Slashdot Mirror
CP80's Cheryl Preston Suggests "CyberSecurity" Group At ICANN
Beezlebub33 writes "A new petition has been filed under the GSNO (Generic Names Supporting Organization) of ICANN to create a new constituency the CyberSafety Constituency. Existing constituencies include 'Commercial and Business,' 'gTLD,' 'Registrars,' 'Non-commercial,' etc. The new proposed one on CyberSafety is in the 'interest of balancing free speech and anonymity with the values of protection and safety in developing Internet policy within ICANN.' If that doesn't raise red flags all by itself, consider that the person submitting it is Cheryl B. Preston. She's listed in the petition with the organization Brigham Young University, but she's part of CP80. She's suggested limiting content on port 80 to the 'right' things, and other stuff can go on other ports, so it can be appropriately filtered by the authorities. Guess who gets to decide what goes on which ports?"
Maybe they should split the ports and create Mormon internet and non-Mormon internet... we call port 80!
I already added my comments in an email response.
Censorship, no matter for what "righteous" purpose you might intend it, always, always, always, leads to tyranny.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Meanwhile, Internet pornography metastasizes at an ever more alarming rate. Pornographers find ingenious ways to circumvent filters, attract new categories of viewers, and build economic and political support.
I wonder why she threw that last bit in there.
It suggests, to me, that her (organization's) larger goal is to neutralize the pornography industry, not just to limit it to adults.
... I propose using Internet port designations to separate online content. ... the right of parents to determine the means and materials by which their children are educated.
The right of parents begins at the computer and ends at the modem.
Clinton tried separating TV content with the V-Chip and it went absolutely no where.
The fact that it is inconvienent for ignorant people to regulate their hardware is not a social problem.
Fucking with the structure of the internet is not the right solution.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
From the perspective of an ISV that does anything besides simple web browsing having to worry about regulated port numbers seems like an unnecessary headache. What about ports 25 and 53, would those get regulated also? the effort is useless without them and exposes lots of downstream parties to liability if they do. Even if you agree with their stated goal, their approach is totally unworkable IMO.
It sounds scary, but I cannot for a moment believe that this could happen. I hate to drag in the old saw, but "the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
I also can't imagine that the rest of the world would appreciate that sort of thing. There'd be international pressure against it. And as I recall, the .xxx TLD issue was pretty close--ICANN really has no motivation to do anything like this, and it would be a move totally at odds with their history (and the principles of the internet in general).
So we're giving time to some nutjob who hasn't got a prayer, and providing something for slashdotters to rant about...par for the course I guess.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
should be 7878
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
How about a counter proposal. Leave port 80 just like it is. The people who want a 'cleaned kid friendly Internet' can establish an alternate port where such a thing would be delivered. Do it like this:
Rule one: all servers running on this new port have to be doing https.
Rule two: all certs will use an entirely new chain of trust established by the consortium doing this new safe net. They condition the server keys on a site obeying whatever content rules they put out, revoking the keys of sites who go rogue.
Rule three: A mandatory set of tags describing the content on each page so parents can adjust their browser accordingly to their views. Such a system already exists in IE and could exist in others once someone actually began using the stuff. After all a browser update will probably be required to get the new root certs installed anyway.
Then it is just a matter of blocking port 80 on kids computers. Best done at the AP/router.
Democrat delenda est
I've just gone through the CP80 explanations of how the internet works and how filtering does not work but should. "The CP80 Internet Channel Initiative is a solution that can effectively solve the Internet pornography problem." That's fantastic. Let's hear more about that. Oh, all content has to be categorized into adult content and "community" content, which can then only be served on port ranges assigned to the types of content. That'll work. And then we block IP ranges of countries which do not require their internet users to categorize content and abide by the port assignment rules. That'll work.
How afraid can you be of your kids seeing naked people and still leave them unsupervised on the big bad internet, hoping that finally someone has found a working filtering solution when even a totalitarian country like China can't effectively censor the internet? At least the CP80 web site is 100% Flash and skips pages uncontrollably, so the chance of it reaching an audience is slim. Nutjobs.
