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Wow, you are right! Ads, terms & conditions, and a privacy policy. What the hell happened???? It has been a long while since I visited their site.

They used to be known as RSAC who just put out a simple comma-delimited blob that you could put in a meta tag. It worked a lot like robots.txt. This really pisses me off.

It looks like our next best hope is the W3C group on the subject. But the W3C will take years to do what really is only a few minutes of real work. :-(

This keeps coming up because nobody on the internet botherws with self-governance. Yet it is those same people who complain every time a politician proopses something like this. There is already a standard content-rating system that allows sites to rate themselves. Internet Explorer has supported filtering based on that at least as far back as IE 4.0. It's too bad that Mozilla does not, especially because it is becoming popular amongs the Mom & Pops who are trying to avoid spyware.

Censorship of the internet is inevitable, and it is going to be a pain since every government is going to have a different set of rules. If everybody just stuck the RSAC or ICRA tags on their pages then we would have a strong argument about why this isn't necessary. Or at least, we could make the laws uniformly require that sites use the standard, rather than enforcing their own regulation. It would put the power back in the hands of the parents.

Movies have one. Television shows have one. Song lyrics have one. Games have one.

We had the "good one". The software industry developed several game rating systems in response to the the Video Game Rating Act of 1994. The two major ones were the familiar ESRB rating system and another rating system developed by the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC).

The RSAC system is the one you describe that used the thermometer style markings. The rating system had 5 levels in the areas of Violence, Nudity/Sex, and Language.

For a while, both systems were in use, and I remember quite clearly the thermometers on game boxes. However, the RSAC rating system was phased out in favor of the ESRB system, and the RSAC no longer exists as a game rating entity.

It's no mystery why this shift occured. The ESRB was established with the cooperation of both Nintendo and SEGA, and large merchants, like Toys 'R Us, would only carry games that were ESRB rated.

One problem is the vast number of sites which, for various reasons, don't label appropriately - usually either because they don't label at all or intentionally try to keep ahead of the censorware.

Another problem is that any set of rules will result in miscategorization, while whitelist/blacklists are neither scalable nor do they satisfy the desire for local control of categories.

I'm the concerned parent of a 5 year-old (who uses "google" as a verb), a trained teen sexuality educator, and I'm extremely anti-censorship. As you may guess, I'm occasionally conflicted on this topic. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that for my family, what I'm looking for is a tool that lets me filter out the bulk of the egregious crap (porn, hate, violence, ads) for casual use.

I'd even be satisfied with a warning rather than a hard filter in non-blacklisted cases: "Warning: the requested page will probably make your little head explode - follow this link if you really want to got there or click here if you want someone else to check it out for you".

The article says it's just a re-hashed version of something that's been around for a while, and by that I assume they are referring to RSAC.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's NOT censorship. TV programs have to label their content. Sure it's cryptic (quick, what's TV MPVD got in it?), but it doesn't stop people who don't care from watching the program. If something like RSAC became the standard for rating, it wouldn't stop people from viewing porn either. It would be the internet equivalent of labeling.

We already expect labeling for TV programs and food, why not on-line content? The only real problem I have with it is that it's a hassle for small web-sites, which is why I expect these systems haven't caught on too well. I mean, as a general rule I don't have "trash" on my site, but if I feel the need to post frontal nudity to make a point about something, or say "fuck" somwhere, I don't want to have to worry about losing my content rating.

So for me, the choice is "be on gaurd all the time" or "not care about content rating". So far, the former has been the more appealing choice and I expect it's like that for most people.

What they need is a category for sites where the content is "not for children" but on the other hand is "not catering strictly to the prurient interest". In other words, simple categories like G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, X, XX, XXX and XP (the P stands for Puke). RSAC is just too complicated; it tries to do "fine grained" content filtering.

Of course another big problem with all this is that there is simply too much content on the net. It's one thing for volunteers to rate movies and TV; there are only so many hours of it per year. Rating the net would just take way too long. So, we are left either with people rating their own stuff, or companies trying to rate it. Everybody has their own opinion about where the cut-off for a particular rating is, so there is no way to trust the rating. Even if there were, you can't put any legal teeth to it because content providers would have to open themselves up for a law suit. So, the content provider is still going to choose "not rated" as their rating.

