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Ports for Porn - Using Firewalls to Block Porn
vicpylon writes "A Utah businessman and his non-profit organization wants to limit pornography to certain ports in the TCP/IP protocol. He is literally suggesting legislatively restricting porn sites to certain ports, so that the "offensive" content is easier to block. This is not workable on so many levels that it is laughable. International adult sites not subject to US laws, proxy servers, enforcement issues all leap to my tired mind as major flaws in his plan. He is lobbying congress, so do not be surprised to see this discussed by some headline grabbing politico.
"
Port number 69?
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
BLOCK porn? Why would you do that?
Unfortunately, what I want to restrict, in general, is the power of the people in charge... Political types just aren't very good at running things for anyone but themselves and their buddies. This is not a (particular) jibe at the Bush administration, just a general observation about the worst suck-ups on this planet, the politicians.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
The TCP port that will be used for it is obviously 69. Actually, this is a great help, as a simple "tcpdump -w pr0n.log 'port 69'" writes all the porn downloaded by your colleagues to a tcpdump file, from which all the video and image files could be extracted later.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
ya baby!!!
That if your kids are doing it, a.) you might want to try getting more involved with them so they understand why you think porn is "evil" and b.) they may not actually be hurt by it, but who knows. As for the technological aspect, it is ridiculous, but people don't seem to understand these sort of things when they suggest them. Now whoever opposes it, even if on the basis of saying it won't be plausible, they will be "unpatriotic"!
This is just going to be as much of a failure as the .xxx TLD.
If we can keep porn on the net by keeping it in a special place im happy with that.
Failure to find a good out of site out of mind solution to porn will just lead to the day of cleaning up the internet.
You can always expect the unexpected! Yesterday it was 10 hours before they changed stories, now it's 10 minutes. The dupes, the trolls... In a little while we may even see a partridge in a pair tree!
Etisalat does a good job already of blocking all porn in the UAE, except in the Media/Internet City Free Zones.
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Hmm - this wingnut used to be the CEO for The Canopy Group and is a major SCO stockholder? Yeah, he'll be the first guy I run to for tech advice....
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Time and time again we see that the courts and politics in general are just flat out not equipped to handle technical issues- then throw in people who don't know much about technology to begin with and you really have a problem.
I don't know if there is a solution but to wait long enough to get a techy judge in the supreme court (and lower courts hopefully), get techy guys in congress, etc.. Some how I don't think we'll live long enough.
It really is obvious, but one of the reasons this wouldn't work is that it would force all porn transports (HTTP, Usenet, FTP, Bittorrent, ...) to listen on the same port number. Yeah, it could probably be done if there's a truly dire need to do so (eg. on corporate firewalls, everything proxies over :80 these days), but it's almost certainly always a bad idea to do.
69 is TFTP, 666 is Doom, 6660 is unassigned but in a range commonly used for IRC.
This idea is doomed for the same reason that the
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Porn in other words.
The "business man" in question, Ralph Yarro, is the guy that used to run Canopy group (SCO's largest shareholder) until he was ousted after a battle with the Noorda family over control. Hardly the kind of guy you'd want involved in anything requiring a sliver of ethics...
So how much jail time would you get for proxying the porn port to 80? Its things like this that make the world scared of a US gov controlled internet.
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Except it's a slippery slope. If specific content is restricted to specific ports, then the next thing you see will be all kinds of pressure groups pushing for ISP's to filter that port.
This idea is from Ralph Yarro
I wonder if it will be as successful as the SCO group under his leadership?
My pics.
Yep, I'm from Utah, thankfully not born but still living here. The politicians here seem to be jackasses, and my reasoning is the morman religion which controls the government in this state. For more info on jackass Utah politicans, see: Orrin Hatch
Then your computer and kids will be safe from p0rn from the Internet
Can we have a topic called "Yes its news, but its only flamebait on Utah republicans, so we're not going to post it, because it lacks any technical merit, and even the most ignorant of Slashdot readers could hack around these restrictions within seconds"?
C'mon, do we REALLY need to see this on the front page? Is the next article going to be "Sometimes audio CDs have data on them too!" or "Government wishes it could read everyone's email" ?
I'd like to see Slashdot rise up to the "technical news that matters to technical people" instead of "Its on Yahoo! News and its about the Intarweb so we post it"
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Utah Woman Deletes the Internet! By Tom 7 (Dissociated Press) REDMOND: Millions of frustrated calls rushed into internet service providers this past thursday as "The Information Superhighway" was reported Missing In Action for several days. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) traced the problem to a home in Utah where Doris Packuko resides. She was allegedly found "hysterical and crying", police say. "That much information flowing through the phone lines all at once generates a lot of heat," Doug Wernicke of the IETF told us, "We just followed the smell of burning fiber optics." "Apparently, she just deleted The Internet right off her desktop. Even after being warned, 'are you sure you want to delete The Internet?', she persisted." Experts claim that this is a major problem with The Information Superhighway, perhaps even worse than animal pornography. "The Internet is a great cooperative work, built by millions of people. It is so unfortunate that it can be ruined by just one person. Thank God we were able to save it," commented Packuko's neighbor. The IETF was able to recover most of The Internet by opening up Packuko's Recycle Bin and dragging The Internet back onto the desktop. The rest was restored from the master backup copy kept on Zip Disk in the pentagon. Puckuko claims ignorance was the cause of her act. "I just didn't know. I was trying to clean up my desktop and I deleted it. I ... I just didn't realize."
Microsoft Corporation reports that they are currently working on a bug fix.
Is to implement a special top-level-domain for porn, something like the .xxx domain that was proposed (and rejected IIRC).
That would have almost no technical issues and be just as easy to block as this braindead proposal.
Everyone okay with that?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
So to sum it up: A Utah businessman nobody cares about plans on asking politicians to implement an unworkable idea. This wouldn't make page 9 of a high-school newspaper, what's it doing on Slashdot?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The first problem: What's porn? The second problem: Who decides what's porn? The third problem: Who enforces it?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
There are only 61538 ports. That's barely enough to categorise my personal fetishes, let alone everyone else's. Where on earth are we going to leave all the other content?
For the past 10 years, Yarro has been building and developing technology companies such as Altiris Inc. and SCO Group Inc. Ahhh so SCO is behind this, that explains how someone was dumb enough to come up with an idea like this.
.."port knocking" and "port sniffing".
International adult sites not subject to US laws
True, but just getting US-generated and US-hosted porn under control, as well as porn passing through US-owned ISPs, would account for quite a lot of sites, and an awful lot of the sites that tend to pop up in Google. America is regularly cited as one of the obstacles to dealing with Internet porn - if it took any steps, however technically incompetent, to address the issue, it would make an enormous difference.
I realise that restricting access to porn may not be a subject dear to the heart of all /.ers, but I have the impression that most of the rest of this thread is going to boil down to "no-one can do a thing about porn, la la la la I can't hear you", when the reality is that a lot of people around the world would like to see the present situation changed, and, one way or another, sooner or later, that will result in legislation. And if a solution is finally imposed, it may well turn out to be as draconian as the French government's anti-nazi legislation, which has been successfully imposed on Yahoo.
Virtually serving coffee
I particularly love the notion that they have that, by sequestering porn off to its own ports, they'll manage to avoid the risk of infringement of First Amendment rights that has come with things like the CDA. But I guess they really aren't thinking about WHO will decide what is and isn't porn, are they? :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
There is currently a petition being driven by my local MP to try and ban 'violent pornographic websites' see BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4460828.stm[BBC News]. Whilst not directly related to this article it is an example of the general public thinking that something can actually be done about these things!
Whilst I have a lot of sympathy for Liz Longhurst who has lost her daughter I do wish that my MP and other MPs would spend 30mins talking to some IT guys to discover that this is an impossible task. Currently they must be wasting lots of time at the taxpayer's expense.
If anyone else in the UK feels the same as me then please use the http://www.writetothem.com/ Write-to-them website to get a message to your MP!
"Why would you do that?"
Because legal minors can't own credit cards and can't buy subscripitions to the sites. No porn site wants to serve porn to kids but there's no way of detecting them.
It sucks (pun not intended), I wish they'd have special IP addresses set aside for kids and a 'DO NOT SEND PORN' list of those IP addresses so they can be blocked easily.
We don't need to restrict porn to a certain port, why not have a "dirty bit" in the tcp/ip wrapper instead? php_enable_porn()
Thats where most of the porn is currently cumming in.
Sindri Traustason.
If you want to make the web safe for impressionable people, then create a .kids domain that is heavily censored (expensive to register a subdomain, money goes to policing it) and only allow children who are likely to be traumatised by seeing sex / violence / social commentary / intelligent conversation / whatever to browse that, at their parents discression.
Feel free to moderate this redundant, since exactly the same point was raised in all of the articles about the .xxx domain.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
P2P - Porn 2 Peers
HTTP - Hypertexttransport for porn.
FTP - Filetransfer for porn.
--- Eat my sig.
This reminds me of an old joke...
Mickey came over to visit Goofy, and found him working in the garden. There were little plots of land labeled "Tomatoes," "Peppers," and, to Mickey's surprise, "Weeds." He asked, "Why on Earth would you want to plant weeds?" Goofy replied, "Well, better set aside a place for them, than let them grow everywhere!"
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
What an ignorant "technology guy". Seriously.
All he could do is create a friggin' nation wide ISP that has strong Porn filters and then he can sell that service to Religious Fundies across America. Then, they can "feel safe" with their "protected" Broadband or dial-up handicapped Internet.
It is absolutely ludicrous that the entire infrastructure of the Internet and network technology be reworked to support his hairbrained scheme of obtainig "teh big pile" of money.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Just 3 bright comments:
1. Wouldn't it be easier to establish a kid-friendly port (i.e. a sandbox port) - concerned parents and other censors can them simply block everthing else.
2. What is porn? A picture of a woman in a bikini might constitute porn in a Muslim country like Saudi Arabia, in a liberal European country the definition might be different.
3. Privacy issues - if porn is transmitted thro the porn port all users of that port might be labelled as porn fiends.
M
when they finish restricting porn from port 80 maybe they can also restrict all of those potty-mouth websites who use naughty language, and after that they can supress all speach to easily blockable ports! we could just copy the chinese system and build a national firewall so we dont have to listen to the rest of the silly world.
SCNR this one, so don't mod me down for not knowing that RFC3514 is an april fools day joke.
Chicken and egg. Are you sure that it wasn't his brain that caused SCO to rot?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The xxx tld was a better idea. Is the urban legend that it was struck down by the US conservative Christian right correct, or Slashdot propoganda? Even if this were possible, it would probably don the same fate.
Can Utah please do us all a favor & secede from the Union. Thank you.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Porn in other words.
Hey, hey, hey. IRC can be used for pirating too.
I'm actually kidding. IRC is used ONLY to promote mature and academic discussions regarding many lofty educational and child-safe topics.
