XXX Top Level Domain May Still See Use

eldavojohn writes "The contract between ICANN & ICM Registry has just been revised for procedures on using the .XXX TLD. ICM is saying that the domain should be readily available for registration as early as this summer. This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities. ICM also mentioned the collaboration with International Foundation for Online Responsibility."

Comments

I call dibs on...

[rednip]

I call dibs on...

playboy.xxx
penhouse.xxx
sex.xxx
movie.xxx
and of course
whitehouse.xxx

Seriously, talk about a gold rush. A legimate porn tld would have users practically driven to it. I wonder if what they are going to do about the 'land grab'. At $60 a pop for every word in the dictionary, they stand to make some serious money right off the bat.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the smart thing to do would be to auction them off. Or offer them to the owner of the .com, .net, .org addresses first.

It's a litle sad that a few idiots are going to make a shitload of cash just because they can hit "Buy" first."

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot goat.xxx

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about:

• christian.xxx.
• oxymoron.xxx.
• wearewatchingyou.xxx.
• insertcorporatebrand.xxx.
• insertpersonyouhate.xxx.
• www.xxx.
• xxx.xxx.
• xxxx.
• cowboyneal.xxx.

?

Re:I call dibs on...

[fyngyrz]

You missed:

• MoveHereSoWeCanCensorYouAndRepressSexuality.xxx

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd go for prophet-mohammed.xxx

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dibs on thepenismighter.xxx. Suck that, Connery!

Re:I call dibs on...

[grapeape]

I dont know whats more sad the notion that creating a red light district for the internet could somehow be seen repressing sexuality or just the idea that for many pornography=sexuality. Most would object to an adult bookstore moving in next door to their house so why should the internet be any different. In real life we create zoning laws to keep that stuff where its both easily accessed by those that want it and easily avoided by those who dont, on the internet we can do that with a top level domain if its done properly. I fail to see what is bad about it. If your internet provider is planning to block content at the ISP level and you dont want them to...switch providers. Frankly the idea of not having to worry that mispelling a url is going to end up with something on the screen that neither I nor my kids need to see is appealing. I would imagine many parents as well as those whose sexuality has expanded beyond jerking off to the playboy channel would agree.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Donjo]

I call dibs on vin_diesel_is.xxx

Re:I call dibs on...

[tehwebguy]

Very good points, but this is the important part:

Any law that dictates what must be placed on a .XXX domain will be completely subjective. At best, it would be completely ineffective. At worst it would scare the entire internet into using a .XXX domainname.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Duncan3]

Screw that.

disney.xxx

You can make 100m easy extorting... er offering them buying it back.

Like all non-com domains, this is just another corporate shakedown.

Re:I call dibs on...

[The Spoonman]

In real life we create zoning laws to keep that stuff where its both easily accessed by those that want it and easily avoided by those who dont

No. Unfortunately, in the real world, the zoning laws are used to squeeze them out. For example, my home town zoning states there can't be an adult establishment within 3500 feet of a residential area, school, shopping center, church or other adult establishment. Even if an area is zoned industrial, if there's one house in the range of the radius, that area's out. It leaves very little option for placement within the city, and since all of the surrounding areas have zoned them out of their towns entirely, options become more limited.

That being said, the Internet ain't the real world and setting up "zoning" laws is easy and effective. But, after seeing what happens in the real world where what seems like a reasonable solution turns out to be an unreasonable nightmare. People get a little gunshy.

Re:I call dibs on...

[fyngyrz]

I dont know whats more sad the notion that creating a red light district for the internet could somehow be seen repressing sexuality or just the idea that for many pornography=sexuality.

(a) The notion is that putting everything sexual into a slot where one simple action at law can force one simple action at the DNS that shuts it all down is the problem -- it has nothing to do with the name. What is depressing to me is that you can't see it coming.

(b) It doesn't matter in the least if some people's idea is that pornography == sexuality. The important idea is that you don't get to tell me, and I don't get to tell you, what is interesting, stimulating, erotic or otherwise. Sexuality is personal. You concentrate on yours, everyone else will concentrate on theirs, and there won't be any reason for you to be depressed. As soon as you being to think that your (romantic, idealistic, whatever) idea of sexuality is "the thing for everyone", you've become the enemy of the people and then you have a reason to be depressed.

Comprende?

Most would object to an adult bookstore moving in next door to their house so why should the internet be any different.

Because we're trying to use the new environment to move away from victorian (and worse) notions of self-appointed moral police proscribing everyone else's idea of what is OK, even if they're in the majority.

In real life we create zoning laws to...

Let me fix that for you: ...create ghettos and put a lance right through the heart of equality.

I fail to see what is bad about it. If your internet provider is planning to block content at the ISP level and you dont want them to...switch providers.

And what do we do when the maniacs in congress legislate the ghetto out of existence? The political system is rigged; you know it and I know it; so if we let them back these people into this corner, what happens when they take that inevitable next step... "for the children"?

Frankly the idea of not having to worry that mispelling a url is going to end up with something on the screen that neither I nor my kids need to see is appealing. I would imagine many parents as well as those whose sexuality has expanded beyond jerking off to the playboy channel would agree.

Yes, I would imagine the whole bloody bunch of you who have delegated the upbringing of your children in a padded world will be very pleased indeed. owning up to the responsibility of having children is so... tedious. Isn't it much nicer when the government does it for you?

First they came for the pornographers. But I was not a pornographer, so I said nothing.

Then they came for the others. But I was not them, either. I remained silent.

Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak for me.

With apologies to the WWII ear personage who penned the original.

Re:I call dibs on...

[omeomi]

disney.xxx You can make 100m easy extorting... er offering them buying it back.

Until they sue you because they have a trademark on the name...Whether or not they're in the right doesn't matter too much, because you stand no chance of defending yourself against Disney without going broke...

Re:I call dibs on...

[Broken scope]

So not wanting to have to explain to his 5 year old why that one woman was putting her fist in the ass of another woman is somehow wanting to bring them up in a padded world. Jesus, I'm all for personal responsibility, but when some actively tries to lure in people who don't want to go there in the first place and people who don't understand what they are seeing(children) by using misspellings... that is what he is talking about. I honestly think that is a mildly reasonable thing to ask.

I remeber when i was trying to get to gamesages.com(redirect to an IGN code site) and misspelled it and got hardcore porn all over the screen. 1 fucking letter. Back when i was 8 maybe 9. I didn't need to see shit like that. I don't want my kids to see shit like that, they don't need to see shit like that.

Re:I call dibs on...

[grapeape]

I dont think you get my point...I dont think that policing the internet is the job of any goverment and I am totally against censorship. But in today's internet its damn near impossible for parents to police the internet for their kids and thats where the policing needs to be done. The majority of the major adult sites out there seem to at least try to be fairly responsible about their content providing warning screens or whatever to make them easier to avoid the problem is that there are far too many that dont care and even seem based on their registered mispellings to cater towards reaching an audience that doesnt need the exposure. If you concider limiting a childs exposure to anal fisting and skat videos raising them in a padded world then imho the more padding the better.

I use the zoning analogy because it seems to work where I live, there are plenty of bookstores and clubs around but they are limited in how they advertise and in how they put their offerings on display. Sure some folks still dont like that they are there, but at least when I drive by Pricilla's (which happens to be right next door to one of the more popular pizza places) its got a rather generic storefront.

I would rather see a democratic way of making things easier for parents or people that just dont want to be exposed to it to have a way to avoid it if possible. So if a TLD isnt the answer than what is? A manditory rating system governed by a world body rather than a single country maybe? The argument I always here is that it would be too easy for a government to block all access to adult material, but countries have tried far more censorship and failed look at china for instance. If there is a will there is always a way. There just has to be some compromise on both sides, is that really too much to ask?

Re:I call dibs on...

[snickkers]

penhouse.xxx Excellet, I've always wanted one of them pens with the picture of someone who magically undresses when you turn the pen upside down.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

There are standards that actually work for the kind of censorship you want. PICS is one of them. There is also various filtering software that you can get. None of these require special top-level domains.

There are significant technical and logistical problems with using top-level domains to categorize content the the purpose of censorship. In 2004, the IETF published RFC 3675, which documented some of these problems. I suggest you read it.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Eivind]

I dont know whats more sad the notion that creating a red light district for the internet could somehow be seen repressing sexuality

It works something like this:

• Open new .XXX TLD.
• Suggest "pornographic" sites should go there.
• *DEMAND* that now that a .XXX tld exists, pornographic sites should be removed from other (mainly .com) tlds.
• Pass laws that say you're "endangering minors" if you put pornographic content anywhere else than .xxx
• Insist that your definition of pornography is the only One True one, thus rendering my schoolbooks from when I was 12 pornographic.
• Insist that schools, libraries and public institutions block .xxx

Separation is the first step towards discrimination and censorship. After you've collected the "bad stuff" in one place under one convenient label, it's much easier to take action against it.

or just the idea that for many pornography=sexuality.

Pornography is obviously a subset of human sexuality. Whats one persons porn is another persons art anyway. (the courts in norway, for example, recently granted VAT-excemption for strip-shows for the reason that they're not principally different from other kinds of stage-performances.(and there's no VAT on culture in Norway))

Most would object to an adult bookstore moving in next door to their house so why should the internet be any different.

If *ANY* bookstore opens where the zoning-rules say "residential housing" people will protest. If the zoning-rules allow normal bookstores, they should certainly allow adult bookstores in the exact same location. Indeed that is the case where I live -- "adult" shops of all kinds are found exactly where other "non-adult" shops are. (The Mall, main shopping-streets in town, shopping-centres etc)

Besides, the argument is stupid. You run into your neighbours in RL. It's immediately obvious to everyone who visits you that there's a trash-incinerator next to your house. This has a real negative impact.

It doesn't have much of any impact to know that your domain coolstuff.com shares a TLD with trashincinerator.com or stripclub.com, the 3 names aren't "neighbours" in any reasonable sense of the word -- certainly the parallells to RL are absent.

In real life we create zoning laws to keep that stuff where its both easily accessed by those that want it and easily avoided by those who dont, on the internet we can do that with a top level domain if its done properly.

Where I live there *IS* no zone for "shops-but-no-adult-ones-please", nor should there be, and if there where I would indeed protest it loudly. (but it'd be unconstitutional anyway, so I doubt it'd happen)

Secondly, you make the elemental mistake of assuming there *exists* a simple clearly-delimiting line as to what is ".xxx" and what isn't. Who is to decide ?

Third, why the singling out of sexuality ? I object to this on principal grounds. Where is .violence ? How about .racism ? Are we gonna get a .religious or .republicans anytime soon ?

I fail to see what is bad about it. If your internet provider is planning to block content at the ISP level and you dont want them to...switch providers. Frankly the idea of not having to worry that mispelling a url is going to end up with something on the screen that neither I nor my kids need to see is appealing. I would imagine many parents as well as those whose sexuality has expanded beyond jerking off to the playboy channel would agree.

I don't see how it's relevant, but I am indeed a parent (3 kids, actually). I would *NOT* feel "comfortable" knowing that some US-based (lets be frank here!) likely religious-dominated "focus-group" decides what is and what isn't "agreeable". I'll like it even less once schools, libraries etc start filtering (

Re:I call dibs on...

[fyngyrz]

So not wanting to have to explain to his 5 year old why that one woman was putting her fist in the ass of another woman is somehow wanting to bring them up in a padded world

No. Not at all. You missed the point entirely. Not being there to see that it doesn't happen, or arranging that specifically in your little world, it can't happen, is depending on someone else to do YOUR job, at the expense of everyone else's freedoms.

If, for whatever reason, you want your kid to be free to sit at the computer without encountering the real world, use a whitelist system to control browsing. No accidents will happen (unless YOU screw up the whitelist.) That's all you need to do. When your child is adult enough for you to accept the idea that they will not implode, become perverted, etc., upon encountering adult play, then you can open the whitelist. Or not; you are, after all, the responsible individual.

Take responsibility as a parent; you can have as much control as you like. Nothing is stopping you. However, if you decide that the government should control everything so that the world artificially looks the way you think it should for the benefit of your offspring, regardless of what anyone else thinks, then you've become the enemy of freedom. My kids don't need to have your ideals inflicted on them. If you try, I will oppose you.

Re:I call dibs on...

[fyngyrz]

But in today's internet its damn near impossible for parents to police the internet for their kids

No - it isn't. The easy way: buy a Mac. Set up accounts for your kid(s). Whitelist where you are willing to let them go. Sit with them as much as you can and expand the whitelist as appropriate. Whitelist their email contacts and their chat contacts. The result? There is no problem. They're as constrained as you want them to be, or not. Nothing horrifying can be accessed unless YOU say it can. This is easily done, and you should do it. As opposed to trying to get the entire world changed to reflect your sensibilities. I'll back you 100% as long as you're just adjusting your kids as you see fit. The very second you start to try to adjust mine, you're out of line. You can do this with your entire home network, regardless of what OS you use, by directing all HTTP and other access through squid on linux or something similar; we use squid at work to keep surfing to work-related sites. It is just as effective at making a whitelist for your kids, it just takes a little study. You wouldn't let your kids be root, would you?

There just has to be some compromise on both sides, is that really too much to ask?

Yes, sometimes it is. Freedom of speech is more important than victorian sensibilities (or lack thereof.) Every time we have "compromised" our rights, we have been screwed. No more.

Re:I call dibs on...

[lukas84]

You know, the Internet isn't just the USA.

Even if you change the TOS for CNO domains to disallow pornography, there could still be pornography under every country TLD except the US.

US laws govern the US, and US based companies. Not the whole internet.

Re:I call dibs on...

[ajs318]

Simple. Make it a condition of registration that everyone registrant of an .xxx domain must have a genuine site (not a link farm or placeholder) ready to be hosted there before a whois record is created. Suspend the whois (and therefore effectively disable access to the site from anyone not using its registered nameservers) if any abuse is suspected.

Of course, this requires a watchdog with teeth .....

Re:I call dibs on...

[KDR_11k]

They'll make something as a placeholder that JUST evades your definition of not genuine.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, screw freedom of speech. I am getting pretty tired of people trotting that out every time they're whining about something. It primarily exists to let you participate politically. I doubt whoever worked to get you those rights in your country had "discussing centipede-in-urethra fetishes" in mind, nor for that matter "sneering at people and 'fixing' their arguments for them". And before you start telling us again how creating a .xxx domain represents the death of democracy, allow me to express precisely how much of a crap I do not give.

Re:I call dibs on...

[1u3hr]

one woman was putting her fist in the ass of another woman .... when some actively tries to lure in people who don't want to go there

So the fisting sites which "actively try to lure in people" will give up their sites to move to a domain that will be blocked by many.

And you can solve drug addiction if people would "just say no".

Re:I call dibs on...

[1u3hr]

I would rather see a democratic way of making things easier for parents or people that just dont want to be exposed to it to have a way to avoid it if possible. So if a TLD isnt the answer than what is?

Install one of the many net nanny applications on your computer. Set its restrictions as strict as you like. Even make it whitelist only: Disney.com, etc. Your problem is solved, you don't bother anyone else.

Re:I call dibs on...

[tehwebguy]

Right, and when I said "Any law" I meant any law, anywhere.

Any law that dictates what must be placed on a .XXX domain will be completely subjective. At best, it would be completely ineffective. At worst it would scare the entire internet into using a .XXX domainname.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Gorm the DBA]

"So not wanting to have to explain to his 5 year old why that one woman was putting her fist in the ass of another woman is somehow wanting to bring them up in a padded world. Jesus, I'm all for personal responsibility"

Install net nanny software on your own PC. Put your child's computer somewhere where you can see what he's/she's doing. Implement a whitelist rule on your home network. Or actually (gasp) don't allow your child to use the Internet (ZOMG!! CHild Abuse!!!!).

It's called parenting. You protect your child from danger. Just like you don't let him play in the middle of the industrial zone or on the center lane of the Highway, you shouldn't let him galavant out on the Internet until he's old enough to protect himself, take care of himself, and respect the limits you place upon him.

Your inability to parent should not cost me my right to see two consenting adults engage in whatever activity they deem fit to show me.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Anonymous Coward]

of course, a little later in life you'll have to explain to little johnny why the congressman who pushed for net censorship and .xxx is sending little johnny IMs to come over for a fisting

Re:I call dibs on...

[tomservo84]

And this is great, fine and dandy *IF* the kid is at home. When the kid goes to ANY other computer, it won't be whitelisted in the same way, if at all.

Note: I have no children. I look at adult sites when I want to (then again, I'm an adult). But I see a need to limit children's viewing of said sites. If the .xxx TLD happens and your ISP blocks it all...GO TO ANOTHER ISP. That's what I constantly hear about other issues with ISP's.

