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'Porn King' Says Google Should Block Porn Access
mikesd81 writes "The Register has a story saying that one of the world's biggest porn producers wants Google and other search sites to put up barriers between kids and adult entertainment. 'Steven Hirsch, the co-chairman and co-founder of Vivid Entertainment, is to deliver this message on Saturday in New Haven, Connecticut as he addresses an army of Yale University MBA candidates. "Responsible companies in the adult industry such as ours have done a great deal to deter minors from accessing adult material," Hirsch proclaims from inside a Vivid press release. "None of the search engines and portals, but particularly Yahoo and Google, has taken any significant steps in this direction.'"
Google has a SafeSearch option. That's a deterrent to accessing adult content. Granted, it's only default on for images...and there's no restriction I know of to turning it off. But it's certainly something.
There are already numerous meta tag schemes for content rating.
http://www.icra.org/label/
http://www.w3.org/PICS/
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/wcl/
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
captcha = ethics
Back in your day the book stores or your buddies dad did not have "midget fisting magazine" or "gang raped Asians weekly"
The pre internet available porn was insanely tame compared to what is easily found on the internet today. Most things on youporn.com make hustler magazine look like softcore crap in Magnum and Mens Health.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I also used to think that it was the parent's, and only the parent's, job to filter out inappropriate content. But then one day, I was in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, and every single one of the women's magazines had a headline like "Have Hot Sex Tonight!!", "Make Him Wild With Desire!!!", "Naughty Nasties You Can Do To Him In The Bedroom!!!!!!!!!!". Right there, in the open, next to the freaking candy.
Granted, there weren't pictures of the mentioned techniques on the front covers of these magazines, in fact the front cover pictures were your typical fully clothed, respectable looking, successful women, as you'd expect in a modern woman's magazine. But doesn't it seem like having those kinds of headlines at eye-level to a fifth grader might make our children get some wrong ideas about sexuality, as in, it should always be on their mind, because it's always on the front cover of those magazines?
What am I supposed to do about that kind of situation, keep my kid inside and away from grocery stores until they're 18? The point is, it is the parent's primary responsibility to filter out unwanted material, but that doesn't give you the right to go around glamorizing, or even normalizing, overtly sexual behavior in places you could reasonably expect to find a preschooler.
I don't believe government regulation is the way to solve this kind of issue, but I think it's well within your rights (including your First Amendment rights), to speak out and ask the corporations, who do have some kind of control what gets displayed where, to do something about it.
For the record, I plan to use a locked-down computer with all sorts of nanny software when my child gets old enough to use one (he/she is due in July, which is why I've been thinking about it more), so this particular issue of Google and Yahoo possibly not doing enough to filter things for the populace at large isn't going to affect me. I just wanted to point out that society, including businesses and including you, the individual, isn't entirely free of responsibility when it comes to someone else's child.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
Those people are right. It is NOT about content. The welcome page has a female nipple. That could be seen as adult content in some countries. Also some of the content might not be seen as fit for children by some.
Now I am not talking wether or not it is, what I am talking about is that a museum domain does not tell anything about the content.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's part of Sex Week at Yale that the guy is here. Vivid is a major sponsor of the week and he's giving a keynote-type talk (supposedly there have also been porn screenings and DVD giveaways throughout the week as well). The MBA students don't even have class on Fridays, much less so on Saturday. I doubt it's as high-minded a calling as you're optimistically making it to be.
actually I believe the proposed TLD was .xxx . See the wikipedia article for details
Unfortunately for your proposal, many sites can not be stuffed into .kids but are "kid safe" while also being not "kid safe".
The main issues with your proposal is that only parents can truly decide what is "kid safe". For example, my 4 year old might not need to access wikipedia, but my 9 year old will.
"Kid safe" is mostly shorthand for "let me use the Internet as a babysitter and blame someone else when my kids inevitably find something I would have objected to had I been paying attention to my children".
And before someone starts going off on how hard it is, know this: I have three children and put in more than 12 hours a day of working. My wife and I also home school our children. We still manage to monitor what our children do, and even better educate them on why. It is known as being a parent. If you "don't have the time" to pay attention to your kids, you should rearrange your priorities. Otherwise porn is the least of your worries to come.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.