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. "

Comments

I guess working with SCO caused his brain to rot

[vidarh]

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...

UK Woman is trying to 'block' violent Porn sites

[joely]

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!

Re:Qualifications

[AndroidCat]

Sure, after all, his company has such an impressive web site, if you like 100% Flash and no content except meaningless buzzwords.

Re:UK Woman is trying to 'block' violent Porn site

[Ngwenya]

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.

--Ng

Re:Why it wouldn't work

[hey!]

Broadly, this is John Milton's argument against censorship in his famous essay Areopagitica.

It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious;
[...]
  If he be of such worth as behooves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes.
[...]
  no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own hours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put himself to the salary of a press corrector; we may easily foresee what kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary.

In short:

1. Men worthy of the post of censor must be of uncommon virtue and character.
   
2. Such men will necessarily find wading through vulgar materials distasteful and will seek to vacate the post.
   
3. Therefore, ultimately the system must eventually employ the unvirtuous.
   

Milton was talking about theological writings here, but in this case the point is that the job of censor is a natural magnet for perverts. To this he adds a psychological argument about the way people use information:

To the pure, all things are pure; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

[..]
... best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.

It may be that people have a set-point for titillation, the way some people think we have a set point for fat metabolism. To the Victorians, the sight of an ankle, or a woman in the very modest underclothese of the time, were no doubt as arousing as hard core porn is to modern Internet users. It may not be coincidental that prostitution was practiced on a scale never seen since.

Finally Milton makes another telling point about the legislation of morality:

If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress; foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?

Enshrining values in law only makes them superfluous.

Re:The xxx tld

[Snowhare]

Not an urban legend: Concerned Women for America - Tell Department of Commerce to Nix .XXX Domain. It's the old "You can't give it legal recognition because that would imply approval of it." You see the same behavior from the Christian Right regarding condom distribution, sex education, needle exchange programs, anti-homophobia campaigns and any other thing they view as 'enabling sin'.

Re:Let me guess:

[kyhwana]

You mean like http://www.empornium.us/ ?
It has lots of good porn, and usually good amounts of seeds.

Re:People should learn

[Toone_Town]

I agree - pornography is a HUGE problem in our society. Children are especially vulnerable...but the responsibility for filtering out such crap falls upon the parents - not upon legislation.

5 years ago, nearly half of all homes had an internet filter of some sort installed - now, only a quarter do. Is this because of the percieved inadequacies of filters? I agree that in the past they have had problems, but recently, there have been many advances which reduce false-positives (the "breast cancer" point is all but non-existant now).

You can get a filter for free at http://www.k9webprotection.com - they offer it as a community service. You can also find some for-profit filters reviewed at http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/.

More perspective

[scoove]

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:

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 /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).

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)

Re:utah and the internet

[S714726]

It's always wonderful when someone rips a web page in its entirety without citing any source. The first result from a Google search for the quote can be found here; this page credits a no-longer-existent page.

Re:Let me guess:

[LordLucless]

Same in New Zealanderese