Re: Paint Your Own Scarlet Letter (Was: Edited Edupage, 29 Feb 1996)

[frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)]

>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


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