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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.'"
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.
I'm not justifying pornography, in fact... I find much of it is deplorable. BUT, doesn't the Constitution afford us freedom of speech/ press? It seems to me the government trying to thwart the .xxx campaign, is flirting dangerously close to being unconstitutional.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Do they realy think that the folks that own barelylegal.com (for example) are going to relinquish their .com domains and move to .xxx? All this does is create a money making opportunity for those who register .xxx and nothing more.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
"The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children," Gallagher said in a letter that was made public on Monday.
.xxx (as well as the numerous other porn sites and link listing services such as sublimedirectory, elephantlist, and thehun). If you don't want to do that yourself, pay a third party to do it, but *do not* and I mean *do not* ask the government to do it for you because you are too lazy to keep an eye on your children's Internet viewing. The rest of us do not give a shit about your desire to not pay attention to those in your family but we do care when you step into *our* personal space.
People who are petitioning the government: Learn to use your computer and block out connections to
I realize that the current administration (and quite a few other politicians outside of the White House walls) want to have everyone come crying to them to "think of the children" but we need to remember *real* freedom first - not the created/imagined freedom the Bush Administration and fellow politicians have decided exists in 2005. This type of behavior in response to a few letters? No thanks.
We are talking about 6000 letters. There are what, ~270 million people in the USA? Sorry but ~6000 letters doesn't give equal footing for their voice, regardless of whether or not it "looks good" politically or it fits the Administration's religious agenda. I realize that "morality" is a huge buzzword in America these days but I should be able to do, see, and view whatever the fuck I want regardless of whether or not children could view the material. The Government should be representing more than just a tiny portion of the population. Just because the pro-porno people aren't stepping up to the bat (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean that their silent voice should be ignored. I'll be more likely to understand when you get something like 80 million letters.
If anything, I would think that the current administration would be thrilled with the prospect of having all the porno in one location. It's easier to track the "undesirables" and ban freedom and artistic expression. At least, much easier than the current setup allows.
ICANN, you fuck up enough, ignore these pointless requests from the Nation of the "Free" and go about your business properly.
The USA has maintained a "take our ball and go home" attitude on other international issues, and there's no reason to expect anything different here. After all, the US Commerce Department maintains that it reserves final policy control over the authoritative root server. ICANN simply cannot do its job as long as the USA controls (or claims to control) the DNS.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Think they'd object to ".cum" for all porn sites?
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
The frustrating part of this move is not that the feds object to this- that's fine, they can make recommendations all they want. The key issue is the timing- after a 5+ year process, they chose to raise their concerns in the final weeks?
they legally forced anyone w/ a porn site to move to an xxx domain, and thus freeing up the rest of the domains for non-porn stuff. Legally force sites to do this. This way parents can block their kids from visiting anything with a .xxx extension. And companies can block their employees from watching porn while at work :D.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
The US government should stay the hell out of the way; the whole POINT of a .xxx domain is that it would (in theory) differentiate pornographic content from the rest of the web so it would be easy to identify AND block! The idea that it would create an "online red-light district" is absurd: people wouldn't be able to just type in ".xxx" and get access to all the pornography they wanted (though if they wanted that, all they need to do is turn off SafeSearch in Google or use a file sharing application).
;^)
Don't they have better things to focus on? (/me avoids the obvious flamebait by not mentioning liberation
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
How can a group called the "Bush administration" object to .XXX domains?
On one hand, Bush is spending millions of dollars (and thousands of soldier lives) in Iraq just to get the oil. On the other hand, he plays the holy man trying to ban internet pornography.
Oh boy, I'm already wishing to for 2008 to arrive...
Even after reading the article I have absolutely no idea why they are objecting to this - It makes no sense at all to me. What's the problem here?
More insightful policymaking from the Bush administration. I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but what exactly is the point of social conservatives objecting to this? It seems if anything this would be in the social conservative's best interest, because by delegating porn to a particular TLD you can more easily shut it down.
Yes, it's unlikely to ever occur. The prominence of .com porn sites will probably never go away. But if your goal is to rid the world of pornography, or at the very least reduce it, wouldn't you want to at least move in the direction of having it all in a centralized, easily controllable place?
