Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
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.
problem #1: I think the coverage rate will be abysmal. People are lazy. Are you really going to go modify all your html files? I've got 8 megs of material on my personal web site (http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/), and I can barely generate the energy to apply dead link mods which people email me. problem #2: If government "asks" you to self-rate your pages, that will in a lot of net people generate ire, they'll monkeywrench their rating in some creative way. problem #3: Kids can hack around the system anyway, so it doesn't matter whether it's rated or not. Especially where "hacking" around the system consists of just downloading a free browser from netscape.com, or installing one off a magazine cover CD. Are the government going to legally require netscape to release browsers which are content crippled and require an is-an-adult cert to disable it? So just use an older browser. I'm sure kids will be trading adult certs like football cards at school. Internet drivers license is another likely dumb move to try to enforce it. Given the likely dubious reliability of the ratings, and near semantic meaningless because of differening values, political and moral beliefs in various communities in different parts of the world it looks like a non-starter to me. Further presuming the government goes for it anyway, I can't see them managing to persuade many people to use it. As you note some porn sites will probably rate themselves, but they will only be doing it to generate more hits (search engines looking specifically for such pages). As Dimitri noted under 21s are probably generating most of the porn hits anyway. (It is 21 in parts of the US right? Surely they're not serious that you can have been legally married 5 years before you're allowed to view soft porn? It'll be 16 or 18 in UK)
General rhetorical question: indeed why have governments at all?
General rhetorical answer: Because people are the way they are.
I'll take this comment to a new message. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`