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Why the .XXX Domain is a Bad Idea That Won't Die
Reader tqft tipped us to an opinion piece on the UK site The Guardian, which lays out the reasons why article writer Seth Finkelstein feels the .XXX domain is a terrible idea. You may recall that last year (being an election year and all), the concept of a triple-X ghetto was revived, considered, and then quashed all in the space of a few months. We also recently discussed the fact that the idea just won't die, as the company ICM Registry pushes ICANN to allow them to pass out the names by Summer. Finkelstein primarily argues that the new domain is a bad idea from a business point of view. Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled, he sees this as primarily a means for ICM Registry to gain a monopoly on what is sure to be a hot-selling product. Speculators, pornographers, and above-board companies will all jump on the namespace in an effort to ensure that their domain is represented ... or not, as the case may be. Where do you fall on this issue? Would a .XXX domain be helpful for parents, or just a political salve/moneymaking scam?
Why not just give the pr0n industry its own tld and be done with it? Yes, the bluenoses will scream bloody murder, but they're doing that about pr0n already, so what's the difference?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
If I say I want no more coffee with reading my breakfast newspaper, then the waiter should go away and not pore another drink.
If pornography website is labeled acurate or inacurate due to domain ".XXX", then that label should go away like my breakfast waiter.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Ignoring for a moment the issue that much of this content is already labeled
Yeah, it's labeled all right. About the time you see a writhing vulva on your screen, and a mega-penis thrusting repeatedly into it using the latest in animated gif technology, you may notice a small blurb of text that says "Please proceed only if you are 18 years of age or older".
I'm not against it, I just want new tlds to stop being approved left and right just to make profit out of basically no service.
It's starting to get very complicated to rely on URLs and the amount of money you have to spend to keep your companys name in your hands is ridiculous.
what constitutes porn? to a lot of people it's the act of sex between two people that is captured in a form of "real" media (photos or videos as opposed to paintings). however to a lot of america (or amerikkka as liberal websites would say :/) it is nudity in a medical or anatomy book when not viewed by an artist or doctor.
No. Really, stop asking.
http://outcampaign.org/
I help to run web filtering at a small primary school, and while I realise a TLD like this won't shift all the crud into an easily-blocked area of the net, it's a good start. Of course, the downside is that nanny-state governments can then instruct ISPs to block the TLD, thus protecting their good citizens. Protecting primary school kids is one thing, but 'protecting' adults is a whole different ball game.
I guess I just argued for both sides of the equation. I think I'm getting fence splinters.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Why the .XXX Domain is a Bad Idea That Won't Die
You've got two errors in the headline alone. 1. Porn is never a bad idea. 2. Porn will never die.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Come on, where is the creativity for a story like that? How about "Triple XXX Domain on Virtual Viagra: The growing movement of the .xxx domain name just won't quit. However, the thrust of the movement is hardly straightforward...... blah blah blah.
This seems to be rooted solely in politics and the money thereof. Let's leave this one to the politicians, knowing when everything is said and done, more is said than done.
Just my $.02
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
this whole .xxx debate is about sexual repression. while having a .xxx domain won't stop the less responsible porn peddlers from invading the rest of the web as they already have done, it certainly won't hurt at all. what this debate is really about, it the religous right not being able to stand the thought of someone living a life style they consider sinful. if we let them have their way the world would be forced into a scary ned flanders world.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
A) makes porn easier to find
B) Does not solve the problem of being able to filter it with parental control software because nobody is going to shut down the porn.com's.
The porn sites have a right to exist, who are we to force them over to .xxx domains? Forcing them all to register with some central DB so they can be black listed would also be impossible becasue there is no realistic way to keep the DB updated.
My solution for addressing the filtering software problem is very simple. We amend robots.txt to include a section for Adult content.
A simple addition on porn sites of a line like this would solve the problem.
User-agent: * Disallow: /forums/ /members/ /downloads/ /
Disallow:
Disallow:
Adult:
Sites not interested in adding the field to robots.txt are not required to by law, but many websites would be willing to accommodate something like this to assist Net Nanny etc., but would fight having to leave porn.net behind for pornforyou12341.xxx tooth and nail. On the internet your company name and your domain name are often the same. Moving them to another TLD would equate to making them shut down and start over under a new name.
This would also greatly assist Google etc. in blocking some of these sites where "safe search" is turned on thus prevent people form going to a jenny.com by mistake and finding porn.
I have made this suggestion a number of time in the past. Maybe I should look into what it would take to get it drafted into an RFC?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I don't really get why this is such a bad idea. Especially if they make it so that any site that sells/features nudity/porn has to move to such an extension.
.xxx domains if that was the only place they could be. And all these damn library filters and crap could be made easier. Block blatant porn, and anything else is fair game. I don't see them putting the Anatomy books behind locked doors so kids can't see a drawing of a nude human, and they don't do it with National Geographic, either. This makes it easy to block porn, and keep everything else open.
Let's face it. www.whitehouse.com was one of the all-time great name squatting done. For the longest time, that was a porn site. How many kids and unsuspecting adults stumbled onto that one in the early days?
I'm no screaming conservative by any stretch of the imagination. I lean a lot further towards liberalism than I ever though I would, mostly because I am tired of religion affecting our laws so much, and personal freedoms being stripped from us left and right.
But I don't see any harm in setting these websites up in a much easier to control/block segment of the websphere. And many of these webmasters would love it if it was that much easier to block content by parents. Just think of all the credit card charges to crap companies that supposedly verify age because a person has a CC #? Sheesh, I had one at 16!
At the very least, I could see killing 50% of the pop-ups I run into, simply by blocking all
Besides, think of all the business that it would stir up for a while. All those porn banners having to be redone! hehehe
about the censorware project and former slashdot editor michael sims. Maybe now that he no longer has bitchslap access, posting the truth won't result in your ip being permanently banned.
If they offered .xxx domains and just made it voluntary, I'd totally get one. They might not offer any specific utility, but I think it might be kinda funny to have.
:)
And how much do you think www.se.xxx would be worth? I'll race ya!
In some countries it is considered wrong for women to lift their veils so other men can see their faces, and in some women walk around with no shits on like men. Sure there are obvious cases, but who has the final word on what is and isn't sexually explicit content? Who is going to pay to enforce these new morals and who's morals?
Do the American tax payers launch a multi billion dollar crusade to purge the internet of porn and bring our Christian morals to the internationally based Internet?
Early proposals for .xx were to mandate that all porn sites use some form of age verification (ie credit card). With all the fraud on the internet do you honestly believe entering your credit card number and personal into on every porn site you see is a good idea? What age constitutes a "minor" anyway? 18 y/o like in the US? How many people here have never seen any porn before the age of 18? How did you turn out?
To me this only sounds like a pathway for rampant fraud. I don't want to complain without offering up my own solution, so I think if anything is to be done then appending robots.txt to include a line for "Adult: /" where the webmaster of the site sees fit is a much better idea. I posted more on this suggestion here
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
All the pron people will register the new .xxx but they will also keep their .com domains. Man, it's as if people think .com is really only commerce sites or all .org are are non-profits.
It's a scam, just like Ralph Yarro's CP80. (from the Canopy/SCO scam to yet another. What, exactly, is in the water in Utah?)
Jeez. Let's repeat this again:
"THE INTERNET IS NOT A BABYSITTER"
--
BMO
Pun definitely intended. But what's to stop someone from setting up an alternate DNS server, take orders for domains like .xxx, .fun. .cum, etc, and then create a plug-in (another pun), or even have the browser hard code this functionality (heck, hard code it into Linux) to query the alternative DNS server? I'm quite surprised Microsoft hasn't done this already with IE, they could make another fortune setting up their own DNS server.
