On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 01:45:15AM +0100, Adam Back wrote: [...]
Even if government were to insist that everyone self rated, it would be damn near meaningless.
I think you are seriously underestimating the usefullness of self-rating. Yes, indeed, there are people who will spoof them, or who may have a completely weird view of the world that allows them an odd interpretation of what the ratings mean, so you won't get 100% coverage. But it is important to remember that less than perfect coverage is completely acceptable. What you have to evaluate is whether the percentage of coverage is worth the trouble. As has been pointed out, a large majority of sites that provide "adult" material (under a very broad definition of "adult") *already* self-rate -- their pages are usually (in my limited experience) plastered with warnings, in fact. And if there was a simple, consistent standard for those already existing self-ratings it would be easy to generate filters for them. Note that this is orthogonal to the issue of whether the self-ratings are government-mandated, and it works independently of government mandate. The reason is that the larger porn sites are in it for the money, and *any* social sanction -- government, mail bombs, bad publicity, mass protest, real bombs etc -- makes it cost effective to do self-rating, if the self-rating is cheap. More interesting than ratings, however, are techniques used to establish credentials for a large class of people. How does one identify oneself as an "adult" in cyberspace? If "adult" means "inhabits a physical human body at least 21 years old" then you have to tie a cyberspace identity to a human body. This is a tricky problem. OTOH, if "adult" means "knows a certain body of knowledge, that only a person who was alive and aware at date X would know", then you have a much different, and really, much easier, problem -- you can devise a test. Such a test should have just a few questions, drawn from a large pool, each of which has a fairly high probability of not being answerable by a child. "I am not a crook" was said by: a) Mickey Mouse, in the "Steamboat Willie" cartoon b) Richard Nixon c) d) Ben Cartrights 3 sons were: a) Jimmy, John, and Sam b) etc c) d) This approach was actually used by -- let's see -- the "Leisure Suit Larry" suite of games, and it was pretty effective at blocking children from playing. [...]
General rhetorical question: indeed why have governments at all?
General rhetorical answer: Because people are the way they are. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html