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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."
.. when I say, You have got to be FREAKING KIDDING ME.
This is about as enforceable as the .xxx TLD. No matter what you do, you're not going to be able segregate the pr0n from other content. Unless you're SCO, I guess, then maybe you could sue those who don't comply by claiming that your intellectual property is on port 80, therefore you own all of the content on port 80 -- millions of lines of HTML!
My blog
What makes this approach that much different from using the .XXX top-level? That's just as easily blocked, and easily passable (ssh or proxy)
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
"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."
Stupid legislators. It's not a fricking toaster, that's rediculous.
It's a series of tubes.
I thought we got that straight a few months ago!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I think we can all agree that the only reaction this requires is a hearty "STFU".
Leaving alone the obvious impracticality of implementation and enforcement (ask Australia about that), this moron thinks that he can legislate morality.
My morality doesn't agree with his. I resent having moral decisions made for me, and I bet the majority of Americans feel the same way. If I want to look at porn, I should be able to look at porn. If someone else doesn't want to look at porn, they don't have to. What exactly is the problem here that requires legislative intervention?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Unfortunately port 69 is already assigned. From my /etc/services:
In any case, the concept is fundamentally flawed. Ports are designed to discriminate by protocol, not by service content. This is just another flawed implementation of RFC3514.
Pirate Party UK
No wonder there is so much TFTP traffic on my network! Its full of porn!
chown -R us
Now all we need is to figure out a way to get Yarro to open Firefox in the bathtub.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
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.
And what's to stop porn site from simply relocating to another country and ignoring this law completely?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
or have their ISPs do the blocking for them.
ISP: So, you want to see porn on the internet? You dirty bastard, that's an extra $50 a month and we'll unblock that port for you.
Of course this would never work since it requires the cooperation of the whole world. As far as I know most online porn sites aren't based in Utah. When will they learn...?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Mostly because, as a parent or not, you don't understand how the internet works. .xxx domain name, and is only about a billion times harder to implement.
As MANY have pointed out, this gives no more protection than the
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!
The big deal is that it will be a government mandate. Toys 'r' Us is a toy store. It's self-governed business knows that porn doesn't belong there so it's not there. I bet you also won't find bongs, industrial chemicals, fresh fruit, bags of concrete, and document safes in there, either.
In you installing a filter on your home network, you're taking some pro-active steps. That's good. Companies that make filters are always improving them so your job becomes less difficult. That's good, too. And neither of those things required laws to be written.
Maybe the real lesson is that people who make content filtering software should lobby the legislature like other companies do.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Sure, you could send your kid into Toys backwards-"R" Us alone without him finding porn (although if your kid is very young you should be going into the damn store with him,) but can you say the same of the Library of Congress? They have naughty books there. The Internet is much more an all-encompassing library than it is a kiddie-friendly toy shop, and it is nobody's responsibility but yours to monitor what your kid does with it.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This is not a technology problem. It is a problem of figuring out who gets to set the porn bit. Since the internet is international no one jurisdiction can assert authority. For your meatspace analogy, it would be like you lighting up a joint, and then telling the LA police to piss off because it is legal in Amsterdam.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
More information on this subject, including a detailed discussion of why content segregation is dangerous, can be found in RFC3675. It suggests an actual workable solution: PICS tags.
PICS Labels (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is a generalized system for providing "ratings" for Internet accessible material. The PICS documents should be consulted for details. In general, PICS assumes an arbitrarily large number of rating services and rating systems. Each service and system is identified by a URL.
It would be quite reasonable to have multiple PICS services that, in the aggregate, provided 300 bits of label information or more. There could be a PICS service for every community of interest. This sort of technology is really the only reasonable way to make categorizations or labelings of material available in a diverse and dynamic world.
While such PICS label services could be used to distribute government promulgated censorship categories, for example, it is not clear how this is any worse than government censorship via national firewalls.
A PICS rating system is essentially a definition of one or more dimensions and the numeric range of the values that can be assigned in each dimension to a rated object. A service is a source of labels where a label includes actual ratings. Ratings are either specific or generic. A specific rating applies only to the material at a particular URL [RFC 2396] and does not cover anything referenced from it, even included image files. A generic rating applies to the specified URL and to all URLs for which the stated URL is a prefix.
This seems like very much the "right" way of doing it. It:
Also, unlike their proposed port breakage, it can easily be turned off if you don't care about it.