How about Congress spend its time doing more important things, like PASSING THE BUDGET. The DOE and its labs need a budget so they can avoid firing hundreds of important scientists.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
The basic issue of porn, etc, isn't gonna go away: a significant proportion of people think that sex is bad/dirty etc. In the US we now have a fairly zealous set of laws prohibiting various sexual action/production (just look at the ESPN.com headline yesterday about the 17 year old who's in prison 10 year mandatory for getting a blow job from a 15 year old). With people that are willing to agitate for these beliefs around, I think in terms of technology we should work to make things like porn as clearly classed as possible, like the xxx domain. I would much rather fight over these issues in the .xxx domain, rather than having my freedoms circumscribed in misguided efforts to attain the approval of the zealous because porn is 'hard to filter.'
I don't like how DNS is run at all. The business with phishing sites, and name stealing is bad enough, but if .xxx is bad because places might block it, why isn't .ca or .org bad?
.com and then we don't have to remember if our site is ebay.com or ebay.ca or ebay.xxx or ebay.org etc..
Why don't we just have everything be
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
While I can't speak much about the registry part of a .xxx name, I believe that it would be useful in the long run.
.xxx name for sites that are looking for a purely adult audience. Not just porn, but maybe places like adultfriendfinder, discussions involving less pleasent ideas, and so forth.
.xxx and helping the government look better at "protecting children", the FBI and what not leans off them a little. Yes, there are filters in place for porn, but they aren't always the best- it can be hard to teach a basic filter the difference between HOT NAKED BOOBIES and a page about breast cancer. Along with blocking out content that shouldn't be, it means that content that shouldn't get through does. A .xxx domain would ensure that the filter knows what to and not to pick out. (Hell, some crappy ones might now mark this page as pornographic since I mentioned "boobies".)
.xxx, and thus bringing us into the realm of "what exactly defines porn", but if it can stay as optional as choosing a .com or .net domain, then I don't see a large downfall. I'm sure others will disagree with me, though, and reply as such. (I welcome this, as someone may talk about a point I haven't thought of.)
While porn ad sites don't care about age, regular pay-for-porn sites would probably prefer those with access to a credit card, meaning those who can likely be there legally. Basically, market the
The government could work off this, too. They allow it to pass, and encourage its adoption by the "less scrupulous businesses", and in return for them moving to a
I can understand the fear of governments forcing porn sites to move to
Direct quote
"Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department."
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
It's really that simple.
Who gets the licensing money for TLD's anyway? ICANN?
.xxx domains. Don't assume for a second that sex.xxx or xxx.xxx is going to sell for $10/year or whatever the going rate for a .com is today. They will go to the highest bidder, probably for 7 or maybe even 8 figures.
.xxx's, and everyone will end up getting the .xxx's just to protect their brand image anyway. The biggest winner will be the company running that TLD, and maybe whoever gives out TLDs.
Anyway, the company (presumably the one in the article summary) stands to make millions auctioning off the prized
IMHO, I'd leave it as it is. You'll never get ALL the porn sites to move to
Here is the direct quote:
"Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors" would be required to move its site to that domain. Failure to comply with those requirements would result in civil penalties as determined by the Commerce Department."
Please do not blindly support the bill without first understanding just what exactly it proposes.
I had another post covering why I think this is bad here and proposed an alternate solution here
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
If porn or adult sites could be required to register under the .XXX domain, that would make it easier to block (I assume, perhaps incorrectly). At least you know you don't want to be there looking for nature pictures.
The idea that the Internet should be made "safe" is offensive to me on so many levels. If parents would do their job and not let their kids roam the Internet unsupervised, this entire argument would disappear. I, for one, want the puritans the hell away from technology legislation. What about you?
The Internet is not a playground for children. It's not a fun Christian diversion. It's a network for anyone and everyone to connect to one another electronically. Let's not turn it into Disneyland or Utah. The last thing society needs is FCC-like regulations on everything they do online. Besides, the responsibility in raising children shouldn't fall into the hands of people than don't have any. Parents need to police this issue, not parents AND single individuals.
The "save the children" argument is just a cheap way to achieve the anti-porn agenda. Don't be fooled. It has nothing to do with kids. Trust me, they'll have pre-marital sex and get each other pregnant without online porn. It's been happening for 1,000's of years and will happen for a thousand more. Humans will do what they're biologically designed to do. Legislation can't stop that.
It CAN, however, open the door for more censorship-inspired legislation. How long until the FCC steps in and begins to fine people that use profanity online? I don't think I'm exaggerating my fears. It's already ridiculous that you can't say "Shit" on the radio. After all, how many kids listen to Larry King Live?
Censorship of any kind is fascism. It doesn't matter what cause it's attached to. Today it's porn. Tomorrow it's anti-Americanism. Just because you may not agree with porn, doesn't mean that laws should be passed to control it. Look away. Install commercially available filtering products. Don't let your kids surf unsupervised. For that matter, don't leave your kids unsupervised near ANYTHING you don't want them around. Just don't ask big brother to watch over you. That fucks us all.
And what about those sites that don't want to move to .xxx. Should be force them to move?
Let me give you some good reasons:
tammyfayebaker.xxx
starjones.xxx
kevenfederline.xxx
barney.xxx
gwnaked.xxx
That's just what I've got off the top of my head at 1AM. Frankly that last one is pretty scary.
HDGary secures my bank
I keep seeing the argument that a .xxx tld will more porn easier to find. Do you really think it could be any easier to find porn on the internet? If you think there is a chance that kids can go on the net and surf around and not happen onto porn then you need a reality check. Porn on the net is abundant and easily accessible.
.xxx is a bad idea, but "it will make porn easier for kids to find" is certainly not one of them.
There are reasons
goatse.xxx
It used to work fine for g.o.a.t.s.e. .cx
But, maybe it gives too bad vibes for pr0n viewers too.
Since there's no perfect solution let's do nothing seems to be the attitude. The primary opposition in truth seems to be the percieved feeling that it legitimizes porn in some way. At least it would give them a fighting chance to block the bulk of porn. It's a loosing battle to remove all porn. Start doing image searches on Google, you'll find lots of nudity. Everyone wants a magic bullet solution. There is none.
With a .xxx TLD I'd finally be able to distinguish between fullofspunk.net as a motivational business website and fullofspunk.xxx as a site featuring pictures and videos of semen.
It will also allow us to distinguish between sites run by Landover Baptist Church, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
At first glance, the .xxx idea seems fine to me. Right now the .com domain space is cluttered with random domain names that will bring up porn. It's not so much the children, as just the sanity of it all. The probability that you can type in a random URL and likely pull up porn says that the usefulness of the domain name is diminishing.
.xxx TLD ends up being a small subset of a larger problem, and doesn't even fix the subset problem. As many people have suggested, it's not going to force porn companies from using .com. It may act as a magnet for children, though I'll suspect most browsers will block .xxx by default (think of the children!). Making the entire venture, a method to get lots of money for some TLD company.
The domain name is supposed to be some type of mapping between a company's name, general interest, etc. to a specific web page. This was great when the web was small, but even without all the porn, it still mostly fails. Thus the search engine.
So URLs are relegated to (sometimes) brand name, (sometimes) company names, bookmarks, and printed ads. That is, all other times, it doesn't really matter what the domain name is.
The
Perhaps a better approach would be to actually put some structure on naming. A hierarchical is already somewhat in use per domain, but is not problem free. Also, name.adult.com is essentially the same as name.xxx.
Tagging is an already wide-used technique employed on the net, why not use it for names too? The tags can be done in an inclusive manner, such that an organization can allow acceptance of a particular web page to that tag. For example, 'child' could be applied to make sure there is no objectionable material. But wait, by whose standard? Well, there could be several 'child' tag organizations. For parents, they can pick the one which agrees with their standards.
Am I in favor of censorship? Definitely not. But I'm also going to have to live with the fact that some people are going to disagree with my sensibilities. Why not give them their own playground, and get them out of mine?
