This would ONLY impact packets that carry pornographic material, and all other packets would remain unchanged. Naturally, you would not be able to have Classified Pornographic material under this scheme, but I think that's probably an acceptable tradeoff.
Oh, I don't know. The remote satalite imaging lab in reston has been known for sometime now to have enough resolution to look down a good clean cleavege, and certainly their perspective is vertical enough.
Furthermore, any parent that wanted to allow a child to attach to the Internet and wanted pornographic protection would be responsible for setting their own filter up to limit these packets. Thus the provider of pornographic material and the parent of the child using the net are the only two groups affected by this change. The rest of the net can continue unhindered. ISPs don't have to identify users. After all, it is the parent and the bookstore owner who are responsible for keeping children out of the dirty book section, not the bus driver who brings the child to the neighborhood or the company that paves the street.
I've thought about this as well. You could also use the IP TOS minimise-cost bit, which is defunct, doesn't require IP options, is included in every packet and in most modern unix's and rfc1122 complient TCP/IP protocol interface stacks can be set at user level with a simple setsockopt() call. That said, it has a granularity of one. To my mind, it is value judgement, and a difficult one at that to decide when information is appropriate or otherwise for a given age group. A given community may feel the age of maturity is something other than 18, and physiologically the age of maturity is different for differing racial groups. It is a strange world where it is permissible to get married at 16 -- and all that implies, but not permissible to think freely until 18, or 21 in certain states. More appropriate would be content flags. Using the security option there is a resonable number that could be assigned. OPT_R_UPPER_NUDITY, OPT_R_LOWER_NUDITY, OPT_R_FULL_NUDITY, OPT_R_FEMALE, OPT_R_MALE, OPT_R_BIZARRE, OPT_R_HOMOSEXUAL, OPT_R_BESTIALITY, OPT_R_DISECTION, OPT_R_INTERCOURSE, OPT_R_VIOLENCE and OPT_R_ADVERTISING come to mind. Unlike TOS however, many IP stacks have no real support for the security option. The value of re-using it then for this purpose it dubious. There is no reason another IP option couldn't be added. Perhaps the spare TOS bit could be used as a catch-all until a content option is implimented. Most french wouldn't be concerned about OPT_R_FULL_NUDITY provided OPT_R_HOMOSEXUAL wasn't set. -- "I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" - Leo Bulero/PKD +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+ |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | |proff@suburbia.net | VIC 3122 AUSTRALIA | finger for PGP key hash ID = | |proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu | FAX +61-3-98199066 | 0619737CCC143F6DEA73E27378933690 | +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+