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Censorware Flaws Shown To COPA Commission
The reports themselves make for the most interesting reading; I'll just summarize them here:
FamilyClickThe following sites were blocked on the "18 or older" setting, in other words, the software thinks they were too violent, pornographic, hateful, etc. to be seen even by adults:
- AIDS Day 1997: China Responds to AIDS;
- Diccionario del VIH/SIDA (a dictionary of AIDS-related terms, in Spanish);
- Camp Sussex (a summer camp for low-income children);
- Triangles and Tribulations, an essay on the persecution of gay men and woman in Nazi Germany;
- "Homosexuality: Fact and Fiction", from the Christian Research Journal;
- genealogy of Alice Ficken (her last name means "fuck" in German).
and sodomy laws, pro-family protests of pornography, a defense of Wicca, etc.
Cyber SentinelThe software's PR blurb says: "At the core of the technology is an advanced recognition engine developed by Security Software Systems engineers (patent pending). This proprietary engine is very fast, very low overhead, and is very accurate."
Blocked sites include:
- CNN.com homepage (because of the story headline "Naples museum exposes public to ancient erotica");
- searches for the term "COPA" on CNet, Wired, Time, and USAToday (because each results page had at least one filthy headline, such as "Back to court for Net porn law");
- The American Family Association (the right-wing group pushing for censorware in libraries and schools, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
- biographies of COPA Commission members Stephen Balkam and Donna Rice Hughes - because they both graduated "magna cum laude" (think about it);
- and, my favorite, the list of papers presented at the COPA Commission!
This was a more interesting test; Peacefire took a sampling of 1,000 domains from the beginning of the .com zone file, and tested which ones that SurfWatch blocked. (Yours truly wrote the one-liner perl script to find sites that respond to ping; for that, Bennett almost named me co-author before I talked him down from his caffeine high.)
SurfWatch claims that it "adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find."
Of the 147 domains blocked, most (96) were clearly "under construction" and were ignored for the test. Of the remaining 51 blocked domains, 42 of them, or 82%, were erroneous blocks.
The 42 supposedly pornographic sites include:
- A-1 Dog Grooming and Kennels;
- American Builders;
- Waterbeds Online;
- A-1 Diamond Limousine;
- Poxy Coat;
- A-Antiques.com.
SurfWatch, for the record, is the software that the American Family Association (see above) and Family Research Council tried to force the Geek Compound's local library to install, earlier this year.
While I applaud Peacefire's (and Slashdot's) efforts to defeat censorware on a practical front, I'd like to (again) point out:
1) Even if the software could implement one person's definition of "obscene" 100% accurately, it couldn't do so for more than one person simultaneously.
2) Even if we all agreed that something was obscene, keeping someone (who is old enough) from looking at it is STILL WRONG.
We don't want to move the censorware battle to a place where they keep getting more accurate and we keep pointing out the remaining flaws. We want to start discussing where it is appropriate to target censorware, if anywhere. For instance, I am totally against any kind of filtering in a library or on all ISPs (that is, I don't mind of ChristSoft wants to implement a filter for their members, but I don't want ALL ISPs to start doing it).
Just imagine 5 years from now. FamilyClick is 100% accurate in filtering out those items they think are obscene. They come to Slashdot and say "happy now?" We say, "well, it's accurate---but we don't like it." Too late.
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Why people would think its anythign else is beyond me. Every time I read these articles I tend to shiver, and then sigh. Shiver because this stuff is popular, and sigh because most people are clueless about the true motives.
You don't want your kid looking at smut? Turn off MTV. You don't want your daughter becoming a devil worshiper? Try instilling a religion You don't want your son smoking pot? Teach him what it does to you.
Something is seriously wrong when you allow technology to be the parent. Nuff said.
Witty quotes suck.
Personally, I like the way the library in my town handles it. If you are below the age of 18 and you have a library card, on the back it specifies whether you are allowed to use the computers or not. Under that, it has two boxes that you can check off. One for censorware, and one for unrestricted access. This way, it is your parent's choice, and NOT Big Brother's choice whether you see the internet in its full glory. IIRC, most of the children have it enabled, so this shows you that most parents want it on anyway, for fear of their precious children seeing something naughty, like BREAST cancer.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Happily reading Slashdot behind SurfWatch.