Re:I call dibs on...

[RealGrouchy]

I call dibs on... ...
whitehouse.xxx

I don't think that's possible. WHOIS reports that it has been reserved by some guy named "William Clinton"...

- RG>

Re:I call dibs on...

[Mr. Slippery]

Most would object to an adult bookstore moving in next door to their house so why should the internet be any different.

I'd be upset about an adult bookstore moving in next door because I live in a residential zoned area, and would be upset about any bookstore moving in next store. I'd certainly rather have an adult bookstore then a McDonalds.

In fact, keeping in mind that "adult bookstore" doesn't just mean "porn-o-rama", I'd rather have a good adult bookstore like Atomic Books next door than a generic WaldenBooks or whatever. And, most relevantly, I'd be very concerned about any law that said WaldenBooks could move into my neighborhood but Atomic Books couldn't, on the basis that Atomic Books has "dirty" books with "dirty" ideas in them. I don't need the government to decide for me what's "dirty", thank you.

If people want an optional .xxx TLD, fine and dandy, just like putting a neon sign saying "We Got Porn!" in the window of a brick and mortar store. The concern comes when the government decides to mandate that "pornographic" sites must stay in the .xxx TLD; when .xxx becomes a scarlet triplet of letters.

Re:I call dibs on...

[Vajra918]

Windows Vista has Parental Controls :)

Clarification

[eldavojohn]

ICM also mentioned the collaboration with International Foundation for Online Responsibility.

As the article notes, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) is not a separate organization. Nor is it in anyway committed to online responsibility of any other nature than asking and/or requiring porn sites register in the XXX TLD.

ICM created IFFOR with the sole intention of having the regulation of porn sites run by a community rather than a company. The name is impressive but the goals of it seem rather specific. You can look at this two ways, ICM really wants porn regulated and easily blocked because they're thinking of the children. The other angle is that ICM wants domain registration moneys. Both can be correct and most likely are.

Re:Clarification

[hackstraw]

First, I think that besides country TLDs they are stupid.

Second, being that others think that TLDs are interesting or at least profitable. Why isn't there a XXX TLD?

If there are rediculusly stupid ones like .biz, .name, .info, .museum, why in the world is there not already a .xxx one? At least then I can find some porn, because its next to impossible now with the existing TLDS (/sarcasm for those who have no sense of humor :)

Re:Clarification

[Ernesto Alvarez]

There is no .xxx domain because it is already known how good such course of action is.
Now, they've made one in order to allow some organization to get some easy cash, while screwing us all with all this "think of the children" stuff. Gee, thanks a lot for listening to what the technical community has to say.

(At least read the title of the document linked, it says a lot)

BTW, I agree with you on TLDs, only country codes should be allowed as TLDs.

Re:Clarification

[TheLink]

Block .xxx? Huh, all along I thought a valid technical reason for having .xxx was so people looking for porn could do the following google searches:

site:.xxx ;).

Seriously though IMO .xxx is more justifiable than .biz or .info.

However, I disagree with you and the GP on TLDs.

I have long been arguing for .here to be a reserved TLD for free use for everyone - like the private RFC1918 IP addresses (10.x.x.x 192.168.x.x etc).

Basically everybody can host their own airconditioner.here in their houses/offices/rooms, and control it with http://airconditioner.here/set?temp=25c. And _polite_ people trying to figure out whether they are explicitly allowed to use an open WAP can go to http://here/ to look for terms and conditions, more info etc.

For more do a search on tldhere:
http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-yeoh-tldh ere-01.txt

I think my proposal had and has a lot more merit and utility than .xxx, .biz, .info and maybe even .tel.

But I just don't have USD100K to give to ICANN to try to get .here and then give .here to the whole world.

Re:Clarification

[LMariachi]

I have long been arguing for .here to be a reserved TLD for free use for everyone - like the private RFC1918 IP addresses (10.x.x.x 192.168.x.x etc).

Bonjour/Zeroconf/mDNS already provides this, albeit with .local rather than .here

Re:Clarification

[TheLink]

Where's the RFC or standard or announcement reserving the .local TLD though?

I'm actually not too particular what it's called, as long as it's reserved and everyone can use it freely in whatever way they choose just like RFC1918 IP addresses.

As for Bonjour. Personally I think bonjour/zeroconf could become redundant- it'll be more likely that you'd end up having "home/room servers" anyway.

After all you already need a hub/switch/WAP/router and maybe even an internet connection or two. People already run Linux on modern routers/WAPs, DHCP and DNS already runs on some of these.

So all you need is for devices to register their hostnames with the home/room "server" and optionally submit the type of services they offer. Then the central server can list the devices (wearable servers, printers etc) present. And people can then wirelessly fetch/send messages/multimedia from/to each other's wearable servers (virtual telepathy), or control stuff via Web UIs on the devices or room servers (virtual telekinesis).

Re:Clarification

[ajs318]

If you're running your own nameserver, you can already do something like this. I created a ".lan" TLD, which resolves to 192.168.* addresses on my LAN, a long time ago.

Re:Clarification

[Corporate Troll]

Huh? You can do this today, and nobody stops you. The domain at my parents is called "jungle" and the devices active on the network are called after characters in Kiplings jungle book. So, yes, bagheera.jungle is an absolutely valid hostname (and translates to 192.168.0.54) on their network.

In a similar fashion, my own domain is called "sharks" and the devices are called after sharks species. So, again, wobbegong.sharks is a valid hostname (and translates to 192.168.0.205) on my network.

You could easily imagine routers being sold with their own nameserver (just like they have DHCP servers today) to do exactly what you want... No need for ICANN to gets its dirty fingers in there.

Re:Clarification

[TheLink]

It's a matter of helping people create defacto standards.

You know the TLD at your parents place is .jungle.
But what's the TLD at Starbucks or your generous neighbour's open WiFi? If you travel visit various spots around the world how would you find out whose network you are using?

What if you want to control the jukebox at a local bowling alley? If we could have defacto standard where http://here/ either shows stuff "here" or redirects to a site which does then more and more sites would have an incentive to offer free internet access, because they could offer other services that make sense in the local physical context.

People wouldn't then mostly "pass through" and go on to the internet "super highway". They might just stop by for fun.

Forcibly redirecting people is lame, plus after they click through how do they find your starting page again?

Re:Clarification

[esme]

i agree that the most likely reason for .XXX is to rake in some cash.

but i think that RFC 3675 largely missed the point. they note that the US govt has the ultimate control of the DNS, but fail to come to the logical conclusion: that means that we can force all .com porn sites (using our definition of porn) to move to .XXX, and simply revoke their .com addresses if they refuse. the rest of the world can do with this what they will, but that ultimately a secondary consideration. they might even get upset enough by it to wrest control of the DNS from the US (though i doubt that). but for the moment, we are in control and can do as we like.

the technical problems presented in RFC 3675 are also seem pretty spurious to me. given the number of new domains, i don't think adding another one will cause much trouble. and the discussion of people using other names is also pretty bogus: the obvious place to enforce this would be at the DNS level, not to go after each user who made a local non-.XXX name and pointed at a .XXX site. how people choose to access sites wouldn't be the problem, it's how sites advertise themselves that would be regulated.

so i think the technical and legal problems are basically non-existent. i'd hope that we would setup an independent panel to review sites and provide a decent court of appeal in the inevitable gray areas, but strictly speaking, that's not necessary. congress could just decree a standard for what must go in .XXX, and let the courts sort it out. given the shift in the supreme court in the last couple of years, this would probably be allowed.

-esme

Re:Clarification

[Jakob777]

When this was originally brought up, My company took to hiring lawyers and push for the .kid or .kids TLDs, if it is up to the WWW to take care for your children and not the parent, why not make a secure area for the child to browse in, not take a industry that i covering a LARGE percentage of the web sites on the net and force it to buy into a small TLD. With this said it would be easy to monitor one TLD to make sure its kid safe, and not have to monitor all of it to HOPE you caught all of it, We all know that porn sites crop up at very strange places,in fact they wait for domains that were used by churches and the like to expire and grab them up. I think all of that is wrong, but if we are going to leave parenting for the net to the net, put them in a back yard not let them roam the streets where it is possible for there to be so many things that would be so wrong for them. We wouldn't be talking about this if most parents were even paying attention to what there kids were doing, or locking there browsers up so they only could goto sites they were preapproved by the parents. And I am sure there is a web site out there that keeps a list of kid friendly sites that they could upload once a month to the list of approved web sites for there kid, but most of them couldn't be bothered.

Re:Clarification

[Corporate Troll]

Easy: as I said, integrate it into the router. So, you set your SSID (fore example) to "bear", and the router automatically sets your domain to "bear". Beyond that it's guessing anyway, because you have no way of knowing if there is a "brown.bear" and a "polar.bear" or even a "teddy.bear". This behaviour would *at best* be acceptable in a home-router, because frankly, I've seen routers that don't even allow me to set DHCP ranges, which frankly, sucks!

What you are suggesting will not work because you need to know what is on the network. I used "bear" in the former, just to be able to give another example like my existing ones. Even if http://bear/ would give you a list, somebody needs to maintain this list. Or you'll end up with a list like this:

• aeg-4577.bear
• electrolux-AC127.bear
• nb-zwingo

Any idea, what is what? And those are pretty easy. Then I didn't even mentioned probable conflicts... Oh, wait, I will:

What if there are two airconditioners? airconditioner01.here and airconditioner02.here? You have to understand that naming is completely arbitrary. You'd be guessing anyway, because you don't know that there are two airconditioners, so you try airconditioner.here and it times out. Normal, because it's airconditioner01.here you should have accessed, but you coudln't know that. Besides, I could call my coffee machine "airconditioner01.here", if I wanted to.

As said: this changes nothing. You are free to do as you wish, and ICANN has no authority over *private* networks. It's that simple, no addition needed. You can setup your local hotspot exactly as you describe without any additional RFCs, rules or software. You all have it at your fingertips now.

It's a matter of helping people create defacto standards.

DNS is a de-facto standard.... You already have it.... Forcing names like "here" on me restricts me, because I actually like naming my own networks. Starbucks isn't going to like the fact that its network needs to be called "here", either... They would most certainly prefer, wait for it,.... "starbucks"! Oh, and what when two hotspots are next to each other? Both named "here"? That's going to be fun...

If you travel visit various spots around the world how would you find out whose network you are using?

You don't need to know... You only want to get on the Internet.... If you want to provide additional service, redirect to your http://here/ thingy (which requires maintenace in the first place!) and list the provided services. Over your local nameserver, they can reach those if they want.

You have all you need.... Nothing you propose is undoable with todays technological state.

Re:Clarification

[TheLink]

Gow would a random visitor using a free network know whether it's .lan or .local or .localnet or .localdomain? There's no standard at the moment. And that's my point.

How would one check the TOS of an intentionally free WAP, or see if there's a bulletin board, or maybe some cool service?

Re:Clarification

[TheLink]

Not quite the same. If the starbucks router sets your domain to bear, you still need to type something into your browser. You can't just go http:/// and expect that to work.

So what does a user type?

So you'd have to type something like http://www/ and your DNS server has to resolve www.bear to an IP. Alternatively you could do DNS wildcards.

But that doesn't escape the fact that the user has to type SOMETHING.

And I'm STRONGLY recommending that there be a STANDARD for what is typed, and a reserved TLD is good because the people could type http://here./ and the . will mean that's a FQDN, ALSO even if people don't use DHCP it can still work (believe me as long as the users have a static IP + static IP default gateway + a DNS set EVEN if the IPs are for their home/office/favhangout we can get it to work in >=99% of the cases).

If Starbucks or whoever is picky they could have:
http://here/

Http redirect to:
http://sf.ca.local.starbucks.com/
or the equivalent

Which could be the relevant server for that outlet - showing menu and other services - jukebox, suggestion/survey forms, local bulletin board etc.

As for telling which airconditioner is which, just put the info on http://here/ or http://airconditioner.here/
or
http://airconditioner.nyc1.fivestarhotel.com/

In the last example, it's not difficult for nyc1.fivestarhotel to figure out which room a guest's PC is in - the switches know which port the PC is on, and the server should know which port is in which room (that's how guests get billed for services). You could also set a cookie that stays valid till the guest checks out, so the guest could control his/her hotel room stuff/services while still stuck in some conference...

If you want your guests/customers/friends to feel at home, you make it easy for them. Otherwise, erm don't even bother letting them access control screens without permission (username/password or https cert).

Your own home could do with just airconditioner1.here and airconditioner2.here because it's just for you, and you know which is which. And you know you only have one washingmachine.here and you've configured stuff so you get an IM/email/SMS when its done anyway, so you don't care.

Hmm IIRC, I think the washing machine alert thing might be patented by IBM or something like that. Darn patents.

Re:Clarification

[Ernesto Alvarez]

Except the US is not the owner (king, whatever) of the Internet.
We saw a few months ago what would happen in this situation at the ICANN summit in Morocco.

The US congress is not the authority in most of the world, and if they tried to pull something like this, don't you think some countries would feel theatened (EU countries, chinese sphere of influence, etc). They would probably see that move as fundamentalists trying to screw the Internet, and also a threat to commercial interests (imagine someone declaring a French company "obscene" and cancelling its .com domain).

It would probably crack the DNS service in two, and lots of otherwise neutral countries would follow if they're allowed independence.

It wouldn't be that easy for the US to decide what goes to .xxx and what not. And if they're interested, they should do it on .xxx.us anyway.

Re:Clarification

[kchrist]

So all you need is for devices to register their hostnames with the home/room "server" and optionally submit the type of services they offer. Then the central server can list the devices (wearable servers, printers etc) present.

What you're describing is essentially what Bonjour/Zeroconf already does, but it does it without your single point of failure. Why rely on a central point for this if the clients can already do it themselves? This is a solved problem.

Re:Clarification

[TheLink]

As mentioned already you already have a switch/WAP/etc which the devices are connected to, unless your devices are using adhoc WiFi (which I doubt).

So you already have a single/central point of failure.

As for "solved problem":

0) As I mentioned the .local domain is still not reserved. This is a problem and should have been fixed YEARS ago. The ICANN etc should reserve .local for such use.

1) How do you find out if there is a TOS for an open WAP you are using?

2) How can Bonjour make it easy for strangers to find and use _intentionally_ provided services on a network or information? My approach doesn't require that a human to use Bonjour. All the human needs to do is use a web browser and use the reserved domain name.

It's too late to make a difference.

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Seems unlikely that existing porn sites will voluntarily move from .com to .xxx domains.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Bruitist]

Not least due to the fact it'll destroy the bookmarks of their valuable customers...

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[maxwell demon]

I guess they'll register an .xxx while still keeping their .com domain.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Quzak]

Yes, they would prolly use their .com as the front door for their .xxx

Enforcement is gonna be fun, I can already see the violations of free speech and censorship happening already.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is UNENFORCEABLE. That is the problem. You cannot MAKE them move, so it is USELESS.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[m0ng0l]

I recall, back when this was getting kicked around the first time out (what 2-3 years ago now?), I came across a posting on Asia Carreras' (a now retired porn "actress" with two kids) web site, where she basically said she supported the idea of a domain exclusively for porn sites.

My prediction (if it goes through) would be that the current owners of porn sites on .com/.net/.org addresses, will (presuming they get the equivalent .xxx domain) put up a redirect to the new page. After a couple months or more of this, the redirect goes away, and the non-.xxx address eventually goes back up for sale (or they keep it registered for themselves, especially if it's a trademark)

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[fyngyrz]

It is UNENFORCEABLE. That is the problem. You cannot MAKE them move, so it is USELESS

My understanding is that domain names are controlled in the USA. If that is correct, then US law can (and almost certainly will) make them move to xxx. If your choice is move or disappear, you'll move.

Remember, as one slashdot signature accurately has it: The root passwords to the US constitution are "thinkofthechildren" and "terrorist."

And of course, once they move, they can be censored. And they will be censored.

They're working to flood us with issues: loss of habeas corpus, ex post facto law and punishment, censorship, government support of religion, watering down science education and the cultivating of a newly gullible populace, wars of aggression, loss of 2nd amendment, commerce clause absurdities, phone tapping and mail opening and lists of enemies of the state (no-fly lists, no live here lists, no get job lists), torture, politics as a completely rigged shell game, theft of land for tax revenue... and it's working just fine. We can't fix any of this the usual way. The xxx industry is just going to be the latest casualty. Just ask yourself: Will you stand up and save them when the time comes? How many others? Don't hold your breath.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[1u3hr]

My prediction (if it goes through) would be that the current owners of porn sites on .com/.net/.org addresses, will (presuming they get the equivalent .xxx domain) put up a redirect to the new page. After a couple months or more of this, the redirect goes away

After a couple of months, half the ISPs have been pressured to block .xxx by default (and how many customers want to go on file as requesting access?) and all the porn sites put a redirect on the .xxx and go back to their .com.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[spiritraveller]

Seems unlikely that existing porn sites will voluntarily move from .com to .xxx domains.

