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New RFC Considers .sex TLD Dangerous
netcentric writes "A post on CircleID has reported about an RFC prepared by Donald E. Eastlake 3rd and Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com's Washington D.C. correspondent, analyzing proposals from various parties to mandate the use of special top level domain names (such as .sex or .xxx) or an IP address bit to flag 'adult' or 'unsafe' material or the like. The analysis explains why these ideas are dangerous and ill considered from legal, philosophical, and technical points of view. Here is the post to this report on CircleID along with some commentaries and link to the entire RFC 3675."
...I am releived of the burden of being a responsible, involved parent. Thanks Mr. Eastlake. *sigh*
At first blush I would consider this a good idea, but seeing that Lieberman endorsed it, I'm forced to knee-jerk the other way.
Now would this "adult bit" be incorporated into the evil bit? Or what?
The Sticky Bit?
I just told someone at work about this, and he said ".sex? What would that be for...porn sites?"
Lets just say I should hope so
...to read why showing a nipple on US TV is immoral, while executing the said owner of the nipple and selling the nipple is a good deed.
Does she have the clap or what?
Free the West Memphis Three!
I don't know about you, but it certainly gives new meaning to some already existing sites.
tomshardware.sex
slashdot.sex
irs.sex
gateway.sex
Internet's about to get real interesting.
At first I read it as .sex STD.
Now _that_ would be a dangerous series of websites.
wbs.
Huh?
1. Create a special place for something considered deviant.
2. Mandate that this is the only place where deviance can take place.
3. Eliminate special place for deviance.
4. ?????
5. Profit!
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
I'm fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the internet there'd only be one website left and it'd be called "BringbackthePorn.com".
If you bothered to read the article, or even the summary, you'd see that the RFC prepared by Mr. Eastlake is against a .sex top-level domain.
I don't think that any sites should be forced into doing this, but that it would be cool if sites did it voluntarily. I mean, I'm sure the sites don't really want kids visiting anyway... they probably aren't going to be able to find a way to pay for content.
While this seems to be a good idea in some ways, I can't help but be reminded of those "free speech zones" they command protesters to stay within if they want to protest something. After all, the entire country is supposed to be a free speech zone, and the entire internet is supposed to be open to any form of speech (that is, within reasonable limits).
Let's work through this. If they came up with ".sex", many workplaces would filter out sites that were listed in .sex. I mean, wouldn't you? Now, let's pretend that you've got a porn site. You want as many people to see it as possible. You could host it at whitehouse.sex and get some traffic, or at whitehouse.com and get more traffic. Which do you pick?
Both, of course.
I mean, why wouldn't you?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Yes, yes you were all happy when the GOTO was considered harmful. But it didn't stop there. Oh no. I warned you, I did.
And now see where it's led? Sex considered harmful!
Bring back the GOTO before it is too late!
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
I'm all in favor of this kind of TLD.
Preferably something easy to type with one hand.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
hmm...
google.sex
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Create the TLD (preferrably .xxx to indicate an "adult" nature, as opposed to .sex which indicates, well, sex. Not all "adult" material is sex). Encourage the porn community to use this new TLD. Let them keep their .coms, .org(ie)s, and .nets. But encourage them to have those domains forward to the .xxx domain. There are responsible site owners in the community. If a .xxx domain suggesst to the potential customer that the site is more legitimate with its business that will create a competitive edge for .xxx domain businesses.
If it doesn't take, maybe then we can discuss this mandate.
Essentially, give them the freagging tool and see if they take to it before forcing them to use it. What ever happened to the "graded-approach?"
i agree. just hope that DDD will have homepage at http://www.ddd.xxx/
that will be fun.
my endian is bigger than yours!
While I agree that a .sex TLD is 1.) a dumb idea, and 2.) a potential legal and regulatory morass, I think it's shortsighted to just roll your eyes and write it off as another "won't someone think of the children" proposal.
.sex domain is one such idea.
Some people just don't like being inundated by porn when they use the Internet. Period.
