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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."
...xxx screws YOU!
Czech language for absolute beginners
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.
[http://www.internetgovernance.org/pdf/xxx-foiapag e.pdf]
are a very interesting read and show how the US Government changed its mind from neutrality to influencing the decision. Probably due to pressure from conservative family-oriented politicans...
BUSH: "Ya see, that's what the pr0n terr'ists want! They'd love us to just release this information. Can't you see people will get hurt! National security (of the children) is at stake here."
.xxx domain then we should probably take the magazines down from the top shelves and put them with the rest.
Suing the U.S. Government? Fair play, you got some balls and/or a lot of naivety. Good luck.
Also, if we don't want a
Just a thought
I am pretty indifferent to whether .xxx gets approval or not, but the argument that it will make it easier for kids to find porn they shouldn't be looking at is absurd, in my opinion. Nearly every half-computer-litterate kid on the planet knows how to use Google and would be able to find whatever they may be looking for much more precisely and quickly than a new domain extension would ever let them.
If you want to combat pornography and restrict children's access to it, you need to start elsewhere.
"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.
They only need an older brother/friend that points them to this . All the pr0n you need...
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.
It couldn't be much easier than it is now; you hardly need a .xxx domain to find porn. Theoretically, it would make it easier to keep kids out because you simply tell your web browser to block everything ending in .xxx, thus segregating those sites. There are much better reasons why the .xxx domain is a bad idea. For one, there's nothing forcing the porn industry into investing in the registry, and nothing forcing them to drop their current domains. It'd be little more than a financial nuisance for those companies who felt it necessary to register their names in both. There is no clear-cut, determining factor as to what is porn and what isn't, which also makes the registry kind of useless.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Libertarians rejected the domain beucase it would make porn easier to block, and Christian Moralist groups rejected the idea because it would in some way sanction the appearance of porn on the net and make it integral it's structure or backbone. That and they couldn't figure out that it would make it easier to block porn.
In many ways it has the same advantages for all sides as Net Neutrality does, except without bussiness interests causing corporate lobbyists to stick their neck around the door.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Why would it make it easier to find pr0n? You can type just about anything into google or similar to get something pornographic. It's *already* (too?) easy to find porn online. whatever the tld ending, it wouldnt matter from someone searching as i doubt they rarely check the url and concentrate on the "content".
.xxx, then if you were say with AOL etc, the filtering of such a site would be very easy and could be done on an account level set by the parents. This surely is a good thing ? Indeed, you might still get the same results from google, but once clicking the link it would just get blocked (so that free previews couldn't get viewed either). If you werent on AOL then perhaps the ISPs could offer it at a different way. Filters based on content of pages being viewed sometimes give false positives but with .xxx i'm sure most filters could get it right.
.xxx or try to get around it, but at least this would have been a start.
However, if a large majority of sites ended
Sure there would be sites which wont do
Oh, and in response to "Who cares if the US pressured them into rejecting the domain" its people like me who believe that the US should not be allowed to dictate what it wants to the world. But thats a different story...
, , , , , karma elon
I'm not concerned so much about that (I would search porn all the time when I was under 18). But I think plenty of parents would agree to .xxx be approved and strict regulations that EVERY porn site gets put on that domain. It's easier to block this way. If they know anything about computers, *.xxx would work fine as a filter on any server or software (even Adblock on Firefox could do this). Any "easy-to-use" "dumbass" filter software could just have a tickbox saying "Block adult sites" meaning to apply *.xxx to the filter list. AOL would of course do this.
.com's and such would have to be moved if they are actually porn sites. It brings in more government regulation on pornography which is something obviously they don't want. I don't think any customers would like this either. So many sites shut down after 2257 was revised, and this just adds on to that.
The issue I think is that so many sites on
I care. I don't care about the .xxx TLD. I think it wouldn't hurt, but it won't help either. But I do care how the decision was made: I want to know if it was independent or if ICANN just executed what the US government demanded. In discussions about control over DNS and the root servers, the US constantly reiterate that ICANN is independent, and even though it is on US soil, it acts without interference from the US government. If there is evidence that the US government pressured ICANN into making a decision that it would have made differently on its own, then it is high time for the rest of the world to establish independent DNS roots.
