. I'd love to see how they deal with it during more active cycles. Your 1 MHz slice might suddenly propegate for a few hundred miles - not exactly the kind of frequency you want for cell-based coverage (unless that is their plan - to only use a couple of nodes per state for "384" divided by tens of thousands of customers. I've been working 17 MHz an increasing amount as the solar cycle begins to wake up a little bit - from the middle of the USA, I had a long PSK-31 contact in Pittsburg PA. It works when your protocol is 31 baud (remember 300 baud modems? or 1200? Yea... that slow). Sharing 1 MHz over a thousand mile radius when the band is open would truly demonstrate some fascinating issues (and you wanna talk about problems with hidden nodes or implementing polling mechanisms over a 1000 mile radius?).

I'm mostly surprised that there are still believers in the dot-com model. Capacity gets paid for regardless of how you fudge the numbers. Either you buy the backbone capacity to feed it or you don't - and towers, trunking, engineering, licensing, compliance all cost real money. Ask a Level3 exec if they ever considered giving free dialup to "pay" for their national fiber rollout and watch their reaction.

This seems more like a frequency givaway scam in search of an engineering solution than anything. Remember that Internet CP80 Port stuff that was so unworkable and absurd to anyone that actually understands anything about IP engineering? Our US house representative has indicated those people are still pushing and they claim their engineers have looked it over and haven't had a credible complaint about their proposal. (Note: The CP80 people haven't gone away and have enough Congressmen that actually think their proposal is a good idea - good time for some followup!)

And if the discussions of the bandwidth utilization were correct, I'm curious where all that higher capacity stuff will come from that is necessary to revenue-share with the FCC. Or is that going to be an oops after the frequency gets allocated - guess we didn't have any left to sell and share. Thanks for the free frequency givaway for a single company. Now there's a scheme I can believe. Just send your Senator a few thousand dollars and get it earmarked. One of our own Senators was kind enough to find $50 million for a rainforest in the middle of flyover USA for a couple thousand dollar donation, so anything's really possible.

Here's a recent story by her concerning CP80, the latest attempt to make pornography go away: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/30342/. *Don't* *miss* the "educational" Flash video by CP80 about pr0n http://www.cp80.org/solutions/CP80-Flash-Overview. html , which is a contender for the title of "The 'Reefer Madness' of anti-porn propaganda". Anybody know of others?

It is the Utah idiot's proposal. His "company", ThinkAtomic, is the only sponsor listed on that site. From the way they talk about ports as TV channels, they probably think the Internet is done by having a DVD-Jockey play discs down at your local ISP. They just have to tell the guy not to stick any adult DVDs into the family DVD player .. or something.

I just read through CP80's "technical briefing" which I'd strongly recommend /. readers review (it's located at: http://www.cp80.org/solutions/ ). Treating the matter seriously (which isn't easy), there are a few observations:

Viability: CP80 isn't. When you misunderstand the very basics of the subject material from the start (such as this nonsense: "Ports & Protocols = Internet Channels")a few minutes with RFC 1700 would be a good start for CP80's technical advisors, if they have any). Consider the following CP80 quote:

There are over 65,000 Internet channels available on the Internet today. These channels are already used to categorize content and services.

No they're not. They're used to correspond to applications that operate at a known port. This is much lower in the OSI model, where content filtering typically requires application awareness (OSI layer 7).

ISP Administration: CP80 wants ISPs to offer you channels (as if the believe ISPs create the content, which you'd have to do in order to control the content at the appropriate layers), presumably 80 & 443 for "clean content", perhaps 81/444 for rated PG (sorry hosts2 nameserver and snpp), 82/446 for R and 83/447 for X (working around microsoft-ds at 445 for the moment). Should we go down this path, this probably will be the necessary incentive for providers to move residential broadband completely to an opt-in protocol/port model and quit blocking ports. We'll just enable the few basics - your "web channels" (ugh), a mail channel that only goes to us and perhaps a couple of others necessary for audio/video streaming and such. We'll push all through proxies to make sure you're not tunneling something other than the desired protocol (and still, there will be ways around this). It's a radical departure at significant expense and unfortunately doesn't quite work (as most things that ignore Internet architecture do). Coordination between all ISPs, NSPs, OS and software vendors, standards bodies and content providers would be rather necessary and mandatory.

There /is/ a potential solution that addresses the unlikely mandatory compliance aspect and approaches the content filtering on an optional basis (usable for those that wish to integrate it) and I'll post and draft it out this morning so there's evidence of prior art (we know how the SCOG folks have a difficult time understanding how intellectual property works). I'd be willing to push it further into a public commons patent application e.g. under ODSL's patent commons (just so CP80 doesn't make the same mistake SCOG did by thinking they owned other people's IP and get congressional support behind misappropriated property).

An effective approach is to use a shim protocol, similar to how MPLS is implemented (and wedged), that would insert a content header immediately ahead of the IP datagram. The datagram would specify content settings and either be processed by equipment (CPE, firewalls, routers, PCs, etc.) that are Content-Shim aware or ignored by those that aren't. Service providers could implement it and push administration of the filtering to the end-user (though this assumes content providers are using the shim protocol as well as they push out traffic). Done at this level, it is independent of port management issues and other unworkable nonsense.

Contact me if you'd like to work on a content shim on sourceforge with the prototype code under GPL and intellectual property donated to ODSL patent commons.

*scoove*
(scoove-at-yahoo.com)

CP80 is not a content filter solution, nor is it another .xxx-domain-name solution.

CP80 is a non-profit Internet channel initiative.

It uses Internet channels--similar to cable TV channels--to categorize content on the Web. There would be one channel for general-public content and other channels for other content, such as an adult Internet channel for pornography.