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The .XXX Saga Continues in Wellington

netrover writes "CircleID is reporting on the latest developments on the .XXX top-level domain as the related ICANN meeting is currently underway in Welligton, New Zealand. From the article: 'The .XXX TLD was widely expected to receive its final approval at the ICANN's last meeting held in Vancouver about 4 months earlier but the discussion was unexpectedly delayed as the organization and governments requested more time to review the merits of setting up such a domain.' But as it has been reported, it appears the discussions at ICANN Wellington are in limbo once again."

24 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. No more new TLDs! by master_meio · · Score: 0, Insightful
    We have too many TLDs now. Remember all those stupid TLDs from the last round, like ".museum"? Nobody uses them. The big-name museums are under .org or a country domain. (Here's the complete list of domains registered under .museum. Most of them don't even work, and for the ones that do, they're usually an alternate name.) Have you ever seen a domain in ".aero" or ".pro"? ".biz" gets used, but mostly by sleazy operators. There are so few legitimate businesses in ".biz" that it has the reputation of a strip mall in South Central LA.

    ICANN should stop considering new TLDs. In fact, it might be worthwhile to start phasing out some of the newer TLDs due to lack of interest.

    1. Re:No more new TLDs! by rs79 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "We have too many TLDs now. Remember all those stupid TLDs from the last round, like ".museum"? Nobody uses them. "

      Once you understand that ICANN was captured by the trademark communiny it becomes cleat why they picked the absolute lamest of TLDs to go forward. So people like you would come to the conclusion you did. Of course the names they picked were stupid. The good ones still sit there. Oh, no, sorry, they don't according to ICANN they don't exist. Never mind they existed before ICANN did.

      ICANN's mandate is to preseeve "stability of the Internet". Whenever a dictator assumes power the reason given is always "to preserve stability". That's really what they say. Check it out for youself.

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
  2. If TLD were enforced like they are supposed to be by huhlig · · Score: 0, Insightful

    this would be an excellent ideas. All porn sites are moved to .xxx and any school business or other organization wishing to ban porn would simply ban .xxx . One would think it would be a simple solution

  3. I sure hope this doesn't happen. by the_macman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    First of all even if it DOES pass do they really think they're gonna be able to push all the porn sites into one domain...seriously. Secondly who is gonna be the comittee that sits down and says X is porn, Y isn't. Just how much of a breast can I show before it's porn? Will Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition become porn? This is my biggest concern. It just seems like too much of a damned fine line even bother passing this domain. Just my .02

  4. Re:Touching is crime by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Please, please don't use "grandfather" and "porn" in the same sentence again.

  5. Re:If TLD were enforced like they are supposed to by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This demonstrates how stupid most people are about DNS.

    What happens when the kid resolves .xxx, and types in the IP address? IP addresses don't end in .xxx. He's just sidestepped the filter.

    Would porn sites have to use email@porn.xxx for their emails? How about for their administrative FTP servers?

    This is not something you fix in DNS, you fix it elsewhere. Anyone that doesn't recognize this immediately, has *no business* taking part in the discussion.

  6. Much more useful than .info or .biz by TheLink · · Score: 2, Insightful

    To all of you who say you can't define porn etc etc.

    I believe the people providing porn and their target audience have a reasonable idea of what it is. If you create a .xxx TLD many of the relevant sites will have a presence there.

    Just skip any stupid legislation trying to pin it down or require sites to use it or to not use it.

    I mean when you do a Google search with site:.au you know you are looking for sites linked to or in Australia BUT of course it's not a 100% thing.

    Same goes for .xxx

    So I say it'll be useful to at least more people than it was to .biz or .info which the ICANN didn't seem to have any trouble approving.

    If I were in charge of approving TLDs, I'd approve .here and reserve it for public special use like the 192.168.x.x, 172.1x.x.x and 10.x.x.x addresses. So at least you can address devices or stuff that's kind of within the area". Like jukebox.here or whats.here, whos.here.

    The usefulness and novelty of being able to control a jukebox in UK from Turkmenistan wears off after a while. But as long as physical stuff remains important, it will remain useful to be able to address stuff by rough physical context/locality.

    With this, people don't have to change their domain search paths or even have one (for security or other reasons). They might even be able to bookmark standard URLs for setting their favourite airconditioner temperature or something like that.

    --
  7. Need 2 Types: .XXX and . ILL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Take a gander at myRedbook. It is a site that helps customers to hook up with prostitutes of a range of ages from a variety of countries. myRedbook has a discussion forum where customers brag about the sexual adventures that they "enjoy". myRedbook is not a joke.

    At Slashdot, we kid a lot about porn, but most of us are cool folks. We would never treat women in the trashy way that myRedbook promotes. We Slashdotters should use our skills to defeat the myRedbook scum.

    myRedbook is not your usual porn site. There should be two IP naming suffixes: .XXX and .ILL. Sites like Playboy or Penthouse get the .XXX. Sites like myRedbook get .ILL. ILL = illegal.

  8. Cost of enforcement? by The+Waxed+Yak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Good idea/bad idea issues aside, if this were made mandatory what would the enforcement cost be, and who would pay it?

    Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property. Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free .XXX domain)? If not, then would they strictly be dictating what kind of content I could put on my site?

    The former is reminiscent of "imminent domain" (pun intended), and the latter is a violation of my freedom of speech. The only remaining option I could see would be for them to buy me out, but who would foot the bill?

    Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't.

  9. Re:If TLD were enforced... USE reverse DNS by agentofchange · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Just use reverse DNS, granted not everyone would have it set up but most would.

    Also some filtering program should be able to easily associate IP's with DNS names using other methods.

  10. Re:Is this necessary? by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, Slashdot should remain slashdot.org, because it's entirely virtual (despite having a disproportionate number of US readers). There are a lot of sites that should be under country-code domains (all .gov and .mil sites come to mind, as well as every .com run by brick-and-mortar companies that only sell within the States), but Slashdot isn't one of them.

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  11. Re:Is this necessary? by MBCook · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The AC that replied to you is right. I haven't been on P2P in a while (the music died, man!) but if there is one thing that is one P2P it is porn. Every single kind you can think of is probably there. And it's free. I'm sure there is true amateur content that people made of themselves, movies people took off web sites and put up, scans of magazines, copies of DVDs and VHS cassettes, etc.

    I would be amazed, AMAZED if even 1/5 of the content on P2P networks was not porn.

    Do you know what found it's way onto the original Napster (what a great service) fast? Porn. Napster could only share MP3s, or so they thought. It quickly occurred to people that you could just rename your file to .MP3 and then it could be shared. Napster didn't care if your MP3 was 1 meg or 1 gig. You would search for some song and find files named "something about porn or content (change extension to avi).mp3".

    Plus there is what is on news groups (NNTP), the web, FTP sites, and who knows where else.

    Music is what made P2P famous in the press, but I'm sure it would be just as big and popular if MP3s never existed. Porn ends up driving just about every technology, like it or not.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  12. Re:Is this necessary? by mattwarden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I always get confused when I hear people whine about how ISPs and the government are encroaching on free use of the Web and promote ways of making things more distributed and much harder to control. Then, in a slightly different context, I hear people support ways to make it much easier for these entities to clamp down on how the Web is used. If it's made easier, people will do it. It's hard for you to filter Internet use because I and many others WANT it to be hard. I don't really care about you filtering your employees' use, and I even support that, but the problem is that any tool that can make it easier for you will make it easier for any other agency as well.

  13. Fundamental problem for govt's and .XXX by R2.0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The problem governments have with the .xxx domain is that, while it may make reguilation of porn easier (doubtful, by setting aside a domain for pornography, it _legitimatizes_ it. The govt would be in the uncomfortable position of saying that obscenity/pornography is bad, but here's a government approved place for it.

    It's analogous to the situation in Pennsylvania (and Montgomery County MD, where I live) with "states stores". In order to better regulate the sale of hard liquor (presumably more dangerous than beer), sales are only allowed through government owned stores. But this now makes the government the purveyor of a substance which can have dangerous consequences and bad societal results - alcoholism and drunk driving. And when this is pointed out, and the effectiveness of the "regulation" is called to question, the unspoken truth is that the State of PA and MontgoCo are as addicted to the money from sales as alcoholics are to what is sold.

    So Bush doesn't want .xxx to go into effect because it would be endorsing something he wants to eradicate; after all, if porn was gone, .xxx wouldn't be needed. If the next president is a Democrat, .xxx will be endorsed "for our protection" - along with hefty fees to pay for the implementation of said regulation. (e-rate, anyone?)

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
    1. Re:Fundamental problem for govt's and .XXX by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The problem governments have with the .xxx domain is that, while it may make reguilation of porn easier (doubtful, by setting aside a domain for pornography, it _legitimatizes_ it.

      Porn is ALREADY legitimized. Haven't you heard of USC 2257? Also known as "All models depicted or filmed in this website are 18 or older".

      Sorry, but I don't buy that legitimization crap.

  14. Re:Is this necessary? by user24 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It'd be better if there was a .safe domain.

    No, it really wouldn't. The trouble with black or white-listing based on TLD is that the implications don't hold up. if/when .xxx is approved, the implication will be that every non .xxx TLD won't contain adult content, likewise if there was a .safe, the implication would be that anything other than .safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content.
    Both of these implications would be totally untrue. With .xxx, does anyone really think that all the porn sites in the world are suddenly going to drop their high traffic URLs in favour of the .xxx equivalents? No, they'll just register the .xxx as well as keeping their .com, and I bet the .com's will remain higher traffic than the .xxx's for quite some time. This is why it just won't work. If approved, this will just generate a lot of revenue for a bunch of registrars, with no benefit to users, either those who are looking for porn, or those who are trying to avoid it.

    Also, there will always be fringe cases that don't neatly fit into a category.
  15. Re:Is this necessary? by rs79 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Why do we need a .xxx domain anyway?"

    That isn't the issue. Can ICANN get it into the US Government controlled root servers, THAT'S the issue.

    They can't.