Pirate Party UK
(I know it's not valid. It's a joke, son. Laugh.)
I'd like to know why this is flagged as censorship. Is it considered censorship that adult movies can't be rated G? Is it censorship that pornography is not allowed in the .gov TLD? Just because it has to be segregated does't mean it is censored.
.com domains are owned by entities in the USA.
Regardless of that, I don't see how this can be enforced, since only a fraction of
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Your analogy is broken.
This is equivalent to declaring that trucks carrying porn cannot drive on certain roads. It's an attack on infrastructure to solve a political problem.
Well, firstly, I would have to say I'm not a parent so I've not yet run into the problems you describe. But from my standpoint, I don't believe this will make filtering access any easier and it puts a significant workload on everyone else.
How do you characterize what is adult material and what isn't? Is that porn or is it art? I personally feel there is a difference - I know porn when I see it and I know art when I see it, but my standards aren't the same as everyone else. Lets assume there aren't going to be the inevitable court battles over "is it or isn't it" and I have complete dictatorial control over "is it or isn't it". Are you as a parent comfortable with me making those decisions for you? I view proposals like this as ways power is being taken out of you (the parents) hands and put in the hands of a less capable bureaucrat.
At the end of the day, it will still have to be up to you to make the decisions on what is or isn't appropriate for your children. And while I do feel that filtering software is a good tool (I use privoxy/squid to filter out malware on my own network), you will still have to sit and teach good browsing habits.
In meatspace, we already have constraints on distribution channels for so-called "adult" material. I can send my kid to Toys R Us and know that he won't find porn. (I think that there are lots of problems with the junk sold there, but porn is not one of them.)
You won't find much porn at www.toysrus.com either. AFAIK they don't sell "adult toys" at all.
While we're at it, TCP stands for "Tube Carrying Porn", and IP is "Internet Porn", which goes to prove that the internet is founded on porn.
ant.
Clearly it's not perfect, but if the majority of that content was segregated, then it would make filtering easier.
Making alcohol and cigarettes illegal for minors does not keep all kids from drinking and smoking, but it does keep lots of kids from doing things that can be harmful to them.
Moving most porn content to an easily identifiable place would help simplify filtering for those of us who want to filter. Perfect? No. Better than current state? Yes.
FWIW, my kids have never been to Toys R Us without me, and I do know exactly what they are doing on line. I love them, and it's my job to look out for them.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
1) Pass legislation to block evil pr0n from innocent kiddies by assigning it to a special port
2) Make it acceptable for an ISP to block an entire port,
3) Pass more legislation forcing some services onto certain ports (and allowing ownership of other ports (just like tv))
4) Buy up ports and force ISPs to pay to use those.
5) Both profit AND control of file sharing.
STOP THIS LAW!!!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Okay, so HTTP porn on port 40001. Now, FTP porn on 40002? Gopher for porn on 40003? NNTP for porn on 40004? SMTP porn on 40005? SSL HTTP porn on 40006? 8-bit telnet with zmodem porn on 40007?
See the problem? Ports are for services. Porn is not a service, it's content of a service.
Maybe we should set hijack the Content-disposition header and set it to "Content-disposition: nasty". Sure, it'll break attachments, at least as far as there's overlap between attachments and porn, but who cares? Your children are safe from your lack of supervision while the rest of us work around your concerns.
When I was a child, I was told what to do and what not to do. If my parents weren't in the room with me the entire time, they checked in on me often enough that they'd catch me doing things I wasn't supposed to do, or at least make me reasonably afraid they would. When I got caught, I lost access to things like computers. When I was in real trouble, I got the belt.
Maybe that's what the Internet needs -- it needs parents who discipline their children for doing things children shouldn't do.
Come on everybody, we've got to stop the proliferation of unsupervised, spoiled, undisciplined children! Think of the Internet!
I for one welcome our content categorizing overlords. I look forward to getting a cushy government job in the new Ministry of Internet Content Categorization, where I will be paid big bucks to consider content before it is put online so that I can ensure that it is assigned its appropriate port number. For example, this idea could be assigned to Port 0, Dumbass Suggestions.
Life needs more saving throws.
You never get unsolicited emails that have porn photos?
I do. My kids don't. Their email is white-list only. (And I don't see the photos either - images are disabled in my mail client.)