Secondly, if .xxx sites get registered it'll make it even EASIER for kids to find porn now.
And easier for parents to block.
Well... If they so choose to educate themselves on the matter in order out how to set their router firewall to block all *.xxx connections.
Not that kids have been looking at their parents porn mags and adult video tapes for the past 20 years. Truth be told... Porn never hurt any kids. Uncaring parents too disinterested in the welfare of their kids have.
Teach your kids to be sexual healthy and not sexually repressed.
Otherwise they are going to learn the hard way... You know... Teen pregnancy and STDs.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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 went a searchin' for alternative sources - that cbronline article has problems in Opera for one thing - http://bigblog.com/search.cgi?id=535484929
Many people (including myself) resent this disgusting smut. I would rather it didn't become legitimized by having its own top level domain. These "adult entertainment" companies should all cease and desist for the morality of the U.S.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Look, I completely agree with that. There is but one problem: depending on the country you are in, the prices for these might be horrendous. I live in .lu and frankly, a domain costs 40€ per year. (It used to be a lot more, back when my dad registered our family name, it was about 100€ initialisation fee and, IIRC 45€ per year) Compare that to 12€ for a .com at Gandi. For businesses that might be acceptable, but me standalone-geek, I have to look at least a bit at my (frivolous) depenses.
So, often national TLDs are simply not competitive with the generic and most people prefer the generic anyway. (It was called the dot-com boom for something, and not the dot-US boom.)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
You know, out of sight out of mind. The people who fear porn and their own sexuality often stand by these trite axioms. They don't want condom use being taught in school because it will increase teenage sexual activity. They don't want female nipples seen on television because it will encourge children to have sex. They don't want an XXX domain because it will make it easier for children to find porn, which will irreperably damage them somehow.
Also, they don't want their government supporting porn in any way. There is no grey area for these simplistic people. They got their marching orders from the corpse of a long-dead civilization and they are sticking with it.
Blar.
Unfortunatly, sex website operator are unscrupulous.
.xxx domain are only a good idea if existing registered domain holder can get the .xxx version locked to them for free and for life.
.xxx domain. But how long will it be before 60 minutes and friend 'expose' the scandal of known company name being used as sex portal, and pointing everyone to it like they are doing for MySpace? Or that some christians fundies boycott Walt Disney over disney.xxx?
We'd end up having microsoft.xxx, slashdot.xxx, digg.xxx. It would be ridiculous.
Of course one could easily block
Regardless of whether or not you agree with the decision, surely I can't be the only person that doesn't believe anyone has a 'right' to get a domain set up?
I think you're wrong. We need all the TLDs we can get, precisely because nowadays companies try to register the same name under all TLDs. The only way to stop this silly practice is to increase the number of TLDs by leaps and bounds. Besides, only if every conceivable TLD becomes available will users learn that the TLD is an important part of the domain, not just an always-there ".com". In every discussion about DNS, someone proposes that we get rid of TLDs entirely. It's an entirely logical conclusion when you look at the way domains are registered and used today, but what are the consequences? Would you really want all domains to be in the hand of one domain registry? How are you going to determine prices without competition? No, the only way to go is to enable as many TLDs as you can find businesses willing to be the registries.
A really shitty film "starring" Vin Diesel? Or is that a case-sensitive xXx?
Sigh.
.xxx domain, then all you need is one simple rule and your job is done. No constant updating of filters, nothing slipping through the cracks - you're done. That's it - that's all.
You just don't get it. Pron is not difficult to find now. What's a lot more difficult (relatively) is filtering it out. If you take all of the existing pron sites and force them to move to
I think a lot would move, since (think about this) those who would have .xxx filtered out are most likely to be under 18, and therefore unable to purchase a subscription. Porn sites would be effectively signing up to limit their audience to those who are capable of paying, and are therefore not wasting bandwidth on kids with strange fetishes who are never gonna pay.
Parents win, porn sites win, filter companies have more time to spend doing useful stuff (Perhaps then winehq.org won't be classed as Drugs/Alcohol), and 12 year olds get a nice clean(er) internet. What more could be wanted?