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
My god! Don't you see the irony here? Internet porn will always be there. But if we were able to have all porn sites go under *.xxx then they'd be easier to block. I see this thing as a major convenience for everyone. I say let .XXX happen and then we can start blocking when we want to not see it... or is it just better to have this stuff in our faces "accidentally" all the time?
Creating a .xxx domain would actually be potentially more risky to free speech than to prevent it. Here's the problem. If you have a .xxx domain, then it's possible to distinguish between the part of the internet that's supposed to have objectionable material and the part that isn't.
So this would open the doorway for regulation to go after merely indecent material on non-xxx domains. They could argue in court briefs that it's not preventing them from existing. This would make it far easier for the merely indecent material to be isolated out of the mainstream Internet. Then the filters get put in place and suddenly people get a controversey free Internet.
So for once I agree with the Bush administration but probably for the exact opposite reason.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
But they aren't, so my investment in the is-teh-su.xxx domain name seems to heading down the drain...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
I'm running a p0rn shop in North Elbonia. My government and my approved domain registrar which coincidently is run by the North Elbonian Dictator's great-nephew don't care if I use .com.
What's the USA going to do, cut off all domains registered by my registrar, or worse, start a war?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think that I'll register www.MoonShine.xxx and sell stills, big glass jugs, copper tubing and straw hats. Maybe even coveralls!
There is porn on the Internet. Why try to hide it? .XXX!
.xxx and know they are getting what they want. People who don't like can throw in the .com and know they won't be subjected to any porn. EVERYONE WINS!
This just helps better differenciate it from everything else, so hopefully one day you don't type in something like whitehouse.COM and get some porn site, because to get a porn site you'd have to put in the
All sites won't switch right away and some will lose their name before they can switch, but hopefully EVENTUALLY all the porn sites will switch over and everyone will be happy.
People who like porn can throw in the
I won't bother discussing how stupid yet another batch of useless TLDs is - much less one specifically for "adult" content (whatever THAT is).
.XXX TLD is because it would be condoning something that the moral majority (the guys who would like Bush to have a third term) finds reprehensible.
.... we're going to support setting up districts in every city where it can be done legally by adults".
However, it's damned obvious that the reason they don't support the
If you oppose pornography and adult content, you can't very well go and support having a special area for it. These people don't care about the constitution or freedom of expression or speech or allowing adults to do what they wish. They don't want this material, PERIOD. It's the same reason they oppose medical marijuana. Not because it may not have medical benefits. Not because it can't be used responsibly. Not because it's seriously harmful or will destroy the fabric of marriage between a man and a woman yadda yadda yadda. Simply because it's "not right" and you can't support such things AT ALL or your constituency will eat you alive.
It would be a lot like the Bush administration saying "prostitution is horrid and evil and wrong and
So I have to say, I'm stuck on this one. Yet another stupid TLD is retarded. Squeezing all adult content into one place is retarded (by the way, because one or two pages of my site might have adult content, does that mean my friends and family can't access my site AT ALL from work or a hotel or a library?). On the other hand, the reason Bush opposes it is retarded, too. In this case, both "enemies" are enemies of my enemy. Heh.
Internet porn is here to stay. Every technological advance ever made by mankind has been used to facilitate the spread of sexual thought. The telephone, mobile phone, ascii art, copy machine, Bluetooth, two-way pager, fax machine, pen and paper, stone tablet, gun, knife, club, airplane, automobile, cart, domestication of the horse, television, VCR, home video camera, IM, DVD player, the computer, and finally the Internet have all been used to disseminate (pardon the pun) sexual thoughts, facilitate the personal connections necessary for sexual intercourse, or make one potential mate more attractive than the others.
It doesn't matter what the rules are, or what the government says. Everything people do, in one way or another relates back to reproduction. It's in our genes at the most basic level. We're going to have sex no matter what. We are programmed to seek sexual pleasure in whatever form is available. We'd all prefer to have that pleasure be shared with a warm-bodied partner, but we will also seek the pleasure alone, or through the stimulation of one or more of our senses.
How many activities do we engage in which use all five of our senses? There are two of them. Eating and fucking. But if we have a head-cold and can't taste or smell food, we will still eat based on sight, sounds, and texture. If we can't touch the object of our sexual interest, we still become stimulated by the sight or sound of that person. Porn is just a variation on a theme. And it's going to remain popular until something better (like the Holo-deck) comes along and steals porn's thunder the way VHS porn did to printed porn.
