From EduPage via E. ALLEN SMITH: SELF-PATROLLING THE WEB The World Wide Web Consortium is pushing the Web page rating system that it developed in cooperation with the Platform for Internet Content Selection, a group of 22 online firms.

From SafeSurf Rating Page via lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote: Thank you for making the Internet a safer place without censorship. Until later, SafeSurfing to you!

Remember, my goal is to convince the congress, president, courts, and Americans in general that the government should not be in the censorship business, not to have a system that actually works. I really hope this self rating system works in practice because (1) it is in line with current Internet practice, and (2) having it work makes a one hell of a fine argument. For many years people on the Internet have been encouraged to provide warnings on things they think others may find offensive. The the use of rot13 "encryption" is one example, another is the practice of putting warning labels (advertisements?) on material. Killfiles (in their most general sense) are analogous to the censoring browsers in this system. (I know it doesn't work for ftp/gopher/email/usenet newsgroups. I hope that the censors think that the web is the net.) (I think I want to start a web search engine looking for pages rated SS~~002 9, SS~~004 9, SS~~005 <5, and all the others don't care.) Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA