nerd’s eye view

Technoculture Tuesday

August 16, 2005 – 4:16 pm | by nerd's eye view

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It’s Technoculture Tuesday at my house. Today’s issues? Porn and theft, of course.

Item one: The Bush administration has acted to stall the creation of .xxx domain addresses for porn. Reacting to, they say, 6000 letters from concerned citizens (aka the Family Research Council) they’ve stalled the creation of the new domains.

I don’t get it. You’d think that folks concerned about porn would want it regulated and you’d think that an easy way to regulate it would be by labeling it or keeping it all in one bucket. Seems like it would be easy enough to add a .xxx blocker to your web browser, no? Further digging reveals that the FRC is concerned that this move will legitimize porn and lead to the floodgates unleashing a torrent of porn upon us. Thank god for the porn free internet we have right now, eh boys and girls?

I sent mail to this pornographer friend of mine (judge not lest ye and all that!) to ask him what he thinks about the .xxx snafu. I get that requiring porn sites to use the designation might freak out those folks, after all, accidental porn is what the internet is about, right? Um, no? Oops. But that’s not where the resistance is coming from. It’s coming from the anti-porn side of the house.

J. says that 6000 letters should not a domain creation block. I say that if the letters say that the Christian right will not be funding your reelection campaign unless you block the .xxx, then domain blocking be done.

Item two: Some guy in Florida (Why is it always Florida? He’s lucky he wasn’t shot!) was recently arrested for stealing bandwidth. He was hitchhiking on an unsecured wifi connection. The homeowner saw him out there and called the cops, and they arrested the guy. He’s going to be charged with theft.

I don’t get that either. If you have a wifi network and you don’t want anyone else to use it, you gotta lock that baby down. It’s not that hard to do. You’re broadcasting your signal, get it? Stop that. You don’t leave a big old bag of money out in front of your house and then act outraged when someone takes it, do you? What did you THINK would happen?

We get three networks from my living room. I can see them, but they’re all secured, you can’t get on them without a key from the owner. There’s a rainbow of bandwidth around my neighborhood, some secure, some not. If you walk around with a laptop running the “See available networks” utility, you’ll get more than you bargained for. One time I was at a coffee shop downtown and while I couldn’t get on to the shops free wifi, I did get a pretty strong signal from someone else who was broadcasting their bandwidth all over the place. Am I a thief? Or just lucky to benefit from someone generous enough to leave their network open?