Can someone tell me when was the last time that all the countries of the world agreed on the same policy?
I am having a hard time here.
I would expect a community like Slashdot to strongly oppose this measure, but this does not seem to be the case because few people bothered to realize that this proposition covers more than just a creation of another generic TLD.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
If it is such a good idea, then why don't webmasters use xxx instead of www in their URLs? It would allow for all the filtering that a top-level domain name would. Just label a site something like "xxx.pr0n.com" instead of "www.pr0n.com". Simple.
Or is it simply about the registrars making more money off of a new TLD?
what gives... .XXX is either porn or adult themed. what's the problem? That they are easily blocked by parental controls?
The mind can only boggle.
.xxx tld is passed, then all it does is grant the domain registrar a licence to print money. Any company or organisation wishing to protect its brand/image may be unwillingly forced to pay for registration in the .xxx namespace purely to stop others from putting up things they do not want to be associated with. While some here might say that that is tough, and I'd be inclined to agree with them, the only one guaranteed to be making any money from all of this will be the domain registrar.
Seriously, if the
A few landsharks may also make money from litigation and suing domain squatters, but it does not necessarily mean they are going to make any money.
Sure it would !
Where could parents find porn otherwise ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
I believe we should add it but not require it. Due to the difficulties in defining and enforcing such a rule. In general though as the web becomes more sophisticated we can more easily block things and this problem should take care of itself. My assumption is those running these sites do so to make a profit. And children do not buy things online, thus they are not a desirable audience. So my assumption from this is that this problem will deal with itself over time with or without a top level domain. And in truth, so what if little jimmy saw boobies. I accidentally stumbled across stuff when I was 12 or so (and had no interest) I closed the screen and moved on. If little jimmy walks in on grandma in the shower however...he will be scarred for life. And if they are looking for it...they will find it..in one way shape or form or another.
Signatures are so 90s
Three words: Network Working Group.
http://outcampaign.org/
This is a very good idea on first blush, but rots into something very bad when you think just a little bit about how it will work. Obviously jennasmassivetits.com and cockpluscock.com type sites will be the first to become .xxx, and we'll all pat ourselves on the back for it. The children are finally safe from substitute teachers who can't close popups fast enough! But now we've started a very slippery slope.
.xxx" or "no it's just the beauty of God's creation" etc.
.xxx domain, and so the sites advocating AGAINST abortion or gay rights will be walled-off. Basically anything debated anywhere in the country will become "adult."
.xxx, meaning that NBC will be on the record for creating .xxx domains for its television shows.
c onlaw/obscenity.htm - and it left us with wonderfully sharp guidelines like is it obscene for a "community's standards" [which community?] and "I know it when I see it." I'm sure everyone across the entire Internet can come to complete agreement about "I know it when I see it."
PG-13 sites will become contentious -- she's in a lacy bra: is the bra see-through or opaque? Or mostly opaque? Or mostly see-through? A whole host of semi-erotic or tastefully erotic sites will suddenly live in a nether-world of "yes it's
And that is only the start. Soon after, very obviously PG sites that, for example, say basic things like "abortion is an option for some women" and "it's okay to be gay" will be considered ".xxx" material; whole swaths of Wikipedia will have to be walled off. On the other side of the political curtain, liberals will likely want to add "hate-speech" to the
And finally you'll emasculate many web humorists. Late Night With Conan O'Brien now runs hornymanatee.com -- it's entirely PG (a man in a large felt manatee suit embraces, fondles, and strokes his felt suit), but some humorless prig will most certainly want it to be
It's a bad idea. The Supreme Court's last ruling about obscenity was Miller v. California - http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/
This might be controversial but I think top-level domains - .com, .edu, .gov, .org, .net - are all a bad idea. It's a bad user interface. I understand the technical reasons why they exist but technology shouldn't be an excuse for a broken interface. Here are several reasons why top-levels suck.
1. They are a limited number of categories that will never satisfy everybody. The basic ones seem obvious - .org, .com, .gov, .edu, .net - but really that's not enough. In Australia we also have .asn.au and .id.au. Even that's not enough. The .xxx top-level is an attempt to corral all pornographic domains into a single top-level domain. Why stop there? Who not create .religion and .news as well? I'll tell you why not; it's a slippery slope and it'll never end. Top-level domains are attempting to use taxonomy to attach metadata to the URL and it's doomed to failure because there will never be sufficient variety.
2. It leads to cross-domain squatting. The classic example was whitehouse.com - a porn site - which caught unwary travellers who were looking for whitehouse.gov. The converse example is a company like Ebay who needs .ebay.com but what about .ebay.org? It isn't registered and Ebay is never going to be given .ebay.org, so it's stupid for the DNS to permit it as an option.
3. The geographical breakdown is equally useless. Lots of Australia companies register .com domains because it's "cooler" which means the geographical taxonomy is immediately broken. It also means an international company has to register several dozen (160+) second-level domains (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, .co.jp, .com.ca, etc). It would make much more sense to browse http://ebay/au/ because then Ebay has an international presence. Apple has the right idea here because that's exactly what they do; all their geographical top-levels redirect to http://apple.com/xy/.
4. The user shouldn't need to care. Why should a newbie to the Internet be required to type .com after the name for companies, .edu after the name for universities, etc? How would they even know? Especially given point #2 that typically there isn't going to be any variation; only one of the combinations will be valid. In fact, most browsers automatically append .com because they know the user is going to type "ebay" rather than "ebay.com". But that's fricking useless for everybody who isn't in the USA (ie, most of us).
5. Some companies straddle the line and don't fit neatly into either category. An example in Australia is Telstra - are they .com.au or .net.au? Are they .net.au when they provide network services but .com.au when they provide non-network services? In fact the distinction is as clear as mud: Telstra has both .net.au and .com.au and they mush them together as they feel like. It makes a mess of the browser security because you can be on telstra.com.au one minute and the next link will take you to telstra.net.au. User. Interface. Disaster.
Now you can disagree with some or all of those points. Hell, Slashdot seems to be full of nitpickers who delight in pointing out grammatical mistakes, so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody said "but without TLD our CEO will be OMG WTF, LOL". But ignore the technical details - they're just problems to solve - and look at the big picture: top-level domains are a broken user interface and no amount of patching will fix it. It was OK as the prototype but because it's the prototyp
The problem isn't filtering content. The problem is that domain names are a terrible way to do it (see RFC 3675), and there are better ways of doing it (see PICS).
As for a voluntary .xxx, the public and legislators will misunderstand its limitations. It's practically begging for bad law. It's better not to set it up in the first place.
http://outcampaign.org/
The biggest advantage for the porn industry is that afterward everybody typing in the address of the link or clickijng a link ending with .xxx KNOWS what he/she wants and thus can be blamed itself for what he tried to see. Whereas with the situation now, the porn industry TAKES the blame if anybody (adult or infant does not matter) accidentaly type in/click a .COM address which does show porn image. By having .xxx everyone wins : all parents or sensible person which can simply then block all .xxx domain, the porn industry because then nobody can anymore talk about being "accidentally" there. The ONLY loss for the porn industry is that then every consenting adult lose any excuse to have browsed on porn domain by accident since with .xxx it willl be obvious that you are on a porn page. ? "ho honey, no I just wanted to learn more about how to solve multiple-body physics interraction and I accidentally clicked onn that porn link" won't hold water if all link end with .xxx
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Creating a red light district would arguably make porn easier to find for children
.xxx,.net,.org, .com or .fucktit domain name. NOTHING which can be found a few click away today cannot be found by anybody older than 8.
.xxx web site but that would not hold water I guess if people pay directly to oversea account, a bit like the gambling casino stuff.
