As for Lucky's point #2 -- Yes, I've read drafts of bills that would make it a Federal crime to misrate. --Declan On Wed, 16 Jul 1997, Lucky Green wrote:
At 07:44 AM 7/16/97 -0700, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Stephen Balkam, the head of RSACi, now says he has a solution. He calls it RSACnews and says that legitimate news sites can use it to rate just their home pages without having to review each article. Now, what's a legitimate news site? The Netly News might qualify, but what about the NAMBLA News Journal? "People who generate firsthand reports that have been in some ways verified or structured in a way that gives clear and objective information as possible about events," Balkam says. "We will be working with the news industry to help us develop a criteria." (This, presumably, means groups that have signed on as supporters, including MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Well, CNET and Ziff-Davis. I'm told that the White House wants to qualify as a "news site" -- even though the information there is rarely clear and certainly not objective.)
I can't remember how RSACi authenticates the tags. I assume they are either signed by a CA or not authenticated.
1) If the tags are signed by a CA. Who operates the root CA? Who will operate the CA that issues RSACnews tags, also knows as Online Publishing Licenses.?
2) If the tags are not signed by a CA. What is someone to prevent from labeling the NAMBLA monthly site, "government authorized news site, suitable for all ages"? Just as the various GAK proposals do not make sense unless GAK is mandatory, online rating systems do not make sense unless "misslabeling" sites will become a felony.
--Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. DES is dead! Please join in breaking RC5-56. http://rc5.distributed.net/