An Internet version of a red light district opened on Tuesday as Web addresses with “.xxx” endings became available for purchase by those interested in providing online adult content.
Florida-based ICM Registry is overseeing the top-level domain (TLD) geared for adult entertainment and reported that it is seeing nearly a million visits daily to its buy.xxx Web site showing where the addresses can be purchased.
“We’ve put a lot of money into this, and 10 years of blood, sweat and tears,” ICM chief executive Stuart Lawley said. “I feel validated. It has been a long struggle, but we stuck to our guns and took the high road.”
The non-profit Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board in March approved a petition to add .xxx to the list of “generic top level domains,” those endings that include .com and .org.
Lawley estimated that between US$10 million and US$20 million were spent on the campaign, which began in 2000.
“Everything up to today has been the warmup,” Lawley said. “The marathon is on.”
He depicted the .xxx domain as “win, win, win,” since it creates an online district clearly marked for those intent on finding or avoiding adult content, and which automatically scans Web sites for viruses or other malicious code.
“That is a first — scanning doesn’t happen at .com,” Lawley said. “Instead of adult sites being risky, they will be among the safest sites on the Internet.”
ICM enlisted anti-virus specialty firm McAfee to scan .xxx Web sites daily for nefarious software.
The sites are also designed with tags to be easily identified by parental filter features in commonly used Web browsers, Lawley said.
Public sales of .xxx addresses come after ICM gave recognized brands and established adult entertainment industry players opportunities to secure Web sites related to their names.
Some popular Web addresses, such as gay.xxx, were sold at auction. The gay.xxx address sold for several hundred thousand dollars, according to ICM.
The risque online neighborhood was opposed by some adult industry firms that feel they are compelled to buy new Web site addresses to avoid others capitalizing on their names and by conservative groups opposed to porn.
A lawsuit has been filed accusing ICM of taking advantage of its exclusive control of .xxx to jack up fees. Annual registry of a .xxx Web site is about US$70 compared with US$10 or so typical of other Web sites on the Internet.
“The lawsuit is clearly without merit and we will defend against it,” Lawley said. “You can choose not to buy a new TLD.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.