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Lawsuit Filed Against Unregulated GloFish
purduephotog writes "You may remember the infamous poll on glowing pets posted in response to the marketing of GloFish. The Center for Food Safety has filed a lawsuit asking to halt all sales of said fish until the government can properly regulate it. More information at ABCNews.com."
or maybe you don't.
(gay sex)
I failed it
save goatse.cx save goatse.cx save goatse.cx save
The Democrats' major spamming campaign going on today.
Yet this is posted, and all attempts to submit the Democrats' spam attempts to Slashdot are rejected.
THE EDITORS NEED TO GET A CLUE: JUST BECAUSE YOUR FAVORITE PARTY IS THE ONE SPAMMING, DOES NOT MAKE IT SUDDENLY OKAY!!!!!!
[This is not a troll. it's a serious message about the sudden demise of goatse. Trolls, however, should feel free to repost this copiously! This post has no copyright!]
.cx registrar's forum, supporting the reinstatement of the domain.
On January 14, the Christmas Island Internet Administration abruptly disabled everyone's favorite domain, goatse.cx. All joking aside, this action brings up serious questions regarding registrars exercising control over the content of websites they don't host. Goatse's geek appeal as a cult phenomenon is arguably stronger than AYBABTU, and has been an omnipresent icon here at Slashdot for years. There's a petition, as well as a thread at the
Regardless of peoples' feelings about what was hosted at goatse.cx, arbitrary domain suspension due to content has potentially chilling effects. CIIA used a vaguely-worded clause in their registration agreement which allows them to disable any domain for any (or no) reason, even if the domain's operators aren't doing anything wrong and aren't otherwise in violation of the agreement. The suspension was apparently done with neither warning nor notice to the domain's owner.
Nearly all registrars maintain the right to take such action. However, to my knowledge this has never been done before, except in cases where the domain's owner was seriously violating the registration agreement in other ways - spamming, illegal activities, etc. - and even then only on rare occasions. The goatse situation essentially amounts to a web-based joe job, wherein the site's owner had no control over links to the domain or how they were used.
Until this week, I'd always been under the impression that it's a hosting provider's job to stop service to a domain. If a website contained content so controversial as to generate complaints, the hosting provider would make the decision as to whether or not to continue serving the domain. If the host declined, the domain's owner could simply move the site to a more tolerant host. And that's the way it should be.
With CIIA's action, the tables have turned, and a registrar - even if only a small player - has set a precedent for registrars playing the role of content moderator. While this could come in handy (imagine dotster.com, who are running Apache on some sort of Unix, suspending sco.com's registration just for the heck of it), it also makes the process of shutting down potentially controversial sites far too easy. What if the Public Internet Registry decides on a whim to disable landoverbaptist.org because "Landover takes parody too far for our liking," or freenetproject.org because "Freenet can be used for bad purposes," or slashdot.org because "there are too many radical thinkers on that site?"
Domain names are finite resources. If it's widely known that you can be found at example.com, and your webhost shuts you down because they don't approve of the content of your website, you can find another webhost and be back online within a day or so. But if your registrar suspends your domain because they don't approve of your site's content, you can't just go somewhere else and "buy a new copy" of your prime internet real estate. (Oddly enough, it appears that Google has decided to ignore links to goatse.cx; I'd been hoping to use the search results to demonstrate the domain's popularity, but no go.)
The finite nature of domains becomes even more of a problem with many ccTLD operators, who are frequently the sole registrars of their root domain. I should emphasize that goatse.cx was suspended, not deleted; the Christmas Island Interne
What's that all about?
Is that good or is that not so good?
You need to update your sig, that post made it to -1, Interesting.
Now I have seen 2 of those, the other one being mine.
I was at a drunken party once where a large group of people started talking about patenting ridiculous and evil advertising-related inventions in order to keep them from being invented by someone else. (Yeah I know you can't really do that but this was a drunken party remember). One of my ideas was a toaster that would connect to the internet, download advertisements, and burn them on your morning toast. We had a laugh at how ridiculous and stupid that was, plotting business models for the startup company (see, give away the toasters for free... etc.) This was before the net bubble burst when it didn't seem all that far-fetched. Well it wasn't because about 6 months later I found a patent for exactly that.