They wouldn't have to.

If they set up a permanent redirect, they can keep their .com domains, but the filter on a parent's computer would prevent the redirect from working.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems unlikely that existing porn sites will voluntarily move from .com to .xxx domains.

Everybody keeps saying this, but it is in total opposition to the facts. There's loads of porn sites that give free advertising for filter software and voluntarily comply with various filtering standards. Believe it or not, but they are in the business of making money - and kids without credit cards aren't exactly profitable, they are just a waste of bandwidth - or worse, if the kid gets hold of a credit card and they get fraudulent payments.

So please, leave the head-sand burying rendezvous to the religious nuts and pay attention to the facts. Plenty of pornographers want this.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[qzulla]

So the kids put in .com instead.

Problem solved.

qz

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

> So the kids put in .com instead.
> Problem solved.

You put in the .com, which redirects you to the .xxx, which the filter then Blocks.
Since the .com wont have any content on it, your suggestion gains you nothing.

All of this was said in the GP...

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[dreamt]

No, but they will _WANT_ to move their content there. I think that most sites would have a much easier time. Legit xxx sites want their sites to be filtered from child access. It makes their legal threats much lower. They will want to keep their .com as a front-end, but keep all XXX content there.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Alsee]

PreScript: The rant below is not directed at the parent poster. His technical comment

If they set up a permanent redirect, they can keep their .com domains, but the filter on a parent's computer would prevent the redirect from working

The porn company is better off picking up the duplicate .xxx site and just redirecting THAT back to their .com site.

Which just highlights exactly why establishing .xxx is a rotten and harmful move in the first place. You get all the censortrolls whining Waaaaaaa it didn't work! It's suppots to work! Make it work! Make a law! Make it CRIMINAL to put BOOOOOBIES anywhere outside of .xxx! And aside from it being a rotten and broken censorship law, it STILL wont work! Even ignoring the impossibility of getting it to actually work properly within the US, there are all of the servers outside of the US hosting BOOOOOBIES. Servers outside the US not subject to US law. So then censortrolls again go on their whining Waaaaaaa it didn't work! It's suppots to work! Make it work! Make a law! The US should pass a law and make the planet obey!

I would love a .xxx domain. However I absolutely positively refuse to stand quietly by as they actually CREATE a .xxx domain.... unless I am first granted permission to haul off with a baseball bat and smack the "make it work" censortrolls upside the head each time they demanding some @%$&# law to "fix" the "problem" that there are still booooobies on .com and elsewhere.

-

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[rawtatoor]

I consider myself well informed of all the stuff you are talking about there, and I agree with your post. But one thing I haven't heard of is the ex post facto thing. What is the deal with that one?

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[dlanod]

More accurately, they'll buy the .xxx version of their .com address and just redirect any traffic back to the .com address.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[alais4]

Unless we tax/mandate them out of existence.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[ari wins]

Who wants to make a difference? Just think of all the young, budding pornsite operators out there that will franticly fill hundreds of servers, solely for our hedonistic viewing pleasures. I, for one, welcome our...oh nevermind. I'm going to go look at some smut.

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[Bruitist]

So if the .com's go back up for sale, who's gonna buy "hotsluts.com" other than a porn site?

Re:It's too late to make a difference.

[fyngyrz]

one thing I haven't heard of is the ex post facto thing. What is the deal with that one?

ex post facto is laid out in section 9 of the constitution:

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

ex post facto encompasses four types of things, legally speaking:

1. Every law that makes an action done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action.
2. Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed.
3. Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.
4. Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offense, in order to convict the offender.

There are a couple of ways that ex post facto has been violated that I am aware of. One is the creation of gun laws that remove 2nd amendment rights from those convicted of a felony prior to the enactment of those laws. As the removal of those rights was not part of the applied punishment at the time, adding the removal of 2nd amendment rights post-conviction is clearly ex post facto as in (3) above. Another is forcing those convicted of sexual or violent offenses to submit to listing on "predator" lists where such listing was not part of the punishment, or the law, at the time of the person's conviction. This action has been deemed "not punishment" by the USSC, and therefore not ex post facto, however any thinking person will view such listing as considerably punitive and I reject the USSC's rationale as sophist in the extreme. This also falls under (3), above.

Problems have already arisen as a consequence of the reasoning behind these constitutionally invalid laws. One you will be familiar with is the no-fly list. The reason you can be listed without any control of your own and no court hearing, is the reasoning behind the sexual and violent offender laws. The USSC said that "listing is not punishment" and they also said in the same ruling that "the state can list you on any list it likes if it says it has an interest" and importantly "consequences of listing are not the responsibility of the state." So: They list you without notice, hearing or ability to contest (just like a sexual/violent offender), you can't fly, whatever the consequences of this are — loss of job or business, failure to see your mom before she dies in hospital, inability to be there when your kid is born — that's your problem, not the state's. Similarly, if a person on the sexual / violent offender list can't live somewhere, gets mugged or killed, can't get a job, has their house egged, etc., the state says that they are not responsible for this and so... listing, they claim, is not punishment.

Of course, this very kind of reasoning has been struck down in courtroom after courtroom; "Yes, I pointed the gun, yes, I pulled the trigger, but I didn't put the gunpowder in the bullet so I say I'm not guilty of murder." US law has always broadly and consistently held that if you knowingly participate in an action or series of actions that you know are certain to bring disastrous results, then you are responsible. No court would ever let a criminal get away with the very reasoning that the USSC has brought to bear on these issues; yet, they think it is OK for them. Clearly, the intent of the ex post facto clause was to prevent the system from going back and hammering someone after they'd already had their day in court. And just as clearly, that's exactly what these laws do.

They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[khasim]

Instead of opening it up like that, anyone who has a .com should be allowed to register the .xxx version at the same price as their .com address.

There, no "gold rush". Even though it probably means giving up some profit, it's the right thing to do.

There may be some cases where .com, .org and .net are all registered to different people and they would all want the .xxx version. In that case, I'd recommend a simple lottery.

But all of this is stupid anyway. The Internet is more international now. We should be dropping new 3 letter TLD names and sticking with .us etc.

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[Chandon Seldon]

Why should anyone have a right to a new domain name just because they have some other domain name?

Just because you have "news.com" or "boobs.net" doesn't mean you own the words "news" or "boobs". If you're going to give favored access to existing domain holders, there's no public advantage whatsoever to adding new TLDs - it doesn't expand the name space, it just takes a bunch of cash from existing companies and gives it to the new registrar.

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[epee1221]

Why should anyone have a right to a new domain name just because they have some other domain name?

The intent seems to be to move all the porn to the .xxx TLD, not just make a new place to put porn. So porn.com could move to porn.xxx.
But then where would we put porn.net? Of course, it is doubtful that porn.com wouldn't want to keep both porn.com and porn.xxx, so you have a point there.

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[eric76]

So eBay would own x.xxx?

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[voot]

fuck yeah im down for that. im tired of looking at a site and wondering what language it is in. the only problems with this would be countries that have more then one official language. it would be unclear what language it would be in. but some countries could use a nonation domain such as .ax for a swedish speaking finn's website. the other problem would be for languages which are not offical anywhere. such as Taiwanese or Esperanza.

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[iamstretchypanda]

Maybe instead of by country it could be by language. Instead of porn.us.xxx it could be porn.en.xxx. This would semi-effectively keep censoring based by countries from becoming much easier while also allowing the user to quickly find pages based on his/her native language.

For multi-language sites maybe porn.intl.xxx (international) or etc. Just an idea.

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[SnowZero]

For multi-language sites maybe porn.intl.xxx (international) or etc.

This is a good idea, since we visit such a site for the articles... Right?

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[StarvingSE]

I would say a good way to handle this would be for the registrar to go contact said porn site and say "hey, you currently own www.wankfest2007.com, we can give you first dibs at www.wankfest2007.xxx if you give up the .com domain name."

Re:They should base it on the .com's already sold.

[LittleBigLui]

porn.com.xxx, porn.net.xxx.

I should have posted this AFTER registering com.xxx and net.xxx, really.

Yet another brick.

[BlahSnarto]

Anyone else worried about this?

Authorities and officials requiring all "questionable"
material be required to don the XXX TLD? again at brief
glance it looks like a good idea, but in the long run it
could be hazardous for free speech in a whole..

Reading material:
http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/BriefHistoryof. XXXandLinks.htm

Re:Yet another brick.

[ScrewMaster]

I worry about anything our government does, just on principle.

Re:Yet another brick.

[Harmonious Botch]

"I worry about anything our government does, just on principle."

A very good priciple, IMHO.

GP wrote:Anyone else worried about this?

Authorities and officials requiring all "questionable"
material be required to don the XXX TLD? again at brief
glance it looks like a good idea, but in the long run it
could be hazardous for free speech in a whole..

It looks like an attempt to cordon off the virtual areas in which free speech is permitted, similar to the real-world designated protest areas that one finds near political conventions. It is a trend that allows governments to say, yes you still have free speech, but you have to say it here. Then they can slowly restrict the designated areas - both virtual and real - until free speech is squished down to nothing.

Re:Yet another brick.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Agreed. Specially since off course a lot of places are gonna block . domains right away. Off course, sites will have a mirror at a .com or .net or .whatever so everyone can access them. Eventually some republican will try to organize the "tubes" of the internet and make . domains for "cuestionable" content mandatory. The definition of cuestionable will be broad and actually very cuestionable =). many ISPs will reduce access to . by charging extra or limiting bandwidth or banning it alltogether.
Censorship in the Internet at your fingertips.
Yes, i'm paranoid. Yes, this is a bit far fetched, but it's far fetched not because there arent s that would make this a reality, it can be considered far fetched and won't probably happend because people will talk, and people will complaint, and people will write, and people will tell. So it isn't redundant to say it, it's exactly because NOW we say it will happend that it won't.-

Re:Yet another brick.

[ScrewMaster]

Incrementalism at work again. You really have to keep an eye on these guys. Incredible, really ... they just can't seem to leave well enough alone.

But I have to say, between the GP's nick of "BlahSnarto" and your "Harmonious Botch" I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face.

Re:Yet another brick.

[Ninjaesque One]

Your spelling of questionable and your use of the phrase, 'of course' is cuestionable.

Re:Yet another brick.

[TuballoyThunder]

.XXX = Worst* Idea Ever

* Ok it isn't the worst idea ever, but it is up there--the only way to get it to work is to implement censorship. I find it amazing that anybody who is a free speech advocate would criticize opposition to this domain. The pressure that the Bush Administration brought against this TLD was one of best free speech actions in 2006. Heck, even Markos Moulitsas Zúniga should be giving praise for stopping the .XXX TLD.

Re:Yet another brick.

[Alsee]

"between the GP's nick of 'BlahSnarto' and your 'Harmonious Botch' I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face", says ScrewMaster.

-

Re:Yet another brick.

[Ignis Flatus]

Anyone else worried about this?

sure, a little. but the whole idea of trying to make the internet a safe place for kids is a silly one. the onus should never be on general content providers or individuals to make sure their website, irc channel, or whatever is kid friendly. first of all, there are various shades of child-friendly, and even the U.S. television rating system acknowledges this.

and speaking of television, that is sort of the kind of model we need. if a website wants to deliver content that is appropriate to children up to age 6, then it should be certified somehow (doesn't need to be government-based) and put on a list. parents could then use software, or a portal of some sort, that restricts where their child can go. of course, we've already got software like net-nanny, and that costs money, but considering the number of large entertainment corporations out there that would like to get a monopoly on those young eyes, it shouldn't be too hard to convince them to pony up the cash to pay for the censoring software, just factor the cost into their fees for being rated.

now some people will certainly balk at that, calling it censorship or whatever, but it won't be mandatory. you can complain all you want that children will be deprived of the wholesome experience of witnessing live birth at your website, but that's just tough. it's not children that have a right to the free exchange of ideas, it is their parents' choice. if their parents want them to witness live birth, they will still be fully capable of turning off the censoring and googling your site. or maybe the parents are muslim and have a completely different set of priorities than your average repressed american family. they should subscribe to their own filter, or filters (shianet vs. sunninet perhaps?).

but anyway, i feel like i'm rambling a bit now. making the internet child-friendly is just the silliest thing i've ever heard of. to me, giving a child free access to the internet is about as reckless as a parent can get. and regardless of what people here may think, there is no one-size-fits-all world view of what is appropriate for children to see. the problem with kids on the internet is that the internet is just way too democratic, everyone has their say. luckily, that same feature also makes it possible to solve the problem. everyone really can have a say in what their children should see. you can make as many filters as there are groups of people.

Can't imagine why it wouldn't...

[aendeuryu]

Capitalism trumps puritanism on this one, I think. These things are guaranteed income. Who wouldn't pay a premium price for the rights to the www.sex.xxx domain?

Re:Can't imagine why it wouldn't...

[TheRaven64]

Because, for most people, .com is the Internet. Do you think Joe (or Jo) Public is going to go to sex.com or sex.xxx first? If you've got sex.xxx, then you are going to need sex.com as well, or you will get someone else typo-squatting and taking away your revenue. At which point, the question is 'why do you need the .xxx domain?' and the answer is 'because if you didn't have it then someone else would and they would use it for typo-squatting.'

The argument that it makes it easier to find things is nonsense. Do you find your country code TLD makes it easier to find things near you? Unless you know the domain of a particular entity, you can't get to it; there's no 'browse the web sorted by TLD' option in any modern web browser. Google lets you restrict searches to domain names, but how many people do you expect are going to be searching for 'porn site:.xxx' as opposed to just 'porn?'

Re:Can't imagine why it wouldn't...

[Ironsides]

Who wouldn't pay a premium price for the rights to the www.sex.xxx domain?

Easy, The guy who owns the XXX.XXX.XXX domain.

Re:Can't imagine why it wouldn't...

[TheBeardIsRed]

you take that one, i'll take:

se.xxx
and goatse.xxx

Filtering porn

[Bob54321]

This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites

Not that I have done extensive research or anything, the will still be a lot of porn available that is not on .XXX domains. I see how adding .XXX to a filter list will block a lot of new stuff but any kid wanting porn will get it...

Re:Filtering porn

[Tim_UWA]

Any kid that wants porn can always get it (put the url in google translator with a bogus language and they can still view .xxx sites), but it might stop a lot of kids accidentally finding porn while looking for something else (assuming that everybody who has a porn site has all of their content at the .xxx address)

Re:Filtering porn

[bunions]

I view it as the porn industry protecting itself. I don't think that any legitimate business -wants- underage kids looking at their wide selection of Mongolian Goat Porn. Setting up shop under a xxx banner is a pretty clear indicator that they're adult content, and since filtering on a .xxx tld is so impossibly easy to do it's a pretty clear indicator that the business has taken all reasonable steps to prevent underage kids from gaining access.

Re:Filtering porn

[Tony Hoyle]

Not really. It's real hard to block a TLD like that effectively... all you need to do is proxy requests to .yyy to go to .xxx for example and the block stops working. If you can make the request to the root nameservers (not necessarily on the same machine or network) you can find the websites.. the rest is just a matter of coding.

Re:Filtering porn

[YrWrstNtmr]

And that is precisely why this is completely unworkable, and cannot achieve the aims of what it is trying to do. Not all "porn" resides on a website that belongs to someone in the porn industry.

Re:Filtering porn

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I would like to hear more about the Mongolian Goat Porn. Email me pls.

Re:Filtering porn

[bunions]

of course not. Getting porn off the internet is, like someone who I can't remember once said, is like getting pee out of a pool. But it IS productive in that it creates a simple, clear demarcation between where general and adult content belongs.

Re:Filtering porn

[mqduck]

Not really. It's real hard to block a TLD like that effectively... all you need to do is proxy requests to .yyy to go to .xxx for example and the block stops working. If you can make the request to the root nameservers (not necessarily on the same machine or network) you can find the websites.. the rest is just a matter of coding.

I'm sure lots of Slashdotters have storied of how they were programming sentient AIs at age 9, but having to do all that is more than enough to keep little Johny from seeing naked people (naked people on .xxx domains, anyway).

Re:Filtering porn

[symbolset]

I'm sure lots of Slashdotters have storied of how they were programming sentient AIs at age 9,

Dad? Is that you?