LegendMUD
Yeah baby! How's THAT for spin?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sounds like a great idea.. porn should be limited to ports 1 to 50000. Hey, good work congress.. now we already have full compliance...
What a boon if done. Think about it! Law enforcement would only have to monitor one port for specific traffic. If you were caught off port then you are already breaking the laws. Not only would companies be able to filter, but ISP's would be able to charge extra for Porn Ports. YOu want this access to this content and wham! it's an extra $19.95. Don't believe it? What about comcastic locking down port 25? NNTP dying on the vine just add Porn Ports? Are we going to need specific Porn Browsers? AOL will be able to charge extra for adult access. This has all the novelty of another idealogues attempt to protect the wayward from themselves.
--- Location Unknown
There is currently a petition being driven by my local MP to try and ban 'violent pornographic websites'
To be fair, this one is only about attempting to extend the laws which cover possession of child pornography to violent porn (rape, mutilation, etc). She's not trying to ban porn websites, just the (currently legal) possession of their materials within the United Kingdom. Yes, I think it's unworkable, but it's not an entirely incoherent approach. Yarro's proposal is just plain crazy. He could even make it less crazy by saying "Right, all web sites in the United States should have to be registered with the (Local/State/Federal government) Department of Naughty Pictures which will then determine whether the site can offer service on port 80, or should be on port 6969." And failure to register a website constitutes an offence.
Yes, it's still stupid; yes, it can be trivially circumvented; and yes, it doesn't address non-HTTP protocols. But at least it's a coherent argument. The tiny, tiny flaw is that it would be struck down by the courts before you could mention the words "prior restraint". I'm fairly sure that the US Congress is prohibited from restricting freedom of spech - something about the first amendment to their contraception, or convolution - some word like that, anyway.
--NgParents would decide to either have a child friendly IP addresss or not. Client side software doesn't work because it can be bypassed, complicated IDs don't help because you lose privacy. They could always buy 2 IP addresses if it's so important to them.
And why not legally restrict advertising and viruses to particular ports too? Gosh, this is going to solve all the internet's problems!
oo
True, there is the question of where to draw the line, but some things are clearly porn. If you're not sure what I mean then visit this site, one of my favorites. That is clearly porn.
I think that your suggestion and the "porn port" ideas are not mutually exclusive. Together they could make a better solution than one by itself.
Also, I don't think that pornographers and their customers (I'm looking at you, Ohreally!) should mind having porn segregated into a "pron ghetto". It is a preventative defense against those who would seek to eliminate them entirely from the internet ("We're good netizens, we're doing our part").
But most of all, it would make it easier for me to find porn if it was all in one place. We just need to make such a move to a porn ghetto economically attractive to the pornographers as well as ethically attractive.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
While I understand many /.'ers don't believe there is anything wrong with pornography, and don't flame me for having my own opinion, I do. That said, I also believe that there are enough people out there who also believe it's not right or at least want to protect there kids from it. So we should accomodate them.
.XXX, it would make blocking incredibly easy...and probably put all "Net Nanny" type companies out of business....for better or worse. The problem is who is going to force porn sites to be restricted to .XXX?
Yes, routing porn images and text through specific ports is a joke. That would take such a major reworking of our present systems that it's not even funny. But what about TLD's? I have long thought that if all porn sites (and yes, "porn" can be defined) were hosted from sites with a TLD of
Oh, and if the people who WANT porn have a problem with this, why complain? It makes it easier for you to find it. Just google site:.xxx
So let me get this straight, if we want to see somebody get decapitated on a movie-trailer web site that's okay. But if two people make love, well, we gotta put a stop to that.
The Utah man states that such a law would give people a choice..
aparently a choice other than RAISING YOUR OWN KIDS.
Cogito Ergo Sum
For something just as infeasible, why don't we just make it illegal for anyone under the age of majority to use the Internet? He may speak for a majority and if the US wasn't a republic (with that aweful notion of rights whether or not you're a minority) then good for him. But as the world has more tastes than his little mind can hold I'll have to simplify it a bit: Censors, fuck off.
Shh.
I'll agree to this stupid idea if the following is done:
- all religious content goes on port 666.
- all political content goes on port -666.
I don't see a reason why we don't push this stuff off of port 80 while were at it. That article made good reason to get this stuff of port 80. How many religions have broken up over religion or political differences? Quite a few. And lets face it... in the US, religion and politics are one.
Gotta love the way the folks in Singapore do it... "Integrity, Service, Excellence"!
my blog
To hell with the IT issues - tell your MP that you don't want any more thought crimes being imposed on UK citizens by over-emotional campaigns based on total illogic ("My daughter would still be here if it weren't for the internet").
Banning child porn is one thing, but banning pictures of activities between informed consenting adults is entirely another.
TCP 80085 seems appropriate
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Something about other governments wanting to impose censorship on the net?
Oh, you meant evil censorship of things the US government approves of rather than good censorship of things it disapproves of....
From TFA: "we are all hard-core technology businessmen".
How appropriate.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
the "I want to control the Internet" issue.
Regardless of ports they want to "broadcast" porn on, there will always be porn on port 80.
To make something like this work you'd have to shut down all traffic on the net, then enable a single port to act as a Subscriber Channel which lists all the content on the web and then let the use subscribe to the content they want to view.
Yeah right!
http://www.gibby.net.au
you even did not see the dept. this article comes from ("the i-can't-define-pr0n-but-i-know-it-when-i-see-it dept.") There IS NO Porn. A breast cancer site shows women (some of them beautiful) touching and massaging their own boobs. Is a Victoria's Secret catalog porn? To prohibit something, you should be able to define it first.
One absurd example: my son, one year and a half ago (he was four) took all his clothes by the pool; my wife snapped a picture of him as he had done so. Some jurisdictions consider possessing a picture of a nude 4yo as child porn, with some stiff criminal penalties. Does this seem reasonable to you?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If this discussion is really about *attempting* to block porn at the router, doing so at the network level is a bad idea, impossible to implement with any level of accuracy. A better idea would be to require HTML header tags, JPG header tags, PNG tags, mp3 tags, avi/mpg video header tags, etc that *identify* porn. An 8-bit unsigned integer from 0-255 would identify the type of porn that the image file contains. 0x00 would mean no porn, 0x01 would mean bikini shots, 0x9a would designate incest beastiality gang rape pr0n. RFC anyone?
For the Nth time... Make a port for child-safe content (since it is a subset of adult content). Content providers who wish to supply children with content use it. Anyone who provides non-child content over it goes to jail. Censor the children, not the adults. The only reason to try the opposite approach is to shove your religious and moral values down other peoples throats.
Fuuny I thought the definition of rape was that one of the parties was not consenting.
It shows that a seed of technical sophistication is starting to take root in simple minds.
This is a double edged sword, but I suspect this is probably for the best.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Not to be all practical and stuff, but the reason we can't push all porn to a single port is that all porn is not protocol homogenous. You can get porn through http, ftp, half a dozen streaming formats, all the filesharing protocols. You could tunnel it through ssl, or ssh. All those protocols have their own ports, and their own listeners. So whatever is listening on 69 would have to be able to understand all those things.
Technically speaking, it'd be much easier just to try and get all the pron people to put some kind of broadcast flag on their own stuff, and then just filter by that. Not that that would work either, but at least it COULD work.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Just who is this guy going to get to do this? I'm not volunteering... Leave the p0rn alone. Most of it is harmless. Expend the energy going after child pornographers; that's a fight I'll sign up for.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Porn can be definable to you, but to other people -- oh, the problem is always other people -- it's not. ...
Some think nude ladies/guys is porn.
Some think softcore hollywood-type simulated-sex scenes is porn.
Some think only hardcore genitals-showing sex is porn.
Some think a nude child is porn.
Some think a semi-nude child (a 4yo girl in her diapers only) is porn.
Some think
You got the gist?
Who gets to define, and enforce, what is porn and what isn't? You?
I'm sorry. I prefer the rule "each parent defines and controls in the manner he thinks viable what is or is not appropriate for his/her child to see/listen/watch -- within a minimum 'child abuse protection' body of laws."
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The controlling interest in Utah will not be happy and will not stop until the State is blocked off with something like the Great Firewall of China. Look at who owns the newspaper in question. The Internet and it's ability to encourage people to be challenged by new ideas is not compatible with their interests. While the call is to stop "porn" now, we all know it's the first step down a slippery path.
Personally I think Zappa gives the best advice here:
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
(start cheesy bass-heavy music)
To be fair, this one is only about attempting to extend the laws which cover possession of child pornography to violent porn (rape, mutilation, etc).
The problem is that this proposal doesn't just cover images of actual criminal acts (which would be reasonable), but includes both cases between consenting adults [this is explicitly mentioned in the conslutation document - so it's not a paranoid interpretation of the law], and cases which merely depict a violent scene, even if there is no such actual violence.
She's not trying to ban porn websites, just the (currently legal) possession of their materials within the United Kingdom.
I think that makes it far worse. It's bad enough trying to control material on the Internet just because some people don't like it, but this law will make you a criminal for merely possessing such material.
Ie, if you take some naughty images of you and your consenting partner that would fall under these new laws, then you'll be a criminal even if you have no intent of distributing these publically.
By blocking all possible ports short of port 80 (for normal web site viewing) you are disrupting traffic from your network that might be not only legitimate, but also vital to the employees using said network. What about messaging clients that are used to contact people outside of the network? What about private company communications software software that connects to other company networks? Yes, you can bind things to work through port 80, but the average person does not know how to do such things. I am not saying people should be able to view their pornographic materials in the workplace, but by simply enforcing this rule through company policy makes things a lot easier. You see that one employee is viewing porn, you reprimand him for it. Now, as far as private citizens go, blocking such traffic to their home connections is unconstitutional. The State or Federal government should not be allowed to control the access to legal pornography (illegal pornography is a whole different conversation altogether).
As I don't advocate censoring porn or trying to stop the porn industry, I also don't want porn to be shoved down my thorat. I don't enjoy it, I have every right to try and NOT see it. I'm not limiting you, I'm limiting myself. I have the right to develop ways to make it easier for people like me to block porn for THEMSELVES, not you.
I'm sick of US politics turning every single freaking issue into an either black or white liberal vs conservative issue. DAMNIT
well in america we have R and NC-17 rated films, which are "you must be 17 or come with your parent/guardian" and "no children under 17" respectively, so an 18 rated film in the uk will SURELY be pr0n/illega/unpatriotic since you must be older than 17 to see it.
-- lol pwned
The first problem: What's terrorism? The second problem: Who decides what's terrorism? The third problem: Who gets to act against it?
The answer is: The State Department decides what it is and what it is not depending on their whims. They also get to act against it. Hmmm...does this seem unreasonable to anyone else?
