LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY njtech)

Stupidity comes in many forms, and from many sources, but one never-ending source fo stupidity is the moral majority. We've all encountered porn unitentionally because of redirects, pop-ups, or mistyping of a legit website which was registered by a porn site. The misgivings of the moral majority over how to deal with this and how to "save the children" could fill up the library of Congress. One thing we hrear a lot about is filters. These folks want filters at libraries, at work, everywhere they can force them into. Only problem is the filters suck. They screen out legit websites that talk about proper ways to use birth control or which discuss the pros and cons of abortions vs adoption.

John Dvorak proposed a decade ago having an .xxx domain specifically for porn sites. You simply wouldn't be allowed to operate a porn site as a .com or anything else but a /xxx. Now of course, what is or isn't porn is another can of worms entirely, and how and who would enforce this was never figured out precisely. ICANN recently decided this was a good idea, until they backed off because of, you guessed it, the Moral Majority.

Here is their press release exalting the demise of this top level domain.

Dvoraks point was that you could then filter out porn easily by disallowing any sites that had an .xxx domain. Simple, and it doesn't filter out the legit stuff. Yeah you might get a porn site that's a .com that slippedm thru and didn'r convert to .xxx but if this went thru, it would be a way to corral the porn sites in a way that made them manageable. As it is now there's really no effective way to accurately screen for porn, period, end of story.

But now, 6,000 letters to ICANN and they backed off.

//shakes head.