Remember when summertime used to be slow and there wasn’t much news and the politicians walked arm-in-arm singing kumbaya while they enacted policies that benefitted the nation?
Nah, we don’t either.
Here are some of the latest items that caught our eye in this busy summer.
.Edu goes .XXX?
Really, it was only a matter of time until we had an item about porn on our site. This is the Internet, after all. A memo from the Licensing Resource Group has been making the rounds, noting that the .xxx top level domain is becoming available and strongly suggesting that colleges and universities pay the necessary fees to lock up .xxx TLDs that could impact their school’s name. Which raises a good question: is this a PR nightmare waiting to happen, or is anyone searching for your school really going to think a .xxx domain is actually hosted by said school? Or as Link Publisher Laura Kenyon so succintcly puts it: “Is #girlsunderstrees suddenly going to become #girlsundergoldenshowers?”
And really, the girls of the Ivy League are in Playboy a lot. Or so I’ve heard. .XXX may not be such a big leap for those wild children at Harvard and Princeton.
How are your schools handling it? Is purchasing a .xxx domain good policy or a waste of money? Somewhere in between? We’d like to hear your thoughts.
The reason you have a job turns 20
Yes, the Web has left its teen years. Twenty years ago on August 6, 1991, Tim Berners Lee created a placeholder page that is generally acknowledged as the first Web page. And over the wekeend, that anniversary gave rise to who knows how many retrospective posts on the internet remembering the way we were. But leave it to Tech Crunch to make a Sargent Pepper’s reference that talks about porn (hey! two items in a row!) and then manages a nice summation in one paragraph:
“In the past two decades we’ve been given e-commerce and spam, we’ve torn down the music, news, and publishing industries, and we’ve LOLed at more CATS than we can count. We’ve seen empires rise and fall, the dissolution of the line between public and private, and the end of enforceable copyright. We’ve seen new modes of communication drive out unwanted regimes at home and abroad and we’ve heard the endless howl of a million voices calling out at once, most of them in comments on this site.
We’ve also seen lots of the aforementioned porn.”
ISPs Get Clocked on Speed by FCC
How well is your ISP performing when it comes to speed? The FCC recently released a study of actual download speeds from different service providers and as Ars Technica notes, the answer to the question largely depends on your perspective. The study looked at advertised download speeds and calculated how often a service hit those download speeds over time, and calculated the results as a percentage. Verizon FiOS, Cox and Charter Communications were the top performers, all hitting 100 perecent or more of their advertised speed. Cablevision, well, they’ve got some serious catching up to do.
Consumers can use the report to get a decent picture of how ISP actually perform. While one advocacy group blasted the results, Ars Technica argued that the report creates a standard basis for comapring ISPs, and proves that speeds no longer “go into the toilet” when people come home from work.
One reply on “Link Boxers: There’s Pr0n on the Internet?!?! Edition”
As far as .xxx domains go, I think the only schools that would even consider this are those whose names are unique and not tied to their city. Harvard might want to block harvard.xxx, but The University of Phoenix probably needn’t worry about phoenix.xxx.