This is actually the least interesting part of the discussion, because the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
In fact, it would be smart of the porn producers to do so first WITHOUT any laws requiring. That way:
.xxx domain, or a pr0n:// protocol identifier would be to place a standard rating.xml file in some sort of meta tag in the pages header. This would list levels of nudity, sex, violence, language, etc, and individuals could easilly filter based on a multitude of things. Think about it -- you set up a proxy server that loads the HTML header, parses for the XML file, downloads it, and then makes a decision whether to let it through or not.
1) People that want to filter (like myself) can quite easilly filter
2) People that want porn can more easilly find it
3) It's a pre-emptive strike that may thwart the formation of over-reaching laws
Another solution that would be better than restricted to a specific port, or a
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
I have a friend in Dubai that bugs me for "business documents" so I zip, encrypt and email him these "documents" from time to time. He seems to get them just fine, but I wonder what would happen to him if the authorities ever checked his laptop. There's a lot more spread in that "spreadsheet" I sent him than the file name lets on.
This legislation will cover acts whether or not the participants are consenting, and will cover even mere depictions of violent acts.
So for example, enjoy play acting out a "rape" fantasy with your girlfriend? Better not take any pictures if this new proposal comes law, even if you only intend to keep them to yourself.
Anything more and you are stepping on other peoples' toes. Said people don't appreciate that any more than you appreciate receiving farm porn spam with images.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Thanks for posting this - in practice it will do little to stop any actual problem websites (eg, material which shows genuine illegal acts), but will criminalise acts between consenting adults.
As well as writing to your MP, there is a consultation document (linked from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4195332.stm ) where you can answer questions. Hurry, the deadline is this Friday 2nd December!
this may actually be quite convenient
And here I was thinking I was going to always give VOIP the highest priority in my QOS rules. It looks like there could be a new king!
Obviously Mr Yarro is God, because otherwise how could he tell that porn is bad, and nobody should be able to see it?
Thing is: porn is out there, so we should live with it. Yes, don't show it to your kids if you think pictures of reproducing animals will hurt them (well, during the middle ages it was normal that kids were in the bed while mom&dad had it going...). But don't judge others.
It's simply pictures (and videos)!
Hey, I'm really pissed
They are fu**ing with the only source for an slashdotter to know what the world fu** really means
Sounds like you just reinvented the evil bit!
Mmmmm, smell that knee-jerk respsone goodness.
After this little fiasco I'm rather more concerned about the quality of the laws that are being enacted than I used to be, even without touching on the "criminalising fantasies between consenting adults" aspect.
To be fair, they're not just trying to ban the websites, they're trying to make accessing them and possessing or producing such content illegal. It's actually worse than trying to ban the websites themselves though; so now a couple who enjoy their sex a little extreme and video it are breaking the law? Or only if they allow a friend (or new partner) to watch it?
I thought we'd grown out of the "TV/films/rock music/$whatever made me do it!" thing a decade or two ago. I guess the internet is the new $whatever.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why a port?
Here is my idea, require a <porn> or <adult> tag on all sites that contain porn or are intended for an adult audience.
We could also implement a <safe=040382672178283940405> code for all sites that are safe for children... which only major sites would bother registering for... this would let parents lock down their computers. You can either now allow porn or only allow approved sites...
Good idea? I think requiring a different port would only lead to mass censorship.
There are already rating boards that do that: a site can list themselves on the board, get an html header string, and put that on their site. Anyone who wants to can read that string (or go to the board's site and look a site up) and see what pages are listed as objectionable, and for what reason.
Support them. I'm at work so I can't look up the URL's right now, but I have a private site that I list with a couple of these.
+++---+++ Fake news ticker +++---+++
Senator S.T.Upid yesterday announced his move to more effeciently battle terrorists. In an interview he told us that his plan is simple, yet efficient. Terrorists, or people striving to make a career in that area, will need to register with the authorities, before they can start working. The hightech passport will get an RFID chip that uniquely identifies the terrorist and his particular area of expertise. With this new technique it will be possible to immediately identify any criminal throughout the world. "Consider the implications when the officer at the border just has to look at the passport and KNOW for sure that this guy is a terrorist. No collateral damages anymore, because he can be absolutely sure about it. No need for jails or annyoing investigation, you can execute him on the spot." the senator says. According to the senator, when this new technique proved itself in the field, there are already plans to broaden the passport to common criminals as well.
I'm sure you'll see some of this, but if you are going to write laws, why not write in that ISPs CANNOT provide a general filter, but that they can filter this port out for customers who ask for it. That way, the ISP can decide how they want to deal with this for dynamic IP addresses, or provide instructions for consumers to do it on their own.
I really have mixed feelings about this whole thing. I realize some of the difficulties with blocking unwanted porn (particularly from other countries), but outside of that, it really does help to isolate content that is likely generate high levels of objection to a section of cyberspace that is relatively easy to filter. This means that people who WANT to filter it can do it easily, and those who DON'T want to filter it will no longer have to worry about their ISP doing it against their will. The porn sites will not even have to give up existing functionality (as in moving to a .xxx domain) because they can just perform a redirect from their port 80 web site to port whatever, which won't work for people who don't want to see this kind of traffic. Look at it this way: every couple of years, there's another big legal push by activist groups to eliminate the porn or in some way subdue it. All of this would stop (or at least decrease significantly) if most porn were successfully channeled into a segment of the 'net that could easily be blocked by consumers who don't want it.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
It's not just porn that needs filtering. Ever do research on Google and have to wade through tons of irrelelivant hits? I honestly think Google could improve searching and help people self select content in one stroke. A quick metatag, or equivalent, that encodes subject type and maturity level would be happily picked up by web designers ... if it helps drive traffic. And it could. If Google had an option that let you say "I want to limit to X" then those people who are promoting "X" will be highly motivated to include that tag on their page. The tag couldn't be used for multiple subjects, or it would act as a key word search again. But if I could say "I'm looking for an ACADEMIC ABSTRACT" then I won't find porn, commerical sites, or little Susy's musings. I'll find abstracts. On the flip side, a browser filter that people can self select to avoid certain types of content based on the tags isn't censorship. It's personal choice.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
porn is about opening up new ports, not getting restricted to just one!
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Why not just use the "evil bit"? http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3514.html
Like this one: http://excaliburfilms.com/partner/mainaffiliate.cf m?ID=1765
I wonder why Utah is even a part of the United States. Really, given they are backwards religiously and socially (kinda like the South, actually), they should cecede (sp?) and go on their own. That way, they can put up a REAL wall and block out all the dirty, naughty things in the world.
Isn't this the same state that allows polygamy?
How about a three part solution?
1) Each US ISP makes a subnet available for the under 18 crowd that a parent can attach to their dialup, dsl or cable modem account. Let's call it a kidnet. Client software is used to route the computer through the main route or the kidnet route depending on login credentials. When one of the kids uses the computer, its dns shows up in the kidnet subnet, e.g., 20-43-56-11-home.kidnet.attbi.net.
2) A law is put in place requiring adult content providers to block requests from any computer within a kidnet subnet. Stiff fines, threat of closure, etc.
3) Consumers interested in this services submit complaints to a kidnet abuse email address, e.g., kidnet-abuse@comcast.net, identifying unfiltered porn sites either not complying with the law or outside the US jurisdiction.
It would be straight-forward for a content provider to filter clients based on a know list of kidnet subnets and dns names. No 1st amendment issues would be relevant since it's the consumer that requests the service.
The point is, tag the kids on the network, not the content providers.
Thoughts?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Since the original proposal comes from Utah, I hereby suggest that the bill should be amended so that all material that spreads the Mormon faith, creationist teachings, or other religiously inspired materials get relocated to port 666.
Or whatever.
Or to put it differntly: Considering that most of middle America was originally built by people who came there from Europe to escape religiously inspired persecution, how come they are so keen to reinstate it now, just because they think they have a chance to make it their particular flavor of intolerance?
If someone would have come on here a few weeks ago and posted a story about how some major corporation was planning to install a potentially malicious rootkit into your computer whenever you autorun one of their CD's, many here would have probably laughed at the idea.
Then, some technically inept executive got hold of it and here we are. Of course one could argue that we should be glad that Sony bundled a rootkit with their CD's because it has exposed the dangers of overzealous executives. However, in this case, where we have a proposal that deals with a matter as far reaching as internet infrastructiure, it needs to be exposed well before any possibility of implementation.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
You just have to wonder if he is secretly working a deal where polygamy sites will get through, but heaven forbid that he sees a boobie outside of his 15 wives...
This is actually the least interesting part of the discussion, because the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
Which jurisdiction? Or did you forget that in some places it is illegal to show a picture of woman's face, in others the age of consent is twelve.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Using DansGuardian with Squid is not a difficult to set up. The default blocks are quite comprehensive, and completely customizable. There are even gateway/firewall distros like Smoothwall and IPCop that have drop-in support for DansGuardian.
Now, if more people would just learn the need for a real firewall, and how to configure the darn thing...
Because i still get all my porn from newsgroups. no popups, easy to spot trolls, no need to bother hacking into porn websites, and if you throw out the cost of internet access, which I'd be paying for anyhow, completely free. At any rate, I see trying to eliminate porn on the internet, as killing the goose that laid the golden egg. without the adult industry opening up and running sucessful businesses on the internet, it'd probaly still be the domain of the geeky. basicly all slashdot stuff. not saying that is a bad thing......
Porn sites should be good neighbors and clearly identify what they are "selling" and make it easy to block if you aren't "buying". People who want to buy what they are selling will find them if they want it. People who aren't "buying" won't buy, even if you shove it in their faces. You can shout "free speech" all day, but it's really more a case of "sound marketing". If you have a product that appeals to some and offends others, it seems you would want to sell it to those it appealed to and keep it from those it offened.
Heck, I consider nude, pretty women in non sexual situations art. I will occasionally seek out such pictures. But I get really annoyed when they are not "as-advertised". I like what I like and expect sites to tell the truth about what they have. For some, ANY nudity is unacceptable. They should be able to reliably avoid that.
I like how all of the quotes in the article have a sense of a pre-rehearsed, pro-product wording. It's almost like everything that was said was approved through some corporate pr doctor. I'm afraid this is going to be one of those bills that no one wants to vote against. No senator wants a commercial during election time saying he or she voted for pornography. And one last thing, this doesn't suprise me that this whole concept was born in Utah. Thats fine if they want to keep their ultra-conservative, weird-rligion beliefs in their own state, but they shouldn't try to impose it on the whole country.
Just out of curiousity, I logged into my SCO server and checked out a few things. I've got bad news to report. Take a look at this:
(note: numerous pound symbols removed to avoid slashdot lameness filter)
#/etc/services
Copyright (C) 2005. The SCO Group.
Any use of this file without the express written consent of SCO
and paid SCO System License is prohibited. Ports, services and
sockets are all the intellectual property of the SCO Group and
are protected under copyright law. Parties found using clean or
dirty ports without the SCO System License will be sued in a Utah
court.
(some deleted)
cp-http 80/tcp Cleanport Web
cp-http 80/udp Cleanport Web
#dp-http 81/tcp Dirty pervert web (blocked!)
