NYET, coercion, and censorship

[bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204]

The goal of wanting to allow one's kids to read the net without them being exposed to 
"adult material" that they're not old enough to deal with is not unreasonable,
though I know people with a variety of attitudes toward that aspect of child-raising.
One way to implement it is the heavy-duty authentication of adults vs kids, with the
network infrastructure designed to authenticate everything so you can identify all posters,
etc.  Most of us are probably against that :-)  (By the way, similar sorts of things have been
proposed by the "get schools on the information highway" movement.)

But there's another way to do it, taking an end-to-end approach, using PGP tools.
Give all the kids who want to participate PGP keys, with a web-of-trust created for
certifying a web of "good kids" (you can have the center of the web be the parents' organization,
or your churches, or PTAs, or Kidsnet or whatever), and use tools that only allow them to 
receive PGP-signed messages - shouldn't be too hard to modify a web client, nntp server,
or mail-wrapper to do it, and it doesn't force any structure on the rest of the net.
You also have to modify the tools to sign messages they originate.

Now, to make it possible for your kids to find enough screened material to be interesting,
you'll have to organize a lot of people, but that's inherently part of the job.
Alternatively, you can build gateways from "trusted" information sources;
if Prodigy's censorship is adequate, gate in prodigy messages.  If Clarinet news is
something you consider reasonable, since it's almost all wire-service news,
then gateway that into your net as well, if you can find a way to satisfy licensing.
If you want to add "well-behaved adults", you can add them too, though you may want to leave your 
net tools flexible enough that they can also read the open network.

That way, we can all coexist, and it puts the burden on the people who want special services,
rather than having them force everyone else's tools and policies to change.
It's also more honest, by pointing out to the users that they're getting a special
pre-screened service, rather than implying that the rest of the world wanted a fully-controlled
network.

			Bill