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
There are a number of exemptions to FOIA, of which national security is only one. I have not seen the responses given in this case, but I would speculate that they included the (b)(4) exemption (Trade secrets, commerical or financial info) and (b)(5) (privileged inter- & intra-agency memoranda and letters), which are probably the two most frequently used exemptions. A full list of the exemptions can be easily found through a Google search. E.g., http://www.corporateservices.noaa.gov/~foia/foiaex .html.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
I completely agree that these people (government types) play this childish "nyaaa-nyaaah I know something you don't know!" game. I don't know if things are more likely to be redacted now than before 9/11, but it's been crazy for a long time. A long time.
Yesterday, I was just curious what one had to do in order for the FBI to start a file on you (something that I aspire to have at some point), so I googled for "How do I get an FBI file?"
The second hit is the John Lennon FBI Files, which is hilarious and frightening at the same time. In particular: The Parrot Story was at first given to a researcher in a completely redacted form. Only after going through a court battle over this and other redacted documents did the true, criminally horrifying nature of the Parrot Story become clear. John Lennon had been harboring "Linda", who owned a parrot:
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
I suspect the reason the government does this is similar to the reason that the RIAA or commercial software publishers might corrupt peer-to-peer networks with corrupted versions of files. In both the redaction and peer-to-peer cases, The Man is introducing noise into the medium and frustrates efforts of users to get at the content they are looking for.
Maybe the sequel to the Freedom of Information Act should be the Freedom from Redactions act.
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.
The more liberated people are regarding one of the most beautiful things God gave them the less likely they'd spend time and money on what most porn usually is; fake sexuality.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yeah. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
/. story on reclassification of a bunch of documents that had been accessible to the public? Some of these were CIA documents going back to the Korean War. There is absolutely no justification for this, except we know this stuff and we don't want you to.
And I do think it's worse now. Remember a while back, there was a
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Blocking a few .xxx sites and leaving the hundreds of millions of .com|.net|.org|.whatever sites isn't really effective... but it will probably allow AOL to advertise "NEW CHILD PROTECTION FEATURES, PORN SITE BLOCKING!".
Registered Linux user #421033
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.
/. community (and America realizes) what I have come to sincerely believe. This isn't a Bush thing, it isn't a Republican thing, it's a government thing and we, the people, are losing control. I'm not really sure how to get it back but my approach right now is to vote against any incumbent regardless of party to make a statement that this is unacceptable.
I tend to agree and hope the rest of the
So, who will our third party candidate be this year?
And I also know the reason it hasn't been done yet: money. There's a lot of value (for the seller) to be able to sell the same thing, over and over and over again, for no additional expense. "New .food domains! New .travel domains! New .name domains! New .fuck domains! Purchase your name in the new space before someone else does!"
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Probably what the .xxx registry wants. And it's not a terrible idea I guess, for "responsible parents".
.xxx. But is Interpol gonna go nuts on anyone who has porn on a .com, or .org? I don't think so. Neither will any government agency. Also, what's porn? Is this? Or this? I think some may think they are and need warnings on the pages. There is never ever going to be a definition of porn. This is what's so bad about filters.
I kinda see myself as an example. The "every kid" who got away with looking at porn online throughout my under-18 years (meanwhile some of my friends got caught, being stupid). Do I want my kids to look at porn? I think that up to age 9 they'll think it's gross, and they'll probably think erected penises and penetration is gross until another point shortly after. If they came across it online at that age, they would probably close it out right away. Kids at age 9 are online?
When I was 11 I started to look every once in a while, and then went on from there. I think to be a so-called responsible parent, you should probably block. But I don't think pornography has really had an effect on me, and I've seen tons, of many genres. Who hasn't?
It is an easy way to block
In addition, they don't want a new vaccine that prevents early stage cervical cancer and cancer lesions caused by HPV infection, because this may encourage teenagers to be more sexually promiscuous.
To restate: they would rather watch teenagers die a horrible death through cancer, than allow teens to bump and grind a little.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I gave it a try, and googled just about anything
The third result is the porn site, how to bang just about anything around the home.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
But it a few more blocked than before. Sure, allowing .xxx is not the "be all and end all" of the situation, but you got to start somewhere :) Combined with a possibility of having to have all new adult domains registered .xxx or requiring a transfer off .com (etc) would obviously increase the usefulness.