(and so on)
Seriously, I'm intrigued at this remarkable proposal and wonder how they expect to handle illigit services running behind legit ports (a few lines of Python can redirect anything under 443/SSL for instance and makes a nice tunnel), not to mention dynamic port assignment in numerous P2P protocols and things like L2TP (for the user data connection after the connection is negotiated on 1701).
And this overlooks all the circumvention issues. If idiotically simple proposals like this were workable, let's just pass a law requiring all hackers to be required to only hack port 1433 - if you're stupid enough to expose 1433, then you should be hacked. All other ports are off limits to you bad guys.
Excuse me while I go put a "good guys only" sign on the office front door...
*scoove*
Here's the "fair to all" solution. Come up with a "wiki-like" meta tag system tha t exists completely outside the website. Your browser would do a 2nd lookup, kind of like DNS, and would lookup the "tags" associated with the site. People would be able to vote on the fairness of the tags, so if a porn site loaded up teh tags with "cute puppies", pretty soon the vote would force that tag out. You would get lots of peoples opinions on what the website contained. Then you could set your tolerance level as to what you would accept. You could opt in, or opt out, or unrated sites. Then the end user is in full control over what is or is not an acceptable site for them. And the content rating system is in control of EVERYBODY.
How about we... do absolutely nothing at all.
Filters, "kid-nets", and legislative propositions from Utah are no substitute for parenting. When I was growing up, pornography wasn't difficult to get, there was a Latin grocery down the street that sold magazines that would be kept under the counter in any other store, the FCC knew their goddamned place (allocating frequencies, not patrolling morality) so TV was full of near-nudity, my dad had a collection of playboys hidden in his room that I both knew of and the location of, and lets not forget the internet...
Didn't hurt me, didn't reduce me into some kind of sexual vagrant. I'm not a porn-addled deviant, in fact, I really just don't care. Pornography, like anything, can be harmful to the weak-minded and easily-addicted, but just because you can't handle it, or your cult religion forbids it, doesn't mean that it ought to be outlawed. Freedom of speech is more important than your inability to control yourself.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
(BTW, I'm joking)
_______
2B1ASK1
Though I'm entirely for a company being able to restrict what can be accessed on its own machines, on company time. I'm sorry, but if you're such a sex-addicted moron you want to access porn at work, you need help. [/2 cents]
Sure. Why don't we ask spammers to only send mail to port 30 so we know it's spam.
Idiot.
At least one pan-european provider in one of its countries had started in 2004 a "revolutionary" "safe ADSL" offer, soon followed by a concurrent: the idea was to give out a basic xDSL plus some ($$$)filter/proxy. (OT: dear slashdot, kindly support an euro-sign encoding, like iso8859-15 or unicode?)
As technically miserable as it sounds, yes: it failed and I see no signs of it on any of their websites anymore.
1) what to filter? your favourite party enemy's website? who decides?
2) who keeps track of the changes, 10k people employed 24/7?
3) a 14yo kid will find a way to get over the filters in less than a week
but the idea of using a port(?) and forced content/definition by law: that beats me, that's hip, really, and I don't talk about prOn but about what's possibly next in the judgment/filtering saga.
(Ok, this provider filters p2p, that filters ipsec, this one gives you NATted ips,
From the article: "Now it's just a matter of getting the policy in place so we can have at least some part of the Internet that is free of the filth and free of the degradation"
"Your blog has been deemed "immoral" by this court. You are ordered to move it to the filth port ghetto."
FTP is actually "Free The Porn!"
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Most socially conservative politicians would just love to restrict porn-related activities to only one port, that found on the front of the female member of the species.
Because except for them, I can't really see how you can get from anywhere on disney.com to a porn site in a single click.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
> If you want to make the web safe for impressionable .kids domain that is heavily
> people, then create a
> censored (expensive to register a subdomain, money
> goes to policing it) and only allow children who
> are likely to be traumatised by seeing sex / violence
> / social commentary / intelligent conversation /
> whatever to browse that, at their parents discression.
The funny part of this is that most of the "children" who
seem to be traumatised by sex/violence/etc seem to be OVER
the age of 18. Go figure.
But, it would have one effect. All the other idiots who think "the internet" === "the web" would suddenly think "the internet" was porn free (if this idea was implimented) while everyone else with a clue stick would still be able to obtain all the porn they ever wanted.
You think it's a joke, but it's not. We need to balance interests and right now the only seat at the table is for the people who claim to speak for the children.
.xxx ghetto, or do we recognize that the internet already exists and create a new .kids domain?
A lot of the time it comes down to a simple framing of the question. E.g., do we have unrestricted access in most of a public library, with a separate "kid-safe" space with restricted access? Or do we have restricted access in most of the library with unrestricted access (and books with a more adult content) in a separate "adult" area that's monitored by the librarians?
On the net, do we try to create a kid-safe internet with a new
I think the answers are clear... but in practice it's almost always the adult that is marginalized.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
No sig
I think I have enough porn to get me through the apocolypse. I have over 200 gigs!
It's a hand twinkler, you dumbass! And I got a bag of whoopass for you!
I just read through CP80's "technical briefing" which I'd strongly recommend /. readers review (it's located at: http://www.cp80.org/solutions/ ). Treating the matter seriously (which isn't easy), there are a few observations:
/is/ a potential solution that addresses the unlikely mandatory compliance aspect and approaches the content filtering on an optional basis (usable for those that wish to integrate it) and I'll post and draft it out this morning so there's evidence of prior art (we know how the SCOG folks have a difficult time understanding how intellectual property works). I'd be willing to push it further into a public commons patent application e.g. under ODSL's patent commons (just so CP80 doesn't make the same mistake SCOG did by thinking they owned other people's IP and get congressional support behind misappropriated property).
Viability: CP80 isn't. When you misunderstand the very basics of the subject material from the start (such as this nonsense: "Ports & Protocols = Internet Channels")a few minutes with RFC 1700 would be a good start for CP80's technical advisors, if they have any). Consider the following CP80 quote:
There are over 65,000 Internet channels available on the Internet today. These channels are already used to categorize content and services.
No they're not. They're used to correspond to applications that operate at a known port. This is much lower in the OSI model, where content filtering typically requires application awareness (OSI layer 7).
ISP Administration: CP80 wants ISPs to offer you channels (as if the believe ISPs create the content, which you'd have to do in order to control the content at the appropriate layers), presumably 80 & 443 for "clean content", perhaps 81/444 for rated PG (sorry hosts2 nameserver and snpp), 82/446 for R and 83/447 for X (working around microsoft-ds at 445 for the moment). Should we go down this path, this probably will be the necessary incentive for providers to move residential broadband completely to an opt-in protocol/port model and quit blocking ports. We'll just enable the few basics - your "web channels" (ugh), a mail channel that only goes to us and perhaps a couple of others necessary for audio/video streaming and such. We'll push all through proxies to make sure you're not tunneling something other than the desired protocol (and still, there will be ways around this). It's a radical departure at significant expense and unfortunately doesn't quite work (as most things that ignore Internet architecture do). Coordination between all ISPs, NSPs, OS and software vendors, standards bodies and content providers would be rather necessary and mandatory.
There
An effective approach is to use a shim protocol, similar to how MPLS is implemented (and wedged), that would insert a content header immediately ahead of the IP datagram. The datagram would specify content settings and either be processed by equipment (CPE, firewalls, routers, PCs, etc.) that are Content-Shim aware or ignored by those that aren't. Service providers could implement it and push administration of the filtering to the end-user (though this assumes content providers are using the shim protocol as well as they push out traffic). Done at this level, it is independent of port management issues and other unworkable nonsense.
Contact me if you'd like to work on a content shim on sourceforge with the prototype code under GPL and intellectual property donated to ODSL patent commons.
*scoove*
(scoove-at-yahoo.com)
Once politicians hear that ports are a solution to some problem, they're going to try to implement stupid solutions to problems they don't understand. What the heck are they going to think when they hear about ports that have nothing to do with porn?
"Port 80? Good lord. I've heard about ports. Ports are bad. They're what porn runs on."
Kind of like how "Internet" was synonymous with "child porn" in the mid-90's.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Except that the "laws in place" are DIFFERENT IN EVERY PLACE. And this guy is from Utah, we can guess what standards he wants applied.
Much simpler solution: cut off Utah from the Internet. This is something he actually has the ability to do if the state is behind him.
I was involved in the development of a well-known kids internet filter. By the owner's request, it blocked pages that discussed oral sex. Once the monica Lewinsky scandal broke out, people were complaining that that the government report detailing the indescretions, on a government web site, was being blocked by the filter. So we were asked to modify the filter so that any *.gov sites were allowed to have pornography.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Can somebody explain to me why censorship is not a good idea, except when someone REALLY wants to censor something? Still, after years of trying to squeeze some actual sense out of anti-pornographers in Iceland, I still cannot find a single thread of anything even resembling scientific evidence, showing a link between pornography and any "bad behaviour". Every single study I have read, begins by denying that a cause-and-effect relationship has to be established, and instead adheres to what these reports/studies call "common sense", which is scientifically absurd, especially when it comes to limiting freedom of expression and the freedom of research or teenage masturbation.
Democracy IS REALLY CONSIDERED A PUBLIC THREAT in Communish China. Anti-government propaganda WAS REALLY CONSIDERED A PUBLIC THREAT in Nazi Germany. How is this any different? Keep your own damn "common sense" to yourself and try to figure out a way to make youngsters exposed to pornographic material realize that it's a show just like any other car-exploding, blood-guzzling, foul-mouth film like those made in Hollywood. It's shocking, and disgusting, and limits your family values, and you know what? That's the price we pay for a fundamental right called Freedom of Expression. Freedom of expression is more important than a tenuous (at best) danger of some kid at some point mistaking the right to view pornogrophay as the right to rape.
By the way, the crime rate in China is WAY lower than in the USA; does that mean that the right to a fair trial is a bad idea? Hitler got Germany out of an economic depression by simply taking over every single industry and producing arms; does that mean that the free enterprise is a bad idea? Of course not.
Freedom of expression is not just about the right to express what's "healthy", or "ethical". It is the right to express yourself, whether it be in film or at a public hearing, regardless of those factors. Anything other than that, is not freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is boolean, not a floating point. And they call it "the land of the free"... pardon my French (or just sue me); my ass.
A parent that doesn't want its kid to view pornography should have the same right, no more and no less, than the parent who wants its kid to be Catholic. You use whatever methods you can in your upbringing, but this constant "society is responsible for me not knowing how to raise my kid"-argument is getting respect to the point of fascism.
P.S. I'm NOT sorry if I offended someone. Deal with it or move to China.
Not really, it's only sharp on the side they're not talking about.
From the artical:
For the past 10 years, Yarro has been building and developing technology companies such as Altiris Inc. and SCO Group Inc.
