Port 69

by Christopher Paul on March 15, 2007

I must have a dirty mind.

I just finished reading this article on Techdirt, one of my most favorite websites on the net today. Real quickly, the authors really understand technology as it relates to business – something I know a great deal about as its what my career is all about.

So as you can see from the article, the Utah governor wants to move all porn traffic to some other port.  Now besides this being attempted before with the whole .xxx domains, the attempt to move all porn to some other port besides 80 is near impossible.  Not only is hard to identify traffic and force it to alternate ports, forcing someone to route to a specific port is improbable and will be circumvented eventually.  The entire net would have to change, really, and you know how hard it is to get standards in this day and age.

But the idea that you can protect people from content by segregating it just smacks of ignorance.  Elected officials and policy makers only make themselves sound uneducated and ignorant about technology when they come up with and promote these crazy ideas.  While its ok to want to keep adult content away from children, forcing the technology to change human behavior is not the way to go.

The best way to keep mature content is through good parenting.  Good parents will place their computer in a public place, talk to them about on-line predators, and discuss the websites that they find objectionable.  Its not easy but no one ever said parenting was.

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