If I'm afraid that any potential kids/dependents of mine might see something online that I would consider inappropriate, relying on any flavour of RoboBlock is not the way I want to go. Instead, I'd rather set up a logging facility on my browser. I'd make it clear to them that "my computer, my rules." If I find that they spent a half hour on feelmytits.com (fictional example - I hope), they're going to be confronted about it. In other words, active parenting instead of relying on external morality.
When I worked security, locking the doors wasn't our main job; the employees could do that and it wouldn't prevent determined criminals. Our job was to detect intrusion, to deter it if possible, and to report it after the fact. Not a bad strategy in this situation either, I think.
I have some questions, though. Is there an application for home browser logging of this variety? In reference to other messages here suggesting a consensus-based rating system, do you think an ability to cross-reference a log with such a list (to spot those non-obvious domains) might be useful? And finally, any refinements of this strategy to suggest?
Thanks for your time.
-TBHiX- ;)
Have an amoral geek come down on your head like the Fist of God, all for the low low cost of one spam message!
Time for another sneering article about how filterware blocks (doesn't block) some sites that Jamie and Michael feel it shouldn't (should) get. And decalrations that since it didn't work the way they think it should, such software obviously could never be of value.
Uh, yeah. I got a 404 error a few minutes ago -- clearly these so-called "web servers" are a waste of everyone's time. And those idiots in Congress want to spend money on giving schools Internet access!
Face it, what Peacefire and the YRO crew are opposed to is the possibility that anyone could sit down at any computer and be prevented from accessing anything. If that's what they think, fine. But say that instead of, "Look! A chicken breast recipe is blocked! What a bunch of morons!"
The fact is that filterware is going to be used. No matter how many (+5 insightful) posts we get declaring "When I have kids, I"ll let them view all the porn they want." there is simply no way that some schools and libraries (and parents) aren't going to use filters. And when those filters suck, and can't be configured to support what parents think is or isn't appropriate for their children, the tech community will have its own self-absorbtion and smugness to blame.
I was thinking of posting a comment containing a few selected words that would cause /. to be censored by all of these sites -- but I decided not to. To those of you who want to do so, don't.
Why?
Because you can go much, much further.
In every online bulletin board you can find, add to you, add a few selected keywords and a link to a site explaining what the point of this is. That site, for whomever feels like putting it up, should contain a succinct description of what our plan is (put keywords into enough web pages that everything is blocked, showing the true usefulness of censorware) plus links to the EFF blue ribbon campaign, peacefire.org, censorware.org, and a brief description of why censorware is bad.
Don't bother with slashdot -- it's just one of those "hacker sites", after all. And I mean hacker the way the general public uses hacker. Hit the big sites. Hit ZDNet. If Disney has talkbacks, hit them hard. Everywhere you post, put that in your signature and watch the success rate of censorware plummet.
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Can we not implement a freenet type decentralized, community based voting mechanism for web sites. This way the majority of the net users would vote on how a site is classified rather than a corporation... C.
It is hard to believe that so many slashdoters miss the point of censorware. Censorware was never intended to be used in public settings, such as libraries, but in private homes. Parents have every right to protect their children from that which they deem unacceptable; they should be given an effective tool that can facilitate this. One thing I find unfortunate is that no one mentions RSCAi ratings. This was a system of page ratings coded into the page. The browser (IE at least) then parsed out that line of code and determined if the page was permitted based on selections by the administrator to determine what was acceptable and what was not. It is truly a shame that this never caught on, it was a method of ratings that really worked.
Free as in speech, free as in beer, or free as in lunch?
I took a look at Camp Sussex and other than the name of the camp itself, which you think would also cause problems for 1000's of British sites, the only thing I could find that possibly trigger a filter was in the source.
On the main page of the site, there is a picture of 3 girls at the camp, the filename for the picture is girls1.jpg this seems like pretty weak evidence to block the site on though.
There is also the possibility that the server hosting the camp's website also hosts a pr0n site and that the camp is blocked because of its IP address.
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I agree totally. I've said it once, I've said it a million times, the thought that a judge could do a better job of setting Internet policy than you or me is absurd.
Porn sites that use normally innocent and innocuous words to describe their business, and therefore get all sites with those now naughty words banned...
"mom, why can't I get to www.disney.com?"
'Well hon, I guess its all the 'Mickey Mousing' going on there'
-={(Astynax)}=-
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"Darkness beyond Twilight"
Let's face it, there are a billion ad-banner flooded porn sites out on the net. Practically all of these are just there to show you naked girls and grab your credit card number. Many of them do dirty tricks such as slightly-misspelled domain names.
