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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.'"
Steven Hirsch: "Won't somebody please think of my profit margins ... *cough* I mean ... children?!"
My work here is dung.
Should read:
'Porn King' Says Google Should Block Internet Competition As It Hurts Video Sales
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Translation: It isn't OUR fault that children can see porn on the Net, it's Google's and Yahoo's, since they don't filter search results for children. (Which is not actually entirely true in either case.)
My blog
I use a search engine to search the internet.
There is pr0n on the internet.
I think it's pretty simple...
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
"Responsible companies in the adult industry such as ours have done a great deal to deter minors from accessing adult material"
Ah, no. I think they have been doing what they can do deter non-paying people from accessing adult material. When a 16-year-old types in a valid credit card number there really isn't anything they sanely can or should be expected to do to prove how old that person actually is. But heay, the fact that minors generally don't have credit cards sure is a handy-dandy public relations score for them.
And oh joy, now the porn industry wants to do as much as they can to make Google suppress all the free competition out there. Thanks but no thanks. Google is merely building a "phone book" of addresses out there and it is not reasonable or possible for them to play policemen judging each site out there if it is "acceptable" or "not acceptable", and it is not reasonable or sane to demand Google play policemen on who is forbidden to look up what phone numbers in the phone book.
Google's already going above and beyond what they need to do in offering their "safesearch" option and (if I'm not mistaken) defaulting it to on. No demand or expectation that safesearch is supposed to be accurate, just a "whatever effort we felt like putting into a maybe useful but not necessarily accurate automated grouping" sort of thing, and an if you don't like the results don't use it sort of thing.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
"None of which are content classification. Tell me, should a pornography museum be under .xxx or .museum? DNS is not a content classification system and is totally unsuited for such (mis-)use."
This is not a subtantive argument demonstrating the idea will not work. Just an edge-case that probably nobody cares about.
"Um, yeah, and if 13-year-olds stopped looking for dirty pictures on the web, that'd solve the problem too. That's not going to happen either."
Of course not. Nothing will stop a determined 13 year old. But an 8 year old that types "pussy" into google? That's different.
The key here I think is "progess not perfection".
I don't have a dog in this fight, I jsut think it's funny a solution is sought to what some perceive is a problem and a fairly elegant tehnical solution almost made the light of day but was squashed by the Bush administration; the net effect of which keeps porn in "the mainstream".
I love irony like this. I live for it.
Need Mercedes parts ?