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some porn -- or reference to porn -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever. Half the spam you receive -- and you can't help receiving it -- falls under most people's definition of porn.
So why is that? We don't put up with it in the rest of our day to day lives.
Most communities regulate porn theaters, porn magazines, etc., very strictly. Even if you, personally, like and consume porn in the privacy of your own home, if you leased an office building, you probably wouldn't want a porn theater opening up on either side of you. If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving porn there. Very few people would vote to let their city accept advertising from porn companies on park benches and bus stops.
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing porn. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
It seems to me that the porn industry has a lot of money, and they're willing to pay it to people to get their advertising and their products out there to where people will pay to consume them. If that's the root of the problem, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose possible ways of regulating the way the porn industry does business. The
Not the best one, perhaps, but a legitimate one nonetheless.
Breakfast served all day!
Now, some person bent on mischief registers a ".com" domain name that points to my website.
Am I in trouble here? Who committed the offence?
Now, imagine, I pay some person in Nigeria cash to set up domain names in ".com" that point to my website and continue to do so as each domain name is taken down.
So much potential for abuse by or against adult webmasters.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So now the underlying protocols that drive communications for the entire world need to have bits to designate "sexual content", just to appease the ridiculously puritanical Amercians.
Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened to your priorities. You'll go to war and kill 1000s of people to find WMD (which it seems never existed). You'll televise your murderous rampage to the world in all its horrifying brutality. Yet if a woman shows a breast on television then there's a "moral" outcry. Whose morals? It seems your society's morals are those of a prudish spinster.
The incredible thing is that in the area of morals and censorship, America shares more in common with religious regimes like the Taleban than with any other group. I can only think of two regions in the world that are so ridiculously out of touch with their human nature: the USA and the religious nutcases in the Middle East.
It'd be so easy to dismiss this rant as a troll or flamebait. Sure, it's easier to ignore that which you wish wasn't true, but you know that I'm making you uncomfortable because I'm telling the truth. There's a serious problem with morals in America right now. Your laws are repressing a natural part of the human existence, imposing an incredibly puritanical view of humanity onto millions of people, yet your same lawmakers allow a 10 year old child to see a man murdered on television. What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
So we should ban it; especially as it creates the very kids we are trying to protect from it, shame on you!
I have thought about this a few times, and I actually think the benefits in terms of keeping pr0n away from people who do not want to see it outweigh the risks in terms of keeping pr0n away from people who do want to see it. After all, where there's a will(y), there's a way.
However, I also think it's unlikely to happen. The UK and US governments seem to think that there is something wrong with sex -- especially the non-procreative varieties -- but prefer to deal with it by pretending it doesn't exist. Creating a special domain for pornography and then taking action to ensure it is used properly would mean having to admit that people do enjoy sex.
And that's something I really can't imagine the authorities ever agreeing to, given the way the USA reacted to a lady's chest being shown on TV, and the fact that until recently, you weren't even allowed to depict a hard-on in Britain. The only way it would ever gain any sort of approval would be if someone else started it off. But in countries where sex is seen as just being something people do, they probably would not see the need for a separate place on the Internet.
I could be wrong. I'd like to be wrong. But it's going to require a pretty major attitude shift somewhere.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Instead of trying to figure out what's naughty and what's not, we can just whitelist all white-middle-class-evangelical-family-friendly content, put it in .PRUDE, and they can block everything else.
Advantages: the evangelicals are happy because they can be pure and clean without having to actually make any moral choices, and the rest of us can use this thing called "free will", which allows people to view and avoid whatever content they desire.
Read the RFC and you'll understand the problems with a mandated TLD. It's not about protecting the kids, it's about being forced to have a TLD that might not be appropriate for your website. If you discuss abortion rights, would you need an adult TLD? If you discuss condoms, would you need an adult TLD? Who decides what is adult? The FCC? Congress? RTFRFC
"You know Myra, some people might think you're cute. But me, I think you're one very large baked potato."
Dummy up you parents, start taking back control of your kids lives instead of letting MTV and the internet be in control.