I'd love to have a child-safe internet channel where content was intentionally restricted.
Whitelist the sites you approve of. Block everything else.
Already have it. It's called a PICS label.
"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.
All your ports are belung to Utah
I was going to make a hardcore double penetration input-in-the-output-port joke, but then I started thinking about how many networking geeks would jump all over the joke based on the fact that double penetrating the pron port would cause a tcp/ip collision, and therefore no penetration would occur, and I gave it up as a lost cause.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
it is very unlikely that any site would adopt such ideas as moving to a specific port or top level domain on a global scale, basically saying "Don't enter here".
Instead, it is more likely that businesses will adopt the reverse: Invent a means for sites to advertise that they are safe. A ".kids" top level domain would be much more effective than ".xxx", toy stores and other businesses targeting children would make sure to get their site up in that domain to reach their audience.
For the same reason, a technical mean for sites to optionally advertise the content rating should be considered. The current http header lets the client specify a string of preferred languages, this lets servers redirect a request to the best matching language, or accepted formats.
Similarly, one could add a header in the request accepted content classes. The response header should contain the actual classification returned. Servers not returning a classification should be treated as not-rated and may default to block or pass.
The neat thing about this is that search engines will also get the classification header and a search query can restrict to matching classification. This way children won't find undesired results. Also, it provides more granularity, individual URL's can be classified differently.
Of course, there are two problems:
- It can be spoofed - but question is if there is a business incentive to do so.
- Standardizing classification is very difficult, but at national level should be possible. The class codes could be prefixed by the national codes.
Many sites might just remain non-classified, but if schools and institutions say that they only allow classified content, organizations will adopt this to reach their audience. If laws are passed to hold organizations liable for spoofed classification (but not lack of classification) then this might actually work: Those who have a business incentive will get reliable classification and the rest will simply remain unclassified. And no one have to move their domain and reestablish their name.
You have to understand, this is not a bid to clean up the internet, this is a bid to clean up Yarro's reputation. Yarro is a mormon, and his reputation in the church has taken a huge beating with his falling out with the Noorda's and the whole SCO debacle. In Utah, members of the church who are businessmen can expect to have other memebers of the church who are businessmen not want to do business with them if they have a tarnished reputation. So... he is engaging in some very high profile activities to try and look as if he is championing moral behavior. He doesn't give a crap whether this actually passes or not, the whole point is just to make noise. In fact, he doesn't even have to have anyone even believe him. Just as long as there is enough "morality" noise that a person who would prospectively do business with him can point to to say "see... I'm not selling out in doing business with him", then he can still access his business network.
This is "informative"? As a former BYU student, let me correct your misinformation.
The LDS church owns an NBC-affiliate TV channel which has chosen not to carry some of NBC's offerings. Even if the leadership of the church has specifically requested that SNL not be carried, how is this a problem? They're a private company. If you don't like what they do with NBC programming, take it up with NBC.
You're wrong about MTV being "banned" in Provo, and I don't even know what you're talking about. There is no University or city-mandated censorship of the channel, and I personally never noticed it not being available at all (if a cable provider *didn't* want to provide channel, they certainly ought to be free not to do so). I also don't understand why you are bothered by blocking of Web sites within the school's network -- it seems to me to be a pretty common practice within "work" environments like businesses and schools.
BYU is a private university. Students, when enrolling, agree to an honor code that restricts their behavior on and off campus. You seem to take offense at the fact the someone would make such a voluntary sacrifice.
There's a fundamental difference between a person voluntarily agreeing to behavior restrictions and a government mandating these restrictions. BYU is "like China" in the same way that making donations to the Red Cross is "like communism."
I saw these guys last year at a technology expo here in Utah. They had these really cool T-Shirts they were giving out to everyone who signed their petition. The shirts had nothing to do with CP80 or pr0n or anything like that. It had some cool nuclear age artwork from the 50's on it.
I talked with the guy for a bit and found out what they were trying to do. I told him it was a dumb idea and it would never work and it's not enforceable. He didn't have any great answers - just kept saying "we'll make them move to another port" emphasizing "make."
Figuring that it could never work, I signed their petition in the name of getting a free T-shirt. Looking back, it was a mistake, because apparently this thing is going somewhere despite its complete lack of reason. I sold my soul and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I haven't ever worn the T-shirt.
or else!