.sex sites(paintings, etc), judge on a case-by-case basis. Obviously, the Venus De Milo isn't smut.
For god's sake let them have their own TLD like they were some sort of country.
And if there happens to be nudity on a few non
Fun with languages!
Wah!
Two years ago I gave a talk to a bunch of two-year college marketing folks (NCMPR) and one of them asked me how to get their site unblocked from these services.
Their college's name? Middlesex Community College
I had a hard time believing (at the time) that they could have been blocked just cause the word "sex" is in their name. I figured there had to be something else (like a student's home page or something) doing this.
Now I have to worry about my own college, because we have a campus located in Sussex County, Delaware. Heaven's forbid if we put up a page that describes the location of the campus...
What I don't understand is the amount of people who get upset and threaten to sue about being on the RBL list, a list that every site is manually dealt with and has instructions for how to get off of it, yet there are no cries from both near and far about this censorware crap.
It's getting tougher to find an office or school who isn't wired to the net. But the way our society works, companies, with little exception, cannot afford to let people run around wild on the net.
If one guy's voting on the Tits of the Week (towview.com), he's creating a potentially "hostile" work environment for which the company can be responsible. And that means big bucks.
That's controlling corporate resources, nowhere near as bad as forcing a library to do what most have fought so strongly against.
I think most of us hate the idea of censorship.. but it's a reality we can't ignore.
No it's not. We hate it, and therefore we must fight it. Just giving in is the WORST thing you can do because it means you're willing to let yourself be CONTROLLED by those who think that THEY KNOW BEST FOR YOU.
I guess my point is to think about investing in some of these companies, like Websense (on the Nasdaq), even if their software is so shitty and it pisses you off.
NO. We should fight them to the point that they no longer have any business. We should not support them at all. One thing ethics tells you is that YOU DO NOT SUPPORT THOSE YOU DISLIKE. In my case, that's Rambus and any company that creates Censorware.
Instead, why not spend that money you'd waste on censorware companies, and help fund the ACLU and the EFF, the primary organizations that help protect our rights?
Her name was Donna, she was an author, / She's been on daytime TV, got a shiny B.Sc. / She wants to censor - all of the porno / But being the EiE VP, that was not enough for she / She had recieved a sign, to protect kids on-line / With a congressional appointment, who could ask - for - more - 'cause the COPA, ... (etc)
Wah!
Of course, that's assuming we can all agree on what does and does not constitute a porn site.
.sex TLD? Does it depend on how much nudity, or what kind is depicted? What about sites that are more suggestive than photographic? What about Cosmopolitan magazine? Playboy? Sex advice columns? Sites run by homosexual support groups?
.sex TLD would make it easy to write an anti-porn filter, but deciding which sites should be moved (exiled?) into the new .sex TLD would be a nightmare.
Sure, some of the sites are fairly obvious (to us) as porn sites, but what about the grey areas? Does the sexual content have to be "pornographic", or is mere nudity enough to require a
My point is that there are sites which you and I might not consider to be obscene, sexual or pornographic, but others would.
Basically, this shifts the filtering process from software and into the name registration system. Requiring all porn sites to use a
I would maintain that probably the best thing any parent could do is instill in their child a healthy attitude towards sex. Another thing would be to monitor their on-line activities until they are either responsible or of a certain age.
It amazes me that these people forget that the first line of defense starts out in the homes, with the parents. A kid who is aware of sex and what it is, but realizes that he is not ready for it will not go looking for porn and will stay away from sites dealing with it.
But for those who are for censorship online: You cannot force someone to be good. They must want to be good.
Ciao
nahtanoj
I think what everyone seems to be forgetting is that people have a right to censor. Everyone seems to think all censorware is bad, and that everyone on earth should be able to see anything anytime they want, but if I want to install SurfWatch on my computer at home, I have the right to do so. If someone wants to install Net Nanny on their computer so their kid doesn't look at porn, or hate groups, or whatever they don't agree with, they have that right. Businesses have a right to install it to keep the employees from surfing the web and not working. There are a lot of uses that you may not agree with, but are perfectly reasonable.