Sorta makes you nostalgic for a president that was doing it to his intern instead of doing it to the country, doesn't it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Even if there is no perfect system, the one proposed in the RFC (hooks to allow browser software to consult your choice of 'rating authority') seems to be much more promising than this TLD nonsense.
As the RFC points out, if you create 'adult and non-adult' TLDs, how do you decide (on a global scale) what it means to be 'adult' or 'non-adult' when countries, religions and communities have such incredibly divergent views of what they should be? For any answer to work, it -must- take this into consideration, and provide a mechanism for different communities to select different filtering criteria.
The persecution of people accessing some adult TLD is potentially a serious issue, or perhaps not, but it's the technical issues that make adult TLDs not only pointless, but inherently dangerous.
The owner of a computer has **NO CONTROL** over what DNS names are pointed at their IP address. That means that there is no way you can prosecute an adult-themed site for being referred to by a non-adult TLD, or prevent an adult TLD from being pointed at a non-adult site for DoS purposes.
Who wants to write for Java or .NET when you could do it in .SEX instead?
There is no need to set up any new TLDs, becuse it is simply a doddle to run the webserver using a port number appropriate to its content. There is nothing 'sacred' about the number '80'. You only have to change the number 80 in line 96 in /etc/apache2/conf/apache2.conf. Change the Listen parameter from 80 to whatever you want. This would allow the freedom of speech enthusiasts to say what ever they want to say and yet at the same time make it simple for those folk who do not want to hear that speech to eliminate it with ease. In effect this would allow for the creation of lots of WWWs. For Example:-
.tif files only. )
69 - SEXplicit Cunni-lingus Movies. ( Trivial File Transfer Protocol will have to be moved to 6969, drat! that's the orgy number. )
80 - Innocuous censored stuff.
81 - Computer Cracking.
82 - Sex Education.
83 - Free Software Source Code. ( Like your new neighbours? )
84 - SEXplicit Copulation Movies.
85 - Commercial Software Advocacy.
86 - Racial Supremacy Advocacy.
87 - Currently taken by ttylink.
88 - ditto kerberos.
89 - Artistic Nudes. ( High quality print ready
Then there are also literally dozens of high number ports available if needed. Never happen of course, because of the huge financial interests of the network nannies, but it could create a new industry called the Net Content Classification Tribunal. The whole exercise could be run by the UN and suck up billions of dollars.
- DOD employees including uniformed military (the expression 'curse like a sailor' comes to mind, although jarheads, grunts, and flyboys hold their own)
- DOD contractors in industry
- researches at universities and technical institutes.
But demanding that adult sites label themselves as adult is the wrong way to go, and mandating a particular filtering scheme for everyone is worse yet. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided the it was important for schools to be connected to the Internet. And now they're shocked, shocked! at what they've found. It's as if a teacher took a bunch of grade-school kids on a field trip to a titty bar and then demanded that the authorities shut it down.If someone wants to create a TLD like .kids, and make whatever rules they want for their piece of cyberspace, more power to them. Net Nanny and its ilk can whitelist the 'safe' sites, blacklist the 'unsafe' ones, and parents who want their kids subjected to such filters may choose to employ them.
As a father (and grandfather!) I have always figured that if my children want to look at something really perverted, it's their desire to look at it that's the problem, so me putting up filters really won't accomplish much other than protecting them against fat-fingering an URL (or forgetting that the White House is part of the .governmnent
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I started reading the RFC and I was initially alarmed by the title ".sex Considered Dangerous". Then I realized that I am a Slashdot reader, so I am unlikely to encounter any actual sex. Whew! That was close!
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
First, let me start by saying I don't have an answer to the problem of kids and porn on the net. Having said that, a few observations.
1. I don't think there is a kids and porn problem. Raise your hand if you viewed porn at one time when you were a kid. Now keep your hand up if you turned into a social deviant. Not many, eh! Speaking from personal experience, the people I knew growing up who turned into social misfits and freaks are the ones who were shielded all of their lives (see home schooled and religious fanatics).