Explain me with the advent of search engine, how is it difficult for any kids to :
* type in www.google.com
* enter free porn image (or free porn video)
* clicks on "I am 18 and want to see the preview video"
I am sorry, but that argument do not hold any shred of water. Unless you are speaking of mentally disabled children, if they want to search for porn, they will find it whether it is a
Now for the rest of your argument, I agree you can't force the rest of the world onto it. You could try to force sales of subscription in the US for porn to only comes from
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It all sounds like the evil flag to me.
Think about who's going to be paying out money - porn site owners.
...but it would be nice if the money was used for something useful instead of lining a few political pockets.
If it was me I'd be auctioning the names off instead of "first come, first served". "sex.xxx" ought to be worth millions...
No sig today...
We used to have a lot of topless beaches here in Brasil. I'm headed to Maceió today (my home is in a mountain city, far from the shore), and I'll tell you if there we have some when I come back.... :-)
But seriously, Namibian Himba people and South Ethiopian are specifically cited as having traditionally barechested woman in the wikipedia page about topless.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
That would fix the filtering problem simply and for ever. Also the people should be informed that the numbers are just as good as, if not better than, names. Thus all the interesting numbers would get some intellectual value. Why have the General Electric Company not exploited the IP address 3.4.5.6 for example? Surely that's worth a bob or two? Wake up shareholders of the corporations which hold class A domain numbers, you can sue your corporate directors for not maximising the return on your funds! Taken to the obvious conclusion, a Class A IP number squatter should have all 16 million numbers taken off them and these numbers reserved for porn servers. How about the unused 51/8 network for a start? That would free up 4,294,967,296 numbers which could be especially reserved for porn servers. On the other hand the current user of those numbers could exploit them to provide a substantial income to the British DHSS, who are the current number squatters. Rent your porn server IP number by paying the pension of a poor Briton! Bags 51.52.53.54! The very ages when a flagging body actually needs perking up with a bit of visual stimulation. The mind boggles as to the value of that number. Surely that would keep the even most debauched users of porn happy for a while? As for a .xxx TLD! Well really!! That is just fraud pure and simple. To separate suposedly undesirable content from the rest of the HTTP traffic you just pass a worldwide law to put the all the porn servers on a port other than 80. It's a one digit change in the Apache web server config file. And creating a browser which won't work on that port so as to protect the children's parents from the embarrasment of having to explain to their little ones what the genital organs are for.
The easy solution is to block everything apart from the following netblocks
.spam domain for all spammers and a requirement that all spam be sent from a given netblock?
10/8
127/8
172.16/12
192.168/16
No more porn (except the stuff you host locally).
And while we're at it, how about a
(tongue firmly in cheek)
That's perhaps a nice wish. However, assuming it will go away is another thing.
Government is not simply a world marketplace that offers ideas and if no one buys, it restocks the shelves with other ideas. We give government the special power of force that we do not give shopkeepers wherein if people disagree with the ideas it is offering, it can take action. The more vague that action, the more subject to the individual whim of an individual attempting to enforce or, just as likely, to exploit such powers.
To pick an obvious and somewhat overused example, the bad ideas of the Nazi movement were indeed rejected by the people, but it's a stretch to say "therefore one should not worry about governments getting an occasional wrong idea because these things tend to work out". It took time to notice the problem in that case, and very bad things happened in the interim. By the time a problem was noticed, it took was not easy to fix. One cannot simply fast forward to the outcome without seeing the time in between and say "it was a bad idea and eventually no one bought it".
McCarthyism in the US played out with somewhat similar shape, although fortunately far less cost in human lives. But by similar shape, I mean that it was a kind of insidious idea from the start, and it crept like a cancer with people not seeing what a bad idea it was until it was widespread and it started to impact so many people that it simply could not be ignored.
The notion that the government should be able to push things "harmful to minors" into this ghetto is like giving a big gun to anyone who has government authority to act but not telling them who to aim it at. Harmful to minors is not a statement like "boils at 100 degrees" that can be objectively tested. What protections does it offer to people who have no intent to harm minors and are simply operating in an area that raises questions.
Some things that have been classified by at least some people as harmful to minors within our lifetime include sex education, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth , and the teaching of evolution. Will we expect to find the teaching of safe sex practices only in the .xxx domain? What about climatechange.xxx or darwin.xxx?
And that's only in the US,
the supposed model of freedom. How will such a domain be construed in countries around the
world that have more conservative points of view. Will we see tjmaxx.xxx? barnesandnoble.xxx?
mit.edu.xxx?
The problem with "parental" government is that people often naively assume that it it has a brain at all, and also that the brain will be applied uniformly. In fact, what is more likely is the kind of thing you see on cop shows all the time where cops come to a restaurant owner who won't give them the info they want and they say "I'm sure you wouldn't want the health inspector in here all over you." So the guy caves and gives up the information. The public isn't served by the health code law because in the end, the law is more useful (to those TV cops, at least) or some undisclosed purpose than it is for actually making sure things get cooked right.
And the problem is that the undisclosed purpose is flexible and varying. The whole war on terror is going the same way. If the government can make "being a person" (or at least, all of its aspects) sufficiently illegal, then there's always at least some club handy for threatening to arrest a person if he gets out of hand, whatever the enforcer thinks is out of hand. And at that point, there's no freedom left. That's an analogy that Slashdotters should understand: It's like software patents. Overly broad. Overly vague. Applied inconsistently. Difficult to defend. And offering no really safe avenue of behavior. And that means no one can safely develop anything. They can just hope they aren't singled out for enforcement.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
So even if you were able to wave a magic wand and put every porn website on a *.xxx TLD, you have not addressed the problem of the link adverts / banners / clickthrus.
.com .net and so on TLDs featuring adverts / banners / clickthrus from .xxx TLD domains.
Pulling a number out of my ass, probably half of the websites out there that rely on advertising / banners and clickthrus to exist in the first place do so with "normal" adverts, ebay, amazon, x10 webcams etc.
Which means half of them rely on porn adverts, so you will have half the commercial websites out there, on
What are you going to say to these websites? Sorry guys, you are going to have to shut up shop or secure VC funding?
Porn marketing is the same as any other kind of marketing, they WANT to get their message out, the do not merely do not want to be filtered out, they will actively oppose it.
Look at it like this, I can type all kinds of searches into google, and chances are extremely high that I will get TOTALLY irellevant sponsored links to amazon and / or ebay in the results, and I mean TOTALLY, you abso-fucking-lutely KNOW that there is no such item for sale on ebay, and no such book for sale on amazon, but the link is still presented to you.
___NOT___ because it is relevant, but because MONEY WAS INVOLVED.
This is why you will never ever "solve" the "problem" or porn, any more than I can solve the problem of advertising, personally I like to see none, ever, ever again.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
The implications already are that .com is commerce, .org is nonprofits, .gov is government, and .net is for networks (for instance, ISPs).
.gov is actually enforced.
.XXX domain is like having one of those "You must be 18 to enter" things. It's a way of self-censorship, of saying "I know this is pornography, and not safe for children."
.XXX, but I think having your filtering software be a line in a host file is really, really nice.
As far as I know, only
So, basically, registering a
There have been technical arguments against
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's insanely easy to block a whole TLD, but no one's forcing you to block it, and no one's forcing pornographers to use it. Hell, plenty of them already have "You must be 18 or over" links, and even banner ads for things like NetNanny.
.com name. You are not required to have any kind of network, or be related to any kind of network, to own a .net name. You are not required to be a nonprofit, officially or unofficially, to own a .org name.
.gov, but the only thing similar that could happen here is the .XXX registrar(s) refusing to accept registrations from anyone who won't use it for porn.
And you aren't exaggerating your fears, really, but you are having a knee-jerk reaction to one immediate assumption. It's true, this article makes that assumption, but you can still stop frothing at the mouth and try to look at this sanely. You are not required to be a corporation, or participate in any kind of commerce (other than your registration fees) to own a
The only one I know of that's actually enforced is
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Is there a single one other than momentum? As far as I can tell, everyone and their dog owns a .com name, so if the .com servers can handle it, why not just pool those into the root DNS servers?