And yes, AOL can do what you said, and I bet they would have done!
, , , , , karma elon
There is a W3C article, Why Using TLDs for Filtering is Ineffective, Harmful, and Unnecessary, that points out all the downfalls of creating a .xxx domain. This excerpt sums up why I am personally opposed to the idea:
"7. The definition of what is offensive obviously differs greatly from country to country, from year to year, and from person to person. If bare ankles are considered obscene in some cultures, but are permitted in photos of Web sites in France selling sandals, then individuals wishing to keep photos of bare ankles out of their home using filtering on ".xxx" are unlikely to succeed. How will sites about safe sex or AIDS be treated? Who will establish what is art and what is pornography?"
Also, having read these documents it appears to me that this whole thing is nothing but a land grab by ICM.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
And the saddest aspect is that teenagers always have and always will be having sex. Denial of information about sex only causes pregnancies and the spread of STDs - and now cancer!
They should know that based on previous decisions, ICANN doesn't need no stinking government agencies to make stupid, badly thought out decisions. I mean, really. psah.
Due to the highly sensitive nature of the information involved in this lawsuit (namely George Bush's nightly visits to www.wifeysworld.com and the fact that he doesn't know how to change the bookmark address in IE), we're not going to grant you the necessary security level for which to challenge our authority. Lawsuit dismissed!
You just don't get it. Pron is not difficult to find now. What's a lot more difficult (relatively) is filtering it out. If you take all of the existing pron sites and force them to move to
Bullshit. The only way you could achieve that kind of filtering is to create a ".safe" domain and prohibit access to everything else.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The only way for this to make "porn easier to block" is if hoving porn on all the other domains was outlawed requiring it be moved to .xxx. What kind of slashdot user would be FOR banning porn on the internet?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Let's sue everybody!
No sig for now.
I once saw a page that had every word redacted including the preprinted form descriptions. The only thing visable were the preprinted lines of the form (and I don't think I should've even seen that). =)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
You apparently don't get it, the .xxx move would be voluntary. The new .xxx domain would not clean up the .com domain, bascially leaving us in a worse position (depends on your viewpoint I guess). So .xxx could be blocked, but the already existing porn pages would still be out there.
.xxx domains knowing how easy it would be for their site to be blocked? .xxx is worthless.
How many would move to
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
As far as this law suit is concerned, I don't see how the government pressured ICANN at all. If ICM was on the ball, they could have gotten the word out to have people show their support for .xxx. Since they were caught sleeping on the job, (being sore losers) they want to sue because the other side was deligent in making their views heard. Besides, ICANN can vote however they see fit, if they let the views of others sway them against what they know is morally right, then those weak minds need to be replaced. But then, that statement could also be made about alot of our politicians who are swayed by the lobbyist of big businesses.
We could have used you as a general at Verdun in WWI. We could have won that battle in a day if we had simply taken all the German soldiers and forced them to move to the open ground, then we could have simply shot them. No year long trench battle, no 700 000 casualties, no eventual stalemate. We win - that is all.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
(It was called the dot-com boom for something, and not the dot-US boom.)
Until recently, each domain directly in the .us TLD was allocated to a U.S. state. Any other entity had to be located in Colorado to get a domain in .co.us, in Nebraska for .ne.us, or in Oregon for .or.us. Compare to .com, .net, and .org, which allowed domain holders nationwide (even worldwide).
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
Which also makes you wonder what else they might be up to, instead of doing their actual job.
By the way, when I say "We" I'm not French, I'm just thinking about the Entente in general.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Bzzt! You're assuming that because some porn is in .xxx, there's less porn in .com. It won't work out that way; any porn site with a .xxx domain will offer exactly the same content from a .com address, precisely to be able to service customers with the .xxx filter in place.
Your other assumption is that "there's some people that want to see porn and some that don't". That should read "there's some people that want to see porn, some people that don't want other people to see porn, and some people that don't want other people to know that they want to see porn". No-one is interested in censorship for themselves; it's always to protect the children, or to maintain public morals.
Look at the .xxx TLD pragmatically: the most that will happen is that whitehouse.com is obliged to buy whitehouse.xxx to protect their "brand" - but they're sure as hell not going to let go of whitehouse.com and lose all those customers surfing from work (pr0n is not a business-related activity), school (protect the children!), home (if you're in a loving relationship, why would you need to unblock porn?), church (heh...)