2. Aside from border problems, HOW DO WE CATEGORIZE PORN?!!!!! Do art websites qualify? What if I model a naked woman in Maya and put that on the web? Or is it just 'real' photos and video we're concerned with. What about dirty letters? What if I run a site with pictures of a clitoris? Now what if I put info about women's health on that website? Whether or not I'm creating a site for commercial purposes is irrelevant to me. The fact is as someone who puts content on the web and views content, porn or whatever, I don't want censorship. If you don't like it, set the BIOS password on your computer and try PARENTING your child, instead of giving them the internet as a babysitter.
3. Does anyone realize how quickly content would be eliminated from the web if this were to go into effect? Do you think AOL or Earthlink will allow access to those sites when parents groups protest? This is not making it easier to identify this type of material, it's aimed at eliminating it.
That's my three bits. Take it with a grain of salt. Disclaimer-I run a website for profit (about $25 per month profit, but I just got it going). It has adult material on it. It's at http://www.aliengoods.com/ and I sell bondage furniture. And guess what? I have a disclaimer page that most content filters should catch and block. I don't care because I don't sell to children (let's not get into a public library filters debate - they anger me).
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
That's why I think the .xxx or .adult sites are a bad idea, cause for them to be effective you would have to force all "obscene" content to go under that domain. But I really like the kids.us idea, it can still work even when it's entirely volentary. There's still gonna be issues about grey area, maybe this is appropriate, maybe it isn't, but all in all I think the idea has merit.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
You are painting with just a broad a brush as the idiots who are pushing this .sex shit are.
This is not productive. What would be productive is sharing with those who agree with you, and working to change it. Every culture has it's dissidents, man, including America. Dog knows we need it right now...our government is going batshit crazy...but support for the people who don't agree with it would be nice, generalization about how all americans think that way isn't.
A lot of Americans are pissed off at the idiocy here. Why do you paint us as all being a lot of greedy, grasping nutcases? From a personal standpoint, Fuck You. I've spent nearly twenty years fighting against the idiocy in our government. You know what? It's a losing fight - which I know goddamned well that a lot of Europeans are familiar with - so why are you so busy flaming rather than helping out?
I don't know whether we can stop these out-of-control powergrabs. I don't know if there any real solutions short of violent revolution. But it'd be nice if the Rest of The World would realize that we're not all a lot of greedy morons. You know, we just might need your support if it comes to stopping this shit. We certainly don't need more hatred.
Goddamn. I am seeing way too much of this on slashdot recently. Some of it is justified. Some of it isn't. We're losing the fight here, hey, and we could use all the support we can get! If we lose this fight, the world is probably going to be pretty fucked up. So quit flaming us and help out, godammit. Any way you can.
I'm sorry for the rant, but I also get the impression that a lot of the world doesn't understand the agony in the US these days. For some reason, it reminds me of the international reactions to the craziness that was going on in Germany in the 30s. Don't know why.
Sheeezus.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
And yes, nathanh, your country has religious nut cases too. I don't even have to ask what country it is.
This is a very, very compelling point, although it seems as though someone is going to have to spell it out for you guys.
.prude, too?
The point is, some people find pornography offensive. I, for one, do not--at least, not the kind of porn I like to look at. I find absolutely nothing disturbing or offensive about the human form, even when (*especially* when) it is engaged in the act of procreation.
Some people find black people/black culture offensive. I, for one, do not.
Many people find Judeo-Christian-Islamic dogma inspiring. I, for one, do not. At the very least, I find it annoying. Often, it is quite offensive and/or disturbing to me. (This is NOT an exaggeration--I was recently forced to listen to several hours of fire and brimstone lectures via Christian radio, and I can assure you that I felt no better than a nun would if she were trapped in a XXX video store.)
As distastful as this is to me, it is completely unfair to ask the religious world to segregate itself so that I don't have to listen to their offensive (to me) statements. It's not fair to them, and it's not smart for me, either--whether I like it or not, these people exist in the world, and if I have legitimate issues with their beliefs and actions, I should be endevoring to explain my beliefs to them, not plugging my ears and singing "lalalalalala" whenever they open their mouths.
