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.xxx registry sues US government
An anonymous reader writes in to say that "ICM Registry LLC, the company behind the proposed .xxx internet porn domain, is to sue two departments of the US government for access to documents it claims show the US pressured ICANN into rejecting the domain.
The Florida-based startup will sue the Department of Commerce and the Department of State to get them to release documents that they redacted when they responded to a Freedom Of Information Act request that ICM filed last year."
I thought the government was only allowed to redact documents obtained under the FOIA to preserve national security. Since when does letting people have a naughty domain name threaten national security?
FFS, kick the knee-jerking puritans out of office already.
"Secondly, if .xxx sites get registered it'll make it even EASIER for kids to find porn now. "
It ALSO makes it easier to block. No more wack-a-mole with porn sites.*
Unless that your kind of thing. Nothing wrong with that.
It's the mentality of these people. Never tell the truth, or at least the whole truth, even if doing so would be the simplest course. Refuse to release information, withhold vital pieces of information, mislead, or outright lie -- but never just tell people what's going on. Honestly, I think there are an awful lot of people in government who do it, basically, for the little-kid thrill of saying "I know something you do-on't, nyaah nyaah!" It's an attitude which I saw way too much of in the military, and one which, in the *cough* post-9/11 era, has pretty much taken over every level of government from the White House to your local city council.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm not really sure how to take that tagline...
Anyway, why shouldn't there be a xxx domain? Not mandatory, but if a particular site wants to say right up front, "Hey, I'm porn," what's wrong with that? Maybe it seems a little much to give a whole domain to a single topic, but if you don't want to accidentally see porn it gives you a decent way to greatly reduce the amount you see, and it's one of those universal things in our (and by our I mean the whole world's) society, there's some people that want to see porn and some that don't, and at most a very very small percentage that don't care one way or the other. Give the way TLDs are used these days it seems a hell of a lot more useful than any of the others beside .gov and .edu. Doesn't hurt anyone either, anyone that wants to find porn can find it in as long as it takes to type "porn" in the Google search box.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a "strong" in the computer science meaning of the word filter, but it's decent and it helps out people on both sides of the fence. I don't see why this is being fought. Is disallowing this TLD going to stop porn on the Internet? Am I missing something here?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I wonder what would happen if this company ICM just went out and bought some bandwidth (guess they already got some of that), and set up a DNS server that would handle requests from the .xxx domain, and started selling subdomains of it to people who wanted name resolutions there.
Although ICANN are 'the domain authority' they have refused to handle this TLD so surely its up for grabs? ICM could advertise their services and its up to the DNS admins of all the DNS servers around the world if they want to add it as an authoritative server, surely? If some porn sites decide to get on board and offer free porn to all comers (heh) then the end customer demand might be high enough that ISPs the world over add it.
I freely admit, I am no DNS admin and I dont know how it works.