We all can agree there are some subjects that we wish our children not to view (XXX, Barney, drugs), and other subjects we do not mind (Disney, Birds, Bees [not together]).
What about the "grey" subjects? Where should breast cancer research be? How about the arts? OMG (Oh My Golly), nude photos?
Should John-Boy see that video on how barn yard animals reproduce?
Who gets to make the call on intelligent design or evolution?
A.C.
The top person behind CP80 is Ralph Yarro, of Canopy / SCO / etc. fame, who tried to defraud the Nordas, IBM, Novell, the creators of Linux, etc. He has no ethics whatsoever, but in his book, banning content that he deems not fit for you is completely appropriate.
These people are technically ignorant, and want to gain by enforcing their new laws what no voluntary-based action of good intent would win them. Ignorant lawsuits, and ignorant laws, not created with a modicum of thought or sympathy for anyone besides the profit in becoming the gateway to control the internet and tax and regulate everything according to their "morals". Never mind that he could just as easily set up some port besides 80 with a technology that enabled whatever degree of filtering he wanted and people who agreed with him could move to that port and technology, but he is a dictator and a fraud at heart.
There are plenty of people in Utah and especially at Brighan Young University (where real dissent is not tolerated) who will blindly follow and greatly praise such a person, both for putting a lid on internet-style free thought, and also in the same breath for trying to eliminate Linux, that hotbed of hackerdom, people who don't know that Windows is what is good for them. As much as they claim to respect your freedom on other ports, don't believe them.
Comments on this petition should be sent to ICANN via the email address "cyber-safety-petition@icann.org" mailto:cyber-safety-petition@icann.org
Yarro's anti-porn crusaders are currently bombarding ICANN with form letters supporting this censorship initiative. See: http://forum.icann.org/lists/cyber-safety-petition/mail3.html
Here is more information on this issue from IP Justice and the Internet Governance Project: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2009/03/19/robert-yarro-and-his-anti-porn-crusaders-march-on-icann/ http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2009/3/17/4125801.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Furthermore, the problem is only barely attributable to social conservatives, as a great many liberal democrats love this nanny-state stuff.
Truer words were never spoken.
The internet has a pornography feature!
This is a brilliant attempt at a failure.
It is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard of.
I used to work in adult entertainment. One of the big (BIG) things is availability to customers. Regardless if it's mainstream or not, most customers (readers here excluded) are barely functional on the Internet. They have a hard time trying to even go to a site. I'm amazed at how many people have to go to their home page, which happens to be a search engine, to type the url into the search box to get the site. They can't grasp that you enter it in the address bar. If httpp (http for porn) is put on port 81? We're suppose to believe that they can type http://porn.example.com81/ or httpp://porn.example.com?? It'll never happen.
At times, I tried to move things off to other ports. You'd be amazed how many people couldn't grasp the concept. Even putting a mail server web client on http://mail.example.com:8080/ completely throws them, even though you write it down for them, and it's right in front of them when they try to go there.
Other options have been attempted over the years. The meta tag pics-label was suppose to show what kind of content you were serving up. On very rare occasions, I see it used. Usually I don't.
There were other site rating tags that came and went. They weren't generally used by the browsers. They weren't implemented very frequently on web sites. In the end, they died. If someone was running an adult web site, they honestly wouldn't want to run the risk of having their content blocked by the provider, when the customer did want to view it. So, nothing identifying to say "porn".
Even the .xxx TLD was a spiffy keen idea, but that didn't have a prayer. "Please move all of your domains to the .xxx TLD. Ya, right. First problem. You may have different ownership of porn.com and porn.net. They'd both have to complete for that new position. Then you have to tell all of your viewers, "Go to porn.xxx, we're shutting down porn.com in 30 days". Some clients would only view every few months, or even every few years. They wouldn't have seen the memo, and would then be out of luck. No one, regardless of the business they're in, wants to lose their customer base because they had to move. That's why when you see a physical storefront move, you'll usually see a note taped in the front window saying "We've moved to 14 main street, 3 blocks over. Come visit us there!" those moves are usually unavoidable. It's better for a business to expand to a second location, than to ever shut down their first one. Frequently, it's a death sentence.
