I actually agree that the industry needs to do more, and Prostasia aims to work with platforms on developing well-informed self-regulatory child protection policies. (Backpage is nobody's idea of a stellar corporate citizen.)

The point is not that they don't care at all about sexual abuse of minors, because of course they do, but they also have a (not so) hidden agenda against consensual adult sex work, which is why they made the law so much broader than it needed to be. Here is some reading on this from sex blogger Violet Blue. As others have also noted, this is just part of a bigger bipartisan war on sex that also places porn in the firing line.

Well in fact we are charging minors with sex offences, and that's something that Prostasia will be addressing. In many states, you can be charged as a minor for producing child pornography, by taking selfies for your boyfriend or girlfriend. As a result, you can end up on the sex offender registry, which can be for life (again, depending on the state). While the distribution of such selfies is a real problem, it's pure insanity for the young teens involved to be charged criminally.

It means "protection" in Greek, as in, child protection. But yes, we've heard all the jokes already! The biggest factor with choosing a name for a new organization is often whether the associated domain names available. The fact that we could score both prostasia.org, prostasia.foundation, and prost.asia was what sold us on the name... despite the fact that people will make jokes.

Is there anyone here (an anon please!) who received this supposed welcome email and can post the headers for us to see? Or are we supposed to take LEA's word for it? How would none of the thousands of Alphabay members not have noticed this email address and doxxed him earlier? Color me skeptical.

s/regulation/the basic human right to a decent living wage/

You really think Greenwald is saying "that society can rely on corporate interests for protection"? You need to read more Greenwald.

The world has lots of governments. Don't assume all Slashdot readers are American.

You just take a day-trip down to Singapore, then re-enter Malaysia with a new stamp.

I live in Malaysia and I can't agree with the "don't like Chinese people" part. You probably mean that "Malays" don't particularly like Chinese people (which may or may not be true; I'm not touching it). But as you've suggested, Malays are only one of the three ethnic groups that make up Malaysia; Chinese and Indians are the others. And in some parts of Malaysia, like Penang (beautiful place for a programmer to live!) Chinese are in the majority. There are also Chinese political parties who are strong in both the government and the opposition coalitions. Mostly the Malays and the Chinese get along fine, though they do have distinct cultural identities and people are relatively open with their gripes about the other cultures.

Sorry, I meant the US did not.

The UN did not invent the Internet. Do your research, beginning here: http://www.circleid.com/posts/so_who_really_did_invent_the_internet/.

As any expert will tell you, none of these pie-in-the-sky proposals about the ITU taxing the Internet or the like have any chance of being pushed through. Even the US government itself doesn't take the risk seriously, except for political purposes like this. This is all just the latest step in a huge beat-up about something that could never happen. The motivation is just to distract from the real Internet governance changes that do need to happen, and that are being discussed much more sensibly in other fora (such as at the WSIS Forum last month in Geneva). That doesn't mean that we need to keep an eye the ITU, because it is true that it's a very secretive and closed organisation, but at least let's be honest about the risks.

The US did not make the Internet. Quoting from this history, "The earliest pioneers included a Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, who introduced the idea of data grams and an Englishman, Donald W. Davies, who was one of the inventors of packet-switching. Another of the great pioneers in Britain was Peter T. Kirstein, who went to America at the beginning of the Arpanet in 1969 when it was decided that Davies could not go for reasons of national security." And of course as we all know Tim Berners-Lee, another Englishman, invented the web.