Can anyone give me a good technical reason we can't handle this?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
A .xxx domain could be valuable to the porn industry. Right now they're on the hook when a minor accesses their site. They have to deal with thousands of varying locality laws on the subject. Sometimes their precautions are good enough, sometimes they're not. Sometimes porn purveyors find themselves arrested because little Johnnie found an access code on some message board and Mom caught him online.
.xxx domain and a little help from the US Congress, .xxx could be a legally safe place for Internet porn. It takes one simple law: "A web site accessible only via a .xxx URL is deemed to have taken reasonable precaution against access by minors and shall not be held liable for the same." And then set up http redirects on the old .com sites so that all access is funneled through the .xxx names.
Its not like porn sites want visits by children. Children don't pay.
With a
Presto, the jungle of locality laws is cut down.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Filters are evil, and so is anything that even has the potential to make them more effective.
.xxx, then it will be .drugs, then it will be .violence, and then it will be .government-criticism.
First it will be
This is a slippery slope, and the only way to keep from sliding down it is to recognize the slightest slip towards censorship and fight tooth and nail against it, in whatever form it may appear. Sure, the motives now may be pure, but the mere ability to censor effectively must not exist if we are to preserve free speech.
Yes, there's a lot we find distasteful. But we have to realize that the cost of keeping that which we find distasteful under wraps is that we create the ability to one day take away the right of free expression, and that someday, those very measures that we supported to curb "distasteful" expression may be used to squash political expression - as ALREADY happens in some countries such as China.
I'm only just 18 and I have been using the internet for the last 10 years or so. In all that time, I never ended up or stumbled upon a porn site. Occasionally there were links to what might have been pornographic sites appearing on Google (although safesearch helps with that) so all in all, I don't think it's that hard to avoid porn at all. You mainly tend to end up on it, I would guess, if you're looking for it.
All of the new TLDs introduced have been disasters or fiascos.
New TLDs have...
It's still all about
If authoritarian China can't purify the internet by blocking everything but
Is someone inside of TWO DIGIT COUNTRY CODE being stupid by expecting paypal.[TWO DIGIT COUNTRY CODE] to be legit?
Non-european residents have successfully registered
Non-universities have gotten their hands on
New TLDs: Just say no.
The opposite concept, a .kid domain is a much better idea. You can make people sign an agreement to place only family friendly material on these sites, and then you can install special browsers that only accept .kid websites. This allows the existing net full freedom, but still gives a valuable tool to schools and parents to help monitor the content they allow children to access.
-Z
For those of you who see this as a goldrush or a good idea, you have to consider:
.XXX domain, for relatively little extra value - How many domains are you going to go on a spree for with $75 reg fees?
.xxx, you must follow ICM's (not ICANN's) 'Best business practices' or else lose your .XXX - could this include selling them/parking them?
.XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on .com/.net etc.
.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
ICM wants to charge $75/year for a
By having a domain on
There are bills in congress to make
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
From this self-penned article about what is one of the worst ideas in recent years when it comes to TLDs.
Business Voyeur
I can't help but think of the major company names that would be up for grabs with the new TLD. I am reminded of photos I saw recently of of products (in Eastern Europe, I think) such as Linux Dishwashing Liquid, and Microsoft Toilet Paper.
These are uses of the names in non-computer venues, and as such are likely not infringements of the brand names.
Of course, in the vein of the famous PC-Mac Ads by Apple, I can imagine the ads for MS Porn vs Linux Porn.
The scripts practically write themselves
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
which is to say, not at all. 99% of the time if I see a .biz or a .info domain it is just a link to some spam site (yes, there are non-spam sites with those TLDs but they are the exception). I have no reason to beleive that a .xxx TLD would be any different. Do you really think that wal-mart would allow wal-mart.xxx to be owned by anyone but wal-mart?
If you don't want your kids looking at porn, watch them.
If you don't want people looking at porn in libraries, turn off images. While there are losts of sites that need images to be navigatable, the irritation of not having images is a lot better than over-aggressive filtering software which have a reputation for blocking sites which are not meant to be explicitly pornographic.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I don't understand what the deal is with trying to legislate .xxx through ICANN. Why should government get involved with something that could be taken care of in the private sector? Looks like another service has already implemented it.http://www.new.net/ Of course with services like this you don't get the mainstream audience but at least it's available. Maybe adoption might get here after some time has passed by. The argument concerning the adoption of any tld is a waste of energy in my perspective. Let the market decide what works and what doesn't. I think the problem is the connotation it implies and what people are trying to do about it that confuses the issue.
I fear that once we start going down that path, then other forms of partitioning will become more palatable. One can construct an argument that political speech should be in a seperate TLD so that domain registrants can register as potential lobbyists. To make it more attractive you make the domain registration free for "non-lobbyists" (however that gets defined) and a sliding fee scale for "lobbyists."
I think the whole expansion of the DNS TLD's was a bad idea.
Easier than images.yahoo.com? As it is, people are accidently hitting on porn all the time.
I think it makes much more sense to make porn easier to block, then it's no problem for people who don't want it.
What I mean to say is: .XXX TLD. .XXX TLD when I worked at Microsoft in 1996. I tried to get support to adopt this idea after working with Microsoft and 4 other companies on trying to get filtering software that actually worked. After about a year of nothing but failure, I went to ICANN, Network Solutions, and InterNic, and several other influential companies and tried to get some kind of support for the .XXX TLD. .XXX TLD be used for pornography, and works with other major companies to limit the availability of items like Microsoft.xxx or Whitehouse.xxx, then what we have is another good tool in the fight to protect our children and prevent the spread of illegal porn.
I worked at Microsoft for many years. During that time I tested all kinds of software and how it works for Windows. One of the things I came to the conclusion of is that NONE of the internet filtering software, firewalls, etc. work 100% of the time. In fact, most filtering software including packet-sniffing firewalls don't work well at all.
Some of you say "just watch your kids better"...but the reality is, I cannot watch my child every single day, all hours. I actually have to go to work, I have homework, I have other things that must be done, and sometimes my 12 year old is on the internet without direct supervision...this includes time he is at his friend's houses, or at school or the library...
I have been responsible for taking down several child porn sites that were hosted by Yahoo! and others. These problems are all illegal (children viewing porn, and child porn, etc) and they are most closely related to our problems with illegal drugs...the fight on porn, however, has one advantage; there are tools that can be used to help prevent our children from being exposed to porn. One of those tools is a well regulated (privately or by legislation)
I was first to mention the
Unfortunately, it was not an acceptable view at the time, but it seems that the past 2 years have brought about a change of attitude. We should not fully rely on a single solution, and filtering software, or a firewall, or a TLD, alone are only one solution. But if ICANN takes the lead and requires that the
--E--
i think that the xxx domain should be required by pornographers, and anyone using a .com .net .edu etc domain to distribute pornography should have their domain taken back by icaan. i want a simple way to distinguish porn from the rest of the world to help us in our fight against spam, spyware, and other time and energy and money wasting crap.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The inverse (a domain exclusively for child appropriate sites) always seemed much more practical and effective to me. Let's call it .kids.
.xxx is that undesirable club that you have to force people in to. The pornographers don't want to be in it because they know that it will get filtered out at a lot of places. So it cuts into their business.
.kids domain, is the place where everyone who produces child appropriate material will want to be because they know that a lot of parents will filter out everything but .kids. So you set up .kids and put in place a gatekeeper who monitors to make sure that only the material you want is in it.
.xxx and not .kids because running .kids will be a lot more work (with the content monitoring and all) so they won't make as much profit.
.xxx to .kids because their ultimate goal isn't just to prevent children from seeing pornography. Their goal is to prevent you from having any access to pornography. And that will be easier if it is all in one place.
