Cypherpunk Rating System The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) is a W3C initiative to provide for labeling content on the internet. Initially designed as an alternative to the Communications Decency Act and similar legislation intended to protect children from objectionable content, PICS allows both self-labeling and third-party labeling of web pages. The most widely used rating system is that provided by the Internet Content Rating Association, www.icra.org, which replaces the older RSACi system (not the crypto RSA, it stood for Recreational Software Association). There is also the hilarious Vancouver rating system at http://vancouver-webpages.com/VWP1.0/VWP1.0.gen.html, which gives points for Multiculturalism ("Active involvement of user in multicultural activity using interactive techniques"), Environmental Awareness, Tolerance, Safety ("Active promotion of safe work and personal behaviour"), and of course, the highly important Canadian Content rating. Clearly these rating systems are either Puritanical or politically correct to an obnoxious degree. Nevertheless the notion of providing additional information about the content of an article is valid within the cypherpunk worldview. Content labels can usefully add to the information present in the Subject and From fields. This information can then be used on an individual basis to filter content. Killfiles are an obvious application of this approach, and in fact certain writers have effectively disappeared from the lists for an ever-increasing number of subscribers. Filtering based on content labels is no more in conflict with cypherpunk goals and ideals than killfiling the likes of Choate. Although PICS was designed for web pages, it can be used for mailing list postings as well. The W3C pages at http://www.w3c.org/PICS provide a simple mechanism for passing PICS ratings in any RFC822 (now RFC2822) environment (that is, email). A new header is defined, PICS-Label, which is followed by the relevant information. The PICS syntax is reasonably compact, however it includes a URL which provides a human readable description of the meaning of the labels. A sample label might be: PICS-Label: (PICS-1.1 "http://www.cypherpunks.to/" l r (topics tpg ap pp)) The header is followed by the URL which defines the rating system. l means labels and r means ratings, and then the ratings themselves are in parentheses, using the rules defined at the URL. This example uses an unordered list of topic keywords which follow the word "topics", which are defined below. More complex ratings systems can be defined allowing numerical evaluation on a variety of scales. Those ideas may be worth pursuing. But to start with, here are some possible topic categories with their associated keywords for the ratings tuple: Topic categories, which follow the word "topics": e Encryption ap Anonymity/pseudonymity tc Technical crypto cob Cypherpunk oriented businesses tpg Threats to privacy by government tpng Threats to privacy by business and NGOs gb guns/bombs bt booby traps pp Political parties pe Political elections Clearly it would be highly ironic for a pro-privacy group like the cypherpunks to adopt PICS technology, which has been widely criticized by free speech groups. Nevertheless it would be instructive to have an example where ratings are used for the opposite of the politically correct purposes for which they were originally intended. Cypherpunks could use PICS to help find information on defeating government surveillance and interfering with the increasing crackdowns on civil liberties. Even if the system is not used much, the act of defining the vocabulary could set a useful precedent. It might even be possible to convince the W3C to link to the cypherpunks rating system, since they were willing to link to Vancouver. Then anyone who researches this topic will be exposed to the cypherpunk view of the world. Suggestions for expanding the rating system are welcome. "I write about what I desire to write about." - Tim May