The University of Kansas is buying up Web site names such as www.KUgirls.xxx and www.KUnurses.xxx, but not because it is planning a Hot Babes of Kansas site.
Instead, the university and countless other schools and businesses are rushing to prevent their good names from falling into the hands of the pornography industry. Over the past two months, they have snapped up tens of thousands of “.xxx” Web site names that could be exploited by the adult entertainment business.
“Down the road there’s no way we can predict what some unscrupulous entrepreneur might come up with,” University of Kansas trademark licensing director Paul Vander Tuig said.
The university spent nearly US$3,000 in all. It plans to sit on the .xxx names and do nothing with them.
The brand-new .xxx suffix is an adults-only variation on .com. The .xxx name went on sale to the public for the first time this week, promoted as a way to enable porn sites to distinguish themselves and a means of making it easier for Internet filters to screen out things parents do not want their children to see.
ICM Registry of Palm Beach, Florida, is the exclusive manager of the .xxx names and sells them through a dozen middleman companies, such as GoDaddy.com, for an average of US$100 a year.
Indiana University spokesman Mark Land said the school spent US$2,200 to buy www.hoosiers.xxx and 10 other such names. Other Indiana schools took the same step, including Purdue University and Ball State University.
“This is just a modest cost of doing business in the world we live in,” Land said.
ICM sold .xxx names for the past two months exclusively to companies and others that wanted to protect their brands from the porn industry. During the so-called sunrise sale, ICM registered nearly 80,000 names, chairman and chief executive Stuart Lawley said.
A search of ICM’s database finds prominent brand names — including Nike.xxx, Pepsi.xxx and Target.xxx — among those purchased.
“Target has applied to block a number of the .xxx domains that correspond with our registered trademarks,” said Lee Henderson, a spokesman for the -Minneapolis-based store chain.
“We do not plan to use the domains,” he added, dryly.
The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, which the US government established in 1998 to run the Internet’s address system, authorized creation of .xxx earlier this year.
The strongest opposition to the suffix has come from the adult entertainment industry.
The Free Speech Coalition, the industry’s trade group, lobbied against its creation, complaining among other things about the registration fees.
VENEZUELAN ACTION: Marco Rubio said that previous US interdiction efforts have not stemmed the flow of illicit drugs into the US and that ‘blowing them up’ would US President Donald Trump on Wednesday justified a lethal military strike that his administration said was carried out a day earlier against a Venezuelan gang as a necessary effort by the US to send a message to Latin American cartels. Asked why the military did not instead interdict the vessel and capture those on board, Trump said that the operation would cause drug smugglers to think twice about trying to move drugs into the US. “There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people and everybody fully understands that,” Trump said while hosting Polish President
A French couple kept Louise, a playful black panther, in an apartment in northern France, triggering panic when she was spotted roaming nearby rooftops. The pair were were handed suspended jail sentences on Thursday for illegally keeping a wild animal, despite protesting that they saw Louise as their baby. The ruling follows a September 2019 incident when the months-old feline was seen roaming a rooftop in Armentieres after slipping out of the couple’s window. Authorities captured the panther by sedating her with anesthetic darts after she entered a home. No injuries were reported during the animal’s time on the loose. The court in the
Japan yesterday heralded the coming-of-age of Japanese Prince Hisahito with an elaborate ceremony at the Imperial Palace, where a succession crisis is brewing. The nephew of Japanese Emperor Naruhito, Hisahito received a black silk-and-lacquer crown at the ceremony, which marks the beginning of his royal adult life. “Thank you very much for bestowing the crown today at the coming-of-age ceremony,” Hisahito said. “I will fulfill my duties, being aware of my responsibilities as an adult member of the imperial family.” Although the emperor has a daughter — Princess Aiko — the 23-year-old has been sidelined by the royal family’s male-only
For more than a century, the fate of the dazzling Darya-e-Noor diamond has been sealed inside a bank vault — a mystery that haunts Khawaja Naim Murad, great-grandson of the last prince, or nawab, of Dhaka. Locked away in 1908, were the family’s heirlooms lost during the violence at the end of British rule in 1947? Did they survive Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971 and the string of coups that followed, or are they still safe, dusty, but untouched? Many suspect that the jewels are long gone and officials at the state-run bank hesitate to simply open the vault, fearing that they
RSS