.kids will admittedly be quite challenging (I would suggest putting librarians in charge of that, they have experience with classifying material and setting up child-appropriate sections). But aside from that, isn't .kids a much better idea?
Let's put it this way, if you were starting a club, would you A) make the club undesirable for people to come to and then try to force them into it, or B) make the club a place where people wanted to be and then only allow in the people you wanted.
Well,
But a
Of course, a company like ICM Registry wants to run
And the moral crusaders prefer
Now, that "gatekeeper who monitors" bit about
This is only one of many bad ideas. The CP80 Internet Channel Initiative proposes what amounts to a "two-internet" system - a set of ports restricted to kid-friendly content, and another set where anything goes. I can think of problems that would arise if they simply wanted to designate a new set of ports as "safe" ports, but I get the impression they would rather keep the current scheme and relegate anything inappropriate to a new set of ports. There may be some political support building for this right now, although the idea has been around for a while now and hopefully is a non-starter.
What I see in a lot of discussions (even here) is a focus solely on the pornography industry. However, the people who want to make these things law don't care about just the pornography industry. They want to regulate anything sexually explicit. So places like blogs and slashdot where people have discussions of a sexual nature (or post explicit ascii art) would be regulated by these laws.
"fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy"
I'm sure the original architects, users, and maintainers of the WWW in the government and educational realms felt the exact same way about the .COM moniker being created in order to open the floodgate of commercialism into their tiny, intellectual ecosystem. And they were right for thinking so. They probably had more reason to be upset about THAT change than ANYONE has to be upset about THIS change.
.XXX on top of .COM is like going to a guy with 90% burns all over his body and holding his hand over a lighter. Yeah, sure you may do a LITTLE damage, but in comparison to what's already been done its meaningless.
Adding
The 'net was raped when corporations were allowed to turn it into a vast wasteland of advertising, marketing, and surveillance.
Adding a designated porn area is just the natural progression of things.
I've been reading these comments and there's so much debate whether the porn sites are going to jump at the chance to move to a .XXX TLD or not. And then there's the issue of whether this is going to become a gold-mine for the registrar. Well first of all, it probably is going to become a gold mine for the registrar, but this is a perfect example of a case where maybe a non-profit, government sponsored entity is set up as the registrar. In coordination with the new registrar and new .XXX TLD, pass laws sufficiently punitive that would highly encourage legitimate porn sites to move their operations from .COM to .XXX. Use the revenues from the .XXX registrar to find and punish those adult sites that won't make the move. The porn industry is big business, there's no reason why it shouldn't subsidize it's regulation and enforcement.
Most anti pr0n laws on the books in little wet spots around good ole blue nose rednekk looky at the nekkid wimmen in back of the county fairgrounds along with the jedges, cops an preachers and other perverts, 'country' America state somewhere in their text about 'contemporary standards', 'community standards', etc. It really is not stretch now to blanket serriptittiousely check through backdoors in the new 'Vista' system from micro$ anybody's IE browser history for any and all '.xxx' domains in the history. Any present, then the black maria will come full of jackbooted coal bucket helmeted rednekk thugs to pick them up and throw them into the modern day concentration camps. End of story. The trials will be jokes as judges and cops who themselves looked at the same in real life in the backs of those county fairs will happily and hypocritically sentence the pale basement dwellin geeks to thousands of years of homosexual servitude to leering aids ridden gang bangers in our prison systems all at taxpayer expense. And you taxpayers will be paying for all this circus.
Just hang on a little longer -- Unisys is coming out with some major [patentable] improvements ANY TIME that everyone will just HAVE to have!
Parents gotta surf with their kids.
Does anyone actually harbor delusions of things being any different before the Internet? Prior to the net, porn was still avaliable, kids still looked at it, and the earth continued to rotate just fine.
Uncle Bob's under the bed box, boxes in the attic, etc...
If you are at all worried about what your kids are doing online, surf with them, get involved and let them know you are there to help!
My kids started surfing about 94. This dilemma lasted about two days --just long enough for me to think it through.
Here's what you do as a parent:
-put the computer in the family room where the screen can be seen
-when your kids are young, surf with them!
(This is great fun actually. The kinds of stuff they want to see and do can be very enlightening where getting to know your kids are concerned.)
-have them use a search engine to locate sites at first. Improper URLs lead straight to porn / malware / virii, etc...
-nurture a trusting relationship.
Bad things might happen. If your kids come to you for help and can do that without fear of harsh punishment, they will!
I had this happen in my house once or twice. They came right to me, showed me the screen full of nasty popups and asked, "how do I avoid / get out of this?" No biggie, we talked about it, and all was good.)
-let them know the Internet is logged. (not completely true, but true enough) Essentially, their surfing reflects on your record. It also means what they did can be found after the fact. (also not technically true, unless you setup the logs, but again true enough to get the job done.)
-let them know about identity issues. It's perfectly ok to construct identities on the net sometimes. They need to know when and why this is appropriate.
All in all, doing these things has made Internet life with my kids solid. Over the years, I've had three major issues. All were easily dealt with. Minor league compared to other parents I know, who did not do these things. They essentially get the full range of crap. Site sneaking, dangerous online chat / IM, downloads full of crap, identiy theft, buying things on e-bay, the fricking works!
After seeing this contrast over the years, I know the right path is just what I wrote above. It's so much easier to have an environment where kids ask for help and act in a solid way, than one where they essentially only work on not getting caught. Too many secrets makes for an Internet mess where kids are concerned.
Getting back OT: The XXX domain will do exactly nothing to address these issues. I've got a coupla sites blocked right now. Not porn, but for other reasons. My Space is one that got the kids too sucked in. They spent every waking minute on the site looking for attention. So I canned it for those reasons, not content ones. They can go elsewhere to participate on the site and they know it. At home though, it's better to not have it and they know that too. (And will tell their friends why!)
The only thing XXX will do is force the issue of content regulation more than it already is. The sad truth is that no amount of content regulation will solve the problem of parents not doing their part to raise decent netizens. Fix that and this whole issue goes away for all but the extremists looking to change the world rather than simply learn to deal like the rest of us do.
Blogging because I can...
Some small African or southeast Asian country with a weakened economy just needs to officially change their name to, say, Xxeveron.
Once that's official, they're entitled to a *.xx domain name and can sell it to the online pornographers at $50 a pop. Granted it's only two Xs instead of three, but it's still a win-win situation for everyone.
I believe the .XXX domain is a great idea. It would allow easy filtering of the entire domain, and would also allow those who wish to access these services to still do so. I do not think pornography is bad, but there should be a mechanism to prevent children from seeing them. I think this is one very simple way to do this. The other of course is mandatory PICS self labelling of websites which would allow a web browser to be configured to reliably filter such sites out. At the same time, those who want to access the content, could choose to allow it through. this is much more preferable to more intrusive means which are more difficult to implement, such as requiring age verification. Ratings would be as easy to enforce, but would be very simple to implement for all websites, without being intrusive, without making it difficult for websites to comply, and allowing the end user to do nothing more than configure a few settings on their webbrowser, not have to hand over credit card information to websites to gain access. It protects the right of all parties involved.
Maybe I'm way off base here, but ever since I first heard mention of a .xxx TLD, I instantly thought "Wouldn't it be better to have a 'xxx.' prefix instead?"
.www TLD for 'world wide web' sites and a .email TLD for e-mail addresses. '.xxx' for a company's adult-rated site makes exactly the same amount of sense; i.e. not very much at all.
I mean, we don't have a
People seem to have lost sight that the prefix on a domain name signifies the function of the server under the domain, so www.yourdomain.tld is your website and mail.yourdomain.tld is your mailserver; If you're going to run an adults only site xxx.yourdomain.tld seems like the logical choice to me.
Scrupulous DNS hosters (like ISPs) could then encourage the use of such a prefix for their customers who are running that kind of site.