Now get that banana out of your ear, and get back to work.
This space for rent.
What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with what you can say, or which pictures you can post. This is about whether or not to create a special .xxx domain.
Obviously anyone can see, there is plenty of pr0n on the internet. No one thinks this will change. But does it make sense to try and force all content of a certain type into a certain domain extension?
Why don't you stick to the issue?
The real question the Bush Admin seems to be missing isn't between an internet with a red light district and a clean interent- it's between an internet with a red light district and an internet where every third .com that pops up on a search for breast cancer on yahoo is a pornographic site.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
But I already found some porn on the internet, even though they haven't added the xxx domain yet. weird.
- and we can let the alcoholics have the .xxxx TLD, (remember the xxxx rotgut from the Bugs Bunny - Yosemite Sam cartoons>).
And illiterates can have the .x TLD (they don't have to sign for anything, just make their mark).
So that leaves the double-x TLD. Isn't 2x the size of some fat people's clothes?
So, the assignments are as follows:
First of all, its idiotic.... Do you create a .nazi domain so that you can easily filter hate sites?
Now, what happens to all the pr0n on the .com sites. What if you post an image to imageshack.us and its slightly pornographic? So that doesn't get filtered, or do you employ "handlers" to monitor this and decide?
So at best, its ineffective and a big waste of time and money.
So this would open the doorway for regulation to go after merely indecent material on non-xxx domains. They could argue in court briefs that it's not preventing them from existing. This would make it far easier for the merely indecent material to be isolated out of the mainstream Internet. Then the filters get put in place and suddenly people get a controversey free Internet.
The constitution gives you a right to freedom of speech. It does not give your a right to have people want to hear what you have to say, nor does it give you a right to force people to listen to you.
Forcing porn site operators to operate on a .XXX TLD would be no different from forcing them to be rated X and thus not accessable to minors. it is not unconstitutional at all so long as it is available to those looking for it ( if the government forced Google to not index .XXX for example, *that* would be crossing the line ).
I would have thought conservatives would have approved of the .XXX domain as well, easier to block. Hell, I'd have thought they would have made it mandatory (did I mention, easier to block). So I'm REALLY confused why either side thinks this is a bad thing.
.XXX domain we can remove porn from the net". In which case, someone swallowed the wrong color pill ...
.XXX makes it a 'too easy to find' issue. Sheesh, ever hear of google/yahoo/msn/'your favorite search engine'.
The ONLY conclusion I can see is: "maybe if we do not allow the
Time to take the correct color pill and see this in the light of reality, porn is NOT going to disappear. At some point, when reality sets in, people have to learn to deal with it, one way or the other. So whether it is 'free speech', 'protect the kids', 'ban porn' or '1st amendment rules!', I would think people would back this.
I fact if I thought ANY crowd would be against it, it would be the Liberals not the Conseratives. The Liberals MIGHT complain that segregating it to a different domain makes it too easy to block.
I don't know, is this a
-- sign me confused
Or to take the real world analogy farther: The decision is between an internet with a red light district and an internet where adult shops are randomly opened between supermarkets and toy shops.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The .xxx domain will never achieve the goal of segregating "pornography" from the rest of the internet. It's a level of bureaucracy that may generate more money for registrars and filtering companies, but will not stop sex-related content from "poisoning minds".
.com domains be given up by porn sites for .xxx? How about hustler.com, or playboy.com? At what point is nudity considered art and not pornography? Or maybe it's both. Would a Mapplethorpe exhibit have to be under .xxx? He made a lot of art that doesn't involve penises or bondage. Does Karen Finley's work go under the .xxx domain? How about Vanessa Beecroft or Spencer Tunick?
.kids domain should show that segregating content isn't likely to succeed. Whatever guidelines or rules or enforcement is put into place will be circumvented. It's how the internet works. The bottom line is the entire DNS system can be ignored and some other name service put into place.
As is pointed out elsewhere, why will
The failed
This is all we need. goatse.xxx "all goat all the time."
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
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.
So, we have to have "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" on CDs, and an MPAA which assigns ratings to movies, and basically the same thing for games - and TV shows! But having a label which everyone can recognize (and gravitate towards or away from as they chose!) is a bad thing?