Perhaps that explains it. Is this a ploy for SCO to deflect attention away from their lawsuit with IBM?
Does his team include Darrel?
Hahah - what a joke - and of course some dick head reporter picks this up as feasible. I wonder what PR firm is behind this? Would this have something to do with SCO?
OR, they can move to a muslim country where the ISP blocks porn sites. Nothing like being on a long business trip in the middle east and trying to unwind in the eve only to get your favorite entertainment site blocked by some wholesome picture of people with headscarves saying "Because this is a muslim country..."
Not that I have ever tried that.
Really.
You belive me, don't you?
Check google news for Ralph Yarro or his proposed CP80. Guess how many times his name shows up - once. In this article.
I'm living in Utah - Utah county, where this guy is from - right now and I've never heard of this guy.
The article says he's spent the last 3 months in D.C., but the Google News search doesn't show his name even once during his time in D.C.
Ooooh... he's made presentations to Utah representatives and senators! Wow! People from his own state listened to him for 5 minutes, amazing! Some even gave him a quick quote, supposedly! I could probably do the same thing with minimal effort.
A poster above me said this isn't even worthy of the 9th page in a high school newspaper. I agree. Then again, Deseret News is quite similar to a high school newspaper, so it's probably well placed.
instead of a port, howbout a domain? it'd be super-easy to block adult content if all of it existed on .xxx domains.
then again, little horny hackers could memorize some IPs and bypass DNS.
that there was such a huge pr0n problem. Give me a break. I spend hours on the internet at work, and never see anything that resembles a porn site! (I work for the city and your fired on the spot for viewing porn at work, no questions asked) This whole mess smells like a bunch of tech "BUISNESS" men who want to setup a system to make these providers a shitload of money. Thats it end of story.
The truly scary part of this whole mess is that if they implement a system like this how long is it until you have to pay for other "feature" channels? Want to view information on autos? an extra x.xx/mo... access sites to do secure online transactions? an extra x.xx/mo Of course they won't do it all at once so noone makes too big a fuss. (Remember if you put a frog in luke warm water and slowly heat it up it will sit here and cook)
The really sad part about all this is that the goons on capitol hill only care about money, so they will prolly pass the law before I get done writing this post...
I get sick of the filth as much as the next person, but this is just rediculous. It's called NetNanny and blacklisting. We don't need any more laws -- we need some repealed (*cough*DMCA*cough*). Politicians need to get a clue and stop talking about technology....period. They're just butting into an industry that they do not understand.
Its not surprising how clueless these guys are considering they start off with a self declaration that "we are all hard-core technology businessmen". Its usually best to let your peers determine your level of technical proficiency or lack there of. A wannabe dork doesn't count.
And you have to wonder when a "high-tech think tank" works on a problem since 2003 and "kind of develop a concept" which turns out to be a single line in your web server configuration:
Listen my-pron.com:69
You wonder where is all the high tech?
Yarro has some good points about the effectiveness of filtering, the cost of implementation, and the existence of a group of net users who require some assistance in creating the internet experience that fits their views, however, his solution is to force everyone in the world into the personal view of a few people in Utah.
Hopefully this cp80 garbage will never gather steam and waste too much government time which should be resourced to more serious issues, but if Yarro really wants a solution he should really work the other way around (and probably find some fresh thinkers for his tank, because frankly the current bunch are obviously worthless).
While I think there is some decent filtering options out there, if what he really wants is censorship via ports then what he needs to do is have his sensitive group completely block port 80 and then have someone proxy a whitelist of acceptable websites or perhaps even ask whitelisted websites to listen on both port 80 and on his clean port.
There is no need to force the rest of the world to fit into the moral views of a small group of people. And passing pornography legislation is not high-tech, its the oldest tech in the book, any book, even before there were books.
burnin
I could have sworn that porn sites were already pretty much limited to port 80 and 443. Anyone who wants to block those ports should feel free.
Well... not quite. Blocking *.xxx names from a DNS server would not prevent one from accessing questionable sites directly by IP address. Of course, with many wesites sharing IP addresses via virtual servers, that access doesn't work so well these days... and requiring such sharing (with the default IP address site being clean) might not be too onerous a regulatory measure. And there's the additional problem that ISPs would have pressure to block DNS queries to XXX, which in the future would relegate a complete DNS feed to the same bin as a complete NNTP feed is these days: rare, premium pay, and mostly the province of perverts. But these are fairly minor socio-technical issues.
The real problem with the Orem loon's suggestion is that of those 65000 "channels" she refers to, a lot already have dedicated traffic, and we need some for on-the fly outgoing connections. (Although removing all outgoing port connections would clean up the internet completely....) Still, the Port 30 suggestion above is about as good as this could hope for.
It was short sighted of the Bush administration to block the XXX domain. I suspect the main problem is that they don't want ANY sexually explict material out there, and the XXX domain would "legitimize" it. On the other hand, considering how whitehouse.com looked for a couple years, I can only imaging what whitehouse.xxx would turn out to be like. Maybe that worry was really behind their objection....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
HPTP - HyperPorn Transport Protocol
So many people would like that one more I think.
Everyone agrees the idea is dumb. However I think it might be possible to hit this from the other direction. Basically the problem with an open internet is kids and access to questionable materials. What about having a collection of servers that agree to recieve on another port (say 2083) where everyone on 2083 is child friendly. Then kids software can just block port 80 and not block 2083. The internet exchanges simply don't allow 2083 in internationally so no problems with foreign access.
Heck I'll even be happy to have focus on the family or whatever certify 2083 content. 2083 becomes "clean http" and the rest of us can go about our business without worrying about holy rollers.
We could even go further. 2083 is G rated
2084 is PG (say for kids 8+)
2085 is PG-13 (10+)
etc...
This could work very much like the MPAA.
Why do you believe that?
A significant number of the people clamouring for restrictions on porn do it based on arguments centered around morality, degradation or violence. If they believe porn to be degrading, morally reprehensible or cause increased violent behavior, why would they stop just because they were given "protection" for themselves?
These people are in it for the long haul - if they can't get broad prohibitions, they'll chip away at the "problem" one bit at a time.
If we had mandatory .xxx domains, we'd have much less teenagers accessing unwanted porn sites, because their parents would have enabled the .xxx domain blocking.
Did you know that ONLY ONE porn site can have registered THOUSANDS OF DIFFERENT DOMAIN NAMES?. How do you expect us to block them all, heh?
Adding a simple filter to "*.xxx" is so simple. But thanks to your stupidity, porn is STILL uncensored and running rampant.
Thank you! Why don't you call your group "Porn for Christ", "Christians for pornography" or something?
Morons.
Geez, do Slashdot editors read the other articles? Ralph "scumbag" Yarro is the guy from Canopy
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Almost all porn is violent. Really.
Have you looked at whats out there in 2005? I can think of a handful of fairly famous photographers who seem to appreciate women (yay Petter Hegre!) , the rest of it
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
If we just ban the food, all the rest will just work themselves out. We all know that eating food leads to music, bible and porn related injuries. I don't have detailed figures on this, but I bet that over 99% of all porn/music/bible related injuries happen within 24 hours of food use.
ian
Does anyone have any better ideas as to how to stop this unprecedented assault on our sensibilities, fuelling addiction and debasing our society? I'm all for something - obviously a TLD called .xxx would be easily bypassed by ip addresses. How about a range of IP addresses?
Women have been limiting the entry ports for sexual contents for ages now, so how is this new?
This guy is a nutcase...
l for the list.
At a minimum, he likes to reappropriate property from the public commons into his back pocket, either through litigation or legislation. Here's the run-down on his racket:
1. Create the controlling thinktank that holds controlling interests in all your ventures: http://www.thinkatomic.com/
2. Create a bunch of "portfolio" companies (not operating companies, but incorporated legal entities with domain names registered and parked and separate financials to channel the money through). See http://www.thinkatomic.com/business/portfolio.htm
3. Organize one as the nonprofit to push the allegedly idealistic idea through with the presentation that you won't individually profit. CP80.org is playing this role. Lead with a public presence, website, a PR firm, etc.
4. Hold submarine patents or other IP work in process in another organization. I'm guessing EXO Applied Science will play that role, but it's just a guess.
5. Have yet another organization come out with the licensed technology to sell to others - or just license it for use. Surf Recon or Jumpseed might be those organizations. Jumpseed has a misconfigured website running Apache on CentOS here: http://www.jumpseed.com/
6. Have attorneys ready to chase IP infringement (ala SCOG).
It appears to be a SCOG racket again, except this time with a legislative requirement angle. Someone needs to run USPTO patent searches on these company names and the principals as well.
Once again the "moral" morons of the world shoot themselves in the foot.
.porn domain. But "no one " wanted the .porn domain becasue it would encourage porn... sounds like the same stupid argument used against contraception.
.porn domain?
The easiest way to have been able to block all porn would have been to restrict porn to the
So... no we're going to break tcp/ip to do the same thing we could have done easily with the
"This petition shows the government just how many people really oppose this horrendous imagery,"
50,000. Out of how many people? I wonder how many refused to sign her petition?
So the guy was supposedly 'obsessed' - nevermind that anti-pornorgraphy types will define almost any viewing of pornography as being obsessed, just like anti-some-drugs types define any recreational use of illegal drugs as drug abuse - but is there any evidence that his viewing pornography resulted in him becoming a killer or did it perhaps actually delay his move into killing?
And I certainly wouldn't trust the British authorities to have any sort of rational attitude when it comes to what should or should not be banned.
"You see real women wearing pigtails much past the age of about twelve"
Girls love it, especially when attending events like raves.
There's a lot of rough pornography. There are also a lot of women who love rough sex. It is impossible to pigeonhole human sexual behaviour, declare these things normal and good, but those things deviant and bad.
And who knows where pornography would go if instead of constantly trying to wipe it out, a pointless endeavour, it was distributed as acceptable entertainment. It may be the case that pornography is the way it is because of constant attempts to suppress it.
And you can't generalise about consumers of pornography.
I think children should be simply banned from the internet.
that way adults can enjoy something without some fucking children ruining it.
Why complicate things.... Just set the already standard evil bit...
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
if you take some naughty images of you and your consenting partner that would fall under these new laws, then you'll be a criminal even if you have no intent of distributing these publically.
Actually, there was already a case brought against a group of gay S&M fetishists, who took videos of themselves in various sub/dom situations, and hammering nails into ... well, you can guess the rest. They were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and, IIRC found guilty - even though there was never any intention of distributing the material. What is being proposed here - and let me be clear, if I wasn't earlier - I think the proposal is not a sensible approach - is the enclosure with the definition of Obscene Publications of violent sexual imagery.