An example of this usage might be, say, Google Images with safe-search turned _off_ running from xxx.images.google.com, or Heff running his online corporate newsletter from www.playboy.com and pictures of the bunnies at xxx.playboy.com.
Or am I just spouting crazy talk here?
Insert witty sig about inserting witty sig here, here.
Demand every porn site change their url to www.xxx.mypornsite.com (or .org/net/etc) instead...
and forbid them to use the old www.mypornsite.com
That way everyone would keep their current domain
doesn't have the same appeal as whitehouse.com For some reason, it just sounds cheap.... Plus, how could you ever get away with saying that you accidentally went to the wrong site?
Erotic speech is already separated out from other forms of speech and this has already been ruled on as an acceptable segregation of speech.
This is why there are laws against running around town naked.
I'm not disputing that pr0n is speech that has been limited based on societal norms. My point is once you start the ball rolling with gTLD's partitioning forms of speech, I am concerned about other forms of speech that might be targeted on the Internet. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
If you have a .XXX domain it does not but provide revenue for the registry ... Adult domains can still be all over the map. You can not (at least here) take a valuable commodity by the use of government intervention and move them to the .xxx TLD without compensating the owners. Well legaly you can't. And we can't regulate .com, .net, etc. use worldwide. It is way way to late for that.
.kids TLD. And have the registry requirements be such that the information content is kid friendly, and that even ratings tags must be incorporated in all websites in the TLD to further narrow things. Of course these presupposes a worldwide concensus on content that is or is not acceptable to kids and what should or should not be rated with what flags. Violators get there domain blocked, and after a period of appeal, auctioned off. (look for new and interesting ways to destroy the credibility of sites by hackers to cause valued domains to be released!)...
So better would be to have a
No matter how you look at it, it boils down to there being software to help parents (and leary adults). Parents need to be more involved.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Isn't XXX what is on all those jugs of moonshine in old cartoons?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All of the author's complaints could be solved simply by ruling that if you currently own a .com web address, you also now own a .xxx address.
If you want to sell it, you can. If you want to keep it and do nothing, you can. Or you could do anything else you want with it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every time this comes up, and people go "This isn't such a bad idea...", they dont stop to think, who decides what is porn?!? We cant even legally define it, "I know it when i see it." is not a valid system for this kind of thing. Other posters have touched on this. A whitelisted .kid TLD is a much better idea.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
>> Would a .XXX domain be helpful for parents, or just a political salve/moneymaking scam?
.xxx domains, not registred sex offenders, but by good parenting, simple eliminate the childs internet connection, and when they want online, don't use time limits, actually be there with them, and they'll get sick of you being behind their back thus they won't want online, that is all you have to be is a good parent, dont rely on somebody else.
would it be helpful for parents hell no, ever heard the saying "the apple doesn't fall to far from the tree."? so would this domain naming work? again hell no. this idea is just a political "think of the children" front, if you were really a good parent you wouldn't let your children get on the internet because, it's 70% chance of luck that the children will stumble into a "child safe" website, and then it gets infected with adware, because that site wasn't "internet explorer safe", and so the porn pops up, or they child could of delibarately looking for porn, or they may give out out too much info like on a website like myspace, this all could of been avoided by, no not keyloggers, not
heres my opinion, if the porn industry is getting their own domain, wouldn't it be far to also force others like for advertisers get a ".ad" tld, for known spammers, a ".spam" tld (heh this i find quite funny since i think this will benefit more, but hasn't been taken into consideration), ".pirate" for "p2p" users :P, also what about child safe websites, ".child" ?? , huh seems fair enough??
TLDs exist out of nothing more than a technical convenience. There is no usability value to a TLD.
.net, .org, .biz, .me, .you, .xxx, .whatever, .the, .fsck, and .else? Thus, the proliferation of TLDs causes a drop in the relative worth of each tld. In the meantime, a tremendous cost will be borne by businesses trying to enforce their trademarks in accordance with laws not intended to deal with the realities of the Internet as it exists today.
If I say "IBM", do you have any question about what company I'm talking about? Funny how that worked without saying "IBM.com" or "IBM.company" or whatever. IBM is sufficient.
TLDs will proliferate because there is economic incentive for those who sell TLDs. And each time a new TLD comes out, the relative value of TLDs in general will drop until they lose relevance altogether. And it WILL go this way, because A) there's money in starting a TLD, and B) once started, a TLD will basically never be retracted. Thus, it's a one-way street.
Who wants to register mystupidcompany.com,
The answer is simple - Build a TLD of ".". Collapse all other domains into this super-root, while allowing ANY arbitrary phrases to the left of the dot. EG: it's perfectly ok to register "because.i.want.to." as a domain name, even though no TLD of ".to" might exist today. Domain slashdot.org becomes slashdot.org. and there can be a "slashdot.somerandomname.", but it has no more value than any other "root" domain, and slashdot would be reached by its new root domain, "slashdot." And from there, standard trademark law can govern, as it does today.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If the US did that, the EU would set up there own root servers over night and 'fork' DNS. If that day comes, Americans can say good bye to the intraweb. That is if the new at&t hasn't already gutted it by bribing congress into gutting network neutrality.
Jennifer Garner in Alias is a promising candidate... now if we can see the edited versions...
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The biggest challenge facing the .xxx domain is that we lack an easy browser shortcut to append ".xxx" .com? Easy. Ctrl+enter .org? No problem: Ctrl+Shift+enter .xxx? trouble. What's left?
.xxx domain will be a fool's errand.
Until we can standardize an easy shortcut key combination (enter?), pursuit of the
Yes.
What is your scheme going to do with all the "adult" sites that pack up and move to other countries, so they can retain their .com address, and -- as you yourself just noted -- keep the business of all those 3PM browsing-from-work customers?
.com domains, and not get shoved into the .xxx ghetto; their cash-flow depends on people being able to access them. If the .xxx domain existed, that would become the focus of blocking, making a .com porn site even more valuable!
.com TLDs. Do you really think that they're not going to move the domain registrations to the Netherlands, or Russia, or Sealand? Of course they are.
.xxx as ordered; second, you're going to have U.S.-based adult sites that gave your plan the finger, and moved their operations abroad, behind shell companies; third, you're going to have non-U.S. based sites, which may carry "adult" content, but are legitimately not subject to any of this U.S. stuff (which might be benign where it comes from, but NSFW here in the easily-titillated USA; e.g. Danish lingerie ads). So that leaves a bit of a problem. If you block sites in 1, then you give the advantage to 2. And there's no way to block 2, without building a Great Firewall around the United States, like China, and also blocking 3. At that point, you might as well unplug the United States from the rest of the world and just call this Internet thing quits.
You illustrated exactly why those sites have a reason to want to keep their
So you've created twofold incentives for porn sites to maintain their
So what are you going to do at that point? You're going to have 3 categories of adult sites: first, you're going to have U.S.-based adult sites that shuffled off into
It doesn't matter if it's "the right thing to do," because it will never work. Okay? Look, getting rid of all crime would also be the right thing to do, but we can't do that, so it's a stupid discussion to have. A heavyhanded scheme like creating an ".adult" or ".xxx" TLD would be a terrible idea, and it might fracture the entire concept of the Internet, which is probably only the most significant achievement of our civilization in the last 50 years. Let's not fuck it up.
If we really want to protect kids from porn, there's a fairly easy way to do it. Create a "kid-safe" domain, under the country-code domain. So, things deemed safe for the U.S's kneebiters can be at ".kids.us", while those safe for France's can be at ".kids.fr" (or whatever the French word for 'kids' is, I'm a little rusty). Schools, libraries, etc., would then be free to limit their users' browsing to the approved domains. Companies could do the same, if they desired.
It's just not practical to try and pen all the "offensive" content into some sort of adult zone. If kids need to be kept away from porn, and I'm not even convinced that they do, then they need to have a kiddie area on the Internet; it's just not feasible to make the entire net 'kid safe.'