Minority vs. majority should NOT play a part here. The majority shouldn't have the right to censor or segregate the minority anymore than the minority has the right to censor or segragate the majority.
Hell, let's get back to the analogy at hand: a few decades ago, the majority of people in the south would have found the image of a black man and a white woman kissing highly offensive. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches, too, were probably quite offensive to many people. Maybe the mass media should have segregated these controversial things, put them all in one newspaper that you had to go out of your way to find, a newspaper that no *respectable* white person would ever read. After all, people have the right not to be offended... right?
Wrong. This guy's analogy was spot on. You are responsible for your OWN level of offended-ness, and if you desire censorship, you should censor your own eyes (or your children's eyes) yourself. If you can't, then maybe you'd better wise up to the fact that there's shit in this world you don't like, and it's best to just suck it up and move on.
Yeah, it sucks, but if you want ANY sort of progress to happen in this country, you must accept the fact that sooner or later, eveyone is gonna get offended by something or another.
Hell, I find it offensive that some people find the human body and/or sex offensive. Does that mean we need a
Which is entirely possible when there's a locality involved. The theatre is in a known place and the magazines are tangible objects. The applicable community standard is that of the community in which the theatre or magazine is found. How does a politician in the USofA regulate a web server in Russia? If a teen in Oklahoma visits debbie.does.donkeys.da.ru where does the offense take place? Sure, YOU can create a .xxx domain, but what happens if Ivan-the-donkey-owner is a nationalist and takes pride in hosting in the .ru domain?
One answer is to abolish all TLDs other than country codes and make it illegal for citizens of your country to "fly under a foreign flag". That way your government can censor its citizens without bothering the rest of us simply by black-listing the two-letter codes of countries that refuse to bow down to the White House.
If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving porn there.
In my company the stuff tends to end up in the male washrooms (whether for practical or ethical reasons).
And just who is "they"? And how are "they" going to control "all porn sites" - in the whole world?
Furrfu, people who can't be bothered to think even for a millisecond before making some dumb statement (and obviously without RingTFA) just piss me off sometimes.
Creating .sex or .xxx could only make .com and .net kid-friendly if it all porn were legally required to use it. Due to varying worldwide standards and attitudes about free speech, and the difficulty of enforcement, that would not work. Since the creation of a porn-free space is the only compelling argument for creating such a gTLD, and there are compelling arguments against it, it's simply a Bad Idea.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Why the fuck should it be this way around?? there is no advantage. The solution is simple, you make a .safe domain and you enforce strict rules on that domain only, you leave the rest of the internet alone. Already we have domains that are restricted (AFAIK) you cant get a .gov address unless.. your with the government, and the same for .ac/.edu - the next logical step is to do the same for this, not the other way around.
Lastly, if a kid is too young to risk seeing anything dodgy, then they are probably too young to even gain anything from using the internet as a whole for education. Think about the (educational) things you use it for, do younger kids need that?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I support it being illegal to fraudulently use a META tag to claim that a site is age-appropriate, based on whatever standard of age-appropriateness you're talking about. But fraud is already illegal, so we don't need any special new law to make it so (although one that codifies penalties for certain kinds of fraud wouldn't raise my hackles awfully much.)
If you want META, I think you ought to write up an RFC codifying a standard. Something like
That's a pretty lightweight protocol, which allows sites to certify compliance with whatever authority's standards you might care about. The filtering software can use various criteria of your choosing to whitelist safe sites, including allowing you to add certain sites or even entire domains to your own whitelist, while only making it illegal to take the deliberate action of declaring compliance falsely, and allowing every existing web page to remain legal (because none of them contain these META tags in the first place).Keep your kids off the Internet if you don't like it the way it is. The people who built it never for one moment claimed it was built for children, and it's wrong to impose a law at this date that places such a positive obligation upon webmasters.
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SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.