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ICANN Approves .xxx Suffix For Porn Websites
An anonymous reader tips news that ICANN has officially approved the creation of a .xxx suffix for porn sites, confirming the rumors we discussed on Thursday. While this resolves a 10-year debate on the subject, the Guardian notes that "many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org." Others are more confident, like Stuart Lawley of ICM Registry, the company sponsoring the new TLD. "Mr. Lawley said more than 100,000 domains had preregistered. He said he expected that when the dot-xxx domains opened for business, nine to 12 months from now, some 500,000 domains would register, or roughly 10% of the five million to six million adult online sites."
More importantly (at least according to Ars Technica) is that ICANN approved Chinese internationalized domain names in this same update notification. What's the big deal with the XXX domain? Okay so now I know that the porn site I'm going to is actually a porn site ... big deal. Ain't going to help filters all that much anyway unless it's required which would be really stupid and shortsighted. I think the changes for a billion Chinese speakers is bigger news.
My work here is dung.
Nope, xxx is actually recognised in a lot of countries. I have never heard of it meaning crossed/censored before.
I just asked people from Germany, England, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden (IRC ftw) and they all knew what it meant.
Actually, quite a few languages use "xxx" as a placeholder for "adult", "porn" and the likes. I have seen it used as such in practically every country I've ever been to.
Words like "adult", "porn", and -- to a lesser extend -- "sex" are English words that have no meaning in other languages. "xxx" is pretty universal in that it isn't actually a real word that would need translation.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Incidently, no. "xxx" comes from old wordfilters on school nets, where blacklisted words were replaced by x's instead. Guess what sex got replaced with? Yup, "xxx".
No, GPP is right. "XXX" far predates the widespread use of networking in schools, and comes from the movie industry. The story goes something like this: when the MPAA created its film rating system in the 1960s, they copyrighted all the ratings but X. So if you said you were making a G-rated or R-rated movie, say, you had to get the MPAA to sign off on it, but you could rate your movie X without any approval. If you submitted a porn movie (or occasionally a very violent movie) to the MPAA, they'd obligingly slap an X on it, but it wasn't a requirement. The porn industry being what it is, porn movie producers decided that just "rated X" wasn't strong enough to get their target audience's attention, and started slapping the label "rated XXX" on the hardcore stuff. It didn't really mean anything, of course, but it was apparently an effective marketing ploy. Eventually the MPAA decided that they didn't want to be associated with X and XXX at all any more, and stopped rating movies X altogether, replacing it in their ratings scheme with NC-17.
Except for that last bit, all of this happened in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when the number of schoolkids using any kind of networking technology was vanishingly small. Trust me, when you register "barelylegalteenlesbians.xxx" it's not images of PLATO you'll be evoking.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
See this explanation. phantomfive (GP) was almost correct, except that the movie rating system didn't have any rating more obscene than "X", porn movie advertisers/marketers invented the "XXX" as even more shocking than "X". And because of the "misuse" of X, the MPAA has moved to calling it "NC-17" which is hard to twist into a marketing advantage.
There's always a way around domain name filters. http://1113982824/
It's not about pornographers hiding themselves. Actually many pornographers will set up an .xxx domain as alternative to their existing .com domain. What they will not do is to give up their existing .com domain, which their customers know, which are likely linked from somewhere, and which are not so easy to filter.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
well? you think "sex" means sex in other languages?
Actually, it does in most languages. And where it doesn't, people do understand it.
I'm sure that 90% of those preregistrations are by domain name squatters.
Of course they are, which is to be expected since this whole exercise is nothing more than registrars grabbing at cash.
The sad part is all the uninformed idiots posting here who support the idea -- if even a fair number of Slashdot posters still don't understand why this is such a horrible idea then it's no wonder ICANN caved. On the one hand, they look good to the morons who have been pushing for this stupid idea for years, and on the other they were probably bribed with a huge amount money. Win win!
For those wondering why .xxx is a terrible idea that is completely doomed to fail (at all the "official" goals at least, it will certainly succeed as the gravy train it's designed to be), read RFC 3675: .sex Considered Dangerous. It has all the same arguments being presented here, plus more.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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DNS is a protocol, you're thinking of TLDs.
Indeed, it is:
1113982824 -> 0x42660768
0x42 0x66 0x07 0x68
__66_.102_.__7_.104
104.7.102.66.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR lax04s01-in-f104.1e100.net.
66.102.7.104
I did not know you could do this until just now, so thanks GP!
(Also slashdot's layout mangling is awful, so please excuse the underscores)