The people who control the internet have decided, in their near-infinite wisdom, to create a new domain type. This one is .XXX, and there's no prize for guessing what that refers to.
As we all know, porn sites like to hijack well known names. I'll never forget the day that I decided, while doing a technology demonstration in front of hundreds of people, to use the Office of the US President for my example. I typed whitehouse.com by reflex, instead of the somewhat more correct whitehouse.gov. It turned out that whitehouse.com was a porn site, as I and the hundreds of men and women watching soon discovered. I apologize (again) to everyone who was there.
So, name hijacking on the new .XXX domains is an obvious problem. To counter this, the Gnomes of the Net have declared a sunrise period of 52 days, which began yesterday, September 7, during which people can block use of their brand names.
And there's the rub. They're only allowing you to block use of your name if it's a registered trademark. If you're Microsoft, you can prevent a porn site using microsoft.xxx. Although that would be ironic since micro and soft probably aren't at the forefront of desirable concepts when you're looking for porn. But if, however, you want to block GaryCorby.xxx, just to pick a random example, then you can't do it.
I'm fairly sure the Gnomes haven't thought this through. Maybe Hollywood celebrities trademark their names, but the vast majority of people who might get googled from time to time don't. A porn site could register hundreds of mid-grade names and point them to the same salacious location.
So I'm stuck. And so are you, if you want to block your name.
17 comments:
Yikes. I can only imagine what they could do with my blog name.
Hi Gary,
There is a work around - you have to buy your own name.xxx.
That might lead to disapointment for the xxx surfers though
Seth
Hi Creepy, (may I call you that?). Welcome to the blog. I think this is the first time you've commented.
Er...yeah...except then all the visitors would ask what's a query? Creepy they'd understand though!
A brilliant idea, Seth. Did I mention they're charging about $200 per domain per year? That's only about 20 times what any other domain would cost. Not that I'd ever accuse internet name registrars of being rapacious bloodsucking leeches or anything.
I can't see this being that big of a problem. There are already plenty of sites that phish my blog, and it's not even very popular.
Yikes. This does not bode well. The potential for targeting individuals as a form of harassment is also a concern!
This line alone ...
Although that would be ironic since micro and soft probably aren't at the forefront of desirable concepts when you're looking for porn
was worth the price of admission.
Thanks for the laugh.
That's a good point, Vicky. I didn't think of that. I guess every time someone becomes temporarily famous their name is going to get turned into a .xxx domain.
Terrific.
I suspect it might be a nine days wonder for most of us, though yet another reason to never go into politics (it will tempt someone to have juliagillard.xxx surely). Generally speaking though the porn internet and the normal internet don't meet up that often (your example being an exception rather than the rule I think). Even in my day job in the health sector where I routinely google all sorts of potentially porn-inducing terms (e.g. breast) because I want medical sites I don't run across porn all that often
Hey Travis, how's things? Glad you liked it.
JuliaGillard.xxx doesn't bear thinking about. TonyAbbott.xxx, perhaps even worse, though I guess he can carry off wearing budgie smugglers. (This is an in-joke for the Oz readers...)
You may be right, Bernadette. I usually make sure I'm in the room when our girls are googling stuff, and I've yet to see them hit that sort of problem. Plenty of booby-trapped, virus-laden web sites though.
Well darn, I thought maybe they'd created the extension FOR the porn sites, so we can recognize them at a glance and not accidentally click on/type the wrong address. No such luck apparently.
As for NancyKelley.xxx... I pity the Jane Austen fans who click on that!
You're quite the Renaissance man, Gary--I never know quite what I'm going to get when I stop by your blog. New book covers, Ancient Greek history, or... porn jokes.
And on the bright side, perhaps some of us might gain more blog traffic from this? If my name gets picked up as a cool .xxx site, maybe some people will accidentally click on the .com version and realize that reading about Ancient Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, and writing is really more interesting than what they were looking for.
Or maybe not.
Nancy, I'd almost be willing to lay a small wager that within a year there'll be a JaneAusten.xxx. Yeah, that's sad, I know.
Hi Stephanie, this subject did come up, so to speak, because of my writing, so I claim a small degree of consistency. If you'd really like me to veer off-topic I could do mathematics, Formula 1 racing, guitars or particle physics. Actually, come to that, particle physics is getting interesting just at the moment. Maybe I should do a blog post...
Interesting post and I enjoyed reading all the comments, too. I laughed out loud at the micro and soft comment. Does this mean I have a similar sense of humor or Travis???!!!! ;)
Ew. I feel icky now. Especially uncomfortable for those of us who write for children and teens. Lovely. Hopefully parental blockers will be updated to weed out those search results.
I wonder if George will use some of the vast sums headed his way with the release of Star Wars on Blu-ray to "purchase-protect" his characters and their names.
Hard to imagine that anyone would go to a site jarjar.xxx then again, leia.xxx has several possibilities, all of them interesting. (Remember the SNL skit with Senator Al Frankin and Carrie Fisher?)
As many of you may remember (if you're old enough) the Space Based Missile Defense System proposed by President Raygun was quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by media and policy wonks alike. Lucas went to court to have this stopped as an infringement of his copyright. The judge essentially told him to get out and stop wasting the court's time.
We are now on a new frontier -- the gods alone know how this will play out. I wonder if Al Gore envisioned this when he invented the internet in the first place ...
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