IMHO, there is a world of difference between child pornography and simulated rape and mutilation scenes between consenting adults [NB: if the photos are the result of actual rapes or mutilations, then they are already considered obscene by virtue (or vice) of the non-consensual element]
The evidence that I have checked out in this area indicates that consumers of child pornography tend (note that word) to be more likely to act as child abusers. I am certainly willing to be convinced otherwise, but in this case, I agree with the ban on such materials being in the public domain, in order to safeguard the likely violations of rights to children which might otherwise occur. But that's where it stops. I don't support the extension of such bans to violent sexual imagery. Libertarians might well disagree with me, but that's surely their right.
--NgI am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
We have laws against obscene material.
Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) gave us a three part test. A jury must answer yes to all three questions.
1 Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
2 Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law;
3 Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
This is a factual issue to be determined by a jury.
Your argument is facile and repeated far to often.
If Mr. Yarro hates porn he doesn't need to download it. Very simple. But interestingly Mr. Yarro has a not just a history of lobbying but one of mental problems. I just hope the next institution he is seeking out for treatment will keep him for a while.
Probably true, but I haven't seen any statistics on this. Running counter to this is the fact that those jumping on the "porn isolation" bandwagon are from Oregon, where you are most likely to find the morality-centered argument. Either way, I feel that the most significant number of people just want to keep it out of their homes and away from their children (purely conjecture on my part).
If they believe porn to be degrading, morally reprehensible or cause increased violent behavior, why would they stop just because they were given "protection" for themselves?
Look at it this way ... if you isolate the porn, you have two positive side effects. The first is that you remove the support of the people who are only trying to keep porn away from their children. The second is that you yank the legs out from under one of the best arguments of those who want to do away with porn completely. Somebody mentioned earlier that it would be great if the porn industry would do this voluntarily. I agree. That would keep additional laws from hitting the books while at the same time diminishing the perceived problem.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Lots of religous folks in the Mormon capital of the world. A local-yocal jury might not want to convict the great crusader against pornography.
This strategy has worked successfully for others.
Yarro owns 40% of SCOX.
DISCLAIMER: I AM AN UN-ORTHADOX MORMON
It wouldn't be to far from what the Chinese are doing with the internet in their country, except now it is a whole state doing it. Actually, something like would work, it may get struck down by the US Supreme Court, but there are so many sheep^H^H^H^H^HMormons, who would vote for a constitutional amendment just cause their (perceived, all be it false) notion of the "Prophet" desiring such legislation.
Kind of funny, seeing that the University of Utah was apart of Arpanet, though, to be fair, the U is not very Orthodox Mormon friendly (and good for them, some one has to counter balance BYU).
Problem is, few sites take advantage of kids.us; nearly all kid sites are NOT in kids.us. One problem may be that it appears there's a single monopolist in control of the domain registration; that means higher domain prices, and more importantly, any kid site in kids.us would put their entire business under the control of that monopolist. There may be other problems, too.
Which is too bad. I think the basic idea of kids.us is actually sound. We need to find a way to eliminate risks to the organizations signing up to kids.us, and and then encourage them to use it. If there were a "safe for the kids" area on the Internet, perhaps some of the other concerns would be reduced.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
This could just be the inet version of upper shelf magazines in the Convenience Store.
The porn industry knows what they do - they arent stupid. They dont need to be protected as a disadvantaged group. They do need to be regulated.
It is to their benefit to formalize their place on the internet. With this change instead of being somebody who "snuck in" they could now be recognized as an Adult Business with a recognized distribution mechanism.
It wont solve any problems of predatorship, or exploitations. But it will allow the "businesses' to separate itself from the criminals to some degree.
I'm not sure if it's more amusing or disturbing that this guy wants to fix a social issue with technology. Seriously, if porn in the workplace is a problem in your office... hire better people.
Only on Slashdot does a "Right to Porn" issue get front page billing. Strange. It's as if the current slashdot crowd would contend that there is absolutely nothing wrong with pornography. Somehow I don't think any of the framers of the Constitution had pornography in mind. Lincoln probably wouldn't have thought of the "right to porn" as an inalienable right. Sigh...
1.2.3.4porn.fun
And you can now go to http://porn.fun/ for all of your porn needs.
On top of this, have none of these "technology businessmen" ever heard of proxies? It would be trivial for me to setup a proxy server at home, which I can browse to on port 80, and then have it send request on to wherever I want it to. Worse, I would expect that we'll see a bunch of these pop up after this sort of thing is enacted. Heck, you might be able to make money off this sort of thing.
- Setup a port 80 proxy
- Sell access
- ??? - Afterall, the last thing you would want is logs for the FBI/CIA/Stazi to seize
- Profit!!!
Either way, this CP80 idea is just as stupid as anything you'd expect from people associated with SCO.Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
would answer "no" to all of the above questions, in *all* circumstances. It's my firm opinion that:
1. every average modern person should find sex acts depiction appealing and interesting;
2. what is the applicable law? why should legislation apply to consenting intimate acts of people?
3. every single smut has serious artistic value IMO.
And I know *lots* of people that think similarly to me, at least WRT #3.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
"has been building and developing technology companies such as Altiris Inc. and SCO Group Inc." Yes, that SCO group.
No Sigs!
Here is the best way to protect your children from bad things online: 1. Grab the phone or network cable in your hand 2. Pull 3. Temporarily reverse these steps when you can look over your kid's shoulders.
...is force Microsoft to put effective popup blockers and spam filters into Windows software. I have this stuff with Linux, and I'm never invaded by unwanted porn.
Microsoft, Real, etc. won't do this themselves, because making it easy for porncasters ensures adoption of Microsoft software. Do a porn search with your favorite file sharing app, and see how many files are MS formats compared to others. This is because MS makes it easier to serve, and serve additional advertising with, Windows Media. I'm starting to see obnoxious popups with Real Media files now too. Even NPR is doing it!
You see real women wearing pigtails much past the age of about twelve? NONONONONONONONONO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don't like pigtail porn either, it's stupid. That said, you are wrong. There are plenty of women wearing pigtails. I was just at a birthday party last night and someone had them. I think she's mid 30s. Go to a college campus and you'll see lots of pigtails. Oh, and how come you know so much about this porn you claim to hate?
"I highly doubt that comes remotely close to an actual representation of sex for 99% of the population"
Well, everybody looks at Vogue and Cosmopolitan as the representation of beauty, but for 99% of the population, its not true.
I just tell my kids that everything on the Internet is a lie. They seem to have gotten by so far with that little jem.
The original post is fairly misleading. According to the linked article, the proposal is not limited to porn sites. The proposal implies that ALL web content be categorized into channels.
In Lorain, OH, the library had computers with internet access set aside for kids and only kids (under the age of 12, I believe, and I think they changed it to under 9). They also only had chairs in that area that were comfortable only for small children.
They also had and have a disclaimer that they would not be stand-ins for parents.
Talks with the staff demonstrated that they were unaware that:
1. Children of such an age should not be unaccompanied by adults.
2. Most children of that age cannot read and lack other skills necessary for the utilization of a computer.
3. To the extent that some of the children are school age, they are required by law to be in school for a specified time several times out of the year, during which they cannot use the library computers set aside for them.
4. While adults generally have to have jobs, their job options are flexible enough that a good number of them can be into the library during the time that children of school age have to be in school.
5. People are children of the ages that they have computers set aside for, for a relatively short time of their lives, so the number of patrons that are not in that category vastly outnumber those that are.
On the basis of these facts, I tried to explain to them that dedicating those computers for the use of children was an extremely inefficient use of resources, but they would not hear me out.
They do not appear to have material regarding their computer allocation and policy regarding chld only computers online, so it's hard to speak definitively, but the whole point is to illustrate how those who try to make decistions with kids in mind may have no idea what a kid is, nor remember their own childhood well.
I don't know what some people feel they are accomplishing by mocking attempts like this.
In truth, looking at porn only leads to captivity, so I would think that those who love freedom would be more interested in trying to eliminate porn from their lives rather than trying to mock attempts to do so, even if the attempt may have some technological flaws.
Personally, I love freedom, therefore I try to avoid porn as much as possible, and if some law is going to make it that much easier for me to avoid porn by putting it all in a single TCP port, so much the better for me and my family. Why? Because porn is not worth protecting!
And being married, I love sex too, but I love how sacred sex is. For those of you who have never been married and never experienced how wonderful sex is within marriage, with complete fidelity, let me tell you, it is totally worth it. The world tells us so many lies about sex, that it is sad.
Porn is just a big lie. Instead of trying to save it, let's just be rid of it. Sure this guy's attempt may have some technological flaws, but at least he's trying.
Whats the matter, Slashdot? Arbitrary govt regulation got you down? Why don't I hear all the advocates of the .XXX TLD applauding this effort...? Seems to me the technical challenges are roughly the same, and so are the moral "goals" of the project, right?
.XXX advocacy really about forcing porn into the mainstream like I told you it was?
Whats the matter, Slashdot? Had a change of heart? Or was
The net effect of this proposal is that it would require the ISP to essentially do content filtering. Since even a passing knowledge of the internet shows that you can't legislate this solution worldwide, it effectively forces the ISP to monitor compliance with the "porn port". It can't work any other way.
...and of course once you do that, its an easy leap to say "well, you already monitor for porn, you should also monitor for copyright violations, slander, libel, and unamerican activities".
And once you do that, the slippery slope is the ISP becomes more than just a provider of bandwidth. Either criminal or civil lawsuits would force each of the ISPs to monitor what goes on each port.
What a slippery slope.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Wouldn't a better solution be to not view pornography if it offends you? I know it's scandalous, but not everyone is offended by porn; some couples even enjoy viewing it together.
See, I seem to remember back in the day before this whole an-internet-account-in-every-pot thing when the best firewall for pornograpy was giving your kids a good solid beating when they looked at shit they were expressly told not to look at.
Didn't even require $600,000 worth of printing up legislative documents, either.
s'wut i sed.
I don't know what some people feel they are accomplishing by attempts to fight decisions about what content I can and cannot see like this.
In truth, limiting my choices for me only leads to my passivity, so I would think that those who love the new freedom would be more interested in trying to eliminate choice from their lives rather than trying to rely on education and self-responsibility, even if freedom of choice may have some human-nature flaws.
Personally, I love being freed from responsibility, therefore I try to avoid self-responsibility as much as possible, and if some law is going to make it that much easier for me to avoid the burdens of making decisions and self responsibility by putting it all in in the hands of someone else, so much the better for me and my family. Why? Because free thiking is not worth protecting!
And being lazy, I love free thinking too, but I love how easy giving it all over to a theocracy is. For those of you who have never given in and and never experienced how wonderful letting others make your choices for you, with complete supplication, let me tell you, it is totally worth it. The Elders tell us so many simplicities about life, but thinking of all the decisions I would have to make on my own just makes me sad.
Freedom is just a big lie. Instead of trying to save it, let's just be rid of it. Sure this guy's attempt may have some ideological flaws, but at least he loves Jesus.
s'wut i sed.
i find puritan jesusfreaks offensive. can we possibly restrict them, along with 737 club (or whatever it's called) and the rest of their propaganda, to certain ports, times and channels? if they can ask for legislation restricting that which offends *them*, i'd like to see that which offends me legislated away as well.
