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My Response to Dr. Dobson's Reply |
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Written by Walt Robertson
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Friday, 19 August 2005 14:10 |
 Thank you so much for your reply. I have read your citizen link article. It seems to me that Focus is basing its opinion primarily on what one person is telling you and I'm here to tell you - you have been deceived.
I'm a born again, Bible believing, repentant, faith in Jesus for salvation, putting to death the deeds of the flesh, child of God - Christian. I have also been in the information technology industry for 16 years. I am even a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer - if that impresses you. With those as my credentials, I boldly tell you that David Burt doesn't know what he is talking about. He's a PR guy - not a technical person. Ask to talk to his geeks directly and see what they say!
His company does not have to block IP addresses one by one. If they did that, they would be blocking untold numbers of legitimate web sites because multiple web site names can exist on a server at the same IP address. Many web hosting companies provide the same IP address to multiple companies. Besides, if his company were blocking sites by their IP address one at a time, the pornographers just have to change the IP address of the server and they have bypassed him. One web site can have multiple IP addresses. With tools available from places like dyndns.org, a web site can change it's IP address every day or even every hour.
His company does not block multiple pages on the site one by one as he implies, either. The domain name is sufficient to block every page there at one shot. If the browser cannot get to the server, it cannot read any pages on it. That is a simple, commonly known fact.
There is this technology call DNS that translates IP address to domain names and domain names to IP addresses (check out some utilities if you wish to see how this works at http://dnsstuff.com). The "family.org" website is on a server that has an IP address of 12.109.227.30. It took less than a second to find that out. DNS is the foundation of how the Internet finds web sites. A simple, automatic DNS lookup returns the IP address of any domain name on the Internet in nanoseconds. A reverse IP lookup reveals every domain name on a server at a given IP address in seconds. Filtering software does these look ups automatically based on the domain name - not one at a time by human effort. He is not telling you about this - why not?
A new top level domain name will not increase the number of possible IPv4 numbers. There is a finite number of available numbers and more domains will not increase it. How this can possibly make his job any harder is beyond any technical person I've talked with to explain. He's just not telling you the truth about it for some reason. Further, does he really think that my 13 year old is going to be able to figure out how to get around a content filter by calling the url by the IP address? Come on! He's just not credible.
One entry in each of my DNS servers would tell all 1150 of my desktop computers simultaneously to disallow access to any .xxx websites. One entry.
True - there is no mandate at this point to force pornographers working legally in the USA and other countries to use .xxx - yet. Obscenity laws are hard to enforce and can be subject to legal interpretation. True, there will be those that flout the law and more web site names will be registered as .xxx because of this - but it will - I promise you be very easy to filter for businesses - where most of the porn ends up, for ISPs such as AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, and for home filtering programs. A lack of .xxx is not stopping those that will flout the law now. There remain millions of unregistered domain names in the .com, .net., .info, .biz., .name., .us., and on and on that can be made porno sites. The lack of a .xxx does not stop the proliferation of legal and illegal sites that we find objectionable.
This is one that goes in our direction and you don't want to support it simply because it doesn't go far enough? It is not all we want, but it's a step in the right direction.
Please - I'm begging you - make my job easier. Get on the smart side of this issue and stop listening to people who only claim to know what they are talking about. Please stop until you have more than one "expert" source of information on how the technology works, and please try to find someone who actually knows what they are talking about this time.
Thanks,
Walt Robertson, MCSE |
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Last Updated on Thursday, 25 September 2008 18:02 |
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