Re: misunderstandings of PICS
At 01:19 PM 5/7/96 -0700, you wrote:
well, in any case the idea that there should ever be any pressure of page designers to include certain tags I find wholly inconsistent with the original PICS proposal and rather abhorrent. unfortunately it may be unavoidable.
I understand at one level, but not the visceral response.
my fear is that the supposed "failure" of self-ratings could be twisted by its opponents as evidence that it is inadequate to deal with the real problem.
I think your fears are a little too paranoid here, but maybe they aren't. The question is how much of this hoopola stems from fundamentalist thought police, or concerned but ignorant parents/congressmen. If self-labeling worked (which I see few cases in which it wouldn't) I can't see the concerned but ignorant being unhappy. Rather they'd be a bit better educated and feeling pretty secure their kids won't get their hands on naughty material. And then if self labeling had some failures, that's an incentive for others to provide third party services (as others have argued). PICS had to sell itself to the net as much as to the masses. Self-labeling appeals to the net, it may appeal to the masses, but there are other things in there to sweeten the deal for them if not.
I am not against self-ratings, I'm just saying that they seem to be the area most ripe for being misunderstood by the public, or lead to undesirable situations, and this is already happening.
Then we should help educate the public. I dislike dumbing the net down for the masses. The real question here -- as far as the public having a fit -- is the use of digital signatures in the labels. I expect we will not see signatures used in the first generation of label services or ?compliant? browsers. Just like ecommerce, it takes a break or catastrophe to get people to move in a constructful manner on the security front. _______________________ Regards, Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words. -Spinoza Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle@mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E
well, in any case the idea that there should ever be any pressure of page designers to include certain tags I find wholly inconsistent with the original PICS proposal and rather abhorrent. unfortunately it may be unavoidable.
I understand at one level, but not the visceral response.
I see I should have been even more specific. what I mean is that I think it is great to encourage page writers to include tags. what I find somewhat abhorrent is pressure on them to include particular tags that imply certain kinds of judgements. in other words, yes, please use the tags. but don't pressure individuals by sending them nasty email, "you should have included a sex: 10 tag in your page and you didn't!! your page clearly has a sex: 10 value!! how can you not do this!! I am going to email your administrator!! I hope you get kicked out of cyberspace!!"
I am not against self-ratings, I'm just saying that they seem to be the area most ripe for being misunderstood by the public, or lead to undesirable situations, and this is already happening.
Then we should help educate the public. I dislike dumbing the net down for the masses.
me too. but as the cyberangels demonstrate, the public can easily misunderstand virtually anything, esp. well written technical proposals, and it takes a lot of effort to create a presentation that is free of ambiguity.
The real question here -- as far as the public having a fit -- is the use of digital signatures in the labels. I expect we will not see signatures used in the first generation of label services or ?compliant? browsers. Just like ecommerce, it takes a break or catastrophe to get people to move in a constructful manner on the security front.
yes, it is a bit disappointing how slowly digital signatures are catching on in some ways and the herculean effort it will take to implement it nicely. this problem was particularly difficult with the rating system, because you have multiple signatures: a signature by the creator and by the rater. the rater signs not only his rating but links that signature to a document signed by the author. (a sort of recursive signing.) furthermore in electronic documents you often have pieces that are altered and theoretically have to be signed by the transit mechanisms, such as headers in email messages or newsgroup posts. to fully implement digital signatures well in cyberspace will be far from trivial. in some ways we don't have a very robust ground to build on. for example, even though mail headers are supposedly standardized there is still a lot of variation in the way some clients treat the different fields (trivial example: not correctly interpreting the reply-to, errors-to, etc.)
participants (2)
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Joseph M. Reagle Jr. -
Vladimir Z. Nuri