What is considered “unsafe for children” is an extremely broad brush. It would include the entire Straight Dope site. You can’t have kids reading about whale penises and such, can you? Think about it. Schools, businesses, etc. would ban access to the SD. You access from home, the SO checks the browser log and finds you have been spending hours at a “porn” site, nevermind the details, etc. You get in a little trouble with the law, the police get a list of subscribed sites from your ISP, the jury is told you frequent porn sites, your lawyer tries to protest, but there’s that “.prn” hanging there.
It’s ghetto-ization. Never good. Let’s put these people over here in there own special domain, school, neighborhood. Once in the ghetto, it makes it a lot easier for bad stuff to happen. Keep in mind that the people who propose such things never have 1 step in mind. They have a long term plan, many steps. Feed it to the masses one at a time.
I consider “.com”, “.net”, etc. to all be adult domains. Adding “.prn” is redundant.
The arguments I have read that are for this strike me as naive and then some.
That’s a good point, ftg and even sven. I object to the idea that the entire world should be sanitized for children rather than children’s parents making decisions (and enforcing them) about what children should see and what they should not.
If you don’t want your kids to see porn, monitor their Internet usage. It’s not like it’s difficult to do this! Check the browser logs (and make a rule that kids are not allowed to clear the browser logs).
The one thing that I would like is to see more high-quality search engines that allow you to filter searches. It’s damn hard to search for some things without getting porn.
A hostname-based filter could easily be bypassed by just typing in the site’s IP address.
You could set up a filter to use reverse DNS–i.e., block IP addresses that resolve back to .prn hostnames–but then how are you going to make sure all “adult” sites have working reverse DNS at all times? What happens when reverse DNS goes down due to maintenance or network outages (either at the porn site’s ISP or your local ISP), and all the filters stop working?
Spam is an entirely separate issue. No one wants to receive spam, period. Just ban it completely.