If you think porn scars a kid... wait until he gets a girlfriend.
~Ben
Actually, I can, and do say so. They don't even make my top 10, except peripherally the Hummer H2 bit.
- Abortions used to be illegal, and we had lots of abortions; the debate is whether to make it illegal, which does very little of any actual consequence, except decrease the quality of medical care overall.
- Prayer in schools? Another non-issue. It turns into government sanctioned religion eventually, and gets kicked out as unconstitutional. It's against my religion to take the Pledge of Allegiance, but they do that in most schools in the country; I learned early on you can say "WHY pledge allegiance..." and nobody can tell the difference.
- Intelligent Design/Evolution -- Nobody who's ever done the Creationism/Intelligent design thing in office in the last 2 decades has ever stayed in office long enough to make it happen. Non-issue.
- Taxing the rich? The rich have never payed taxes noticably. Non-issue.
- Drilling in the ANWR -- A damned shame, but barely a scratch in the surface of our overall environmental/climate quagmire, and a complete diversion from the real related issues (e.g. stopping the use of petroleum for fuel, etc.)
- Balanced Budget/Deficit Spending -- these are just more and less direct methods of taxation.
- One you don't mention -- Fighting Terrorism -- Deaths due to terrorism are nothing compared to deaths due to disease, natural disaster, and famine soon to come from climate change. Heck, the Tobacco companies kill way more people in a week than terrorists kill in a year. (well, roughly that proportion, I haven't looked up the exact numbers lately.)
Most of these issues are in fact short-term smoke-screens, designed to get you emotionally riled up; but when you look at things like what actually kills innocent people in large numbers, (even if you count embryos as innocent people, depending on your religious leanings) these issues don't even make any kind of a prioritized list.Instead, we should be
- massively improving education (class sizes in the 5-10 kids/teacher range), so that we have more graduates capable of contributing to the
remaining items.
- (Here in the USA, anyhow) ramping up the CDC, FEMA, and other organizations that directly save lives, rather than cutting their budgets and responsibilities.
- Similarly putting way more money into similar United Nations organizations.
- Figuring out how to run our economy without fossil fuels, and how to
get the C02 levels in the atmosphere back down.
- completly redesigning transportation to be orders of magnitude safer and not use non-renewable fuels.
- take our most efficient helthcare system (Medicare, not any private insurance company) and take the age limit out of it, and give it to everyone. Let the insurance companies make money on fires, or go out of business on hurricanes (as global warming combined with long term trends scrubs our southern coasts clean of civilization...)
</rant-mode>So anyway, I do think both major parties (and most of the small ones, too) have entirely the wrong priorities. The Green party has the closest to the right direction, but even there only in the broadest of terms, and they've demonstrated no facility with winning elections.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
I agree it's really tough to know exactly where to draw the line on judging porn vs non-porn. My vote for where to begin segregation (until we have a better consensus) is any site requiring payment for viewing.
If you want money for your pics (or other content), it must be segregated, along with all promotional material (no free samples available to non-porn channels).
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
When somebody comes up with an obviously stupid idea and takes it right to the top like this, they tend to reply to all the people that laugh at them along the lines of "Well, whey laughed at <insert name of now recognised genius>."
This should be called "the <someone> effect" where <someone> is the name of somebody who had a chronically stupid idea that WAS indeed found to be completely stupid. Of course almost by definition the name of that <someone> would now mean nothing to anyone, but are there any exceptions? Any suggestions?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I don't know about USofAn constitution, but our constitution gives people the right to privacy. That means IOW that I do have the right to commit ANY consensual intimate act with ANY person that is capable of giving consent and with ANY inanimate objects of my lawful possession; zoophilia / necrophilia / pedophilia not included because I would be trampling on OTHER's (animal or people) rights. So, despite of the costumes of the populace of the place I live I would like to be able to have consensual oral sex with seven women if it's alright to you.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
A near technical impossibility but I'm sure the sailors would be happy!
nt
Yes they should. They want the service, they pay for it. Lots of places to buy it from, too.
Other than that, stay the fuck away from my wallet, leech.
Talk about overkill! Why couldn't you just have limited .gov sites just to allow oral sex?
=P
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
You raise valid points, yet what you say with regard to adults and porn comes down to personal responsibility.
Porn raises expectations too much? True, but porn has also helped a lot of couples to spice up their relationship.
Porn can be addictive? Yes, but so can cigarettes and alcohol. That's why access for children is restricted, but adults can still smoke and drink themselves to death.
Porn isn't that different from other potentially dangerous "hobbies". I don't want legislation to handle the decision-making for me. Again, this is about porn and adults. With kids, it's a different issue.
fyngyrz! That is perhaps one of the best ideas I have read on slashdot (minus the acronyms). This idea would work even better than the proposed porn-port, just based on sheer volume - there is waaaaaaaaaay more porn on the Internet, it's just easier to block off the religious nuts to their own separate neighborhoods.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
The opinion of one adult actress is not exactly proof. And the power she claims to have over men is rather volatile.
I think it's quite obvious that exploitation has to be reevaluated with every single porn movie or photo set. Some objectify and degrade women, some don't. Besides you'll probably get differing opinions for every single case. Try to get a soccer mom from the Bible Belt and an Amsterdam bar owner to agree on this topic.
There is just too much different porn out there to classify it all as either degrading or not degrading. It's like saying all novels are interesting, funny or boring.
Right?
You know the kind with the hansom young Nazi officer on all fours with a leash around his balls being held by a burly black man saying, "So, what were you a saying about being part of the master race?"
que the porn music
that's still ok right?
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
I'm currently getting ready to set up a squid proxy/content filter for a local boys and girls club. The lab has 30-40 kids ranging from 6-10 years old with only one instructer... huge liability. The thing that strikes me as wierd is that the internet is full of FREE porn, but good porn blacklists cost big bucks (well for a small town boys&girls club anyway). Most offer "grey lists" and age appropriate lists. If these politicians really want to help they would hire a good blacklisting company to provide these lists for free. Then there would be no major change in the internet and people who need to do some filtering (like childrens charities) could choose to use the filtering. dan
The "com" or "net" that you're referring to aren't just added to the URL, they're how your site is found. There's actually an implied . at the end of every URL, so http://slashdot.org/ is actually http://slashdot.org./ and then it is somewhat similar to the way you would use the directories on your computer, but in the opposite direction, and some more details. So if you're looking for http://slashdot.org/ it first goes to ".", which is overall, then finds "org" within ".", then finds "slashdot" within "org" and that's how you get here. If there are subdomains, like "yro.slashdot.org" or "politics.slashdot.org", then it keeps going down the line. There's a few more things in there, but they don't really matter for the sake of this discussion.
As for creating an ".xxx" in place of ".com" for all porn sites, even if it were possible, there's no way to gaurantee that all porn sites will be in the ".xxx" domain, or that all sites in ".xxx" are even porn.
".tv" is a good example. ".tv" is supposed to belong to a country in the Pacific. However a few years ago when it was first found out that ".tv" was the countries domain, television shows wanted to use the names in ".tv" because it would be perfect for them because they are TV shows. You could enforce other sites not getting into it with strict regulations I suppose, but then you'd have to define what is pornography,which could eventually lead to what pornagrophy is allowed, etc etc.
Also, there is then no way to make sure that a porn site is not outside of ".xxx", in fact, if you make regulations on ".xxx" then it'd be easier to make a new porn site just a ".com" instead of a ".xxx".
I am generally against censorship, but in the case of porn, I agree that there are times and places where it is not appropriate... e.g., schools and libraries. Ensuring that such places have a reliable means of blocking it would actually serve to protect the right of everyone else to view it, by providing an officially sanctioned venue for its publication.
Unfortunately, Shrub opposes the creation of the .XXX TLD. It's not enough for the NeoCons that kids should be prevented from seeing porn; they don't want anyone to have access to it. Creating a .XXX TLD could be seen as legitimizing the Constitutionally-protected exercise of Free Speech that is the porn industry.
My comment is not a troll, it is my honest opinion. Moderating me down just because you have a difference of opinion is abuse of moderation.
I think this Utah proposal has merit and I support it. If you want to spend your time mocking, that is your choice, but I can tell you that I've found a lot of happiness and self-esteem avoiding porn (and tissues as you call it) and without hesitation I recommend to everyone to avoid porn like they would a deadly disease. I don't look at porn, because I don't want my self-esteem lowered, I don't want to be miserable, I want to know who I am, and at best, I want to spend my time on other things.
If you want to have the choice whether to look at porn, you have to choose not to look at it. Anyone who has become addicted to porn will know what I mean.
Oh come on, Orrin is wacky, (same as Bennett) but with Utah being the reddest state in the union (yes, it is redder then Texas), their seats are the SAFEST of all the seats in the US Senate. Barring more people moving from California to Utah (which is happening), Orrin and Bob can come afford wacky radical right wing extremist ideas, the rest of Congress can not.
/. move to Utah county kind of like what the Free State project is doing in New Hampshire. As an added incentive to move, Provo has a FTTH project called iProvo that is going smoothly, and Fiber is being laid out in Orem, and other Utah counties via UTOPIA. Come on /. FIBER TO THE HOME! We can take over Utah!
Maybe that is what we need to do, organize a mass
Hello, world!
Better then the .xxx domain, or this silly port/channel idea would be to phase out any root TLD that is not a country TLD. That means phasing out .com, .net, .org etc. Just stop registering new domain names for those TLD's, if a business wants a .com address, they can have .com.us, a non-profit? .org.us. This can also be done for any other country, a Canadian business? .com.ca UK? .com.co.uk and so on.
.us, so those that want a 'clean' internet can set their browser to only query the .us TLD and no other. P0rn could even be completely blocked on the .us domain. As long as there is an opt-out for those who want the p0rn, then this would be fine. Though you would still have plan IP addresses to deal with, that is easy to handle with geo-location (whatever the technically word is, I do know that all IP addresses are at least associated with a country). Of course I do not know if IPv6 has a similar method, though with the current rate of adoption of IPv6 with in America, that won't be a problem for a long time.
This is already done with other countries, google.ca is for Canada, google.co.uk is for the UK, google.de is for Germany and so on. Besides with search engines the way they are now, lengthy domain names are beginning to not matter as much as they once did.
If you do it this way, the US could enforce what ever the hell type of restrictions on
Note that the article said that the ridiculous port/channel approach was supposed to be an opt-in thing, where you opt-in to block all the p0rn ports/channels.
Similarly, back in March, when Utah passed another anti-porn bill, it was for opting in for a filter that ISP's where being forced to run. The filter would only be turned on if requested.
This is the key, and an understanding of the Mormon concept of Free Agency is helpful to see why Utah is creating these laws that are for opting in and not outright banning p0rn all together.