.xxx is not a filter. It won't help people searching for or filtering out porn. It's a money grab, pure and simple.
And I do think it's worse now.
/. story on reclassification of a bunch of documents that had been accessible to the public? Some of these were CIA documents going back to the Korean War. There is absolutely no justification for this, except we know this stuff and we don't want you to.
The "War on (some) Terror" provides a good excuse.
Remember a while back, there was a
There's the possibility of embarrasment for people still involved in government. In some ways it's a bit like extending copyright terms on works which already exist.
What about sites that are art sites that include nudity? Should they be placed under the XXX domain? That would greatly restrict their potential traffic, since people might feel uncomfortable about visiting a .XXX site.
.xxx domain? What if it's a picture of a famine victim in Africa dancing in the first rain in a decade?
.xxx domain, but I'm concerned that a lot of other sites that deal with mature subjects might be pushed into the .xxx domain against their will. It will become a convenient ghetto that the conservatives can use to limit access to anything they don't like.
.xxx domain is set up, expect to see legislation forcing some sites to move. Shortly after that, expect to see a "sin" tax imposed on the registration fees for .xxx sites.
.xxx domain will eventually be set up. I also suspect that in twenty years, .xxx will be associated with a lot more than just porn. It will be associated with anything the government doesn't like.
Exactly how are you going to define a porn site? Some of the non-nude sites are pretty racy, while some of the art sites with full nudes are very tastefully done. Does picture of a woman a wet clingy t-shirt justify forcing a site into a
I think most legitimate adult sites would prefer to be under a
Once the
I suspect the
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
It seems to me that the .xxx distinction would be a little like a scarlet letter to slap on a porn site so the whole world will be told a)that the people who run it are perverts and b)that who ever visits the site is a pervert without even having to find out what the site is. .xxx = bad. Who knows how long after that then .xxx start being banned by ISPs. And then what, give Deomcrat and Republican websites disctinctions of .dem and .rep. And then how long after that might an ISP block access to one or the other because of the political leanings of the owner. And since it is far to easy to track a person's movement on the net, how fast will a catalog of users who visit .xxx (or .dem or .rep) sites be developed and exploited. Any regulation of the net scares me. Any attempt to ostrasize and/or single out on class scares me. Especially when it has to do with out freedom of speech, something which must be protected.
A few people may register domains for defense reasons, philosophical reasons or because they are gullible. Everyone else including most ISPs will simply ignore them. So while there may be some money to be made this way it will be nowhere near what could be made by running a real TLD.
No ISP is going to be interested in a service that noone really uses (by really use i mean as critial to access there stuff not aliases) and noones going to wan't to really use the names while most ISPs don't support them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why can't we just continue to use the dedicated pornography domain, .ru, like we have been for all these years?
Get the .org server address from the root servers.
Get the slashdot.org address from the .org server.
Get the it.slashdot.org address from the slashdot.org server. Any one of these steps can be cached. The more domains under a server's authority, the more likely that they will be cached. Hardly any requests go to the root servers, because everyone has the locations of the .com, .org, etc. servers cached already. The commonly used domains within these servers are also cached, so they only need to server the less common ones, and this load is spread around (the root servers, .com servers, .org servers, .uk servers etc. are not all run by the same people).
While the system you suggest would be possible, it would mean that every single DNS request would have to go to the root server. You want www.microsoft? Go to the root server. www.slashdot? Same. www.bbc? You guessed it. The increased load would not be sustainable with the current infrastructure. Since you'd need a lot more root servers (there are 14 currently) than there are now, and they would need a huge amount of storage space to store every new TLD, you would end up with updates taking a very long time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Caching is a fairly developed technology. One could envision a system where the root server almost never gets touched, because all the "second level" servers cache all the requests.
I'm not attempting to define those "second level" servers; that's what the RFC would do. However, it's not necessary to break a string into "groups of characters separated by periods" in order to effectively cache lookups from that string to a group of 4 (or 6) bytes.
Off the top of my head, we could have 26 "second level" servers; each would serve requests of domain names that started with "a", "b", etc.