Re:Filtering porn

[Alsee]

Getting porn off the internet is, like someone who I can't remember once said, is like getting pee out of a pool.

Yeah, a memorable and genius quote. It's from the old TV show NewsRadio, said by Joe Garelli. But it wasn't a comment about porn, it was a comment about trying to take back anything once it has leaked onto the internet. The exact quote:

You can't take something off the Internet! It's like taking pee out of a swimming pool. Once it's in there, it's in there.

A perfect example being the idiot Brazilian courts currently going off on a internet piss hunt, and getting all pissy that it isn't working.

-

Not gonna work

[ip_freely_2000]

.
All the porn sites are going to do is redirect the .xxx domains onto their established .com domains. There has to be some way to force porn off the .com TLD. Probably the only thing to do that will be an army of faeries riding in armor mounted on flying unicorns. ( for those lacking a sarcasm detector, it means it's never going to happen )

Re:Not gonna work

[Professor_UNIX]

There has to be some way to force porn off the .com TLD.

It's pretty easy actually. All they have to do is make it against the terms of service for the .com registration and the next time registration comes around make everyone put up a $500 deposit on their .com domain registration as a bounty. If anyone reports a legitimate occurrence of pornography on that web site, they get the $500 bounty and your domain gets put into on-hold status until you've cleared away the offending content to the satisfaction of the registration authority and paid another $500 deposit. It'd be self-policing for the most part.

Re:Not gonna work

[Ironsides]

All the porn sites are going to do is redirect the .xxx domains onto their established .com domains. There has to be some way to force porn off the .com TLD.

I'm gonna take a wild guess at something for this. However, it would require blocking software.

No sane operator of a porn site is not going to register their .com/.org/.net sites in the .XXX domain. So, what software could do, is check the .com/.org/.net site and see if it resolves the same as the .XXX domain. If so, then you would know that it is most likely a porn site.

Basically, the .XXX domain could provide a nice crosscheck for a lot of sites.

Re:Not gonna work

[bucky0]

So, youtube, myspace, fark....oh, anything that lets users post content can be shutdown just by posting a pornographic image and telling the cops?

It seems like a good idea, but I think it would be ultimately unworkable.

Re:Not gonna work

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a new domain for those: .srop (slight risk of porn).

Re:Not gonna work

[XnavxeMiyyep]

And when people buy fox.xxx (porn involving foxes), yahoo.xxx (porn involving the excited) and google.xxx (porn involving large numbers), hilarity shall ensue.

Re:Not gonna work

[tehdaemon]

Sweet idea! A $500 reward for hacking a website and leaving no incriminating evidence.

Re:Not gonna work

[ClamIAm]

There has to be some way to force porn off the .com TLD.

Why? The domain was designed for commercial use. Porn sites are often commercial, therefore pornsite.com. If we start requiring special domains like this, two things happen:

1) It becomes a lot easier for people and organizations to be censored and harassed.

2) The people and organizations affected will host their content elsewhere and/or get a domain from a country without the requirement.

Re:Not gonna work

[1u3hr]

Probably the only thing to do that will be an army of faeries riding in armor mounted on flying unicorns.

Sounds like a job for Maxwell's Demon.

Re:Not gonna work

[GIL_Dude]

No, his proposal was to see if they resolve the same. They would not resolve to the same address, so the access to fox.com, yahoo.com, and google.com would be allowed.

Re:Not gonna work

[AnyoneEB]

The GP suggested checking to see if the .xxx domain and .com domain referred to the same server. Naturally, you could buy google.xxx and point it at Google's servers, but it would not be the same as what you said. Then again, maybe porn sites which want to make themselves easy to block (i.e. don't want to look like they are trying to show porn to minors), could simply have all of their sites redirect to .xxx sites, which could be trivially blocked by a filter. That is, sex.com would be accessible, but it would just redirect to sex.xxx which would not be. As to whether such filters should actually be used, that's not my call. I do not think it is unreasonable for a parent to attempt to filter their child's internet access. After all, the child will find a way around it eventually. :)

To make myself clear, .xxx could not and will never be useful for blocking all porn, but it could at least help.

Actually, this comment makes good points, although I am not sure I agree with the high cost/oversight idea. I suppose domains having a specific usage and oversight to ensure they are actually used that way is reasonable, although it does not seem to happen much on web currently.

Re:Not gonna work

[Rakarra]

an army of faeries riding in armor mounted on flying unicorns.

You're talking about porn. In such a context the above quote brought up... interesting mental images.

...

You, uhh... have a site for that? (.xxx domain only, please)

Nothing here except a monopoly trying to cash in.

[glomph]

ICM somehow got the .xxx franchise, based on WHAT? I'd like to see the truth there.

Anyway, it's a dead asset, unless they can cash in on the monopoly money!

ICANN will do the right thing as they always have.

Creating a new TLD will do nothing except enrich the franchisee, and make a bunch of flat-earthers in Flyover Country yowl a lot.

fucking religous nuts

[timmarhy]

that's all this boils down to, is religous creeps attempting to push their views on the world. they think if you enjoy sex, god will hate you. oh please please god forgive me for using my penis!

pointless

[delirium of disorder]

To protect the children, we must enable every cable and satellite company to provide xxx content on channel 69!

Ummm...Are we going to restrict other channels from carrying pornographic content?

No. It's technically difficult and would be expensive and violate the first amendment.

Doesn't this just give the porn companies more porn channels while doing nothing to censor kids (which is unethical anyways)?

Obscenity Laws

[simula]

If xxx becomes a top level domain, I can see a great moral push to force any content deemed "obscene" by local communities into the xxx tld. An attempt to whitewashing the internet so that only xxx contains content that is considered "foul, repulsive, or detestable" by every local community across the world would be very unfortunate for the notion of free speech.

Re:Obscenity Laws

[Tony Hoyle]

Won't work. If your website is hosted in any other country then it's unenforcable. 'local' communities can't agree on stuff like that - the US is decidedly on the puritanical side & would rather view the viewing of naked flesh completely.. Europe is a lot more liberal (and in fact has no meaninful censorship of its adult content), UK somewhere in the middle. In Japan manga shows children having sex regularly and it's considered perfectly normal..

So you're just never going to get a law that'll stick beyond the confines of your own country.

Re:Obscenity Laws

[Sancho]

It's mostly problematic because of the annoyance in rebranding and in user-created content. If you've spent years being, say, attrition.org and all of a sudden you're required to move to attrition.xxx just because some of your content is obscene (not necessarily sexually explicit) then moving is going to be painful (though you can certainly also own attrition.org and redirect--this won't get around filters). For sites like Youtube, Livejournal, etc. they suddenly have to split or censor their content. It's unworkable if only for that last reason--almost all of the currently most popular websites would have this problem.

That said, it would certainly make it feasible to whitelist sites you want to see rather than the more difficult task of blacklisting sites which display content you don't want to see. I wish there was a magic bullet for this problem. Unfortunately, there isn't one.

Re:Obscenity Laws

[sadler121]

Last I checked ICANN is located in the US and is over seen by the US Department of Commerece. If the US passes a law that would force all pr0n to .xxx, ICANN would be forced to comply.

Eminent Domain

[Swimport]

If porn is only allowed on xxx domains this would make established sites worthless. Could you even link from your old site to your new site? Effectively it would be eminent domain, except I doubt domain owners would be compensated. Domains like freep0rn.com would be worthless overnight. Not to mention the free speech issues. Perhaps Government Criticism should be limited to .gc domains.

Re:Eminent Domain

[Sancho]

HTTP 300 codes. They cause redirection. Makes it real easy to redirect from your old domain to your new site.

That said, the 'freedom of speech' issue on this strikes me as a little weird. Is slashdot.org restricting my freedom of speech by not letting me host whatever I want on their front page? Originally, TLDs had specific purposes and they were restricted to those purposes. Is that a restriction on freedom of speech?

The tags allow you to, at a glance, have an idea of what is present at the site. .org told you that it was a nonprofit organization. .net told you that it was a service provider. If .xxx existed at the time, you'd know at a glance that there was porn there. It's only restricting speech if you actively block addresses at that site through a law. This site makes it easier to execute such a law, but it doesn't prevent such laws from being passed.

if only

[huckda]

they would then REQUIRE any and all illicit sexual content on the web to use .xxx
and ENFORCE it...school administrator's jobs of content filtering would get a thousand times easier...

Re:if only

[YrWrstNtmr]

they would then REQUIRE any and all illicit sexual content on the web to use .xxx

Just two questions:
Who defines illicit sexual content?
Who is the worldwide enforcer?

Re:if only

[Swimport]

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=215552&cid =17503014

Re:if only

[foreverdisillusioned]

they would then REQUIRE any and all illicit sexual content on the web to use .xxx and ENFORCE it...school administrator's jobs of content filtering would get a thousand times easier...

What do you mean by "illicit"? Last time I checked, most types of porn are perfectly legal in this country. It's not the government's job to force perfectly legal websites to change their TDL just because YOU think that there's something wrong with the human body or sex in general.

Re:if only

[huckda]

enforcer? whoever has control of the route thus the ISP go as far up as need be.

defines? Merriam-Webster?

Re:if only

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Yes, obviously free speech should be sacrificed to make the school administrator's jobs easier. HOORAY FOR CENSORSHIP!

Re:if only

[YrWrstNtmr]

enforcer? whoever has control of the route thus the ISP go as far up as need be.

And when the site is hosted in a foreign country, and they tell you to go away...what do you do.

defines? Merriam-Webster?

Describe the definable difference between the opening shot of a porn sequence when the girl still has some clothes on, and a Sears/Macy's/VicSecret underwear ad.

Re:if only

[Sancho]

Can you remind me of how free speech is sacrificed in this scenario?

Re:if only

[Quintios]

You can get that Sears ad for free in the mail without fear of your parents knowing what's going on! :)

Re:if only

[1u3hr]

defines? Merriam-Webster?

I believe that's a dictionary, it defines words. (And there's much dispute about those.) How do you define a photograph? Do you know how much time, effort and paperwork and argument is involved in classifying movies for cinema release? Could that be automated to automatically and reliably classify millions of webpages, tens of thousands of videos?

Re:if only

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Content that the government deems inappropriate is being suppressed and regulated to a certain area.

Re:if only

[1u3hr]

they would then REQUIRE any and all illicit sexual content on the web to use .xxx and ENFORCE it...school administrator's jobs of content filtering would get a thousand times easier...

Great. Who is "they" that are going to require every website, whether hosted in Kazakhstan, Christmas Island, the Vatican City, Russia, North Korea... to do this?

All for the benefit of school admisitrators. Why not just make a white list for the sites you want kids to have access to, kids can apply to have sites added, if they're trusted they can do it themselves knowing they will be subject to review.

Why not ask all criminals to turn themselves in a police stations. That would make policemen's jobs a thousand times easier!

Re:if only

[Sancho]

I see no suppression. Please refrain from hyperbole.

As for being "relegated to a certain area", that's not a good analogy. It's more like the content is being tagged, and then anyone who wants to can block based on the tag. This is very similar to what RBLs do to maintain lists of spammers, so that those who wish to may block based on the list.

Re:if only

[XnavxeMiyyep]

The difference is that RBLs are private entities and do not legally enforce anything, just like I can censor domain name containing the word "tree" from my computer without forcing websites containing the word tree to purchase .tree TLDs. However, ICANN is associated with the government and would force those with "inappropriate content" to purchase new domain names, etc. Would you support regulation that forces sites supporting whatever party is opposed to the current government to be regulated to a .opp TLD?

Re:if only

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU and get back in your Free Speech Zone, or you'll be arrested!

Re:if only

[Dun Malg]

enforcer? whoever has control of the route thus the ISP go as far up as need be. No, you daft knob, that wouldn't fucking work. ISPs have no authority to cause sex.com to move to sex.xxx. Again, who do you suggest will enforce the mandatory move to .xxx?

Re:if only

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the FUCK modded this shitforbrains as "Informative"?! ./ should make people's comment moderations public.

(Col. 2.7.0-default posting as AC because I lost my password, d'oh.)

Re:if only

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should a .xxx tld be required in order to help a school administrator, or parents or other groups. If they want to protect children or make a school administrator's job easier, then they need to create a .kid tld.

A .kid would require that all sites on it are kid safe. These sites could be reviewed much easier and they could have the sites license removed if it violated a kid safe list of rules, and the site would no longer exist. I believe in order to have a .gov a site must be a government site (a US government site). A .org is supposed to be a non commercial site (been awhile since I confirmed this one). So a .kid would be easier to maintain than a .xxx.

Off-topic part:
When I was a kid, all we wanted to do was grow up so that we could have more freedom. We were restricted as kids. Now that I am an adult (30 this year), people are trying to remove my freedoms by protecting kids from pretty much everything. Why do I have to constantly lose freedoms? (Yes that was a selfish closed statement). I want to play a violent video game, I still have to wonder what was removed in order to keep certain people from protesting against said game due to "Think of the children" arguments. GTA3 series of games were very well done; Postal2 not so much. If I want to look at porn then I should be able to look at porn.

Why is everything "Think of the children"? Why is it not, "Parents think of your kids and take responsibility"? If "some" parents would think more of their own kids and maybe spend more time with them, then their would be less I would have to worry about. If parents are too busy working their jobs in order to purchase more things, and not taking care of their kids, then I don't care what they have to say. If a parent is working hard just to make ends meet and they need help watching over their kids, it is different, but still should not fall to government to create laws that restrict those that are of a legal age.

Sort of back on-topic:
If a .xxx domain is created, no matter what, in time all "obscene" material will be pushed there, either by lawsuits or by fines. I do not agree with what my neighbors think is obscene, I do not agree with what my parents think is obscene, I do not agree with what my siblings or my friends think is obscene. So how is obscene to be judged? Is Michelangelo's "David" obscene due to the presence of male genitalia? Is a picture of this work of art obscene as it shows male genitalia? Is anything in an artistic setting protected? Is anything explicitly sexual obscene? Is anything of a questionable nature considered obscene? (Note: that is questionable by my standards, as in a painting done with feces instead of paint.)

There are many people's versions of what is obscene and what is not. Did they not create a new movie rating to differentiate between sexual movies and those with extreme violence? Communities used to decide what was obscene and what was not in their community. With the web, the old fashion communities disappeared and new ones sprung up. If you do not want to view what some communities consider okay, then you move on until you find a community that agrees with your sense of obscenity. To create a tld of .xxx you are digging beneath solid ground. To dig this way you are creating a slippery slope which will end up with the web falling off a cliff, never to be seen again.

Re:if only

[veganboyjosh]

link please.

Re:if only

[Anonymous Coward]

Who defines illicit sexual content?

And do they have any openings in the reviewers department?

Re:if only

[enrgeeman]

I think the parent poster is referring to the fact that school kids would be underage, and the porn would therefore be illegal, not that the porn sites are illegal.

Re:if only

[foreverdisillusioned]

Regardless of whether or not the kids viewing it is an illegal act (and I don't think this is true--usually, only the act of giving a minor pornographic material is outlawed, not the act of the minor viewing it) the porn itself remains legal. By analogy, cigarettes don't suddenly become illegal if a careless parent leaves them lying around for minors to find. The school owns the internet connection, thus it is the school's responsibility alone to manage how minors access it. The legality (nor even the social responsibilities) of an internet site don't magically change just because the school decides to give their students net access.

Re:if only

[huckda]

porn is legal for children to possess/purchase be involved with in any way? since when?

Re:if only

[huckda]

pedantic is the appropriate word to describe that..

Re:if only

[huckda]

I'm sure those genius folk at Google could code something up ;)

Re:if only

[huckda]

yes they do... the refuse to provide a service...that's all the power they need.

Re:I call dibs on... penhouse.xxx??

[madsheep]

penhouse.xxx??

I don't know buddy. Think you've got a few winners with the others but I am not so sure about penhouse.xxx. Some how I don't see a house of Pen's being very erotic.

Underlying Problem

[chris_eineke]

Isn't the underlying problem of this really the centralized nature of DNS?

Re:Underlying Problem

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

How do you propose to create a useful decentralized name resolution system where the names are meaningful?

Re:Underlying Problem

[Workaphobia]

I don't agree about the centralization part, but I certainly think DNS could be vastly improved in other important ways. If we could redesign DNS from the start, I would like to add more hierarchical levels, along with support for choosing/merging different namespaces. Since I'm not an expert at this, I'm probably being a bit imprecise in my terminology, but I'll try to clarify.