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
http://www.network-tools.com/
http://www.bankes.com/nslookup.htm
http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html
Type in a name (say, whitehouse.com) and they magically retrieve an IP (in this case 66.129.115.23). Neat, eh?
These were all in the first five Google results for "DNS lookup," which isn't that hard a phrase to remember, even if you don't know what it means. I have seen middle-schoolers use SOCKS and CGI proxies to bypass filters on MySpace; you are gravely mistaken if you think they're not capable of something as trivial as performing manual lookups of a few well-known domain names.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wish our elected leaders would find some real problems to solve.
They will, just as soon as they're done creating them!
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Two questions:
1) When are you, George Bush (either one will do), the Pope, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to sit down and flesh out (pardon the pun) these rules, as to what is "tasteful," "artful" and "erotic"? Because my copy of Websters is falling a bit short. Where, in particular, are you going to put Sally Mann? How about Jock Sturges? Or, for that matter, the lingerie section of the Sears Catalog? I think Mahmoud might have some feelings on what constitutes tasteful female attire, maybe he can help us.
2) Assuming you get the rules all fixed, how do you plan on enforcing them? Let's assume that there are a few "rogue states" out there that don't see eye-to-eye on this; you know, like maybe France, or Belgium. Aside from thermonuclear war or a Giant Firewall, which seem to be the best options that come to mind, how do you keep their content off of our entirely "tasteful," "artful," "technical," and wholly un-"erotic" TLD?
Extra points for answers that don't involve attaining godlike superpowers, takeover by aliens, forked DNS roots, or destroying the network in order to save it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"as a parent of a pre-teen, I don't want my kid looking at the nasties that Google brings up when searching for school materials."
.XXX domain, it's not at all clear how you could make this happen. And before you answer, don't speak in generalities, think in terms of congress defining what porn is (ain't gonna happen), supreme court allowing it, people moving their businesses over seas, an international body coming up with "porn" rules. I mean, that would be more of a mess than Iraq.
.XXX
It happens less than you imagine, and when it does, they aren't scarred by it.
Yes, I have two kids, aged 15 and 11, they use the internet for school stuff, yes they very very occasionally stumble across porn, no it doesn't harm them, yes, they laugh about it.
Seriously, the most you "stumble" across is a picture of a naked girl (anything more than this this you have to jump a few links in). It just isn't the problem you paint it. And the problem is, if you try to force the porn sites to the
Bottom line: You're overstating any problem that might exist and minimizing the practical issues around
"Especially if they make it so that any site that sells/features nudity/porn has to move to such an extension."
.XXX TLD. That should be easy, right? After all, everybody agrees on the definition of porn. So Playboy would be porn, right? Well... they don't actually have any sexual depictions at playboy. The generally have pictures of naked girls with pouty lips. In most of the world, that doesn't classify as porn (well, China and Saudi Arabia will agree with you, anyway). Well, people f*cking goats. Okay, that's probably porn. But also illegal in most of the world. So the people who have these sites are probably not eager to jump over and announce themselves to the world.
.COM sites over to .XXX? I imagine you'd have an appeals board, and then court cases. And then some or most of these sites would not be forced over to XXX. So what you'd end up with is an Internet that has porn under .COM, some porn under .XXX. And not a significant change, but with a lot more laws and governing bodies, and people campaigning around the fact that "How can Playboy get a .COM? That stuff is bad for kids!"
Before we begin, define you "they" are, and define how you would enforce "has to move".
Every pro discussion of this proposal says the same thing, but they wave their hands just like you over these two points.
Who are the "they" that will be forcing porn sites to a new TLD? The U.S. government? Okay, well, you've covered the U.S. Will Canada do the same? How about the Netherlands? Russia? You mean you're going to get every government in the world to help you with this? I'm betting you'll get China and Saudi Arabia to help you right away. Beyond that, it's a crap shoot.
Why will it be so hard to get agreement? Because you need agreement as to what goes in the
So assuming you came up with a working definition, you'd set up a commission to surf for porn and then force offending
You will have just created problems for no real benefit.
And P.S. I want to be on that commission. Porn is cool. It's one of the best parts about being a guy.
good idea in theory. If all the porn sites went to the .xxx domain it would be easy to block them and give parents the piece of mind they want.
however, I can't see this happening. When these sites realise they are losing money they will want to move back to .com.
Rob the PT Msc Student
After all, I can always do something like:
slashdothotties.com
Now, make all the jokes you wish about what such "hotties" would look like, but you get the point -- having a domain that pretends to be you shouldn't imply association, anymore than whitehouse.com ever did.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
So, in that sense -- yes, we could use other standards, but this one is technically dirt-simple to implement
That's where I tend to disagree with you. Blocking a TLD is technically simple, yes, but somehow putting all the porn sites into that TLD, is basically impossible, by any stretch of the imagination. Every scheme to do so is suspiciously short on details.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't think you disagree with me there, I think you're still making the assumption that I want such a scheme to be successful -- that I even want a filtering scheme to be successful. If it gets to the point where I can add ".xxx" to a host file for my Public Library and check the box that says "Our Internet is filtered," I'm happy.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Say we try the xxx TLD. OK, now what good is having adult sites relegated to the xxx TLD unless people take advantage of it by censoring websites with that TLD? So products come out, from browser plug-ins to firewalls which do this. Which of course reduces the traffic for those sites. Now, if you have adult content you want as many people as possible to see, wouldn't you put it up on a .com or .net domain? Of course you would. In fact, things would be even better for you than they are now because your competition would be out of the running for anyone using something blocking the xxx domain. But by doing this, adult content would once again be just as hard to identify as it was before. So would the groups who wanted the xxx domain say, "Oh yeah... I guess that didn't work" and give up? Again, no. They would simply start advocating that anyone with adult content be *required* to use a xxx TLD. And the only way to achieve that, would be to have a process in place whereby .com and .net domains could be monitored or reported for having explicit content, and then forced to use a xxx TLD. And there you have the problem with the idea - the only benefit it can offer hinges on being able to determine what is "adult content" and what is simply "content for adults".
While I personally have no problem with what *I* consider pornography to be hosted exclusively on xxx TLD's; the goverment's ability to define adult content has been tested many times, in many ways already. They're not remotely as adept at defining these boundaries for people as people are at doing it for themselves. As as poor as their chances are for doing anything close to a decent job at it are - it would require a huge amount of resources for them to even attempt it. And that's just for content that originates from the US; which is of course not the only source of adult content. An international body would have to be established which had the final word on *all* the world's content, and if even one nation didn't agree to go along with it, it wouldn't have any chance of succeeding at it's stated goal of making it easy to identitify adult content so that it could be avoided.
When you really consider what would be required for this to work, anyone with an even passing familiarity with the way the Internet works must conclude that taking the XXX TLD approach to helping people avoid adult content is doomed to fail; but likely to cost a lot of money, time, and political turmoil in the attempt. Personally, I think there are many more effiecient uses of our time available before we consider trying something so problematic as the xxx TLD.
Just move all the existing p*rn .com domains over to .xxx
As simple as that
Back in the late 80's, New Jersey set up "photo cops" on a few highways (rt. 80 comes to mind). Photo Cops were unmarked vans that were set up on the side of the highway that had radar guns and cameras peering out the back window. If you drove past the van exceeding the speed limit, the radar gun registered it and the camera took a picture of your car and who was driving. You'd get a letter in the mail several days later with the summons and a photo of the evidence (i.e. you in your car). Simply un-disputable.
Now add the story of a politician who was speeding down the road (who would usually get a free pass from a police officer if caught otherwise). Summons and picture gets sent home, however, the picture clearly shows that the politician was in the car with his mistress.
Yeah. Those things didn't last very long.
Now change the story to .xxx domain....
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...