If one of those got heavily loaded, it could be broken up into 26 more servers each, keying off the second letter in the string. (And of course the "q" and "z" servers would likely be broken up some time after the "e" and "i" servers.)
Stuff like that. It's not difficult, we've just got a lot of momentum behind the current system.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I thought the government was only allowed to redact documents obtained under the FOIA to preserve national security.
You mean "to preserve things marked as Secret", which ammounts to the same thing, if you call "national embarassments" national securiity.
And you're also forgetting that the government agencies can redact to perserve the privacy or trade secrets of its employees, contractors, or the general public, or that the government HAS to redact any document when ordered to by a Judge. (For example, a sealed juvenile file.)
Manufacture, distribution and possession of child porn is already illegal in all civilised countries. Banning it from TLDs won't make a bit of difference.
I don't think this ringfencing has been ruled unconstitutional.
Many things [like this] are completely different from first appearances.
Specifically, the exemptions are [and this case my money is on (b)(5)]:
one which, in the *cough* post-9/11 era
.xxx domain, then the terrorists have won!!!
If we allow pr0n to have a
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Second, there is very little protection against corporate or governmental employee malfeasance, short of clearly criminal behaviour. Both hide under the doctrine of "vicarious liability" and escape personal consequences. Perhaps this doctrine should be made more porous or pierceable. This would serve as some counter-balance to defacto job security.
The 'libertarian leaning' part of me wants to sum up a lot of what you say metaphorically like 'the state power is like a nest of machine guns planted in the middle of the town square.'
The existence of the machine gun nest (a powerful state government) is the problem, no matter who controls it.
The 'conservative leaning' part of me has always been of the 'take away the motherfucker's ability to fuck with us' tendency. And one of the few appeals that 'conservatives' of the modern ilk have had for me is when it seems like they're shuttin' down bullshit and firing bureaucrats.
Needless to say that the Bush administration and the bullshit that has transpired over the last bunch of years with 'the Republicans being in power' has disgusted me. But it makes me want to shitcan ALL the politicians, not flip the channel back to the corpulent tax-n-spend Democrats.
It's one big stupid bird. Flap the right wing, flap the left wing, fly up over everybody and shit on them.
I meant that controlling .xxx porn sites will be easier. Now it is almost impossible to find all porn sites distributed along tlds.
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
Another thing is that parents would easily disallow .xxx sites on their home computers to prevent their kids on seeing porn. Same goes for schools maybe.
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
Right.
1. An RFC is published.
2. Magically, it is implmenented with little effort.
3. Profit.
'Off the top of your head' is right.
'It's not difficult...' Uh.....
You're the knee-jerker. The
When pornographers and conservatives both oppose something, you know it has to be bad.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt explains why pretty clearly
Teach your kids to be sexual healthy and not sexually repressed.
1. Sexual healthiness is no more sexual indulgence than it is sexual repression.
2. Sexual healthiness is not porn.
I remember many years ago reading an OpEd by former NY Rep. Otis Pike in which he said that the most of the 'secret' documents he saw were classified not for national security, but to cover somebody's ass.
The .xxx domain is almost universally despised.
Cite please.
Pornographers hate it 'cause it forces one level of regulation upon them.
It forces fuck all. Nobody is forced to use .xxx, it's optional. And pornographers like it because it's easy to block. Kids don't have credit cards, kids are just a waste of bandwidth to pornographers - or worse, if the kid gets hold of a credit card he isn't supposed to, there'll be chargebacks on their account, which can cause problems if it happens often enough.
Have you ever actually visited a porn site? Absolutely loads of them have free adverts for things like NetNanny on their front page. And you think pornographers are against blocking?
Borderline sites (artistic nudes, SI swimsuit, etc.) may have to move to .xxx by the law
You really are talking out of your arse. Which law, precisely, would this be? The one that only exists in people's heads?
Conservatives/reactionaries and rabid Christians despise it because it legitimises porn.
Yes, and those are the knee-jerkers I'm complaining about.
It also makes finding porn theoretically easier
No it doesn't. Again, you are arguing from ignorance.
porn? what about whiskey?
