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SCO Chair's Anti-Porn Act Advances In Utah
iptables -A FORWARD writes "Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah reportedly plans to sign a resolution urging Congress to enact the Internet Community Ports Act. The ICPA proposes that online content be divided by port, rather like TVs have channels with adult and family content, so that certain internet ports will be 'clean' — so-called Community Ports — and others will be 'dirty.' Thus, they hope to remove objectionable content from port 80 and require that it be moved elsewhere (port 666 was already taken by Doom, sorry), so that people could more easily block objectionable content, or have their ISPs do the blocking for them. This concept is being pushed by the CP80 group, which is chaired by Ralph Yarro, who also chairs the SCO Group. That probably explains why they didn't choose to adopt RFC 3514, instead."
To all legislators:
Please leave the internet alone. It works well. People smarter than you created it. It has revolutionized our world. Parents need to take care of their kids, not you. The more changes you make, the more likely you are to break something. Here's a deal. You don't need to get in the news to get my vote. Stay out of the news for a year, and I'll vote for you.
Another genius idea from people who know absolutely nothing about how computers or the internet functions. Ports are for protocols, not content. The "content" is just a paticular arrangement of data sent over that protcol.
What these guys really want is to mandate that all IPv6 packets have a TOTC(Think of the children) bit. Defaulted to 1, for "unsafe content". They then pass legislation banning ISPs from handling anything with a TOTC bit of 1. The only way to get a TOTC bit of zero, without breaking the law, is to apply for an extremely expensive licence and audit, available to only the largest corporations.
Entirely coincidentally, the Chinese government's UFTP(Unsafe for the People) bit will occupy exactly the same position in their altered version of the IPv6 protocol, ensuring that the new, saer net will be fully interoperable.
Farfetched? Well, which is more likely? This or competant government that's for the people?
May the Maths Be with you!
Umm...what? Where the hell do "hackers" and "malicious packets" come into this?
We're talking about content. And, to be honest, a voluntary system for identifying "adult material" would probably be adhered to. Because it's in the porn industry's best interest.
The porn sites are in business to make money. Period. And they're well aware of negative image that they give the rest of the industry, and that there's a lot of heat on them. Frankly, it helps them a lot to be able to say "look, we provide technical means to allow parents to filter this out for their children." Now they can do business in peace, without the hue and cry of "Think of the Children! We must protect them from teh interwebs!"
Is it possible to circumvent this system? Absolutely. Will some people fail to adhere to it? Without doubt. But most of the "legit" porn industry would probably be relieved to have a system that lets them say they're acting in good faith as responsible citizens.
The problem here is the implementation, not the concept. Segregating content by internet port is just silly. And the underlying concept is somewhat disturbing--I think the notion here is like broadcast and basic TV, and FCC decency standards could be enforced on port 80. Frankly, that has a LOT of negative implications that have nothing to do with porn.
Simpler to implement solutions that would achieve the same effect: Add a new TLD for porn (though IMO the proliferation of TLD's in also flawed, but that's a different rant), adding a specific meta-tag (just as we do today for robots), adding a new attribute to the tag to classify certain images as adult-only, etc. I'm sure there are better ideas than mine out there.
At some point, people who are ACTUALLY concerned about children are going to stop trying to figure out how to somehow outlaw porn and work with the industry to put voluntary controls in place.
"There is this assumption that you can't control it (the Internet)," Yarro said. "It's a toaster, we made it, we can fix it. ... We can solve the Internet pornography problem tomorrow if we decided to."
What Internet Porn problem? Nevermind the silly thought of the 'Net being a toaster.