.xxx would be a way of labeling yourself as "please, Congress make a law forbidding my business," but from a provider-consumer/avoider basis, this sounds almost ideal to me. It's when government interferes that things go sour, I guess. (For the record: I vote liberal/Democrat.)
I don't know if Constitutionally it makes sense, and I guess I don't know for sure if using
I mean, the internet is already chock full of graphic porn - wouldn't putting it together in one place (from a TLD point of view) be better than having it all over? For everyone?
I mean, this is kind of like clear labeling on foods of the amount of Sodium, Calories, etc... Isn't it?
Education is the silver bullet.
with ctrl+enter and shift+enter and ctrl+shift+enter used what's going to be the keyboard shortcut to add 'www.' and '.xxx' .com to keep the name part, until there's aconflict between .com and .net or some other one. Another domain is another chance for massive domain/type-o squatting and all the media attention. So what happens when all the "good" names are used, sex.xxx, porn.xxx, whitehouse.xxx maybe even slashdot.xxx featuring nek'd mother boards, or not? They're just going to go back to .com once all the popular names are taken, unless they want to have .x .xx and .xxx, who said the domain has to have three letters.
It maybe useful for some filtering, schools, florida libraries, parents of under 18 kids, but that's about it. Wow, a whole 6000 letters, were they all from members of the same religous parents group, like the one responsible for over 90% of the letters condeming the Janet Jackson breast at the Super Bowl?
Last I heard the porn industry has a lot of money and infulence, where would the VCR and Internet be without the interest of the adult entertainment industry? Giving the industry its own upper level domain will be recognizing that it does exist and is more popular than those with their self proclaimed higher morals may want to accept.
If they're going to try it, it had better be very well regulated, allow the owners of
It's either going to work or be a big mess.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Obviously, whether or not there is an .xxx domain will have no impact on the availability of porn on the internet. The Bush administration is evidently worried that by allowing this, they will look like they are somehow countenancing porn.
.xxx domain would have made it easier to protect kids from accidentally stumbling over porn (of course, nothing is going to stop kids from intentionally searching out porn).
.xxx, then there would be an immediate demand for libraries and the like to block all .xxx sites, followed by pressure on ISP's to do the same. Porn vendors would move back to .com to avoid the filters. Then there would be pressure to create laws to force them to use .xxx, which would of course fail because porn vendors would simply use international ISPs. Ultimately, we'd have a lot of bother, a lot of unnecessary regulations, and we'd be back to exactly where we are today.
If it had worked, the
But it wouldn't have worked.
If porn venders moved into
He can object all he wants. Who cares? He can't stop it. Some conservatives have made the assertion that a .XXX domain would just expand the number of x-rated websites out there. True. But, with people registering .xxx, all I have to do to protect my kid from casual browsing is to replace *.xxx with the ip address for something more wholesome, like the pleasant and uplifting sites of the Mainstream Media. That's alot easier than creatively filtering any domain with words that might be sexual in them.
I am seriously amazed at the idiocy of not only our elected officials, but a huge chunk of the US population.
Do they (the morons) honestly believe that the porn industry has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the .xxx domains to become available so they can finally put sites up? That somehow the internet has been porn free all this time and .xxx will open the floodgates?
WAKE UP! The floodgates were open long ago and we're all paddling along in our little spam filled canoes looking for a drink...
"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."
.xxx domain. As easy as it is to avoid a redlight district (if your so inclined).
.com, .net, .info, etc. domains in favor of a .xxx or .adlt or some other top-level domain that allows the user to know the type of site they are visiting. That was the objective of the different top level domains after all.
I personally perfer the idea of a virtual red-light district over what we have now... adult peep-shows on every corner.
Honestly, think about how easy it would be to filter porn if it were all in the
I personally think that the Bush administration should be lobbying to require that all sites providing materials for adult only entertainment should be required to relinquish their
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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)
I seem to remember an article about the US not relenquishing control of the root DNS servers to an international body of some sort.
I seem to remember a large number of US citizens saying things like, "the US has never abused it's power (over domain names)", "the US would not impose its views on other countries by interferring with the domain names", and so on.
Some of us who posted that we didn't want the US to have controll over the domain names because we didn't trust the US administration got flamed to a crisp.