And, while they may not be 100% accurate (and depending on which ones you pick they are FAR less accurate) they do what they are supposed to do, which is help to keep kids (or whoever) away from things they shouldn't be looking at. I think they should have to reveal that they have 10% fake blocks (or whatever it is) but that doesn't mean they can't be used for anything. If they are used intelligently they could be a great tool (especially the one(s) with open block lists). There aren't evil anymore than DeCSS is evil because it can be used to do bad things. It's all in how you use it.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Roblimo better be careful with his limo service, then ;-)
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
My mental image of the whole thing is a library with controlled and uncontrolled (or minimally-controlled) terminals, where uncontrolled terminals were only available to adults and controlled terminals were available to children. Uncontrolled terminals could access pretty much anything; controlled terminals could access sites already in the database with a ranking (within an category) above a level set by the local staff. Unlisted sites being accessed from the controlled terminals would be bounced to someone else for approval (I'm imaginging this going to someone supervising the children's area of the library). Alternatively, children's terminals could be in one of two modes: private but limited to approved sites or monitored but allowed pretty much uncontrolled access. That way if little Johnny is looking at porn/bomb howtos/drug recipes/whatever, someone shadowing the terminal can see it and either shut down access to the site or go have a talk with Johnny.
On the moderation side, scoring would be a bit more complex than /.'s - moderators could be ranked, and moderators with higher ranks would have more influence on the scoring. Similarly, moderators with low ranks or moderators who abused the system could be given less influence and eventually dropped. By doing this, you could hopefully prevent "poisoning" of the system by people with agendas. Ranking could be handled by something similar to /.'s meta-moderation, but probably more automated. If librarian A puts a site in a category and librarians B, C, and D all disagree with that assesment, A's ranking (overall or within that category) goes down. There could even be a way for the general public to "nominate" sites for moderation with suggestions as to categories.
The biggest headache with the whole thing, I think, would be who does the moderating, particularly early on - it's not like most libraries have people sitting around doing nothing who could just take it on as an additional duty. Unfortunately, it's not like there's a good base list out there that could be used as a seed.
One interesting thing is that if such a system was developed it could have commercial potential as well - perhaps a version of it that did not include the ability to moderate, but which did allow the use of frequently-updated copies of the score files from libraries. By providing it to libraries for free, a company would both help libraries avoid community pushes for censorware with an agenda and gain access to a pool of site raters.
Overall, there are all sorts of potential approaches to the problem of protecting people from disagreeable information, the problems are that there are so many different ideas of what's considered disagreeable and there are so many different ideas of who needs to be protected. On one end, you have people who believe that what's appropriate is no restrictions at all; on the other you have people who believe that all access should be tightly controlled; in between you have the bulk of the populace. In the US the general tendency is probably toward less control, but the tight-control people are noisy. Assuming that somewhere in the middle (limited control) is where things are going to end up, the problem becomes one of ensuring that the controls that go into place are not too restrictive, and that's where I think approaches like this could come in.
Finally, before people jump all over this as advocating censorware, I lean toward the less-control end personally, but I think that there are some things that need to be discussed with children before they're exposed to them unsupervised. Children who think and parents who teach them to do so are the way to go, but in our current society I'm not sure how much we can depend on that.
fencepost
just a little off
Shouldn't filtering be set up by kids so that their parents don't suffer the trauma of stumbling across naughty bits on the net?
It's only parents that have trouble with alleged pornography. Under-age kids either don't understand what they're seeing, or they react with "Yuk!" or else they think it's hilarious (and you've got to admit, rubbing squishy bits together has to be the funniest thing on the planet), and older kids positively love it.
And since kids understand the technology far better than their parents anyway and can easily bypass any block they like, it's really they that ought to be doing the censoring to protect their parents.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What bureaucrat(s) get to decide which companies are "porn" and which companies merely have "erotic" or "adult-themed" content? And if you find your site branded with the scarlet "S" and subsequently blocked, to whom may you appeal?
Will sites dealing with homosexual lifestyles, erotic fiction, transcripts of Supreme Court nominee hearings, or pro-life/pro-choice advocacy be labelled with ".sex" because of their "adult" content? Does an online gallery of the collected works of Robert Mapplethorpe or David Hamilton warrant the imposition of a .sex domain?
Defining pornography is pretty tricky. D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Allen Ginsburg, Henry Miller, and other notable 20th century writers all faced accusations of obscenity. I realize that you probably have a very clear idea of the kind of sites that should be given a .sex TLD, and I probably wouldn't disagree with any of your choices; but, unfortunately, I don't think we can depend on the same rational objectivity on the part of any board of de facto censors.
As another poster has observed, it will be all-too-convenient to enforce a blanket ban on anything with a .sex TLD, and certain lobbying groups will doubtless see to it that such a ban is enforced on campuses and in libraries, or required of local ISPs in small and not-so-small towns across the nation. After all, what elected official wants to be on record with such an "anti-family" position as supporting access to those dirty .sex domains?
