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Top Level .xxx Domain Concept Under Scrutiny
An anonymous reader writes "The Bush administration is objecting to the creation of a .xxx domain, saying it has concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography. This is despite the the .xxx domain being approved in June and New.net selling domain names using the .xxx suffix for many months before the approval." From the ZDNet article: " The sudden high-level interest in what has historically been an obscure process has placed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in an uncomfortable position. ICANN approved the concept of an .xxx domain in June and approval of ICM Registry's contract to run the suffix was expected this week Other governments also have been applying pressure to ICANN in a last-minute bid to head off .xxx. A letter from ICANN's government advisory group sent Friday asks for a halt to 'allow time for additional governmental and public policy concerns to be expressed before reaching a final decision.'"
The Register is reporting that the letter to the ICANN board of directors couldn't include the phrase "xxx" for fear of it not getting past e-mail spam filters.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Can you show where in the Constitution where the First Amendment limits itself to "Political Speech".
The First Amendment reads, in its entirety:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I have two problems with your post.
.XXX designation.
1) X has be superceded by NC-17 in the United States.
2) The MPAA movie rating system is a *VOLUNTARY* rating system that most movies are given as many theatres will not run "unrated" films. This is very different from a government (or even a quasi-governing body like ICANN) administering a
I'll leave the "slippery slope" arguments to others and stick to the nit-picking for now.
Yes my friend, and surprisingly the statistics show that violent crime and rape are DOWN in the past few years, discrediting certain theories that cheap, universal access to porn actually creates rapists.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution. To amend is to change, and amendments are basically changes to the Constitution. And, by definition, changes to the Constitution are considered part of the Constitution.
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Sounds to me like the Bush administration is fighting against the .xxx domain because they feel they're fighting the spread of Internet porn. Like someone's going to go: "What? No .xxx domain? Well I guess I have to give up my idea for that BukkakeBarn site..."
Get real. All the domain does is give porn site operators the opportunity to denote their sites as pornographic, which in turn may help site filters and potentially foster government regulation. The Bush administration probably likes both of those things; strange that they shouldn't try and just let the .xxx go through then. Maybe they're just not used to making mistakes.
(insert witty/esoteric/dumb quote here)
relevent to this discussion - and apparently ignored by ICAN is RFC3675 .Sex Considered Dangerous http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3675.html
The first few paragraphs are worth noting in this discussion
[begin snip from rfc]
Introduction
Periodically there are proposals to mandate the use of a special top level name or an IP address bit to flag "adult" or "unsafe" material or the like. This document explains why this is an ill considered idea from the legal, philosophical, and the technical points of view.
2. Background
The concept of a .sex, .xxx, .adult, or similar top-level domain in which it would be mandatory to locate salacious or similar material is periodically suggested by some politicians and commentators.
Other proposals have included a domain reserved exclusively for material viewed as appropriate for minors, or using IP address bits or ranges to segregate content.
In an October 1998 report accompanying the Child Online Protection Act, the House Commerce committee said, "there are no technical barriers to creating an adult domain, and it would be very easy to block all websites within an adult domain". The report also said that the committee was wary of regulating the computer industry and that any decision by the U.S. government "will have international consequences" [HOUSEREPORT].
[end snip from rfc]
What he's saying is that kids can easily type "http://1.2.3.4" and reach the same place as "http://hugeyams.com". The only way to prevent that is to see if there is a DNS record linking 1.2.3.4 to hugeyams.com and putting up a denial messagebox if so.
But this breaks for four main reasons:
1) DNS names can map to one or many IP addresses. "hugeyams.com" might be a server farm, or a mapping that changes every night. The mapping isn't 1-to-1, it isn't constant, and you can't rely on your information being current with broken caching servers out there.
2) "1.2.3.4" could be a single server hosting thousands of "separate sites" including hugeyams.com and aclu.org. Block one and seriously violate the constitutionally-protected speech of the other (political speech trumps all other speech).
3) A huge number of IP addresses do not have the right DNS name mappings (PTR to CNAME records in the in-addr.arpa domain), or they may have no PTR record at all. ('Net history: at one time the only incentive at all to fix this was to get access to the download site for the 128-bit encryption version of Netscape.) Getting 100% of the 'Net admins to maintain PTR records is practically impossible.
4) Even if a PTR record exists, the web site owner has no control of it, the ISP of their hosting company does. What you (as a porn operator) pay $50/year to call "hugeyams.com" they might call "39876fb-box55-eth1.sf.us.bigassisp.net" .
So even if ".xxx" is adopted as a TLD it can be trivially bypassed by disregarding DNS, and forcing everyone to use DNS is practically impossible and could break lots of other low-level things too.
Technically, a bad idea. Socially, a stupid one.
Any content created solely for the entertainment of adult audiences and including nudity or sexually explicit imagery must be placed [...] on a .xxx domain.
.XXX domain and censored. Now we could sit and argue about this all day, but my point is that you can't ever just reduce something down to "clear verbiage," and maintain any connection to reality.
That's slightly better. Now, what is nudity? What about this?
( . ) ( . )
Obviously a pair of ASCII breasts. Now what about this?
http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/morepr0n/pr0n22.txt
Is that illegal? What's the difference? What about drawings? 3D renderings? Sculpture? None of which show any *actual* nudity, since they're all fantasy creations. So we'd need to change your wording to "photographs or works of art depicting nudity or sexual content." Now what about movies or stories which contain adult content? Some of the darker web comics are created "solely for the entertainment of adult audiences" and may include nudity or sexually explicit imagery, even if they're not about porn. But I doubt their authors would appreciate having their work shuffled off to a
Whatever happens, it will be complicated, it will be ugly, and it will more than likely be unfair to a large number of people. With that in mind, why should we mess with a system that already (for the most part) works?
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Ok. Someone *PLEASE* explain to me why the HELL people get all worked up over a nude body. Is it somehow "shameful" to see a naked body? Do you censor your own mirror in the bathroom, for fear you'll see your own nipples? The only shame from a human body comes from those people who are either a.) ashamed of their own -or- b.) whose religon tells them it's a bad bad thing.
.xxx because there are those times I want to watch a woman maturbate.
Well while nude is an issue... I think the issue at hand is hard core porn. I'm not an expert in porn but I'm under the impression the tripple X refers to hard core porn.
The problem with hard core porn is much of it tends to be degrading to women. It's perfectly normal for adolescents to be curuious about sex, but the problem is much of this material you get in the back room doesn't paint the best picture of sexuality... unless you think going doggie style and slapping someone on the ass yelling "who's your daddy" is followed by a facial is the best picture. Even worse is anal followed up by a blowjob... this doesn't make me happy and sounds none too healthy.. to me anyway. Would you want your kids doing this? I think not.
For this reason I do wish there was some spiffy cool provision to designate sites with hardcore porn from those without it. I'm all for the hard core stuff being reserved for adults... and if some one of age wants to watch internet vids of women going to the bathroom... great! For me I prefer watching women maturbate. I say yes to
By all common usage, both judicial andpopular the Bill of Rights is part of the constitution, and by popular usage the most important part.
Since the Bill of rights were passed by congress in 1789 and ratified in 1791, it was decided that the Bill of Rights would be added as amendments before the constitution was ratified. These 10 Amendments are are far more a part of the original document then you seem to think. The 10 Amendments of the Bill of Rigths were also all ratified as together as one document.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Whitehouse was a print magazine in the UK, back when porn was .. tits.
There was a campaigner called Mary Whitehouse who tried to organise the religious pensioners to protest against smut. The name of the magazine was a deliberate 'swivel' to her.