Cypherpunks Rating System

[Nomen Nescio]

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