Well. This is exactly the kind of tampering that we didn't want. Top level domains should be controlled by an international group that does not let one country impose its views on the rest. I hope people now see why some of us want this.
If you support freedom, free speech and the constitution, yes.
.XXX universally? In Australia, it's not a big deal to show naked people on television (at least after a certain hour). I've heard the word "shit" on British television. In America, you can't even say "nuts" if you're clearly referring to testicles.
.XXX? I've seen film clips of chicks making out, Dr. Ruth and a news woman talking about vaginal dryness. Car chases. Discussion about beheadings. Half naked strippers sitting around and giggling with Donut Boy (Neil Cavuto). Not to mention stuff on the actual Fox Network. Or even the big three broadcasters.
.XXX because I have a couple pages mentioning a wild party with some hot chicks I was at? Or because I have a webcam and my girlfriend happens to walk by it without a shirt one day? If some middle eastern country finds that showing a woman's face is pornographic and offensive, does that mean that any website anywhere in the world where a woman isn't clad in a burka belongs in the .XXX TLD?
.XXX? Does a medical website with photos of genitalia have to be a .XXX?
.COM site that someone in the US finds offensive are they going to seek to have me extradited to face charges in the United States?
.XXX TLD?
.KIDS TLD into which only completely kid-friendly content can be placed? When regulating free speech, they've typically ruled that you must choose the solution that will least impact the freedoms and rights of the majority. Rather than sanitizing the entire internet for the sake of toddlers, it would be easier to sanitize a single TLD for them.
But they don't care about that. Remember, Bush has the support of the type of people that form organizations who then go and send a 250,000 complaints to the FCC about ridiculous things on television from three or four individual people claiming to represent the entire country. He has the support of people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who think 9/11 was God's way of telling us that lesbians are evil. He has the support of people who think that a flash of a boob with a pin-covered nipple for one second on television is going to harm people.
These are groups that want all "inappropriate" material to be done away with. It isn't a matter of "only adults should have this". It's a matter of "this is filthy and we should burn it". Politically, his most staunch supporters would see any step to set aside an area just for porn as condoning it.
Oh, and using the ESRB to suggest that this is just "a way of rating content" is silly. How are you going to rate content that belongs in
Would the web-equivalent of what you see on Fox News Channel be considered
Should I have to register my entire domain as a
Since Netflix rents rated R movies, does that make them an adult site? Do they have to become a
Is a website about boxing or professional wrestling acceptable, even though it "promotes violence" but a site about swimsuit models isn't? Is ICANN going to become the arbiter of what is is "adult" the world-over? Or is some American agency going to be responsible for that? If I'm Korean and I have a
What about Amazon.com? What about your local library's card catalogue? Both link to and provide adult content (everything from Fanny Hill to "art" books of lesbians in latex whipping each other and sex manuals). Do they both have to move into the
And, more importantly, if we MUST do something stupid like this, doesn't it follow more with the Supreme Courts previous rulings to have a
Anyway, in my entire life I've never accidentally come across mass quantities of adult material. Or any quantities really. You have to go looking for the content. If you're coming across hard core facial sites or something, it's because you're looking specifically for them or you're clicking on links at illegal warez sites. Either way, your eight year old is not going to "accidentally
http://www.walken2008.com/
(Yeah, I know it's a hoax)
Find coupons in Greeley
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]
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.
I just don't understand what the big friggin' deal is. Children run around either semi- or completely naked a lot of the time, but usually nobody associates anything "dirty" with that.
I really wish people would decide for *themselves* and not peek over everyone else's shoulder and tell them their opinion is sooo wrong we need to make a law so that EVERYONE follows their morality.
A.A
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
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.
It's about what you say you oppose. It's the appearance of impropriety that's to be avoided. The actual impropriety itself is great if you can get away with it without seeming, in public, to condone it.
"It's offensive to all parties involved"
.xxx TLD is entirely voluntary, and must be paid for by whomever wishes to use it. Do any of you -really- believe that someone whose livelihood is based on their porn-site business is gonna willingly move into an easily-filterable location, then pay for the privilege of being blocked out?
Correction: It's offensive to -you-. Do not deign to tell me, or anyone else around you what is or is not "offensive".
I'd be willing to bet it's "offensive" to you, simply because you've been taught all your life that it is. That doesn't make it a fact.
And for those who somehow believe "God" thinks nudity is a sin, for whatever reason or by whatever rationale: according to your own scripture, he created Adam and Eve -naked-. They were neither ashamed of their nudity, nor aware that it was bad. Only after they tasted the apple did they suddenly decide, "OMG, I'm NAKED! OMG, don't look!"
The point here is, nudity is not "sinful". Being ashamed of it is.
As to the originating article of this discussion..
1. The
2. Man, it's a good thing that our President and his administration don't have anything important to be worrying about, eh? Like, say, poverty, drugs, violent crime... maybe a "war" that needs tending to?
Come hear me sing!
Require all pornography sites to operative via name-based hosting, where the default server (read: the server that matches the IP address) does NOT contain porn or any information that can be used to reach porn.
Even Google contains "information that can be used to reach porn" as it is a search engine. So does this post, since it mentions you can go to Google. So does Slashdot because it has this post. You need to lose that last phrase there - it is WAY too encompassing.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
OK, I am NOT all that upset by my children seeing a picture of a naked body as such, but I AM upset by my children seeing one or more naked bodies engaged in activities that most parents (in most but certainly not all societies) agree they are simply not ready to see.
To make it really simple:
Naked body: no big deal
Naked body with farm animals and medical implements (and possible violent acts): NOT OK
Let's be honest; 'net porn is NOT just some pictures of naked bodies.
I really don't care what other adults do, but I would appreciate some mechanism by which I could *reliably* choose what my children have access to. Games, movies and TV have ratings that I can use. It would be nice if the 'net had something similar.
I have long favored the ideas of either a "red light district" with a .xxx designation (or even better .x .xx and .xxx -- maybe even a .xxx!) or a .kids. Either way I would have at least SOME semblance of a chance of choosing what my children can see.
When they become adults it will be their resposibility to choose what they want to see. Until then it is my responsibility. I just want better tools than the ones that have thus far emerged.
That post was from me. The preview button reset my login info. Come on webmaster, that is a very simple thing to fix.
I would agree with you. A naked body, in an of itself, is nothing but a naked body. In the case of art, many times it's admiring the human form - whether we're discussing the classical greek form, or finding beauty in a not-so-idealize example of the human race.
With that said, however, when a naked body moves into the realm of sex, it moves into something that is, and should be, private and intimate. Even aside from that, a 10 year old watching Cum Guzzling Gutter Sluts 4: Cum Garglers is probably about as appropriate as...well... honestly, that's probably one of the more non-violent inappropriate things ever.
There's a huge difference between admiring and respecting the human body and using the human body to elicit erotic reactions. Sex isn't bad, and it shouldn't be seen as being bad, but it should be seen as being intimate. Something done in relative privacy. Not something we all need to be seeing all the time. If we want to seek it out, as adults, then fine, that is our perogative. Showing that stuff on broadcast TV, for example, should be pretty much out of the question. That applies to the internet as well.
But to say that nudity, in all its forms, is wrong...well...that, to me, is much more offensive than a cooch ever could be. I don't cringe when I see a boob, a puss, or a wang. I'd much rather the first two, but I'm not going to die (and my morals aren't going to self-destruct and send me on a homicidal rampage either) if I see the latter. We, as a society, hide the human body and promote the idea that being unclothed is an atrocity to the point that it's truly an exercise in self-loathing. That's not healthy for the individual or the society. Erotic nudity should be restricted to mature adults - I agree. But non-sexual nudity should be an accepted part of our culture. And for those of you who may say that all nudity is sexual - when looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, do you form a tent in your pants? Is the first thing you think "woo! boobies! it's time to fuck!" Because, if so, it's possible you have some psychological problems that need to be attended to.
Nakedness is no big deal, but the social dynamics of having sex is not something little kids can comprehend. Sex is perfectly natural, once you're ready.
Porn is especially tricky as it's not real sex. It's a fantasy world, with fantasy values. Kids using porn as a model for their own sexual activity can end up getting hurt both physically and psychologically. (For instance: You seldom see people applying lube before an anal sex scene in a porn flick, but I sure wouldn't want to engage in anal sex without it...)
.: Max Romantschuk
American rules for reality:
See, it's all so clear.
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.