I know killing off the adult entertainment industry is a motive in wanting to force them to move. It won't work, but it'll really shake up the industry. New companies will get lucky and make more money. Old companies will be very very upset that they went from multi-million dollar empires, down to nothing. In the end, sites will still pop up as .com's on port 80, and they'll make good money by avoiding the new found filters.
If it wasn't an idea that would hurt things, why not move the mainstream sites over to a new "safer" place?
It then brings up the question, what's "safe". What's safe for my kid may not be safe for your kid. I run a news site. We carry news. What if you didn't want your kid to know about wars, or famine, rape, murder, drugs, or gay/lesbian/bi sexual preferences? Better not let them read the news.
Is a woman showing cleavage acceptable? How about in a bikini? Lingerie? Topless? Full frontal nudity? Implied sexual intercourse? Obvious and visual sexual intercourse? You may not want a 10 year old seeing too much cleveage, so should that be in the porn domain? Now you've moved things in
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
How about this? We keep Port 80, but they get all the IPV4 ports above 70000.
"Part of the CP80 solution includes free technologies that would allow an individual to report violations that appeared on the Open channels. The information reported would include copies of the offending content, time and date stamp, URLs, IP address and other information that would allow an individual to take action against violators."
Sounds so much like the DMCA.
I don't like the idea of systemizing this sort of thing.
The best solution is multiple (competing) whitelists. That way, we don't have a doll manufacturing bribing "the ratings organization" to let their edgy ads into the stream.
The kids will still be exposed to edgy stuff, but when bribes flow things go sour quickly.
It's the monoculture thing.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
CP was a good name for this site...
Perhaps, because 80% is better than what it is now, they think.
Part of the problem may be that the parents themselves are afraid of the 'net, still. If the parents can't handle the unrequested porn ads, they're going to have a hard time monitoring the kids.
Considering what I've had to go through to be able to monitor myself, I can't say that I blame the parents who don't want to have to harden themselves against it. It's not that the body is dirty or scary, it's that it can be so interesting that it gets in the way of doing necessary things like working and talking to people. You know, relating to the people who are physically near you.
Oh, and I guess there is also that wish for sex to remain a "special" thing.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
but then again, you're liberal by name only if you think this is a good idea.
As many, many, *MANY* others have said, CP80 just wouldn't work. I'm going to ignore any technical reasons for the moment. Let's just grant them that a system could easily be put in place to sign users up for "Community Ports" (filtered) or "Open Ports" (non-filtered). Ok, we have that system ready to go. Now what?
First of all, we need to determine what gets filtered. That seems easy. Cheryl Preston said we just need to filter the "material harmful to minors." Except, who decides what is harmful to minors? And minors of what age? Is nudity harmful to a minor? What if that minor is a 15 year old and the nudity was in the context of a safe-sex video? What if that nudity was an article in National Geographic? What about curse words. Surely any curse word should be filtered. So any forum that lets a member curse one time much pack up and move to the filtered side of the room. What about religious discussions? Would saying "God doesn't exist" be harmful to a minor? What about a page saying that Santa doesn't exist? That could be a bit traumatic for a 5 year old. We'd better filter any page that says anything negative about religion. Personally, my wife and I find Barney and Teletubbies to be harmful to minors (and adults). Could we lobby to have them filtered? (I think that last one might drum up more support for the plan.)