A while ago, I got curious as to how DNS worked, and was mildly interested in adding a .local TLD specific to my LAN. I could have just added all my host names on my network to each machine's /etc/hosts file, but that's an inelegant solution and the point of this was to be moderately elegant. I could have just turned one machine on the network into a nameserver, have it handle .local requests, and forward all others up the chain to a real DNS server, but that carried with it the problem that it was a single point of failure (where failure is "Oops, I forgot to turn the server on") for normal, real DNS requests, and that was unacceptable.

Ideally, I wanted the resolver on the clients to work by trying the first nameserver in its list and seeing if that one supported .local. If not, it would go on to the next, and so on. In that way, I could make the first nameserver in the list my own and modify the listings on that one server to control DNS over my whole LAN, while defaulting to the real nameservers for everything else. But the resolver doesn't work that way. It only goes on to the next nameserver in the list if the one it tries is actually not responding.

It's really the same problem as trying to use one of those alternative root nameservers (which I briefly investigated, until I realized they were all crappy networks that were abandoned years ago). DNS does not lend itself to merging namespaces, or giving control to the end systems over that kind of thing. (Hmm, I guess that really is a matter of "centralization" then. I take back what I said at the beginning.)

Anyway, more relevant to this conversation: I would like to see a much more structured namespace than the crap that is today's TLDs. The problem is that things like .com, .net, and .xxx are global entities when they really shouldn't be, since it fails to categorize them according to jurisdiction and can cause them to conflict with totally unrelated and geographically displaced entities. I think it would be preferable to eliminate all TLDs and use nothing but country codes (Of course I realize this is unrealistic, I'm not an idiot.). Then you could make the first subdomain of the country code indicate its purpose, subject to the jurisdiction and interpretation of the people of that country. Suddenly, what qualifies as obscene, or non-commercial, or personal, is no longer an international political crisis.

The price would be slightly longer domain names, but I think some sort of aliasing system that could be set to one country code by default might help. I dunno, I think that should be an after-thought.

I apologize if my thoughts are a bit jumbled, I'm rushing to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

Re:Underlying Problem

[kchrist]

Ideally, I wanted the resolver on the clients to work by trying the first nameserver in its list and seeing if that one supported .local. If not, it would go on to the next, and so on. In that way, I could make the first nameserver in the list my own and modify the listings on that one server to control DNS over my whole LAN, while defaulting to the real nameservers for everything else. But the resolver doesn't work that way. It only goes on to the next nameserver in the list if the one it tries is actually not responding.

The way I read this is that it works exactly as you want. If your internal DNS server is unavailable (turned off, on fire, whatever), DNS requests go out to the external servers (your ISP's, maybe) and things work as expected. Your example scenario relies on your own server both a) responding to DNS requests, and b) not being able to resolve a name on your local namespace. Unless you've deleted the zone file or something I don't see how this would be a problem.

I use a similar system for internal DNS both at home (all OS X) and at the company I work for (50/50 Windows/Linux). Internal hostnames are on the ".int.example.net" subdomain (where example.net is our real, public domain name). The DHCP server hands out this internal subdomain as a search domain and the internal DNS server as the first nameserver. This DNS server holds the zone file for "int.example.net" and resolves hosts in this domain to the appropriate RFC 1918 addresses, while forwarding other requests to the external DNS servers. External DNS servers for the main domain don't need to know about this internal subdomain. I've been doing this for years.

Alternately, just use Bonjour/Zeroconf on your local network and skip the DNS server entirely.

Re:I call dibs on... penhouse.xxx??

[glwtta]

It's a typo, should have been "penisland.xxx"

The question not getting much discussion is...

[Nkwe]

Who gets how many dollars per registration?

Re:The question not getting much discussion is...

[madsheep]

The question isn't getting much discussion because it's right there in the article and is referenced above:

What has not changed about the contract is the registration fee for dot-xxx domains: It will remain at $60 annually, with $10 of each registration going to IFFOR.
In case anyone is still wondering, it will cost 60 USD.

Re:The question not getting much discussion is...

[Nkwe]

In case anyone is still wondering, it will cost 60 USD.

The point being that .COM domains register for under $10 now. $60 times the number of potential .XXX domains is a *lot* of money. Is this about moving and corralling porn (which won't work anyway) or is it about making a lot of money for the registrar?

protecting the children

[1u3hr]

The submitter, or Slashdot editors, say "This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children..." (this is nowhere in TFA).

This is bullshit. How does creating a NEW domain for porn protect anyone? Only if at the same time porn is made illegal everywhere else, something that is not publicly advocated by the sponsors of .xxx. Though it's suspected that's an objective. However, no one has been able to clean porn out of any TLD and this remains impossible to do except as a symbolic and empty "We're protecting children from porn" statement. The only benefit of this new domain is the registrars who will collect $60 per year for all those existing porn sites who will be blackmailed into buying a corresponding .xxx domain to protect their brand from typosquatters. No one will set up a site solely on .xxx, a formula to be blocked by default from many users; they'll all just redirect to .coms or CC TLDs. No one will be "protected" from porn at all.

Yes, it does.

[khasim]

Why should anyone have a right to a new domain name just because they have some other domain name?

So that it won't turn into a "gold rush" with lots of "squatters" fighting over it. If someone has already gone to the effort to develop whitehouse.com as a porn site, then why not make it easier for everyone and give them first shot at whitehouse.xxx?

If you're going to give favored access to existing domain holders, there's no public advantage whatsoever to adding new TLDs - it doesn't expand the name space, it just takes a bunch of cash from existing companies and gives it to the new registrar.

Adding a new TLD will also move "a bunch of cash" to the "new registrar". The only question is who will provide that cash.

And it does "expand the name space". It is a new TLD. Go ahead and register slashdot.xxx if you want to. But I'd still prefer to give CmdrTaco first shot at it.

What you probably meant is that it won't add any new porn sites. That is probably correct. But it really does not matter. Anyone who wants to set up a porn site right now can do so.

All this will do is allow the legitimate porn sites to redirect their sites to the .xxx domain and make it easier for schools and such to block them.

It won't solve the whole problem, but it will allow the legitimate porn sites to "protect the children" without subjecting them to squatters trying to drive up the price.

Although I still believe that this would be better served as *.xxx.us instead.

Re:Yes, it does.

[Propaganda13]

So .com is supposed to get the first choice? There are sites that started out as .org and .net that have come to be known by those extensions, but eventually purchased .com to protect their name. Slashdot.org and cmdrtaco.net are two such sites and others like freshmeat.net have only the .net domain.

As for using .us, etc., what about sites that are not country specific like slashdot.org or international business and organizations. Also country domains make it easier to censor based on geography.

I've always felt that tld's forced companies and individuals to buy as many tld's as possible. While .xxx gives the porn industry another way to self-censor and makes the registries more money, it doesn't solve any domain name issues.

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

"Although I still believe that this would be better served as *.xxx.us instead."

Don't go there. No really. In principle that is great. But we have seen something similar in the public school systems across the us. It is a nightmare. You end up 5-8 segments; addresses like www.ehs.unit40.effingham.il.us *mythical, but the real ones are worse*. Anything beyond three segments is unwieldy.

Re:Yes, it does.

[rawtatoor]

I wish you could have made your point with out mentioning slashdot.xxx I'm not even sure what the nightmares I'm going to have because of that entail.

Re:Yes, it does.

[Tim_UWA]

Everyone else in the world manages fine with it.

Re:Yes, it does.

[Chandon Seldon]

Do you keep all your files in your computer in the root directory of the filesysystem (i.e. "/" on Unix or "C:\" on Windows), or do you use subdirectories to organize things? I'd be much more interested in http://www.joes-pizza.lowell.ma.us/ than in http://www.joes-pizza.com/

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

"I'd be much more interested in http://www.joes-pizza.lowell.ma.us/ than in http://www.joes-pizza.com/"

Easier to parse for a computer. But it would be a nightmare to try to remember more than two or three addresses that way. I don't know about you, but I pull up numerous sites on a lot of different computers. I need to be able to recall the full url for all of those sites from memory and need to be able to add and remove urls from the list without a study session.

"Do you keep all your files in your computer in the root directory of the filesysystem (i.e. "/" on Unix or "C:\" on Windows)"

Of course not, but burying things several levels deep is even worse. Putting everything in root would be only using tld's. Putting things one dir deep would be like using just the current registered domain with not subdomain such as x.com. The current system I am saying is quite enough is x.x.com. And things have gone much too far with x.x.x.com. Websites with that many sub-levels of content are confusing and unwieldy. Directory structures that do so are also confusing (especially if they use the same names for sub-folders in different folders).

The fewer levels of depth and sub-classification the easier it is for HUMANS to parse the address. Sorry mods, my post was a legitimate point, just because something might upset the foreign GUESTS to the forum does not make it flamebait.

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

Really? I will be sure to let all those foreign .com address know that. There are non-country specific tld domains registered to people and companies all over the world. Especially .com's. In fact, I can't even think of any country specific urls off hand other than the bbc site.

Re:Yes, it does.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be better as .xxx.us since then it can fairly and reasonably be governed by US law.

sex.xxx.us isn't any big deal to type, no one is suggesting sex.sometown.state.xxx.us (or however you do it).

Re:Yes, it does.

[KDR_11k]

That would work for a website that's supposed to cover only a small area. I'd expect a .com to cover multiple countries while ccTLDs would cover a country (often websites filed under a ccTLD redirect to the country-specific version of the main website) and more specific domains would apply to websites meant for even smaller scopes. Generally anyone would try a ccTLD and then the generic TLDs when looking for a company, if the company offers region specific services those would be reached through ccTLDs, if the website has no country-specific services (e.g. Slashdot) the generic TLD would be correct.

Re:Yes, it does.

[ZorroXXX]

In fact, I can't even think of any country specific urls off hand other than the bbc site.

This probably says more about your (limited) world view than it describes the reality.

PS: This is not meant as a flamebait (although I cannot guarantee that it will not be perceived as one).

Re:Yes, it does.

[lahi]

The DNS system is severely borken. By design. Of course this is a consequence of lack of foresight back when it was designed. No new TLD can fix that error, a complete redesign from a global perspective is required. In the beginning, there was distributed hosts files, where each host had a globally unique name. This was replaced by the hiearchical system with a few TLDs. The intent, of course, was to have a deep hierarchy that would allow better performance and overall usability. However, except for a few countries that mirror the TLDs, we effectively have a two-level system, with a great deal of overlap. (www.apple.dk redirecting to http://www.apple.com/dk for example.) The usage of a pointless extraneous protocol identifier (www.) is a stupidity in itself, of course.

IMO the only meaningful solution is to replace domain names by random n-digit ID numbers, created in a way so that each ID has no regular pattern in it (otherwise we will see hoarding of "pretty" ID numbers.) Naturally, that would just replace domain name squatting with search engine doping, but perhaps this could be a good thing. Search engines would have to work harder to reject fake boosters and focus on valid quality content.

Alternatively, enforcing a deeper hierarchical model could help a bit, but that would require global agreement upon a categorical hierarchy which is a pipe dream if there ever was one!

-Lasse

Re:Yes, it does.

[lahi]

The DNS system reflects its origin in educational systems and a few large enterprises, where fairly deep hierarchical departmental structures made sense. For large-scale commercial purposes this conflicts with the primary commercial desire: being easy to remember.

The only effective solution will be to abolish domains completely, and rely on search engines, augmented by tagged searches (for example "Trademark:Apple", or "Stock:AAPL".) It would probably be best to inject a level of (complex) random numeric identifiers instead of relying on IP addresses directly, as using the latter directly from the search engines might result in a preference for certain IP adresses, as has been seen with phone numbers.

Unfortunately, this would mean that Google would effectively hold the keys to the whole Internet, which is probably undesirable, even despite "do no evil" and all. Perfection is unattainable, it seems. Ultimately this is closely connected to the philosophical notion of identity and uniqueness, and I don't think there can be a good permanent solution.

-Lasse

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

That would provide more available id's, domains, whatever tag you like. However it would reduce the practical utility of the names. If I wanted a random string that was difficult to remember I would just use the IP address.

A name like 'google.com' is simple to remember. I am not bound to a bookmarks list to remember it. I can sit down at any browser anywhere and remember that very simple name off the top of my head. The name is easy enough that I had it memorized after a single exposure.

Your own post makes clear that your deep hierarchy would really only be useful for parsing by machine. The true value of domains has been shown to be not merely a fixed location, but by being a HUMAN parsable system.

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

"It would be better as .xxx.us since then it can fairly and reasonably be governed by US law."

Why would you want US law governing the internet? That would elminate most of the value of the internet. The xxx tld is to allow PRIVATE sector filtering, not government regulation. Government regulation and censorship is bad. Especially when you are talking about regulation of porn by a puritan government. I mean really, concerned soccor moms with delicate sensibilities certainly shouldn't have the ability to lobby and make some form of dirty and raunchy porn illegal.

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

"This probably says more about your (limited) world view than it describes the reality."

okay, lets do a test. Lets use google to produce results that do not mirror my world view. I will search for popular keywords and check the first page to see how many country specific domains come up.
keyword - results
sex - 0
money - 0
drugs - 0
porn - 1
news - 1 (the bbc)
animals - 1 (the bbc)
taco - 1 (woot an actual foreign website!)
pig - 0
name - 0
computer 0

okay, that is 100 top 10 results by keyword. According to the all mighty google these sites are the most relevant on the internet for these fairly random subjects. 96% of the sites used non-country specific tlds. Of the remaining 4% half were the bbc I had already credited so that takes us to only 2% and those were ranked 8 and 9 at the bottom of their respective search pages.

I am sure the occurance goes up dramatically if you start searching for results in gobbily gook. But English has more or less become a trade language and while you will find many chinese sites in English you probably won't find many US sites in mandarian.

I am also sure there is a great deal of worthwhile content produced all over the globe and doubt these results reflect US versus foreign content. My point is that foreign content providers are using three letter tlds. I have a suspicion that two letter tld use is higher in asia but I can't verify it. Most asian content is meant to be consumed by asians and is non-english so I would never be exposed to it.

I also find three letter tlds valuable precisely because they do not divide the world into seperate segments like a map. A .com website could be asian, european, usian, it doesn't matter. With .com everyone is combined into a single global audience. The more two letter tlds are used the more people will be divided into seperate audiences again. This is to the benefit of those who wish to control and regulate the masses and contrary to the interests of the masses themselves.

Re:Yes, it does.

[Chandon Seldon]

Have you considered that in some foreign countries they speak languages other than english?

Re:Yes, it does.

[Chandon Seldon]

The world is a big place, and different websites have different exposure levels. The .com domain is excellent for international trademarks. In some cases, the properties of the .com domain have *created* international trademarks. That's great. That still doesn't mean that "http://www.rockportusa.com" is a better name for the Rockport, MA chamber of commerce webpage than something like "http://shop.rockport.ma.us/". Sure, it might seem hard to remember - that's because you're not used to it. If you *assumed* that local websites would be in a town.state.us hierarchy, that would be the obvious place for that site. I definitely think that's easier to remember than "rockportusa.com" or some shit like "shop-rockport.travel".

Re:Yes, it does.

[mooredynasty]

Don't take all the fun out of things - people love a good gold rush, stock market windfall, or tulip bulb bubble. It's a natural part of the government-regulated economy, not unlike the sudden "appearance" of wireless frequencies, etc. Present .com porn peddlers have no automatic claim on the new TLD that is, IMHO, long, long overdue. Let them bid on the domain names just like Verizon, et al, bid on the airwaves.

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

You mean the possibility I covered extensively in the post you are responding to? Nope, never crossed my mind.

Re:Yes, it does.

[shaitand]

"If you *assumed* that local websites would be in a town.state.us hierarchy, that would be the obvious place for that site. I definitely think that's easier to remember than "rockportusa.com" or some shit like "shop-rockport.travel"."

Local websites are only intended for local exposure. The vast bulk of web consists of sites that hope to get more than local traffic. First, I don't want the URL of my site to reveal my address. If I put something on my site that criticizes Muslims, I'd prefer they be limited to the website as a way of responding.

By definition sites on the web are international content, you put things on the international web in hopes that it will be seen by the international audience that is found there. Your scheme would put the focus back on local content. The only ones who benefit from that are local shop keepers who are attempting to use a medium that is not related to geography of content posters to advertise to a geographically specific audience.

If you are addressing the practical need for more domain names then more depth based upon content would be more appropriate. If you run a shoe store, you don't want customers in Michigan you want any customer who wants a pair of shoes. If you didn't you would be advertising in a medium that is appropriate for a specific local. The same is true if one puts up a homepage or a blog. You want as broad a potential audience as possible. If your address is harrysblog.effingham.effingham.illinois.us then you aren't exactly poised to receive the same potential audience as insightblog.com.

Your scheme would also let a large local ISP who isn't a fan of a neighboring communities sports team block all the content from the neighboring community with ease.

