Re: Third party rating services NOT self-rating (was Re: Yet another self-labeling system (do you remember -L18?))

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 01:45:15AM +0100, Adam Back wrote:
[...]
> Even if government were to insist that everyone self rated, it would
> be damn near meaningless.

I think you are seriously underestimating the usefullness of 
self-rating.  Yes, indeed, there are people who will spoof them, or 
who may have a completely weird view of the world that allows them an 
odd interpretation of what the ratings mean, so you won't get 100% 
coverage.  

But it is important to remember that less than perfect coverage is
completely acceptable.  What you have to evaluate is whether the
percentage of coverage is worth the trouble.  

As has been pointed out, a large majority of sites that provide
"adult" material (under a very broad definition of "adult") *already*
self-rate -- their pages are usually (in my limited experience)
plastered with warnings, in fact.  And if there was a simple,
consistent standard for those already existing self-ratings it would 
be easy to generate filters for them.

Note that this is orthogonal to the issue of whether the self-ratings 
are government-mandated, and it works independently of government 
mandate.  The reason is that the larger porn sites are in it for the 
money, and *any* social sanction -- government, mail bombs, bad publicity, 
mass protest, real bombs etc -- makes it cost effective to do 
self-rating, if the self-rating is cheap.

More interesting than ratings, however, are techniques used to 
establish credentials for a large class of people.  How does one 
identify oneself as an "adult" in cyberspace?

If "adult" means "inhabits a physical human body at least 21 years 
old" then you have to tie a cyberspace identity to a human body.  
This is a tricky problem.

OTOH, if "adult" means "knows a certain body of knowledge, that only a
person who was alive and aware at date X would know", then you have a
much different, and really, much easier, problem -- you can devise a
test.  Such a test should have just a few questions, drawn from a
large pool, each of which has a fairly high probability of not being
answerable by a child.

"I am not a crook" was said by:
	a) Mickey Mouse, in the "Steamboat Willie" cartoon
	b) Richard Nixon
	c) 
	d) 

Ben Cartrights 3 sons were:
	a) Jimmy, John, and Sam
	b) etc
	c)
	d)

This approach was actually used by -- let's see -- the "Leisure Suit 
Larry" suite of games, and it was pretty effective at blocking 
children from playing.

[...]
> 
> General rhetorical question: indeed why have governments at all?

General rhetorical answer:  Because people are the way they are.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
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