Censorware Summit Take II, from The Netly News
*********** http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1173,00.html The Netly News (http://netlynews.com) July 16, 1997 At The Censorware Summit by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) If you host a web page or publish online, be warned: soon your site might become invisible. Search engines won't index it and web browsers won't show it. Unless, that is, you agree to attach special labels to your web pages identifying how violent, sexually explicit, or inappropriate for kids your site is. This was the thrust of today's White House censorware summit, where President Clinton sat down with high tech firms and non-profit groups in a private meeting to talk about pressuring the Net community to make cyberspace childsafe through labels. "We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or not it has material harmful to minors, to rate its contents," Clinton said after the meeting. Vice President Gore was there, too, giving a quick demonstration of how labeling works. Spooked by the threat of a revised Communications Decency Act, high tech firms are seriously backing labels for the first time. Joining Clinton in coercing Internet users and businesses to label all their web pages were Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos. "I threw a gauntlet to other search engines in today's meeting saying that collectively we should require a rating before we index pages," Robert Davis, the president of Lycos, told me. Translation: if you don't play ball, and label your site, search engines will ignore you. As will future users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The next version of IE will default to displaying only properly labeled web pages, according to Ken Wasch, the president of the Software Publishers Association. Since many users won't turn off that feature to reach unrated sites, many large web sites now are facing hefty pressure to self-label. Other high tech firms rushed to join the presidential limelight. Netscape promised to join Microsoft and include label-reading software in the next version of its browser. America Online's Steve Case thanked Clinton for "backing industry's efforts to make cyberspace a safer place." IBM announced a $100,000 grant to RSACi, a PICS-based rating standard originally designed for video games but adapted for the Web. The industry giant also pledges to incorporate RSACi into future products. [...]
If you host a web page or publish online, be warned: soon your site might become invisible. Search engines won't index it and web browsers won't show it. Unless, that is, you agree to attach special labels to your web pages identifying how violent, sexually explicit, or inappropriate for kids your site is.
As I remember these systems such as PICS do not index back onto the PICS HQ server to find your rating, but just check HTML tags in your page. Also, of course, the "PICS off" part of the options will be passworded to prevent kids from retrieving unrated/high rated pages, so we need to find a way around this. Now presumably Congress will pass a law mandating correct rating of pages, but we could set up a non-US site which acted as a proxy, a bit like the anonymizer, and when it was requested it would retrieve a page, strip of all current tags, and replace them with new "no violence, no sex etc.." tags. Clearly however this would be a *very* high bandwidth application, but it`s just a thought. To kill the bandwidth problem, maybe someone could write a local HTML anti-PICS proxy, so, one would load up the web browser, point it at http://localhost which would bring up a simple page with a box for the URL to retrieve, the local proxy would then use HTTP to get the page, strip of all existing PICS tags, insert new "no sex, no violence etc..." tags, and forward the page on to the browser. However, I find it unlikely many censorous parents would have the foresight to ensure the kids login couldn`t install other s/w such as an old browser which doesn`t support PICS and would display the pages anyway, so it looks like the whole discussion may lead nowhere, apart from maybe the advantage of the new browsers other features being preserved in the proxy route. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"
On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Paul Bradley wrote:
However, I find it unlikely many censorous parents would have the foresight to ensure the kids login couldn`t install other s/w such as an old browser which doesn`t support PICS and would display the pages anyway, so it looks like the whole discussion may lead nowhere, apart from maybe the advantage of the new browsers other features being preserved in the proxy route.
You mean like the WebTv boxes that run Netscape 1.x? :) Hehehehe... The best thing for us to do is simply force a "Fuck You" rating on all our pages - voluntarily rate it for sex content, foul language, beastiality, anarchy, drug/bomb recipies, or whatever - but make the page very useful to force people to come to the page anyway. Easy way to take these ratings out at the knees. =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian | "If you wanna touch the sky, you must |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com| be prepared to die. And I hate cough |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ | syrup, don't you?" |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, | For with those which eternal lie, with |.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"| strange aeons, even death may die. |..... ======================== http://www.sundernet.com =========================
At 10:58 AM 7/17/97 +0000, Paul Bradley wrote:
To kill the bandwidth problem, maybe someone could write a local HTML anti-PICS proxy, so, one would load up the web browser, point it at http://localhost which would bring up a simple page with a box for the URL to retrieve, the local proxy would then use HTTP to get the page, strip of all existing PICS tags, insert new "no sex, no violence etc..." tags, and forward the page on to the browser.
It's an obvious extension to CookieCutter. It won't get you around PICS systems that are configured to block unrated pages, or around censorware systems that filter out naughty words, but it's still easy.
However, I find it unlikely many censorous parents would have the foresight to ensure the kids login couldn`t install other s/w such as an old browser which doesn`t support PICS and would display the pages anyway, so it looks like the whole discussion may lead nowhere, apart from maybe the advantage of the new browsers other features being preserved in the proxy route.
On the other hand, I predict censorware implementations that require a specific proxy system (or prevents you from changing proxies), you can't just point to your own decensoring proxy, and you can't get to systems blocked by proxy.singapore.gov or imprimis.vatican.org or be.nice.net or whomever your parent or in-loco-parentis is using. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Declan McCullagh -
Paul Bradley -
Ray Arachelian