Lets keep national pride, local concerns, and geographic entities petty squabbles as far away from the global Internet as possible. It is a sad and unfortunate fact that the hardware that runs the web must be located in the geographic jurisdiction of some draconian government controlling a gullible populace with sticks and lollipops but lets keep their influence to a minimum.

Re:Yes, it does.

[Chandon Seldon]

I'm not suggesting that the only hierarchy be a location-based hierarchy, but a flat namespace doesn't work for everything either. For example, having personal websites at http://www.johnsmith.com/ stops working *really fast*. Remember that http://harrysblog.effingham.il.us/ is still accessible from the whole world - it just means that Harry from detroit can have a blog named harrysblog too (at http://harrysblog.detroit.mi.us/). And if that's the obvious place for a personal blog, then all you have to remember is "harrysblog detroit", assuming you can remember what state Detroit is in (not hard).

But... no one's offering .town.state.us domains, and people keep adding ad-hoc random top level domains, so what we're going to end up with is having to remember an arbitrary string with at least one dot in it. That's a way worse deal than some couple of well-defined hierarchies.

Protect the consumer

[Twillerror]

The porn industry is not a stupid and corrupt as it might appear. They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do. They are not the tobacco industry. They want to protect their interests which means not showing it to kids which is against the law.

They will switch over because it make them look legit. Someone sees the XXX domain and knows that it will probably be a good porn site. I wish there where actually some laws passed to protect the consumer.

Say I get some malware after visiting one of the sites. A repersentative from .XXX will review and then take away the domain name if they do not stop.

I'd say make them pay $1000 dollars for the domain name. With yearly fees. People will pay it if there is money, and the consumer will pay for fast downloads and good security.

The companies that don't switch over will still exist for sure. So blocking them will not be possilbe without the use of a service, but I really don't care. I want a designated area on the net for porn...and this will give us it.

Re:Protect the consumer

[xaosflux]

"I want a designated area on the net for porn...and this will give us it."

I'd settle for a designated porn-free area of the net. Really, .xxx is not going to replace DCC, Torrent, and P2P streams anytime soon.

Re:Protect the consumer

[Kalriath]

So, how much does ICM Registry pay you?

Re:Protect the consumer

[a.d.trick]

They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do. They are not the tobacco industry. They want to protect their interests which means not showing it to kids which is against the law.

As far as I can tell, they're exactly like the tobacco industry in this repect. Sure, they play the law-abiding game, but so does the tobacco industry. Some tobacco companies have even run campains to persuade kids to not smoke. To them it's the cost of doing business. Of course, both of them will do as little as possible to stop minors from getting hooked on their content.

Now you might say that pornography isn't harmful as tobacco (and you might be right). But that's beside the point. The fact is that they would love to have little kids staring at their stuff, but breaking the law is a bit expensive. The tobacco compaines are the same way and they have cleaned up their act alot in the past few decades as the law has put clamped down on their malarky.

P.S. I'm talking about tobacco companies in North America. Tobacco companies in South-East Asia are quite different. I'm not sure about the rest of the world.

Re:Protect the consumer

[ocbwilg]

The porn industry is not a stupid and corrupt as it might appear. They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do. They are not the tobacco industry. They want to protect their interests which means not showing it to kids which is against the law.

This part is true, but there are a number of ways that a porn site operator can achieve this with the .COM or CC TLDs, namely by rating your site appropriately. The problem is, most people are so techno-retarded that they don't realize that there are ratings controls built into their web browser that will allow them to block a significant part of not only porn, but drug, gambling, and violence-related sites. Barring that, you can still buy software to do the filtering. But again, most parents would rather push the responsibility for filtering their kids' Internet access onto someone else.

Now, in an ideal world, all of the porn site operators will also register their site in the .XXX TLD and then change their .COM or CC domain names to simply redirect to the .XXX site, thereby giving you one-stop blocking. The reality is, not everybody will do so. Because of the international and decentralized nature of the Internet, many site operators will ignore .XXX altogether. In some areas you'll probably have parents lobbying ISPs to block all access to .XXX in order to "protect the children", rather than parents taking responsibility for it themselves (same as today). So if you are a porn site operator and you stand a substantial chance of reducing your paying audience by moving from .COM to .XXX, then why would you? And then of course there is the thorny issue of things that aren't blatant porn, but can be construed as sexual. Where is that allowed to live? What about sites like Yahoo and YouTube that have the majority of their content that is not objectionable, but has a small percentage of their content that is adult in nature? Do they have to split their sites? If not, then you can't filter those by just blocking the .XXX.

Say I get some malware after visiting one of the sites. A repersentative from .XXX will review and then take away the domain name if they do not stop.

You obviously have no idea how domain registration works. What you do with the domain is your business. Why the domain registrar should have anything to do with investigating claims of malware and suspending the name is beyond me. In reality, these days the vast majority of malware is delivered either by email, by worm, by ads (which primarily come from .COM sites), or by people installing software that they shouldn't install. Trying to tie any of that to a TLD is absolutely ridiculous.

I'd say make them pay $1000 dollars for the domain name. With yearly fees. People will pay it if there is money, and the consumer will pay for fast downloads and good security.

The further that I get into your post the more obvious it becomes that you really don't understand how the Internet works. The TLD that you use to register a domain name has nothing to do with download speed or good security. And about the only way that you could make a .XXX TLD an even bigger failure than it is already destined to be is by charging people 100 times the going rate of a domain name for a .XXX domain name (i.e., $1000). Think about it for a second, if you already have a .COM or CC name you have very little incentive to also register a .XXX name to go with it, especially if that .XXX name is likely to have a narrower appeal than the .COM name. But if you have to pay a fortune to get it, there's no way you're going to waste the money on registering for a .XXX.

Not only that, there are a fair number of adu

Re:Protect the consumer

[ThePopeLayton]

They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do

I find this hard to believe as the number of porn sites that use terms like: Pokemon, nintendo, yugiyo, etc. is growing rapidly. Not to mention the videos available to download entitled things like : Harry Potter, Spiderman etc.. which just turn out to be porn movies. So you are right the industry isn't stupid, its rather intellegent. Get the kids hooked while there young and you'll have a customer for 70 years.

Re:Protect the consumer

[Ash-Fox]

Looking at some Google results, it does actually look like there is pokemon, yugiyo, mario porn in the first place.

Perhaps the problem is that some adults are getting sexual fetishes for children's stuff?

Re:Protect the consumer

[ocbwilg]

As far as I can tell, they're exactly like the tobacco industry in this repect. Sure, they play the law-abiding game, but so does the tobacco industry. Some tobacco companies have even run campains to persuade kids to not smoke. To them it's the cost of doing business. Of course, both of them will do as little as possible to stop minors from getting hooked on their content.

That's not even close to accurate. With tobacco the industry has to actually get someone hooked (aka, addicted) to their product by exposing them to it repeatedly until their brain craves it. But when it comes to the sex industry we are already pre-wired to crave it. Sex is simply a necessary part of life, much as eating or sleeping is a part of life.

The tobacco industry has to actually create a false perception of need to get you to try tobacco, then create the addictive need for their product (via nicotine). The sex industry simply takes advantage of what already exists in human instinct.

The tobacco industry is slowing killing their customers (along with many innocent bystanders) and must work hard to constantly get new customers. The sex industry doesn't kill their customers, and if anything they probably spur a certain amount of human reproduction which results in more customers for them down the line.

The tobacco industry has a parasitic relationship with people, while the sex industry has a more symbiotic relationship. The tobacco industry is far more insidious and evil than the sex industry could ever possibly dream of being.

Re:Protect the consumer

[Anonymous Coward]

Might be right? MIGHT BE RIGHT?

If you had a child, which of these would you prefer:
A. Gets addicted to porn. Almost certain to happen at some point anyway. Has almost no negative effects.
B. Gets addicted to nicotine. Smells like shit all the damn time. Dies 15 years earlier than normal.

Re:Protect the consumer

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true - the reason is because people under 18 don't have credit cards.

Re:Protect the consumer

[a.d.trick]

Sex is simply a necessary part of life, much as eating or sleeping is a part of life.

That statement is wrong on two accounts. First, pornography is not the same thing as sex. C.S. Lewis came up with a somewhat better analogy here:

Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or bit of bacon, would you not think that in the country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

The second problem is that even sex not the same as the other natural instincts. To quote Lewis again:

But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

...

There is nothing to be ashamed in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

Re:Protect the consumer

[subsonic]

Why do people act like "porn" is this big single business and entity. It's not, there are big companies and little individual sites, people all over the world, some doing this in some sort of regulated "business" way, some doing as an expression of their individual tastes, and tons of people who just watch and distribute it on P2P because they want to. Obviously if you aren't aware of pornography as a young adult or kid, you might not be tempted to buy a Penthouse when you turn 18. But then again there are plenty of people who don't start smoking until their 18, too. I mean, i was also aware of driving before I turned 16. Just because it's existence is acknowledge does not mean that pornographers are actively enticing individuals under 18.

Strangely, the businesses on the up-and-up ("real" media companies based in the USA like Vivid Video, etc.) are definitely NOT interested in underage consumers or participants. They are actually fairly high profile and they can get fined or thrown in jail for breaking the law. The pornography industry in the USA knows that it exists because it follows the rules. They may make a parodic movie featuring something from contemporary culture or nostalgia, but they don't target kids by doing so. However, they can't when someone's kid uses their parents' credit cards to gain access to their site.

Then there are those individuals or small groups who have actually taken something like Pokemon or Spider-man or Disney films and have turned them into porn. These people really are interested in these characters in a sexual way (hey, if it floats your boat...). They do so outside the realm of a business model and regulation.

Then there are those who simply rename their porn movie files to confuse people who are engaging in illegal downloading. But that's downloading DVD rips and bootlegs, and it's quite obviously outside the bounds of any regulation (aside from, you know, copyright law!)

Those who are currently regulated, the first group I mentioned, are generally doing a good job. There are tons of pornography sites based outside the US, and they will not be affected by any legislation. And there are always those people working away from the mainstream that will also go unregulated. This will do nothing but make it harder for the reputable companies to do business.

Re:Protect the consumer

[ocbwilg]

First, pornography is not the same thing as sex.

I never claimed that pornography was the same as sex. I referred to the sex industry, which pornography (or at least it's commercials aspects) are certainly a part. One would assume that if one wanted to set up a .XXX TLD that they would want it used not only for sites that provide pornographic images, but sites that provide other sexually related materials (aka, shops selling sex toys, sex manuals, erotic writing, adverts for escorts or strip clubs, etc).

Regarding the rest of your post, it's probably a wasted effort trying to talk sense (especially about sex and human nature) so someone who cites "god" in their post, but...

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or bit of bacon, would you not think that in the country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

In most societies, food is far more common, mundane, and freely available than sex (or strip teases). Furthermore, the drive for sex (or procreation if you're one of those "sex is only for procreation" types) is far, far stronger than simple hunger. Especially when you are being adequately fed. But if you've ever seen an episode of the TV show Survivor (I know, reality TV is probably not the best example) after several weeks of island life they usually have a competition where the contestants can win tasty, western style meals like pizza, burgers, etc instead of having to forage for bugs or eating the meat of captured rats (or whatever else they can manage to dig up). And wouldn't you know it, when they lift the cover of the dishes so that the contestants can see the meals every last one of them is going "oooh", "aaah", and smacking their lips in anticipation. Even the great prude C.S. Lewis himself would behave that way if he hadn't eaten for a week.

The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body.
Actually, the biological purpose of sex is sexual gratification. A common biological result of sex is children, but only someone pushing an agenda would claim it is the purpose. I don't know about you, but when I'm having sex the last thing that I'm usually thinking is "I hope that this produces children", and I have yet to meet anyone (with the exception of a couple of friends who had trouble conceiving after 2 years of trying) who ever claimed that such thoughts went through their mind. Even after sexual release we typically aren't concerned about conception. After having sex is someone more likely to ask "do you think that you're pregnant", or "was it good for you"?

Furthermore, the biological purpose of eating isn't to repair the body but to replenish the bodies energy stores. If someone is in perfect health they still eat even though their body is not in need of repair.

Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

There's two reasons for that. Firstly, there is a finite limit to how much we can oblige our appetite for food. Eventually you will get full. If you keep eating you

OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

My car won't start!

easier to scrutinize by authorities?

[nurb432]

Sure, i want to sign up for that deal.. no thanks.

NO IT DOESN'T! Or, Article Is A Troll

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities

NO IT DOESN'T. Please at least pretend you've read RFC 3675.

RFC 3675

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

RFC 3675

Huh?

[TheLink]

What's all this silly talk about .xxx making it harder to get porn.

Anyone thinking straight will know that .xxx will make it easier to find and get porn (as if it's not easy enough already).

Note: I'm not arguing against the .xxx TLD though. I personally think ICANN sucks, but looking at the other alternatives it seems like anyone who's likely to take over from ICANN would suck even more.

You all should just let me take over from ICANN :).

Re: religous nuts

[fyngyrz]

MISUSE OF MODERATION ABOVE - valid opinion, substantiated by the evidence and general cultural activity, mis-moderated as flamebait.

How about this for an idea

[Frogbert]

Wouldn't it be better to have a .kid domain name. And only give that to sites are are deemed suitable to be viewed by kids?

Re:How about this for an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet, how about realizing that a kid accidentally clicking on a porn site and then hitting the back button isn't gonna hurt them?

Re:How about this for an idea

[Rakarra]

In fact, it hurts the parents far more.

The kids shrug it off or think it's funny. It's the parents that go ballistic and start crying.

Re:How about this for an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

...And only give that to sites are are deemed suitable to be viewed by kids?

Deemed suitable by whom? The fundamentalist Christians? The Taliban? Hugh Heffner? Big Oil? Who gets to decide what is suitable for my children to view/watch/hear? Oh, now I remember: I do.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cablevision used to...

[CrAlt]

To protect the children, we must enable every cable and satellite company to provide xxx content on channel 69!

Heh.
Back in the day before digital cable, CableVision used to have the Playboy channel on ch69 here in CT.

Easier != Perfect

[nick_davison]

"This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children..."

One porn site moves to the .xxx domain.

A parent blocks .xxx domains.

That's one more site than would be blocked otherwise. Thus, by definition, easier. Not perfect but better than not at all.

Most porn sites really don't want kids hitting them up - they just suck bandwidth and don't have credit cards to convert in to paying subscribers anyway. If sites like playboy.com then become simple redirects over - with .xxx blocked PCs unable to make the redirect - it does cut down on the number of ways a kid can stumble across porn and thus, even if not perfect, it does make it easier for parents to limit access.

Seatbelts don't prevent car accidents. They don't even save all lives in cars that have accidents. But they do still make surviving "easier". Just because something's not perfect doesn't mean it's not an improvement. The same holds true for .xxx as a tool for limiting porn access.

Re:Easier != Perfect

[1u3hr]

One porn site moves to the .xxx domain. A parent blocks .xxx domains.

Why does this site move?

it does cut down on the number of ways a kid can stumble across porn

The reverse, it will just create a NEW area of porn. A magnet for kids to pass around hacks to access.

i like it

[kbox]

This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites

But on the plus side, It will make finding porn a lot easier.

What motivation?

[daeg]

Why would any profitable porn website voluntarily move to a new domain? If you were, say, cnn.com, and a new .news TLD opened up, would you move to cnn.news? Hell no. Even if cnn.com simply redirected to cnn.news, you're losing years and millions of dollars worth of branding and recognition. How often do you go back to Google when looking for porn? I doubt very often, you probably go to some indexing website catered to adult websites instead -- that's big-time branding and worth big-time cash.

Also, dividing what some in society see a deviance is just asking for problems down the road related to censorship and restricted access. "Oh, you wanted .xxx access with your cable modem? That's another $15/month."

Re:What motivation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its going to be a widely recognized TLD... So if you get "boobies.xxx", you probably stand a big chance of getting a lot of hits. Nobody says you need to move there. Just set up a redirect.

branding is key

[aendeuryu]

I think you're underestimating the importance of branding. One of the reasons Coke and Pepsi throw so much into branding is not so that you'll recognize their names, but so that, when you go to the local supermarket, you WON'T recognize the names of their competition.

Also, who wouldn't want to upgrade their porn site domain from "www.ihavethebestboobsontheinternet.com" to "www.boobs.xxx"? I think that opportunity for a more recognizable brand would open up the market a whole lot. Playboy would fork out a lot of money to make sure that nobody else gets Playboy.xxx, and conversely, somebody who's been sitting on the fringe of the porn industry has a chance to jump right into the middle of it with a better domain name.