Obviously, we would need to appoint a group to decide what is harmful and what isn't. I'm sure Cheryl Preston and her organization would be happy to gather a team. With their discerning eye, they would be the final arbitrators of whether your site was good or an evil, child harming menace. Unfortunately for you, you fall in the latter category. Time to move, right? Except you happen to live in France and host your server in Belgium. No problem, CP80 has a plan. First a "customer" (read: a CP80 member with time on their hands) reports you to The Regulatory Agency. They tell you to take down the content or go to the filtered side. You don't comply. The Agency (stacked with CP80 members) rules you in violation and the "customer" can take you to court... except that the "customer" is trying to take you, a French citizen with a server in Belgium, to civil court in the USA. {Mr. Rodgers} Can you say Jurisdiction? I knew you could! {/Mr. Rodgers}
In the end, the entire plan rests on a false premise:
The Internet is completely different from the "real world." In the "real world", the person that I'm talking to is likely to be an American citizen or, at least, visiting America (and thus subject to its laws). In the Internet, the person I'm talking to might be from the US, but could also be from Europe, Australia, China, Russia, etc. This makes it easy to enforce country-specific rules in the "real world." If that person I'm talking to in the "real world" decides to strip down and perform a lewd gesture, they'll find themselves arrested under US law. If the Internet person does the same thing, their home country might permit it. No one country could enforce its laws on the entire world. Imagine how we'd feel if suddenly the Chinese government was able to say that all mentions of their government must be positive and anyone making any Tienanmen Square reference would be extradited to China and shot.
You just can't try to force the Internet to fit into the "real world" mold perfectly. Any attempts to do so will fail miserably.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The term for this attitude is "statism" and it is rampant in America. Got a problem? Make a law! Instead of recognizing that the world is imperfect (and the legal system even more so), make a law any time something bothers you!
That is so true. I remember watching a news report about someone whose son was killed when he drove his truck into a tree because he was talking on his cellphone.
The father's response? To campaign for stricter laws against cellphone use while driving.
Ignoring, of course, that there ALREADY are laws against using the cellphone while driving. Which the father claimed his son knew about. And he claimed that he repeatedly told his son not to drive while talking on the cellphone. His son was too stupid or too arrogant to pay attention to the lesson of not using the cellphone while driving.
Sadly, the full story is even stupider. He was talking on his cellphone, dropped it, and then leaned down to pick it up. Needless to say, when ducking under the dash, it's hard to see the road.
Notice that CP80's "Get Involved" discussions page is 404?
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
That is because to call the Dems "liberal" and the repubs "conservative" is frankly an insult to both words. The "Barry Goldwater style small business leave everybody alone" actual conservatives got ran out of the conservative party by the bible thumpers in the 80s, and likewise the true "let's try something new since the old crap ain't working" liberals got ran out of the dems by the Nancy Pelosi money whores. Now BOTH parties are pro big government, pro blowing lots of cash, pro federal rights over everything.
Frankly the only difference anymore is in the asses they kiss. The repubs kiss the corporate and defense industry booties, while the Dems kiss the Hollywood media and union booties. That is why I hope that the libertarians or greens or somebody steps up to the place but soon, because frankly right now it doesn't matter which you vote for, because both are determined to screw you and the country.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I hate to inform people but Verizon hosting DSL lines in the vicinity of Boston is already filtering port 80. This is in an attempt to force people to upgrade from a personal DSL line to a business DSL line. So it is not a content based filter but an incoming/outgoing based filter on that specific port. But it could be argued that in a content neutral specific environment none of the incoming or outgoing content should be filtered.
Existing constituencies include 'Commercial and Business,' 'gTLD,' 'Registrars,' 'Non-commercial,' etc.
I'm not sure what Gay Transgendered Lesbian Dykes have to do with this issue.
... and then they built the supercollider.
This is like the .sex proposal that comes up every few years with ICANN. Its a nice idea but just wont work, it would be far easier to create a alternate port browser from scratch than attempt to herd cats and reign in all the "bad" stuff on the net.
It would also be an absolute failure since the concept of ports is completely foreign to most end users. Perhaps if it was "special" browser geared towards it's target audience it might work in the sense of those "special" video outlets and edit the crap out of them for their puritan niche.