Unlike what most Mormon missionaries (DISCLAIMER: I was one) would like you to believe that are a vast number of theological differences between Mormonism and Christianity. I would contend that Mormonism is NOT Christianity, and that Christianity today does not follow the true teachings of the man Jesus of Nazareth. Many of these differences are obvious, and despite the Churches recent attempts to white wash it's history, they are still present in an abundance of literature, most of it online. Polygamy is is most famous, with Blood Atonement, and Adam-God running close second and third. These former teachings are not actively taught in Mormon circles and are even condemned as heresy.
Something that is commonly taught is the doctrine of Free Agency. With in Mormonism, forcing someone to do something is not 'Christ like', in fact, Lucifer, when presenting his plan on how he would bring about the salvation of man said that he would make sure everyone would be saved, taking all the honor away from the Father. This would be done by taking away mans free agency. Jesus stepped up and said he would preserved the agency of man, giving the Honor to the Father, and not taking it himself, even if not all men where 'saved'. Jesus' plan was chosen, and as a result, Lucifer rebelled, began the 'War in Heaven' and was cast out (down).
This is why the Mormons in Utah will never out right ban p0rn where the Southern Baptist and other "Christians" will. Mormons are pro-life, and anti-homosexual marriage, however, to many "Christians", on the abortion issue, Mormons have it wrong. With in the Mormon Church, abortion is allowable in the cases of rape, incest, or if the health of the mother is in jeopardy. To "Christians" who believe life
I couldn't find an appropriate article to post this under - so repost it for max visibility. http://forums.torrentspy.com/showthread.php?t=2467 5
well ports may be out of the question, but what we could do is allocate a specific ip range to pornographic content.. that would be much easier to impliment.. and block ;)
I think you might be confused.
Perhaps you are really libertarian and don't know it.
You should try The World's Smallest Political Quiz (it only takes about 45 seconds):
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
Most liberals (and unfortunately some conservatives too these days) want MORE government intervantion in their lives, not LESS. The founding principles of the libertarian movement are:
1) limited govenrment
2) individual liberties
3) free markets
According to your post, it looks like you meet 2 out of the 3 of those.
Here are some links for further reading on the topic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.lp.org/
Libertas in infinitum
Shrinking the federal government to increase state government responsibility? Now you sound like an old-school Republican... geeze!!
ha ha ha.... I am just messing with ya, but in all seriousness I'm glad there are still people who consider themselves liberal these days that do not have these idiot whack-job psuedo-intellectual attitudes about things. In other words there are still intelligent liberals around.
My hat off to you - and I love the Sneakers sig!
Libertas in infinitum
This means that people who WANT to filter it can do it easily, and those who DON'T want to filter it will no longer have to worry about their ISP doing it against their will.
Is it reasonable to believe that those who want this filtered want this only for themselves? Why would they want that? Because they are afraid of "accidentally" looking at pr0n themselves? Because they are bad parents and don't know what their kids are doing on the computer?
Hardly. Those who complain about pr0n are complaing about other people's "immorality", not their own. The freedoms they want to take away is the freedoms of other people, not their own.
People, just RTFM! Condoms come with clear instructions on how to use them properly. We (me and my girlfriend) have been using condoms for birth-control for over 4 years. We have NEVER encountered ANY of the problems you mention.
- If they slip off, then maybe you need a condom with a smaller diameter or maybe you are not putting it on correctly. After ejaculating, you should promptly and carefully pull out while holding the condom in place. It's all in TFM!
- If they tear, there must be a lack of lubrication, which can't be pleasant for your partner even if you don't use condoms. Use (water based) lube or, what we prefer, more foreplay.
- Yes, you shouldn't store them in wallets (again, RTFM).
- As for the comment on overflowing.. That's just plain FUD. It may feel like it is more but the amount of ejaculate is measured in milliliters. There is a large enough reservoir in the condom for that.
A happy condom user.
You are hitting the nail, not squarely, but very close.
The idea of "I-know-porn-when-I-see-it" is not something that can be applied objectively, only subjectively by each individual person. For instance (and this is just one of hundreds I can think of), there are people out there who find depictions of automobile accident scenes to be highly erotic. For them, an auto accident is pornography. For others, it is simply a bad (or sometimes, horrific) scene that you pass by on the way to work (I don't understand it, but then again they may not understand my desires, either, right?). Think about that the next time you are near an accident and are slowed by a bunch of rubberneckers - how many of them are "creaming their jeans", so to speak?
Since such people exist, it is therefore logically impossible to define what is or what is not pornography. Pornography is what people subjectively view and experience it to be.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
BUSH/HITLER/NAZI connections:
http://www.khou.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8028
BUSH/Wall Street/Insider Trading connections:
http://www.khou.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8353
BUSH Brain Chemistry :
http://www.khou.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4455
You are incorrect. Ejaculate volume, like everything else to do with our reproductive systems, varies from person to person, and while you may be able to use a condom without overflowing, the next person (specifically, me, as it turns out) cannot. You can leave extra space at the end, and the condom can move (either way) especially if there is pre-ejaculate lubricating it — even if the darn thing is so tight you can barely tolerate it. Another issue is time; the average encounter lasts just a few minutes. For those who approach the issue for longer, a condom has to deal with a lot more challenges... at that juncture, presumptions that hold for the average couple are no longer valid.
Don't get me wrong: I glad you've been successful. But other people's mileage does indeed vary. Your experience doesn't trump the numerous studies that have been done on the issue, nor does it trump other experiences, such as my own. All you (and I) can really do is put examples out that we are sure of. You report unmitigated success; I have seen failure personally. And I am not ignorant of how to use them, of that you may be quite certain.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Lats take these out of order:
A kid can be savvy about a lot of things and ignorant of others. You asserted that childen do not know about the profit angle. I argued that what makes the difference is education. You then responded by pointing out a child who was smart enough to download porn.
This is orthagonal to my point. Just because a child is smart enough to download porn means nothing about their comprehension level. Children can and should be educated about the nature of sex, porn, etc.
With respect to d) and "feminist/boy toys" a) Maureen Dowd does not speak fo everyone or even a majority. In my opinion you made a broad sweeping generalization about "feminists" and then used that as if it was an exact statement. It is not. I could just as easily claim that "conservatives are evil" or "liberals love beastiality" as I could present one or two vocal examples of each but that means nothing.
On a side note, the ACLU is not a feminist group, they are focused on defending the Bill of Rights. That has included, at times, defending the right of people like Sean Hannaty to broadcast his anti-feminist homophobic views.
With respect to "kids performing oral sex" I too have seen those stories, so what? This may sound extreme but hear me out. Ten years ago there were loads of stories about gangs operating in clean-cut suburban schools. Most of those stories proved to be exaggerated at best. Ten years before that it was stories about stanic cults among teenages, again exaggerated.
I do not consider the news media to be a source of valid occurance data. It is rare that the rate of stories about an act correlate with the rate of the act itself. To that end I seek long-term longitudinal data. The google link provided none that I saw.
with respect to this:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Nor is it clear what respect I was or was not extending. Thuought my entire post I was arguing for the primacy of education as a tool to deal with problems. In particular I was arguing that real educational solutions are the best bet.
With respect to the links that you did provide. None of them showed that this is a common phoenomenon or
How many people know what ports are/do? More people could figure out that .xxx was porn. For those reasons, they probably don't want people to have an .xxx domain as it makes the porn that much easier to get (for those bleeding-heart anti-porn crusaders)
And most of my fellow Christians don't understand that seperation of church and state is A GOOD THING!
Iran is an examploe of a nation that has NO seperation of church and state.
See here is the thing, yeah it's all fun and games if the people that hold your belief are able to exercise power over the law, however when people who don't agree with you hold the power, the tables are turned.
This is again why the government should be limited to its most basic functions.
I used to be a Republican and then grew up and discovered they are practiaclly just as sorry as the Democrats. In fact they might as well be one single party with only minor differences: the Demorubs or the Republicrats.
In 2000 I almost voted for Pat Buchanan but lived in Florida and would've rather have had Bush than Gore, and in 2004 I voted for Mike Badnarik the Libertarian canididate. Unfortunately though so many people tend to vote for the 'lesser of the two evils'.
The only time in recent history that we had a real debate was when Ross Perot forced the two major parties to discuss issues and not just soundbites. If you remember, he did research, showed charts, facts, figures, and hard data. He didn't do sounbites, feel-good statements, or political bs. For a breif moment in time the US was FORCED to look at the issues in a quantative perspective.
I would like to see the Green Party have more membership as well as the Libertarians and perhaps even the Reform Party. Anything to detract from this two-party political oligopoly that currently exists.
Libertas in infinitum
I know it when I see it.
Translation: Porn is very subjective and I'll tell you what it is.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Cheap shots and pr0n humor are easy, but the fact is that these people seriously want to overhaul the Internet Protocol and believe that they can do it by legislation. And much of the Utah congressional delegation seems to agree. This makes it both ignorant and dangerous. The only defense against this is education - they need to understand how IANA and the IETF work, and push their stupid ideas there instead of to their legislators. Then they will get the appropriate technical treatment, and bluster about protecting the kids will be useless.
Hmm. "Utah." Ring a bell?
That "other person" was me.
No. I outright own my various operations. If I want to download prawn, I can. Sadly, I'm usually too busy at work. My SO and I do check out the goods at home, though. I deserve a little credit for that, I think.
My post was intended to demonstrate how ridiculous, and offensive, censorship is in any venue, via humor. I'm truly sorry you didn't understand.
Frankly, I don't see a lack of sexual morality as one of the larger challenges we face.
We have an utterly unjust war going on, our civil rights are being rapidly eroded by local, state and federal government, school boards (of all people) are trying to re-define what science means, children carry guns to school, drunks turn cars into ballistic weapons and get to walk away while munchie-addled pot smokers go to jail, our president is a drooling moron, a huge portion of the nation has no healthcare...
You know, I just can't get worked up about someone pumping hormones over depictions of sexual activity as an actual "problem", other than as one more vector for the government to attempt to control the population. If that's the main focus of your attention, then you and I are two very different people. My concerns about actual sexuality are limited to informed consent and physical safety. I rather think those should be the government's concerns as well, and that should be the end of it. I suspect you wouldn't want my morals forced on you; the reverse is also true: I am almost certainly not interested in conforming to your idea of morals.
So... you seriously believe I was suggesting we put religion and politics on ports we can close... not just nationally, but involving the UN... and leave porn running free around the net.
Listen... I have this really, really terrrrific bridge I'd like to sell, and as it happens, I'm going to make you a very special offer (strictly because I like you... you're obviously a fine, thoughtful fellow.) It's in Brooklyn, and once you own it, you can charge tolls, whatever you want. Just ten thousand bucks, and it's yours. You could make the purchase price back in one day, and hey, I'll let you have $5000 credit, so you only have to pay 1/2 down, the rest when you get it, no hurry, because I trust you. What do you say?
Am I still being too subtle for you?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.