    Here's what really happened. .XXX has been around for a very very long time. The prehistory can be told later, but the point is it was proposed to ICANN, they approved it and they submitted it to the Department of Commerce to rubber stamp as ICANN only makes "recommendations". The DoC said no. Why?

    Wellll, turns out a right wing group who had the ear of Bush had trundled into Karl Rove's offifce about that time and had three "action items": 1) No gay marriage, 2) No stem cell research and 3) no .XXX.

    Rove read the list and said "anout that third one", made a phone call and the newly appointed head of DoC stepped on it.

    ICANN bullshitted and suggested it needed fruther study by world governments.

    Because as everybody knows, the naming of hosts on the network has to be ratified if all the worlds governments. Never mind the DNS apparantly worked ok for over a decade without any world governments knowing the network even existed.

    ICANN is a very expensive single-point-of-failure. A choke-hold on the entire net. And now you're watching it in action. Or inaction.

    The US governemnt will never let go of it's control of the root, ever. When it came dangerously close to looking like the warring facitons of the DNS wars of 1996 would actually agree to settle their differences and cooperate, that movement was torpedod by the man who would later be the head of ICANN. Old military officers never really retire it seems.

    You might ask why the US government still has control of the Internet domain name system. Good question.

    Recall that it was the genius of Steve Wolff that the NSF backbone was turned over to private industry and the commercial internet was born. I did ask him why he didn't do the DNS and IP space as well. "I forgot about that; it didn't seem important at the time" was the answer.

    It's long been joked that the seventh layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack is the "political layer" and it's no longer a joke. The technical administration of Internet names and numbers should not have any politicians in the loop.

    They have the laws of their own countried to do what they want - Jon Postel recognized this, hence the requirement that a cctld administrator be a resident of that country - but ICANN made a deal with the devil, in a nutshell "if we recognize you and your government will you recognize us as authoritative over the internet" an that was it, Pandoras box was opened. And now the goverments of the world hold the internet by the nuts.

    My day in the sun was as the formation of the DNSO within ICANN in Berlin way back when. It was suggested by the ICANN board that a "Government Advisoty Baord" (GAC) was needed by consensus. When I got my 2.5 minutes at the mike I asked for a show of hands for who thought this was a good idea. Thirteen people (out of about 800) put their hands up and the ones I could see were all government poeple. There is a realvideo (sic) archive of this at the Berkman Centre for Law and Technology site.

    The irony is ICANN is not supposed to set policy, it's supposed to measure "community consensus" and make recommendations. But, the way they change the bylaws to suit themselves that may not even be true any more.

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?
  16. Easy algorithm by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What happens when the kid resolves .xxx, and types in the IP address?

    On some websites, you get an error page. On the others, this can be worked around.

    1. Get domain name for given IP
    2. Is .xxx in one of the domains?
    3. Yes, ban the IP.

    That's still much easier than analyzing the page content for keywords.

  17. Re:Is this necessary? by Bios_Hakr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >>likewise if there was a .safe, the implication would be that anything other than .safe TLDs contained 'unsafe' content

    That does not nescessarily follow. The only thing one could assume should a .safe domain be implemented is that anything in .safe should be, well, safe. It's not saying that microsoft.com is pr0n, just that microsoft.safe is not pr0n.

    >>With .xxx, does anyone really think that all the porn sites in the world are suddenly going to drop their high traffic URLs in favour of the .xxx equivalents?

    Hence the need for a controlled domain. If one tried to register a .safe domain, he/she would need to submit the content for review by the registrar. This would be similar to how movies and games are rated.

    --
    I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
  18. Re:It is cowardly to do nothing about pornography by foreverdisillusioned · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Oh, I've got the moral courage to take a stance, alright. I take the stance that you're an enemy of all who believe that the human body isn't shameful, and sex is something to be celebrated, not repressed. Why don't you help clean up all the fucking violence and bigotry (esp. anti-gay bigotry) in our society and then we'll talk about the oh-so-terrible danger that your five year old might see a tit.

  19. Re:More Appropriate Name? by Guppy06 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    More like "UCANT."

  20. Re:Is this necessary? by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    If one tried to register a .safe domain, he/she would need to submit the content for review by the registrar. This would be similar to how movies and games are rated.

    So, .safe.us, .safe.au? Because otherwise, who gets to decide the criteria? Europe, where you regularly have full frontal female and male nudity on free to air TV, or the US, where on most channels they bleep out even the word 'ass'?

  21. Re:It is cowardly to do nothing about pornography by liangzai · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't kid yourself. You don't protect your kids from anything, you just shield them from reality with your religious doctrinary shit. There is no harm for kids to see "coitus", other than that they should know not to bother parents involved in private moments.

    And your "decency" laws only apply to the USA, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a few other theocracies; they don't apply in many European countries. Last time I checked, the internet was a global public spot.

  22. Re:Is this necessary? by stunt_penguin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not only that, but something that is perfectly legal to advertise in NY or California (your new range of adult toys for example) might be considered illegal in Alabama. .safe.ny ?

    Gimme a break

    --
    When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.