Remember the rationale behind the NC-17 rating? The X rating wasn't intended to merely represent pornographic films. The Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy, for example, was rated X. Eventually, however, X came to signify hardcore, and porn merchants used XXX as another marketing tool. The MPAA eventually adopted the NC-17 rating, ostensibly to allow serious filmmakers to release adult-themed films without being saddled with the same rating as Debbie Does Dallas.
Unfortunately, NC-17 is the financial kiss of death. Why? "Family" newspapers mostly won't run advertisements for NC-17 movies. Most major theatre chains won't show them. Major studies routinely require R-rated films to be delivered (such as the case with Kubrick's last film).
The same thing has happened with "Parental Advisory" labels on rock and rap albums, to a degree, but I won't go into that here; I'm afraid I might have rambled on too long, as it is.
In a nutshell, requiring a new .sex domain opens an entirely familiar can of worms. Whether it's labeled Censorware, Parental Advisory labels, or the Hayes Commission, it's still the same can we've been opening since the Comstock Act.
But the problem is the closed lists. How would one know whether it is actually child porn or simply an idea that the list-maker would want banned? With a closed list, you can't know, and there is no outside review.
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The truth is out th- oh, wait, here it is...
Maybe you'd be better off taking a bus trip instead?
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
If they ever made one that was perfect that would scare me more than these attempts at it. Especially since in everyone's mind different material is offensive. It also depends on the context as shown by many of these links. I was wasting time at my local library, where they said the didn't but I found they have Surfwatch happily installed. My roommate and myself got into an argument at work about some irelevant point with Hitler so I went to look up Hitler and try and find info. (I dont remember what I was looking for exactly) But the only sites I could get to were useless. Most of them just history about how the allies won the war. All the sites that mentioned his beliefs were blocked. I finally cliked on a neonazi page that was strict hatred and very insulting and it allowed that. I found it so amusing that I called the librarian over to show her and she took offence and asked me to leave if I was going to look at information like that. I told her my situation and she said I was looking wrong and she would find it. She quickly ran into the same problem, and gave me this solution. Well if it is important you should get it out of a book, the internet is usually wrong anyway. I left think of sour grapes. Just my ramblings.
I am 31337 or something.
All censorware is inherently flawed, in that it "censors". The writers of the constitution knew that if censorship of ANY level was allowed, then it would allow a gradual creeping of more and more censorship until any oposing opinion was banned. Dispite the best of intentions, this type of software could push us towards this state of affairs.
It is quite clearly dangerous, and to protect the rights of all Americans, it should be banned. At the moment, only some sites are restricted, but what if the next version "protects" people from sites that advocate other "dangerous" ideas like free software. Somehow, I don't think the people who write these programs would worry too much if people can't access sites about Linix.
We're talking about absolute control here. Right now, the Internet is not as important as TV, but it will be much more important in the near future, and if there's a single company (or an oligarchy of companies) that's in control of what children can see, without public scrutiny, they can do whatever they want. And they will probably get away with it.
That's why the censorware issue is so extremely important, and that's why Mattel went after the guys who cracked the Cyber Petrol filter list. It's not because of accidental overblocking, it's because of the power of intentional censorship by conservative organizations. In schools and libraries, imagine that!
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I'm sure they would reply that the problem isn't *just* the people sitting at the computer terminals, but the people walking by that might get a glance at something horrific.
The place I used to work explained that they had to strictly monitor every site you went to, not because you might look at something inappropriate, but because some passerby might and could then sue for sexual harrassment.
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Censorship, the government declaring that you can't publish or read information on $SUBJECT, is bad. Adults have the inherent right and responsibility to make their own determinations on what information to expose themselves to.
Filtering software is ENTIRELY different. As a parent, I want some assurance that my tax dollars aren't supplying my children with porn through the library or public school system. You are not being censored! If you want to download porn, go ahead. Just don't think the government, through schools and libraries, has any obligation to assist.
It also seems that you have a choice. One of the following will happen:
- Filtering in all forms will fail and those who don't want to be exposed or shouldn't be will withdraw from the internet.
- Filtering will succeed somehow as software technology improves to make it possible.
- A reactionary legislature will make it illegal.
The first isn't bloody likely with our ludicrous demand that every school be wired. (WHY?)Most here are arguing vehemently against the second.