Never mind that this domain might come into existence anyway so that the .com can be "cleaned up" for safe mass consumption. Not that I like that idea on a philosophical level, but this is pragmatics we're talking about.

Besides, what sounds better? "Playboy dot com?" or "Playboy dot triple-x"? The latter actually sounds like what it is.

Man.. talk about closing the barn door late.

[Maxo-Texas]

This is WAAAAYYYYYYY too late to make a difference helping parents.

you all favor censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the replies I have seen seem to suggest that it would be great if porn sites were forced off of .com and onto .xxx, if an authority forced a site not to use a .com domain - wouldnt this be considered as effective censorship?

on a side note, I own a TGP, a big part of that business is building up a high page rank (acc to google) and having a lot of traffic, if my site was forced off of .com, i would pretty much be forced tp start over, just changing a few links and forwarding wouldn't really help - definetly not in the short term

move all the homosexual sites

[Anonymous Coward]

to .fag or .dyke

fuck those fucking homosexual faggots. fuck them to hell!

Time to retire some TLDs.

[Animats]

We don't need more TLDs. We need fewer of them. ".info", ".aero", and ".museum" should be retired due to lack of interest. (The entire list of .museum domains appears on this page.)

The ".biz" TLD should be retired as a slum-clearance project.

Those half-dead TLDs should be put on maintenance level support - no new registrations, and old ones expire in two years.

Re:Time to retire some TLDs.

[kiddygrinder]

Why bother? who cares if they're unused, i'd prefer it to be open slather on tlds, then we could stop arguing about this crap and i could have mail@firstname.lastname or mebee even firstname@lastname as an email

Well we know who he uses his penis on now

[Anonymous Coward]

You Sodomites will burn in Hell

Even better yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or who wouldn't pay the premium for goatse.xxx?

Flawed

[mqduck]

Forgive me if someone has already made this point, but wouldn't the .xxx TLD, designed to be blocked by uptight people, be the last place a porn site would want to live?

Re:Flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

How so?

Most porn sites do not want to force their porn upon people who do not want it. The uptight Christian isn't going to, on an impulse, pull out the credit card to download barnyard porn. .xxx makes porn sites easily identifiable for both potential customers and people who don't want to view it.

Re:Flawed

[Harin_Teb]

You are assuming that all porn sites are actively attempting to reach out to minors with that statement. I would argue that there are plenty of sites that would love to have an easy way to say "look we're doing everything we possibly can to help parents, at this point its the parents fault." with a .XXX domain they could.

Essentially every website tied to a print medium would want that because it helps them avoid hassle.

Political hypocracy

[Nazlfrag]

US politicians are happy to have free speech when it comes to accepting large bribes.. ahem lobbyist donations, yet seem to forget about it when it comes to simple things like allowing the internet to self-regulate without huge messy bureaucratic nonsense with little social, ethical or technical merit. The responsibility is on parents to protect their kids, not some worldwide standards organization.

Attention, gentlemen (and lady):

[rawtatoor]

As of the time of this post, this thread has officially become the largest wank fest on the face of the planet. This is a huge accomplishment and congratulations are in order to you Slashdot.

Re:Attention, gentlemen (and lady):

[Anonymous Coward]

WOO HOO!! Wank fest! And it's free! :)

How about something unambiguous

[symbolset]

Seeing as how the word "kid" has multiple mutually exclusive meanings even in english.

Dot Why? Why? Why?

[NetSettler]

wouldn't the .xxx TLD, designed to be blocked by uptight people, be the last place a porn site would want to live?

The problem isn't with the true .xxx folks, who probably don't really care and figure their market will find them. The problem is with people who have content that is ambiguous and only "arguably" covered by this. The problem is there is no .PG, .PG-13, .R, .X before .XXX ... which means there will suddenly be a binary division between "good" and "bad". The world is not so black and white.

The real problem is that there is "middle ground", and there must be at minimum three systems, not too: Things unambiguously acceptable, things unambiguously outrageous, and things in between (i.e., hybrid). By making only two groups, you necessarily merge the hybrid with either the protectedthe outrageous. To say that anything not for highly protected people is outrageous is ridiculous and a sudden huge shift to the conservative that seems unlikely to succeed, though it would be a stretch to say that nothing like that would ever be tried--consider Prohibition.

Also, since it's defined in a way that makes it sound like you're in with scum, anyone who voluntarily enters is practically signing a confession that they think their ambiguous content to be depraved. I think that's the saddest of all: That someone who is just worried they might offend someone is basically forced to stand in the street and wave a sign saying "kick me" as their reward for being nice.

It would actually be an infinitely saner thing to create a .G or .KIDS domain where people could move to who want to live in a bubble. There would then be no confusion about who belonged there: anyone who wanted to live by a lot of rules and wanted to be around others of like kind. And there would be very little motivation to cheat, since people who like that kind of thing would rush to it. There's no stigma, after all.

Nor are the standards for what must be in this domain clear in a way that makes sense globally. It seems to me something that will not be meaningfully able to be administered globally, since some countries that think nothing of certain controversial issues will not require .XXX, and it will just end up a casual tax on those who do choose to use it.

Or else it will be be the Internet version of McCarthyism, and the .XXX will gradually expand to be the list of everyone... until it breaks down and you can't watch a PG movie without it being .XXX and people say "why is this closet so crowded?" and demand to be let out.

None of the present plan makes any sense, really. So why are they doing it? The unspoken truth, of course, is that this is not about Net safety. It is about dictating morality. And why is that? Perhaps because they're being unable to sell the same morality voluntarily.

The strange thing to me is that this is all about sex. What about violence? Will there be a .MURDER TLD for people who think killing others is bad? Will the evening news go there? What about unpopular wars? Or just people who are trying to save young women from unscrupulous coathanger-wielding men in alleys or trying to save the world from overpopulation?

.here

[Ernesto Alvarez]

About .xxx, are you really having so much trouble finding porn in the Internet that you need .xxx? ;-) .xxx is more justifiable than .biz or .info, but that really means that we should get rid of those two, and not create .xxx.

WRT .here, I think your proposal is a nice idea in principle, but not very practical.
First, you need to know which DNS is local to your location. That means you need to know at least something about the network, which means a chat with the local admin or getting some parameters via DHCP. In both cases you get to know the local domain (DHCP sends that too, usually).

Then, your solution is too www-centric. Let's assume it is possible to do what you're saying (in fact, you can emulate that behaviour with dns as it is right now). So, you want to check what's here. You type http://here/ and it takes you to the "local webserver" (whatever that means). Great. Now, you want to read news. You enter "here" as an nntp server and you go to the local webserver, not the NNTP server. DNS does not care about ports, only addresses (DOH!).

Now, how do you apply your solution to SSH? You don't because it is not reasonable to do so. Same for lots of other protocols. Basically, you are adding additional semantics to the ones defined in DNS (the rfcs specify what the db entries mean, and there's nothing about "here"). Whatever you do, you must consider that older clients and servers are still around, and will be for years. Backwards compatibility is a must.

It is also a problem, unless everyone has a dns server in every home. Let's say you have the typical Joe Sixpack setup: broadband, with dns, mail, etc provided by yur ISP, what would "airconditioner.here" mean? My house? Your house? The isp's datacenter? You could make it change depending the source ip, but it would complicate matters considerably.

You might have entities that don't have www servers, like my home. http://here/ would mean nothing useful (unless you count my linksys box as the "local webserver", not very reasonable).

You're assuming that Internet is just www servers, which it isn't. You're making exactly the same mistake as the .xxx guys, yours is for good, theirs is for evil, but it is the exact mistake.

Anyway, you could easily do as you want (on your domains of course), just by appending the local domain by default (you could send that via dhcp). That's what the "localdomain" domain is commonly used for. So, you could easily end with "http://airconditioner/set?temp=25c" or even set a "here" fake top level zone in your local dns server. When in doubt, try the "localdomain" domain. Me, I just use the domain I got from dyndns as a local domain and that works pretty well.

Re:.here

[TheLink]

Heh no trouble finding porn. Spammers even send free samples to me, my mom, etc.

Anyway, my proposal is just a matter of helping people create defacto standards, a stepping stone to make further interesting stuff easier.

You suggest .localdomain, Apple (Bonjour) suggests .local, some suggest .localnet. I suggest that ICANN and the world stop mucking about and reserve one ala RFC1918. I don't really care what it is (as long as it's not too long or stupid), just frigging reserve one already.

You said: 'You enter "here" as an nntp server and you go to the local webserver, not the NNTP server. DNS does not care about ports, only addresses (DOH!).'

If you specified "here" as an NNTP server you would be trying to access the local server on port 119, I see no reason why you'd end up at the local server's webserver on port 80. They are different ports, capable of running different services without confusion. So what's the problem? Same goes for ssh and other stuff. If you'd prefer news.here that's fine.

What would airconditioner.here mean? That could be related to what http://here/ told you wouldn't it? I doubt it's polite to change settings of random airconditioners (nor would they necessarily allow you to do so - many ways to control it).

Believe me, I have had a lot of time to think about this and after all these years it still makes sense. I submitted a draft to the IETF in 2001 (and earlier to ICANN). If you think my proposal is convoluted/complex you should see the other proposals which create new proprietary "lock in" protocols to do fairly specialized things in similar areas.

My proposal uses _existing_ technology already available, and allows extensions. People can easily add stuff to it.

Sure DHCP sends a search path, but not everyone uses the supplied search path nor would want to. For example: an ISP network engineer might want to use isp.net instead of the search path supplied by Joe's Pool Place. But the network engineer may find it useful to be able to go http://here./ click on a link, get to http://jukebox.here./ and change the music being played there.

WRT to the dns server "problem" - people can get it from DHCP, or DNS packets could be redirected (believe me that's done all the time in many Paid Internet places with very little problems). Tons of people ALREADY have dns servers in their home- just go look at an ADSL router sometime.

If DNS is such a big problem one could even reserve a special IP. Any area server would respond to requests to that IP that pass through it. So at worst you'd see an ISP advert page or a Linksys router's default page ;).

If you don't get anything or much from http://here/ you could assume that the area doesn't have interesting local services intentionally available for the public.

But maybe in some sites after http://here/ I could go to http://whos.here/ and then see ernestoalvarez.whos.here (Mr Alvarez's wearable server) listed and be able to upload or share files, multimedia streams etc.

For security reasons one should use encryption, but for most browsers this means you'd want to click on a "secure mode" link that contains the https url using the FQDN for that area. e.g. https://jungle.alvarez.foobar.org/ which would offer similar pages to here.

Anyway, virtual telepathy and telekinesis are just steps away.

Well, duh.

[Kadin2048]

it just takes a bunch of cash from existing companies and gives it to the new registrar.

I see you're catching on.

.xxx: Good idea. .xxx for regulation: Bad idea.

[ChaosDiscord]

I'm a supporter of the .xxx top level domain. Like, say .museum or .pro it will expand the domain names available, help companies better brand themselves, and provide a weak but useful way for people who want porn to find it. However...

This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities.

The porn isn't all going onto .xxx; nor should it. The idea that .xxx should exist to make it easier to filter is ridiculous. Do we have .museum and .pro so I can more easily protect my kids from museums and professionals? Nonsense. Many museums and professionals are in .com, .net, and elsewhere. The exact same thing will happen for .xxx. .xxx won't ghettoize the porn, it will just give it a neighborhood to live in for those companies that chose to. The only way .xxx will be useful for filtering if it's illegal to put porn anywhere but in .xxx. But then, what's porn? Photographs of naked people? Photographs of topless women? Shall it henceforce be nationalgeographic.xxx? Perhaps photographs of women showing anything other than their eyes; that's considered sexual in some cultures. How about lingerie photographs? Will it become victoriassecret.xxx? Ultimately you can't draw the line in a useful way. The line will be too strict, in which case it violates the First Amendment in a way no one can ignore. Or the line will be too loose, and while people may ignore the First Amendment issues, those who want to ghettoize porn will be frustrated that things they consider porn aren't regulated.

Let's leave .xxx to the same situation .museum, .aero, .pro, and the like are in: it's branding, new names, and marginally useful tool for locating things you want. As a filtering tool it's basically useless.

On the subject of ghettoizing it:

...prohibition of child pornography, consumer fraud, deceptive marketing practices, and spam by dot-xxx domain owners...

So, the domain rules make it illegal to... do things that are already illegal. How useful. Well, maybe it makes it easier to "prosecute" since you can cancel the domain registration more easily than getting a criminal conviction. Thank God there isn't anywhere else people can put up child porn and fraud. Well, except .net, .com, .org, .tv, .cx, and dozens more. Useless, useless regulations. Clue to those reponsible: the bad guys are already on the net. Perversely you're trying to make .xxx safer than the rest of the net. Seems a bit odd.

Re:.xxx: Good idea. .xxx for regulation: Bad idea.

[ScaryMonkey]

I agree. As a certain Supreme Court justice said about obscenity "I know it when I see it." The only way to draw the line responsibly is to have a morally upright and responsible individual vet all adult content and rule on whether is "art" or merely smut. I hereby volunteer myself for this important community service.

The U.N. doesn't do local zoning laws.

[Kadin2048]

In real life we create zoning laws...

Please direct me to the Unified World Zoning Laws, please.

Oh, wait; you mean there aren't any? Well, it's sort of hard to compare a local zoning ordnance to a global ".xxx" TLD, then. I don't think anyone is suggesting that there is a problem with creating adult domains under CC TLDs. If country FU wants to create ".adult.fu", then they should go right ahead. And if region BR of country FU wants to create ".adult.br.fu", they should go right ahead as well. They are also free to mandate that all porn sites within their jurisdiction use those domains. Heck, they're free to block all traffic not originating from their own TLD, if that's what their residents want (I'd argue that they're insane, and shooting themselves in the foot, but hey, it's their country/region/whatever). If residents of those areas decide to go to some other area's TLD, perhaps an area that doesn't restrict it to 'adult' zones, well that's just like driving from Provo to Reno. Not everyone wants to live the same way; when you're on somebody else's turf (or nobody's turf at all, in the case of non-country-specific TLDs), you'd best shut up and deal, and go back to your own area if you don't like it.

Adult sites and content are a local and regional issue, because that's where you're going to have a shot at getting some consensus as to what content belongs where. That's the level on which ".kids" and ".xxx" domains should be created, not at the root level.

Re:NO IT DOESN'T! Or, Article Is A Troll

[JKConsult]

Of all the things I could pretend to have done (gone to the moon, won a Super Bowl, poured hot grits on Natalie Portman), you want me to pretend that I've read an RFC? No dice!

Root of the problem

[LordLucless]

It seems to me, the root of the problem is the original design of the domain naming system. When DNS was first created, they had a handful of TLDs - net for network infrastructure, org for non-profits, edu for educational, gov, edu, mil, etc. This was way before the potential of the internet was even beginning to be understood - particularly its commercial potential. With those initial segregations they've got a relative handful of government sites spread over gov, mil, edu, etc, and everyone else crammed into .com. Of course, then the problem was that this segregation was not enforced - .orgs are not necessarily non-profits, .coms are not necessarily commercial sites, etc. Here in Australia, one of the nice things is that the TLDs are fairly well controlled. You need an ABN (Australian Business Number) to register a .com.au domain. You need to be a registered non-profit to register a .org.au. So these TLDs actually retain a useful meaning, unlike .com, .net and .org in the US. I think it would be useful to have the .com namespace segregated a bit more - including into an "adult material" domain. But the opportunity for that has passed. Refusing to let someone register a domain is much easier than forcing them to change domains later, and public awareness has already settled on .com as the only real TLD. The problem was that they tried to amalgamate the concepts of a unique identifier and a descriptive taxonomy. Due to the lack of foresight setting up the taxonomy (which they can't really be blamed for - nobody forsaw the way the internet grew), the internet outgrew the taxonomy, and it became useless. So now we have a system that is only really used for unique identification, saddled with the remnants of a defunct taxonomy. An ideal solution (IMO) would be some sort of authenticated tagging mechanism, where certain agencies had the authority to tag websites, keeping that system totally divorced from the system used to uniquely tie IP addresses to human-readable names. Even if the tagging system was managed by an industry body (e.g. the XXX tag administered by the adult industry), I imagine many porn sites would tag themselves voluntarily - having that sort of tag would likely help boost the search engine rankings for porn-related searches, which I'm sure they'd be more worried about than their accessibility to minors (most of whom wouldn't have credit cards to pay them, anyway).