I have a simpler solution for them right here:
RFC 3514
This is Treason, violating knowingly the US Supreme Court Ruling on the 1st Amendment by singling out through legislation a person or group for limitation of general availability by class, creation of a sub-class of U.S. Citizen, and knowing fraud in publication of prior censorship models under new codewords as was seen in the alt, binary, and warez newsgroup censorship of the 1990s. Certain U.S. States also have Constitutional Amendments against this limitation of Free Speech by denial of service through knowing means based on content and suppression of report (Title 18 USC Sec 1519 and 1513e) which would make denial of requests to data by any mechanism from a willing requesting party to a provider a Federal felony act. The chart CP80 shows is incorrect, in that it presumes the ICANN and US DoD have authority over the backbone traffic and use of the Internet. While Interstate law does apply and jurisdiction over criminal activity does apply, the OWNERSHIP and RIGHT OF USE including method of use are private in nature to the commercial carriers and independent server hosts - all of whom have the right to use ANY PORT They wish for ANY SERVICE and are protected from censorship by virtue of the unity of common ports for common (vital, commercial, business) traffic such as 80 and 443 (HTTP and HTTPS). This debate is old (as TCP/IP) and this face only shows the tragic low, gross incompetence, and criminal unamerican nature of charity contributions by firms participating with CP80.org to promote this awful concept on the American People. The CDA2 was STRUCK DOWN and the Internet Deemed APPROPRIATE FOR AUDIENCES OF THE AGE OF MAJORITY in the Supreme Court (18+ in most states of the Union). This operation is therefor in knowing conflict with the Supreme Court decision, operating to undermine the United States Constitution, and such an act overt treason of the worst sort. Yes, porn can be bad. So can politics, religion, and diet pill spam. But the cult of the child excuse will not and shall never justify the open act of sedition or treason against the United States or its highest court, nor legislation proposed or passed circumvent those protections (Article 6, US Constitution) or rights of any single State (Article 4 Section 2). 15,000 dead, and all they can do is concern themselves with pornography? 3.5Million animals euthanized annually in the USA, and they want to double the cost of Internet maintenance prior to legislating against industries based on cultural, religious, and sexual taboos? Monsters. Child-like hate-mongers. One and all.
There are solutions and if the goal of this movement was really about protecting children the tools that exist today would be enough. But as you admit, probably unintentionally, what you really want is to force your religious views on adults. If your side was being open about that this thing would never get off the ground, but I guess dishonesty is OK if that's what God's work requires.
You demonstrate the point. That you, as a BYU alumnus, would respond to defend Ralph Yarro was perfect, while ultimately ignoring the moral dimension of his actions, which are clearly on the record. I do not think getting close enough to feel the mesmerizing effect he apparently radiates for the likes of you would make a difference to me. I see plenty of people like him.
At BYU, obviously, any mention of sex or anything aligned against the prejudices of the hierarchy (anti-war? anti proposition 8?) is immorality in the extreme while extreme fraud and dishonesty of the worst sort that Ralph or any other of the Gods of the community is guilty of don't even register as being fundamentally evil in character. BYU and Mormondom are by no means the only place this is true, but they come up frequently enough. Your complete lack of morality is obvious to most everyone else. You all love a good fraud, as long as those involved pay monies to the church. How dare anyone bring this up when you are promoting your God-given right to force censorship on others. How noble that you gave Ralph a hard time over his actions with respect to Linux, the Nordas, etc. You sure showed him!
Well, I've just dug up some gold plates that say that this is a bad idea and that free speech isn't free speech if it's 'balanced' with anything. What? No, you can't see the plates. Only I can read them with this special crystal that I also dug up. Stop hatin' on my religion!
Agreed. I don't think it's limited to Mormons, either. It has more to do with a desire to work and earn a living while raising kids - without having to watch what the kids are doing.
More parental (or grandparental) involvement is needed. The 50-60 hour week is really what is the problem here. Maybe not so much during this recession, but that is a big part of the problem.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Learn it, love it.
[FUCK BETA]
I believe in process. Submit via RFC and we'll see where it goes. My guess is, right where it should...the trash
~NavyWings Senior IT guy and no kidding rocket scientist....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems like she's just trying to drum up interest in her upcoming book on this topic. She obviously has zero technical knowledge, and I seriously question her ability to teach law. (I have no doubt she's *qualified*, but I wouldn't want her near my kids.)
...///...
> So dial back the anti-religious bigotry a tad and maybe we can make some
> progress against the real problem.
That sounds like collectivism, which suffers from most of the same problems as statism.
http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/02/02/2009-02-02_study_finds_online_porn_may_reduce_the_i.html