You're left with the third, which is what you're going to get. Real censorship, not the voluntary filtering which is being offered now. Be careful what you wish for. You *WILL* get it.
It's getting tougher to find an office or school who isn't wired to the net. But the way our society works, companies, with little exception, cannot afford to let people run around wild on the net.
If one guy's voting on the Tits of the Week (towview.com), he's creating a potentially "hostile" work environment for which the company can be responsible. And that means big bucks.
I think most of us hate the idea of censorship.. but it's a reality we can't ignore. I guess my point is to think about investing in some of these companies, like Websense (on the Nasdaq), even if their software is so shitty and it pisses you off.
True.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
They are made to use it first. The problem is that in this day and age people trust press releases for whatever reason. They look at "patent-pending technology" and they believe it can't fail. They see a problem and are looking for a band-aid solution. Since these companies have their lobbyists in Washington and we don't, they're going to win.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
I still like the solution of creating a .sex (or whatever you want to call it) and requiring any porn companies in the US to house their domain there.
It doesn't stop pages from companies in other countries, or illegal pages, but any veteran computer user can tell you that you can't really reliably censor the net. As soon as you make a smarter filter, they'll make craftier pages.
The TLD provides a simple, cheap, effective solution for all law-abiding sites.
I'm very very strongly against government censorship. However, I do believe it's a parent's right to control what kind of material their children get access to (or at least try). This control doesn't extend to schools and libraries. Libraries and schools I do not think should be censored ever. Make parents sign agreements before letting their kids use public internet if liability is the problem.
This censorship software is clearly ridiculous, and seems like it has barely improved since the first versions were released. This only adds to the ridiculousness of the demands to censor public access.
On an somewhat sad sidenote, the network administrator of my high school system is also totally against censorship and tracking of websites, but when upgrading servers last year had software installed which COULD do both (but didn't). Apparently he felt that given the attitude in the school system, it was only a matter of time before mandatory censorship and tracking would be the status quo.
Scott
I wanted to research a Trip to Thailand but the damn library keeps blocking any info about it!!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It is time for the owners of the blocked sites to sue. They should demand that their sites be reinstated immediately. They should demand a guarantee that their sites will never be blocked in the future.
I feel certain that it will remain possible to trick the censorware in both directions for the foreseeable future. There will continue to be false negatives and false positives. The problem is that the image these companies are selling doesn't match with the fine print about the product reliability. And the actual performance has been proven to be even worse than that several times for some of them.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
nt = no text
Wah!
I would still like to propose the creation of both .XXX and .SEX domains;
.XXX TLD category - at no additional fee for transfer.
.SEX domains then, can become open to areas of discussion on sexual
.com pages.
but I disagree that any sites should be required to house thier domains there.
Instead, the clearly pornographic sites (those that deem themselves to be
of an sexual nature that would normally be subject to screening
only by adults over the age of 18) should be encouraged to migrate their
domains into the
This will act both to allow the domain change without oversight by some
faceless bureaucrat(s); and will give the porn-meisters a better way of
focusing their marketing efforts to an audience that is both interested
and able to pay for thier services. In addition AFAIK, the XXX can be
internationally identified with a specific level of adult activity
(aside from those who still count with Roman Numerals), whereas SEX
is more ambiguous between different cultures, social groups,
and educational levels.
The
health and education that may not in themselves be seen (by some groups)
as pornographic. PlannedParenthood.sex, STD.sex, and even DrRuth.sex
could become respected alternatives which can provide more in-depth advice
for adults, while still allowing for both parental discretion, and providing
an educational resource thru the standard
I realize there will still be opportunites for abuse, but I'd think that
most web-promoters would be more likely to follow the path of least
resistance to continuing success, than to try and buck a trend.
If a hacker was so inclined to be really sadistic, instead of physically blemishing a site, they could instead insert a few lines of html into home pages that include "offending" language. These censorware prog's would pick up on 'em, and block the user from getting into the site. Sounds like fun. Good thing I'm not a hacker. ;)
- I'm making a page dedicated to procrastinators! I'll let you know when I get started.
air and light and time and space
Could someone check whether or not Slashdot (or more specifically this story) are also being banned? From the words and discussions, I would be surprised if it wasn't. But then again these companies do tend to surprise.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
at the COPA, COPA will ban ya, the software's a lot like Net Nanna. Oh the COPA, COPA will ban ya, porno and nazis will always get block-ied at the COPA, COPA will ban ya.