Nude & Natural Magazine Naturism is the Way. |
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Nude & Natural Magazine Naturism is the Way. |
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The AFA, Yahoo, and You
IF YOU ARE at all familiar with the online medium, there's little doubt that you have run into Yahoo, one of the more popular purveyors of content on the Web.
Yahoo started out as an online search service and a sort of Yellow Pages of online content. In time, it expanded to be one of the largest interactive sites on the Internet, and now includes e-mail service, user-defined list servers, and user-defined message boards among its many offerings. Almost anyone can sign up to be a Yahoo user and start a message board or mailing list devoted to any topic imaginable. And all at a great price - free. However, expansion has brought problems to Yahoo's doorstep.
Last spring Yahoo was blind-sided from the right wing, when the radical religious group American Family Association (AFA) issued a barrage of press releases blaming Yahoo for hosting pornographers, child molesters, pedophiles, and worse.
The weird thing is, for once the AFA was not entirely wrong.
Unlike America Online (AOL)™ and similar services, Yahoo does not maintain a staff to oversee content. Certainly blatant misuse is addressed when complaints get to the right people, but for the most part Yahoo allows its users to do pretty much whatever they want, relying on users to police themselves into following Yahoo's terms of service agreement.
Yahoo doesn't require a great deal of personal information from a user in order to grant an e-mail account, list server or message board. It's not at all difficult to sign up under a false name or address. This sense of anonymity is attractive to people who, well, have something to hide.
It seems that in its zeal to allow its members to use the service freely and somewhat anonymously in the spirit of an open Internet, Yahoo has managed to attract certain users with less-than-savory agendas. So when AFA and its friends started squawking, Yahoo was faced with the challenge of trying to address the illegal activities that its users sometimes engage in while still allowing for adults to share adult-oriented content.
In a knee-jerk reaction, Yahoo has added a warning screen that pops up whenever one attempts to access a message board or list server that Yahoo has deemed "adult oriented."
And here is where naturism has become snared in the same net as pornography and other adult content. Many naturists used Yahoo's groups service to distribute their events calendars, or to host a localized message board on naturism. These folks woke up one day to find that their material was considered "adult content" in the eyes of Yahoo.
These days when you try to access a naturist list on Yahoo, you are presented with a warning screen. You are granted access only after you declare your age to be 18 or over and affirm that you take responsibility for anything that you might read or view from that point forward. No one is refused access to any materials as long as you pass through this gateway, and you only have to pass through it once for each new area that you access.
One may ask why the topic of naturism is considered adult by Yahoo. The problem is that user-defined areas can contain imagery of any ilk, links to anything, and the potential for explicit dialogue. Since there is no telling what any given user may offer, everyone who is dealing with the topic of nudity of any kind is painted with the same broad brush. Yahoo says it cannot make a determination regarding potential content based solely on current content or a list of certain "legitimate" naturist areas. Expect the dialog between Yahoo and naturist organizations to be ongoing on this matter.
Some naturist users of Yahoo report that visits from the occasional disruptive user have been drastically reduced since the implementation of the adult content warning. But in the same light, the warning screens are no doubt scaring away some interested people who try to make a genuine inquiry into naturism.
Naturist users have taken counter-measures where possible. For example, the TNS Singles SIG, which maintains a message board and a list server at Yahoo, has adjusted its Yahoo intro page to assure that nothing has changed and that only naturism is discussed there, not explicit material. Their Web site at www.sunclad.com /singles has also been adjusted. Another group, the Outdoor Recreation SIG, is classified under Outdoors rather than Naturism and is therefore warning-free.
The AFA, incidentally, is not satisfied with Yahoo's efforts and is still at it with a regular flurry of press releases against the online service. As it tries to do with movies, television and other communications media, the AFA appears to be trying to sanitize Yahoo until it meets AFA's own impossible standards of "acceptable" material.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is maintaining its position is that it is the user's responsibility to avoid what he or she doesn't want to see on the Web, and parents' responsibility to monitor what and how much their children have access to online. And for the time being, it looks like naturists are stuck with an adult warning label on Yahoo.
Noted for its attention to naturism and naturist events in the Mid-Atlantic region as well as to Christian naturist issues, Cheef's Nudist Naturist Place, or Cheef.com, (www.cheef.com) has a large following.
Recently, Cheef.com was "hacked," a term used to describe when unauthorized users gain access to computer systems.
Apparently, one day the domain simply went dark. "Cheef Dan", owner and developer of Cheef.com, worked with his Internet service provider over several days to determine the problem. Finally the ISP told Cheef that his account would be suspended and terminated because users connecting to the ISP's network from France and Sweden were gaining access to the ISP's server to run remote exploits against other hosts.
Now, to me this sounds a bit odd. It's like holding passengers responsible for a city bus breaking down, and not letting them back on the next bus. It's not their fault the darn thing broke down, right? Despite the fact that Cheef.com was running on a specific host service, should its owner be held responsible for outside attacks such as this? Even more odd is that when Cheef asked for copies of the Web site materials so he could make repairs and/or move elsewhere, he was told that everything had been erased. I am unaware of any ISP that erases everything in that manner. Often they will hold such materials for a former customer and make them available, sometimes free and sometimes for a transfer fee.
Could it be that the true "hack" of Cheef.com was anti-naturist sentiment? Only the owners of the ISP where Cheef.com once resided can say for sure.
The loss of Cheef.com also meant a disruption of the Usenet newsgroup alt.nudism.moderated, moderated by Cheef and a small staff of volunteer helpers.
The good news is that Cheef.com will rise again. The setback allowed Cheef to take stock of its holdings and he is rewriting the whole site to make it even better. At press time the site already was partially restored. So don't delete that bookmark to Cheef.com just yet; it will be returning soon.
(Post Script - Just after we published this article in N&N, Cheef.Com was back on-line and running quite fine at a new hosting site - DMK Ed.)
Charles Daney's Pages
www.best.com/~cgd/home/naturism
One of the more developed naturist Web sites is one authored and hosted by California's Charles Daney. In fact, it's so popular that he actually has two mirror sites (Web sites that contain the same info) running to handle the traffic.
Whether you're looking for commentary on naturism and its effect on people, free speech and its association to naturism on the Ânet, or just some real darn good links to other places, Charles' site is worth examining.
Included within the site are essays on women's issues, the young naturist, people's first experiences, and more.
For those who visit Charles' main page, you will also find links to some of his extraordinary photographs of California's scenic wonders.
And for the amateur or professional mathematician, you can even e-mail Charles to consider Fermat's Last Theorem, even though Professor Andrew Wile solved that after a few hundred years of it lying around.
I often receive e-mails asking what the nudity laws are in a given state. I always refer them to the NAC Web site. NAC maintains a listing of nudity abstracts for all 50 states within its pages. The revised NAC Web site carries far more information than it did when it was in its infancy. If you have not stopped by lately, it's worth checking out.
The last installment of this column listed the owners of NIFOC.net as being the "International Leisure Group." This was due to confusing displays in the Internic database of domain registrants. We have since learned that www.nifoc.net is not associated with www.nifoc.com or its ownership. NIFOC.net is owned by the NIFOC Group of Florida. We apologize for any inconvenience the error may have caused.
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