Were that I say, pancakes?
qntm.org
Wait a minute, they have a valid position (but they don't voice it correctly...) Vaccines are serious business. You are injecting something directly into your body. Every vaccine has risks and this one is a vaccine for a disease whose mode of transmission is a fairly deliberate act. Unlike smallpox or polio, there's no public health reason why it should be a required vaccine.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If ICANN grants the .xxx domain, it is accused of trying to ghettoize porn. If it doesn't grant the .xxx domain, it is accused of trying to ban porn. No matter what, they can't win.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I love how people balk about how to "define" porn. I can immediately think of 2 definitions to start with:
.xxx domain could be used as this filter, who knows, but it's better than nothing, which is what we have now.
1. Public Decency - The US (and other countries) has laws to indicate what is "decent" in public. If it's not decent in public, I shouldn't have to see it on my computer either. A "safe filter" should be available to screen out these things. Whether the
2. Not Safe for Work (NSFW) - This is fairly easy to define. If I wouldn't want to see it at work, it's porn or obscene or should be able to be filted out.
I would accept either of these definitions as the basis for a "safe filter". Yes, this would classify things like "artistic nudity" as porn. But frankly, I don't want to see any sort of nudity at work, artistic or not. And I don't want my children to see nudity, artistic or not. If you want your kinds to see artistic nudity, turn the filter off, but I think you would be in the minority of parents.
I find it kind of interesting that we cannot be nude in public, but once we go on the internet, we are bombarded with nudity and other obscene things.
I like porn as much as the next guy, but it would be nice to be able select an option to say "I don't want porn right now" if I don't want it available.
Yes there is. Let's apply your argument to filters on ciggarets: Smoking is deliberate, so filters are a bad idea. And not knowing people are vaccinated restricts my sexual freedom by increasing the risks unecessarily. And you can't say that my having sex with my lovers (yes, plural) harms anyone, so dissaproving of it isn't logical in any free society. Not that we have the aformentioned disease, but it still restricts our freedom.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
I hear Cuba is sunny and warm this time of year. Enjoy.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The only group that seems to really want .xxx is the .xxx registrar itself.
Not exactly. I know more than a few business sysadmins (myself included) that would welcome it. While easy to block at the ISP or national level is a downside, able to block at the subnet level is definitely an upside.
There are good arguments on both sides, for and against the top level domain. 1) Those who are for it, want it because it puts porn in it's own distinguishable category, makes it easier to filter if need be (provided there is regulation of its use, and non-use, which only works in North America). 2) The people that don't want it, for one the porn industry in general, because it makes it easier to filter not only for individual computers, but for large networks and possibly ISP's (which is good AND bad for the industry, and lets face it it's a big money industry), and because it attempts to classify content on the web (not DNS's purpose at all). When there is too much for and against it, you can't expect ICANN to approve it when there is too much opposition on both sides. Hence, don't change anything. The stakes could be big financially for the porn industry, which don't kid yourself folks, would affect the networks, credit card companies, some banks, and associated businesses financially as well. This could be negative, or positive, which is a risk. Billions of dollars here in our country alone. Do I think there should be a classification? Yes. But my friend says no. I think polls would reflect the same.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
Bwah? No Your example is flawed. Filters aren't a bad idea, and neither is the vaccine. But if you want to smoke unfiltered cigarettes, (and if for some reason filters had some kind of negligible or even perceived health risk that even partially justified your desire) you should be able to buy unfiltered cigarettes. You don't want to have to worry about it. Take the vaccine. Someone else might have other reasons not to worry about it. don't FORCE them to take the vaccine.
The decision to make a vaccine mandatory shouldn't be based on whether or not teenagers are going to have sex whether we want them to or not. It should be based on the public health risks.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I never said "little effort". I said "it's not difficult"; what I had hoped the reader would understand as "there are no technical challenges to this implementation."
Then I ended it with "we've just got a lot of momentum behind the current system." I had hoped that the reader would understand this as "there are significant political challenges to this implementation."
I agree that sometimes I do not communicate effectively. I will close with, your projected attitude is not conducive to productive discourse. But it's clear from your projected attitude that this was not your goal, as your words added little value to the discussion, serving only to drag the idea down (and also to cause me to state this position more clearly, which perhaps does help other participants in the discussion, so your added value is greater than zero).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
We'd end up having microsoft.xxx, slashdot.xxx, digg.xxx. It would be ridiculous. .xxx domain are only a good idea if existing registered domain holder can get the .xxx version locked to them for free and for life.