The bottom line? Teach your children well; and let them live in fear of the librarian seeing something over their shoulder, just like we lived in fear of the teacher finding our stash.

[All links pulled from google's first page for each letter - sick, ain't it?]

I think that a better way to filter porn is to require or suggest porn pages to have meta tags in them like meta contents = porn

The Internet Content Rating Association has this form (requires frames and ECMAScript) that you can fill out to create a "PICS-Label" meta tag that you can stuff in your HTML header to mark your content as "family friendly" or "adult-oriented" or anything in between.

There already is a voluntary website rating system. It's the RSAC, and allows you to rate your site in four different categories: nudity, violence, language, and sex. It's been around for a while, and is completely voluntary (which means it's also open for abuse...).

I haven't seen anyone mention RSAC yet. It seems to satisfy many concerns brought up, as well as it's already supported in IE and Netscape.

RSAC allows webmasters to place tags on their pages to rate their use of Language, Nudity, Sex and Violence.

You rate each on a scale of 0 to 4, such as for nudity:

0: None
1: Revealing Attire
2: Partial Nudity
3: Frontal Nudity
4: Provocative frontal nudity

Language, Sex and Violence also have their settings. Parents/cafe owners/whatever can then go into IE and specify what level they consider acceptable. If it's over the rated limit, it asks for a password.

The problem? It's not widely implemented on web sites, and there's no requirement people do it. I own an ISP, and ask that my customers add these tags, and insist that they do if they have any 'adult' content. Nobody has complained so far, and several have commented that they are glad they added them.

As much as I hate the idea of forcing webmasters to do anything, what do you feel about making these slightly more mandatory?

Kevin

Don't let anyone like Katz demonize you for not allowing your children to watch whatever they want whenever they want to.

That's not what Katz is saying. Katz is in no way demonizing good parents. He's talking about theater owners, ushers, etc. who TRY to be substitute parents by making "moral" decisions regarding what a child can or cannot see.
And I agree with Katz. Theater owners shouldn't be taking away a parent's right to decide what children see.
Additionally, they shouldn't be treating MPAA recommendations as law, enforcing them blindly. The recommendations are just that. They are guidelines for parents to decide what children can see. This is a good idea with poor implementation. I don't want to know what somebody else thought of the moral fiber of a movie; I would much prefer facts, such as the RSAC's implementation of a ratings system for software and internet content. It has a rating from 0 to 4 in each of the following categories: Violence, Nudity, Sex, and Language. If somebody sings "Uncle Fucker" it would indicate language. It doesn't just slap on the same rating someting gets if it has pervasive nudity and sexual themes.
In contrast the ESRB has a system that simply says "T" for Teen or "M" for Mature, etc. which is just as bad as the MPAA. While I'm rambling i may as well also complai about the RIAA's rating system for music: a "Parental Advisory" sticker of no parental advisory sticker. That's all-no explanation.
People should be free to make their own moral judgements based on facts, not fed somebody else's moral code and forced to accept it. People need to learn that morals are not universal, and they can't seek to have their moral judgements applied to everyone. People deserve to know more that just opinions: they deserve facts.

Congratulations, you've just reinvented RSACi, and poorly.

There's a standard to do exactly that, it's called PICS. You describe the content in your page (nudity, violence, etc), and then the web browser can be configured with various filters.

If you want to describe the content on your site easily, you can rate with RSAC, which gives you a standard baseline and spews out the appropriate PICS metadata for your web page, and you copy and paste it into your HTML document. Easy. And any loser on the internet can configure their IE or netscape browser (or anything else that's PICS compliant) to not let a user view content above certain levels without a password. Self-governance on both sides is the only way we're ever going to get anything reasonable around here, the filters have already proven to be extremely politically biased (some of them block the National Organization for Women, for christ's sake.