Adult site’s legal battle could aid Web hosting services
March 31, 2007
Web hosting companies could be a beneficiary of good will indirectly from unlikely sources; adult contents publishers. Excerpts from the blog below explains how this could happen:
A federal appeals court ruling in a case involving an adult publisher appears to have delivered broader legal protections for online service providers against lawsuits claiming privacy violations and other illicit behavior by their users.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Thursday released a 26-page opinion (PDF) that upholds a number of lower court findings against the adult-oriented Web site Perfect 10 in a lawsuit against a family of companies including Web hosting service CWIE and credit-card processing firm CCBill.
The same appeals court is also preparing to release rulings in two other cases involving Perfect 10, whose online presence boasts “thousands of images of the most beautiful natural women in the world”–one against Google and Amazon.com and the other against MasterCard and Visa.
Perfect 10’s suit against Arizona-based CWIE and CCBill dates back to 2002 and includes a wide array of allegations, including copyright and trademark infringement, unfair competition, false advertising, and violation of right of publicity–that is, protection against unauthorized commercial use of a person’s image or name.
Source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6172184.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn
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Windows Live Blocking Back links checking
March 31, 2007
MSN, the third largest search engine on the internet seem destined to remain number three with most of the strategies it seem to be pursuing. Not only does it seem to have an identity crisis, does not know whether to call itself MSN the name which it has become well known by over the years or rebrand to Windows Live the name it prefers to call itself recently.
Recently, while the two leading search engines, Google and Yahoo are working closely with developers and rightful thwarting unreasonable automated queries, MSN has taken the decision to black every one out of being able to make queries such as backlinks checking and other queries SEOs and web developers tends to make.
Blog post below from Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager goes as follows:
For those of you who use some of the advanced query syntax in our search engine such as link:, linkdomain: and inurl:, you may have noticed that this functionality has been recently turned off. We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators.
We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries. We have a few good ideas up our sleeve on how to enable this, but want to make sure we are making the right changes that will give you the functionality you want and all of our customers the experience they deserve. Our apologies and thank you for being patient. Keep an eye on our blog for updates.
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Proposal for porn domain rejected
March 30, 2007
Plans to create an internet domain specifically for pornographic websites have been rejected. The proposal for the .xxx domain was voted out by the overseer of the net’s addressing system, seven years after the ideas was first put forward.
Board members said they were concerned that approval would put the agency into the position of a content regulator.
Backers of the .xxx domain said they were disappointed by the decision and would pursue the matter further.
It is the third time that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has rejected the bid.
The idea of creating a net domain for pornography was first floated in 2001 and was given approval in June 2005 by Icann which oversees the net’s addressing system.inal approval was scheduled to take place in December 2005 but this was delayed until May 2006 when the proposal was abruptly dropped over worries about how sites signing up to use .xxx would be policed.
At the time, ICM Registry – the backer of the .xxx scheme – gave pledges that it would ensure sites signing up did not hit users with spam or spyware.
ICM also had to give assurances that it would put in place systems to prevent children seeing the sites and that no .xxx sites would contain images of child abuse.
final decision on the domain name was taken at a meeting of board members in Lisbon, Portugal.
It was rejected by nine votes to five, with one board member abstaining.
Many on the board voted against the proposals because they felt that accepting the domain would mean Icann would be seen as a regulator of content, deciding what is pornographic and what is not. This was not the role of the agency, they argued.
Others, who backed the schemes, said that could be decided by local and national laws.
“We are extremely disappointed by the board’s action today,” Stuart Lawley, ICM’s president and chief executive told Associated Press. “It is not supportable for any of the reasons articulated by the board.”
ICM Registry argue that a .xxx domain would act as a quality control for the industry and would allow individuals and families wishing to avoid adult content to easily filter it.
Critics have pointed out that use of the .xxx domain is entirely voluntary and some suspect that few sites would sign up to use the suffix.
Source: bbc.co.uk
March 30, 2007
At UK webmaster forums, one of the most interesting introduction post are usually from UK webmasters, you will think that UK webmaster forums are the natural hangout of UK webmasters but for some reasons they mostly use US based forums. Nothing wrong with that, its just that with many UK focused and UK based webmaster forums that would be the natural home patch of UK webmasters. For this reason I have decided to compile a list of leading UK forums, not limited to webmasters only.
Webmaster Related Froums
I will not say anything about this forum because its my forum, the temptation to say its the best and so forth but I will leave the judgment to others.
If you run a UK forum please get in touch so that I can list your forum here.
O’Reilly calls for bloggers’ code of conduct
March 28, 2007
BBC new has just reported that Tim O’Reilly amonts others are calling for bloggers’ code of conducts, except from the full story follows;
Kathy Sierra went public on her fears in her blog . The support for a blogger hounded by death threats has intensified with some high profile web experts calling for a code of conduct in the blogosphere.
The female blogger at the centre of the row has been shocked to discover that hers is not an isolated incident. It has led her and others to question some of the unwritten rules of blogging. It could force a re-examination of the way the tight-knit blogging community behaves. Among those calling for a bloggers’ code of conduct is Tim O’Reilly – one of the web’s most influential thinkers. The fact that there’s all these really messed-up people on the internet is not a statement about the internet He told BBC Radio Five Live that it could be time to formalise blogging behaviour.
“I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn’t come through any kind of [legal/government] regulation it would come through self-regulation.” fill story can be found here.
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