... (nah, too easy)
Microsoft.xxx - We have plugs for ALL the holes!
Slashdot.xxx - Plenty of hot pics of geeky babes spread out on PCB schematics, coming soon: the Women of MIT shoot!
digg.xxx -
I think that I'm for it if it makes people taxable money. I know, however, that the internet is for porn, and regardless of the name it will be there. Maybe if all porn was regulated to .xxx it be of moral benefit, filtering it would be much easier.
Do you really believe that? Honestly? That teenagers won't listen to people telling them there's a better way to live life? Forget about stereotypes for a second and consider teenagers who actually do have some self control and aren't dictated to by hormones.
You don't really think that teenagers aren't impressionable do you? That they just might be influenced by a bombardment of movies music and television effectively saying "have sex now or you're a loser, look everyone else is doing it!".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Teach your kids to be sexual[sic] healthy and not sexually repressed.
Care to define these two conditions?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I have a site showing my photographic work. .xxx?
.xxx TLD so I could easily find and others could easily block it, my example is just one of many which makes the distinction between xxx and non-xxx content hard.
Amongst the many photos of landscapes, portraits, events, animals, architecture and fashion are some nudes; would my site have to be hosted on
Though I like the idea of having all the porn sites on a
As posted elsewhere, there are many cases where cultural, political, religious and moral influences change the perception of what should be considered xxx content. Having a xxx TLD would only be useful if it could be enforced and enforcing it would be the worst thing you could do to a xxx TLD.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I've read that there used to be a time when a celebrity would visit a talkshow without throwing a crazy shit-fit. I don't know; it sounds Utopian
What you're assuming here is that the .xxx domain would be MANDATORY for all porn sites. This is a false assumption. There are guidelines for .net, .com, .org etc domain names as well, but there is a huge overlap between them and there are a lot of domains under the 'wrong' TLD.
The .xxx TLD would make it easier for someone that wants to SELL porn to advertise this. The easy filtering of a .xxx domain is just a side-effect as most porn-hosts will also have a number of alternative .com domains.
If you think your artistic works or even your vacation photographs qualify as porn and you want it to be clear to anyone that might inadvertently wander onto your site, a .xxx domain would make it easy and clear. It would mean no more 'are you 18+?' screens / popups / scripts (which everyone answers with YES even if they're not ;) ) since the entire .xxx should fall under this category.
If you don't think your work would benefit from being on a .xxx domain, then you don't have to put it there! The US government will want to enforce this relocation, but they shouldn't get away with that.
The argument about conservatives and reactionaries is what's wrong with the current power-distribution in the world. Somehow most governments (and one of the worst in this case is the US) consists of a staggering majority of uptight religious fanatics that fail to see that their views belong in the dark ages. They want to deny joy to the rest of the world because they are too scared to re-evaluate their own beliefs and since people refuse to oppose their power they get away with it. (read Faith of the Fallen for a nice fntasy-based case-study ;) )
You know, mandatory vaccinations.
Blar.
This is so you won't be able to find these secret underground FEMA bases where captured aliens commence genetic experiments on abducted redneck and sheep.
Also, the seven best spots to plant the nukular device in the San Andreas fault to make certain city into an island.
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
I'm not really sure how to get it back but my approach right now is to vote against any incumbent regardless of party to make a statement that this is unacceptable.
Absolutely. I've been doing this ever since I turned 18 oh those many years ago.
I'd say give Russ Feingold a pass if you're in his district, but other than him, no member of either house has demonstrated any integrity in years.
Hows about you post the relevent 1k or so.
I know I can't real legalese, or RFC-ese in this case.
In any case it is not clear to me.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
"there are significant political challenges to this implementation."
Right. Just like there are 'significant political challanges to switching the whole mechanical world to the left hand thread.
I don't think they are 'political' challanges. Except in a command-based authoritarian political world. Agreed, someone with the character and political power of Stalin, could probably address it as a 'political' challange.
And that last paragraph in your comment is just bizzarre. You picked one HECK of a way to declarate that you don't communicate effectively.
But this isn't about you, or me.