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.xxx won’t make porn more accessible IF…

December 7, 2011 By Anne 1 Comment

…for now – until the blocking technology works with all browsers – families make it a rule that kids use Firefox and they download this plug-in for it: the MetaCert Add-on. Firefox is the only browser for which there’s a .xxx blocking tool, but that’s changing. It’ll work with Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera soon, and I’m sure the major stand-alone filtering products will soon offer updates that you’ll want to look for. So you probably guessed by now that the long-discussed, controversial all-adult-content-all-the-time .xxx top-level domain just launched (see Mashable.com for the history). Porn operators aren’t in any way required to migrate their sites into .xxx, so little has changed. People can still seek out or stumble upon online pornography as before. What has changed is that porn will be easier to find now because anything with .xxx in its URL is guaranteed to be sexually explicit. So families can go back to the adult-content status quo or pre-.xxx conditions with the MetaCert plug-in – theoretically, anyway, since this is all just starting and there’s no research. The good news is that the company behind .xxx, the ICM Registry, requires all .xxx sites to be labeled by MetaCert so that it can block them if used. It also requires sites to be free of the malware associated with so many porn sites out on the Web at large, reports my ConnectSafely.com co-director Larry Magid in Forbes.com, so this is the new sort of high-end “red-light district” of the Internet.

MetaSert has been busy. The company has been detecting and cataloging adult content on the Web at large for several years, now with “more than 250 million sexually explicit Web pages across all TLDs [labeled], including those ending in .com,” according to Larry. That means two things, for starters: 1) it detects adult content in individual pages in general-interest, non-adult sites (not just sites as a whole), including links to those pages, so it’ll give users advance notice (maybe Facebook and other social network sites will adopt it), and 2) their technology can be used in filtering software for the Web as a whole too, not just in browser plug-ins for blocking out .xxx. It may even turn up in filtering software you already use, so check with its developers and look for updates. But it’s hard to tell if the new red-light district will be a “success.” “Five years from now, .xxx could be a bustling adult marketplace, or a gaudy ghost town,” says Mashable. The .mobi and .kids TLDs certainly didn’t thrive (here’s some coverage of mine on .kids in 2004 and 2005). “Will the same thing will happen to .xxx?” asks Mashable. “That depends on how strong the ICM Resistry’s outreach is to the adult-entertainment community, and how consumers respond.”

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Filed Under: Filtering, monitoring, etc., Risk & Safety Tagged With: .xxx, adult content, blocking, filtering, ICM, MetaCert

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  1. The Week in Online Safety, December 12, 2011 « David Burt . us says:
    December 12, 2011 at 10:44 pm

    […] – xxx won’t make porn more accessible IF…, Anne Collier, Dec. 7, […]

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

SocialMediaHelpline.com – helping
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CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
Future of Privacy Forum
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
Prof. Henry Jenkins's blog
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
National Association for Media Literacy Education
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
TheseLittleWaves.net, site of Galit Breen, author of Kindness Wins
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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