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!
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.
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
Why not 6969? It's the "KFC++ port" - "More than just finger-licking good!"
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.