Re:Root of the problem

[LordLucless]

Sorry - forgot to change to Plain Old Text format:

It seems to me, the root of the problem is the original design of the domain naming system. When DNS was first created, they had a handful of TLDs - net for network infrastructure, org for non-profits, edu for educational, gov, edu, mil, etc. This was way before the potential of the internet was even beginning to be understood - particularly its commercial potential. With those initial segregations they've got a relative handful of government sites spread over gov, mil, edu, etc, and everyone else crammed into .com. Of course, then the problem was that this segregation was not enforced - .orgs are not necessarily non-profits, .coms are not necessarily commercial sites, etc.

Here in Australia, one of the nice things is that the TLDs are fairly well controlled. You need an ABN (Australian Business Number) to register a .com.au domain. You need to be a registered non-profit to register a .org.au. So these TLDs actually retain a useful meaning, unlike .com, .net and .org in the US. I think it would be useful to have the .com namespace segregated a bit more - including into an "adult material" domain. But the opportunity for that has passed. Refusing to let someone register a domain is much easier than forcing them to change domains later, and public awareness has already settled on .com as the only real TLD.

The problem was that they tried to amalgamate the concepts of a unique identifier and a descriptive taxonomy. Due to the lack of foresight setting up the taxonomy (which they can't really be blamed for - nobody forsaw the way the internet grew), the internet outgrew the taxonomy, and it became useless. So now we have a system that is only really used for unique identification, saddled with the remnants of a defunct taxonomy.

An ideal solution (IMO) would be some sort of authenticated tagging mechanism, where certain agencies had the authority to tag websites, keeping that system totally divorced from the system used to uniquely tie IP addresses to human-readable names. Even if the tagging system was managed by an industry body (e.g. the XXX tag administered by the adult industry), I imagine many porn sites would tag themselves voluntarily - having that sort of tag would likely help boost the search engine rankings for porn-related searches, which I'm sure they'd be more worried about than their accessibility to minors (most of whom wouldn't have credit cards to pay them, anyway).

Why fillter?

[Zapotek]

Excuse me but... why filter porn sites in the first place?

T3h 1nt3rn3t 1s f0r pr0n!

Oh please

[SamSim]

Do we honestly think microsoft.xxx is going to be used to contain pornography? Do we honestly think porn.com isn't?

Re:Oh please

[Oddscurity]

Maybe the same people arguing for the .xxx TLD will grab porn.xxx to host a site about how 'porn corrupts your soul'*, and what not? Just on the odd chance people don't filter out all .xxx domains.

* Insert variant rhetoric where applicable.

Re: religous nuts

[Workaphobia]

You know what's really, really sad. I took you seriously and was in the middle of posting a response before I saw that you were modded Funny and smacked myself.

I apologize, it is late at night.

Still a broken concept..

[cheros]

I can't believe they're still trying to push this through. It'll be about as effective as asking all the phishing sites to use a .crime TLD.

I guess some consultants are making money off this, otherwise it would have disappeared off the radar a long time ago as Yet Another Bad Idea.

Do you think we'll get a google.xxx?

[Anonymous Coward]

A google.xxx might make it easy to find good pr0n on the net.

Though I suspect that if it had google's safesearch feature on by default like the other googles it may not return many results.

Not wanted, not going to work.

[Killshot]

First of all, I don't see why so many people seem to think it would be so easy for every porn site to just move to .xxx. Moving your domain is not something people want to do if you have spent years branding and promoting your name..
If slashdot moved to www.slashdot.tv or .xxx or whatever, It would take a long time to get the majority of the audience to know where to go, especially since the general internet population types in .com automatically. Just look at the confusion between whitehouse.gov and whitehouse.com.

If it is completely voluntary, that is fine, but then it really serves no purpose. because it will not make the internet any easier to filter.

.xxx only exists as someone's crazy idea to try and regulate and control the internet.

3 times awkward letters - again?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguments about the validity of a porn TLD aside, could we please use just .x instead of .xxx? Imagine saying it: "Rumsfeld dash in dash drag dot ex ex ex" (sorry - I read the "whitehouse.xxx" comment earlier and now I curse my vivid imagination)

I'm just pee'd off with using long-to-pronounce letters in URL's: like "double-you double-you double-you dot bee bee see dot co dot you kay". Saying "triple-wuh" just doesn't communicate "www". Honestly, what f***wit decided on using the "www" thing for the http protocol anyway? Is it really necessary now?

Best name

[franksands]

I always thought that a .xxx TLD was not the best name, it sounds a little childish. Wouldn't it be better .sex or .ero or even .porn?

Re:Best name

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be better .sex or .ero or even .porn?

Goat compatibility test.

goat. sex/ero/pron ?

goatse.xxx

[Anonymous Coward]

i thOugHT Of tHe sAME THInG!

(Browse at -1 if you don't get it)

Holy crap someone edit the summary

[brunes69]

This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities.

I can't even count the number of ways this statement is blatently false.

Well, here's a few:

• A new XXX TLD does nothing to remove porn from existing TLDs
• It is trivial for anyone to show porn on any non-XXX TLD, or for that matter, a subdirectory of such TLD.
• People who want porn know where to get it. People who don't want porn will only encounter it via accidental search or spam email, neither of which this new TLD will do anyting to prevent.

OK... let's pretend for a sec that all of the above is solved... all a kid who wants access to a .XXX TLD has to do is discover the IP address of it via a WHOIS lookup or other means, then create a DynDNS domain name pointing at this new IP. You think this is too complicated fro a kid to do? I know kids in elementary who have their own DynDNS hosts. It's not rocket science.

Here's a newsflash - since the advent of photography, kids have had porn. Hell, even before then hey had nude sketches of women. Kids have ALWAYS had porn. What guy on here hadn't seen a playboy by the time they were 12?

Dear sir/madam, ...

[hummassa]

our content filters detected a rate in excess of 95% of logic and good common sense in your post above. May we ask you what are you doing on /. ??
Anyway, thousands of kudos for you !!!!

Re:Dear sir/madam, ...

[Eivind]

Most people on /. are actually more logical and have more common sense than the average human being. It's just that most are also American -- which has no influence at all on logics or common sense -- but which in my experience corresponds strongly with what with my eyes is a perversely warped view of human sexuality and the harmfulness thereof.

I've got many good friends in the USA. Most of them are unable to rigthly comprehend the *CHASM* between especially southern bible-belt mentality and say the mentality common in Norway.

The parents of my first serious girlfriend, then 15, reacted to the two of us becoming intimate in precisely 2 ways. First, by smiling, and removing the extra mattress I had until then been given when I slept over, commenting that it obviously won't be needed any more. Second, by asking her if she wanted them to arrange a doctors-visit so she could get a prescription for the pill.

For the US, the norm seems more like in-secret, away-from-home (perhaps at a party or in the back of some car), parents-pretend-they-dont-know, children-pretend-they-believe-the-parents-dont-kno w, frequently-drunk, sexuality-a-taboo, parents-cant-be-asked-when-questions.

Security. Openness. Confidence. Adults-one-can-talk-to. Contraception. Non-drunkenness. Acceptance. Even pride. These all are, in my opinion, a much better fundament for a enjoyable *AND* safe sexuality than the oposite.

The US method sounds much more dangerous to me. US kids don't actually have less or later sex than Norwegian ones. (infact the average age of first intercourse is sligthly lower in the US, and teenage-pregnancies are like 10 times higher) It's just, like everybody decided to pretend it's not happening and silence it to death rather than actually dealing with it. Human sexuality, however, doesn't magically just go away just because you decide not to talk about it.

I know I know, not every US parent is like that. I don't mean to imply everyone is. Just that the general trend seems to be quite a bit more in this direction.

Keyboard Shortcut?

[KincaidKMF]

Since control-enter adds "http://www." and ".com", the obvious keyboard shortcut to add "http://www." and ".xxx" is Control-6-9-enter... I forsee firefox plugins and MSIE 7.01. So proud I didn't make a joke about control and entering...

Safe? Not likely...

[Anonymous Coward]

This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites

What's the emoticon for naivete? As long as goatse is not forced into the .xxx domain, no one is safe...

Everyone Masturbates

[HardWoodWorker]

The problem with all the naysayers is that they assume that the majority of people want to block pornography. The majority of men on the planet with internet access masturbate to pornography on a regular basis. We the wankers are more powerful than the self-appointed morality police. It is unnatural to repress sexuality. They've tried many times and eventually failed. The information age has made it virtually impossible today. If the RIAA/MPAA can't block piracy and repressive regimes, like China, can't block dissent, what makes you think they can block pornography? Let's not forget that many powerful people wank, just like you and I. Mark Foley and Ted Haggard are just 2 that got caught. I'd be very surprised if 90% of your senators and representatives weren't accessing porn on a regular basis. They don't want to see their pornography banned any more than you and I.

So in conclusion, porn is popular (arguably the first "Killer App" of the internet, VCR, camera, etc), it is VERY difficult to censor material on the internet, and porn is enjoyed by the most powerful of society (both in government and industry). No one is going to ban your porn.

Moving porno to .xxx makes it easier for those who don't want pornography to block it in their own homes and makes it easier for me to find what I'm looking for. I'm all for opening up the .xxx domain and cannot think of a single good reason not to have one.

Sex.com

[Nom du Keyboard]

So what does this do to the value of Sex.com, now that the forward thinking guy has finally won it back?

Why the .xxx TLD is a f*ing stupid idea

[lahi]

Creating an .xxx TLD will result in a TLD where there is porn (by definition), but it is absolutely useless unless you are interested in porn, because the object of desire and the motivation for all the fuss is to have a place WITHOUT porn.

The only SANE solution would be to create a .noxxx TLD into which all of the worlds domains could be embedded/replicated, on the provision that they agree to be penalized with a hefty fine by the TLD registry if there is found any porn on their site. This could even be enforced through semiautomatic or fullautomatic AI robot means. All domains in the .noxxx are simply returning the result for the equivalent domain without .noxxx. Probably a better name would be .censored - but .noxxx was used above for clarity. There could even be a second-level domain below .censored, so you could get various levels of censorship.

This way slashdot.org.censored could be just the same as slashdot.org except that whenever the goatse guy is posted, and then found by the registry-robot, it gets disabled, and Slashdot would have to pay a fine and reregister.

-Lasse

.local dns

[ChozCunningham]

If there is an existing solution to this problem, or one emerges, I'd love to know about it, as well. This would be a great optional tool for any intranet.

OT Re:.here

[Ernesto Alvarez]

Let's go part by part on this.

You suggest .localdomain, Apple (Bonjour) suggests .local, some suggest .localnet. I suggest that ICANN and the world stop mucking about and reserve one ala RFC1918. I don't really care what it is (as long as it's not too long or stupid), just frigging reserve one already.

Reserving a name, or defining a standard behaviour might be a good idea, sure. It could act as a SHOULD clause (there's no way of enforcing a MUST here). That could be done just by taking ANY domain, declaring it private and forbidding it from being used in the public Internet. It could be any arbitrary domain (example.net is one of those, but it is not appropiate to use it, even in private networks).

If you specified "here" as an NNTP server you would be trying to access the local server on port 119, I see no reason why you'd end up at the local server's webserver on port 80. They are different ports, capable of running different services without confusion. So what's the problem? Same goes for ssh and other stuff. If you'd prefer news.here that's fine.

The problem is the "local server" part. Who said there is ONE local server and not LOTS of them? If you had two physical machines, your idea would not work (pointing "here" to the NNTP server would break WWW requests). "here" will have to point to one machine at one time, you will have to set something that redirects traffic from one to another, a waste of resources.

"news.here" on the other hand, is a pretty reasonable way of doing things (news.here, www.here, etc). Then again, if you know the local domain, or have an appropiate search path, it is just as good to use "news", "www", etc.

Basically, the "here" suffix serves as a placeholder when someone does not know what the local domain is (works more like the local network (0.0.0.0) and local broadcast (255.255.255.255) addresses, instead of the private ones). If you want to make the equivalent of rfc 1918 addresses, it would still mean you need to know what the local domain is. In other words, you're mixing two things (local network/local broadcast and rfc 1918).

As for ssh and here, let's use my home network as an example. In this network we have the machines "grissom", "leonov", "gagarin" and "armstrong". What would "ssh.here" mean? I could define some criteria, making one of them more important, thus making it worthy of the "ssh.here" name. But it would be pretty useless, I should know where I'm going to when using ssh, and have defined "here" myself, and "public ssh service" is a very strange concept.

Believe me, I have had a lot of time to think about this and after all these years it still makes sense. I submitted a draft to the IETF in 2001 (and earlier to ICANN). If you think my proposal is convoluted/complex you should see the other proposals which create new proprietary "lock in" protocols to do fairly specialized things in similar areas.

My proposal uses _existing_ technology already available, and allows extensions. People can easily add stuff to it.

The fact that other proposals as complex and convoluted does not man that yours, just for being simpler, is better. DNS is NOT the right tool for what you want to do. You want some sort of discovery of local services, you should invent some simple discovery method and put it in the public domain, that would guarantee that there is no lock-in involved. Even a DHCP extension might be more appropiate. And DNS could be subverted and lock in created anyway, just look at how microsoft uses it.

DNS exists (ignoring records other than A) to answer just one question: "Could you give me the ip address of the machine that has this name?". You're trying to use A records for something else.

If you really need to find what the local resources are, why don't you read SRV records instead (if available)?

Re:OT Re:.here

[TheLink]

Basically I think you miss my points totally (I guess I'm not good at explaining things).

I'm really talking about:

1) Reserving a TLD for _free_ local use by anyone. If that's done then that is enough for me. Even if the TLD is NOT going to be used exactly the way I propose. A reserved TLD makes for a _firm_ foundation for whatever the rest of the world wishes to build on top. At worst it would be helpful for Apple's Bonjour which already requires such a TLD (it is silly that Bonjour's .local is NOT yet reserved or made standard).

2) Strangers being able to walk into an area, and EASILY find out what local services are _intentionally_ available. Without having to "talk to a local network administrator". Without being forcibly refused internet access till they do something (use browser, forced to see page, click on something).

Just consider my two points _above_.

The rest of the stuff I was talking about is just made _possible_ (but NOT inevitable just possible) by 1) (and subsequently 2) ).

Your last 3 lines aren't that true, please think about my above two points first.

Consider this

[Sv-Manowar]

For those of you who see this as a goldrush, you have to consider:

ICM wants to charge $75/year for a .XXX domain, for relatively little extra value - How many domains are you going to go on a spree for with $75 reg fees?

By having a domain on .xxx, you must follow ICM's (not ICANN's) 'Best business practices' or else lose your .XXX - could this include selling them/parking them?

There are bills in congress to make .XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on .com/.net etc.

Their policy includes the right to 'Reserve geographic and religiously/culturally sensitive names', how far could this be expanded? - would someone really end up paying $75 per year for sex.xxx?

There are now hundreds of thousands of adult websites across the .tld spectrum, ranging from .com, to .co.uk to .jp - not all of these will switch, with international webmasters not bound by US rulings - this could create an unfair marketplace for US businesses

From this self-penned article about what is one of the worst ideas in recent years when it comes to TLDs.

Cash grab

[silverhaz3]

This is nothing but a cash grab. $60/domain? Hilarious!

• .travel? Check
• .museum? Check!
• .aero? Check!
• .coop? Check!
• .sucks? Coming soon!

Dangle enough money in front of icann and they'll make anything a tld.

Oh Please

[vakuona]

I for one think it is a good idea to perhaps force all porn domains into the xxx TLD. I think this should have been done long before. Not because I want them censored, but to make it easy for people who want to limit what can be viewed on certain computers to do so. When it comes to porn, the cat is out of the bag. No one is deluded enough to think that the government could wake up one morning and order people to stop making it. They would have a right riot on their hands. Government do not want to create a situation where their power would be shown to be limited. Why do you think they give in to protests. Because if people make themselves ungovernable, then government is toothless.

Any measure they take to be able to force porn sites to identify themselves as such is tantamount to censorship if you believe what you here on the dot. The domain registrar is probably not going to make much money off this. They will be closely watched to ensure that no underhand dealings go on. If anything, opportunistic slashdotters will rush out to buy domains and sell them on ebay long before the registrars milk their supposed client. And if $30 (an exaggerated example) is too much for a budding business, then you probably have no business trying to buy one of such domain.

There is not that much money in porn to sink billions in domain name registrations. Simple economics will keep the prices down.

Making life easier for parents

[Slashdot Parent]

As a parent, please let me assure you that a .xxx TLD does neither facilitate nor inhibit my ability to protect my children.

Also, please let me assure you that "seeing some naked human bodies" is very low on my priority list of things my children need to be protected from. Most kids become naturally curious about sexuality only when they are ready to be curious. Before then, it's "eww, gross! Make it go away!" I see no reason to either encourage or discourage this natural process.