Slashdot Mirror
Internet Firms Launch New Web Rating System
Jeremi writes: "Salon has a brief article about a new content self-rating system being proposed to Congress in lieu of government-imposed restrictions. I wonder if this is a good thing or bad, and whether or not it will succeed where previous attempts failed?"
It actually seems half decent i guess.
This being a voluntary rating system, it will do about ZERO good. The only sites that will utilize them will be pr0n sites, but big WHOOP! The net nannys and other censorship organizations of the world will still base their censorship based on keywords and other flawed methods. So, what's the point?
Nah, actually it'll have to be implemented through
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
It's going to work for about 5 minutes. Then little Billy is going to figure out that he can kill the software that blocks the website using any myriad of ways. (CTRL-ALT-DEL/taskmanager comes to mind, but also holding SHIFT at boot, going into MSCONFIG to remove the actual entry at startup, etc.)
The other thing is: it's a voluntary rating system. What's to say babylonX or whatever else you're visiting just says screw-it and posts the porn without rating it? You can't block every website that doesn't have a rating, since that'd block waay too much of the web out.
And even if they can get around those hurdles, there'll be web-based proxy services set up to strip the pages of their ratings, or mask the ratings.
Nope. Not gonna happen. Never work. Nice thought, though.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
What rating will /. have?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Linux rox0rz my s0x0rz!~*
Grap. Nuva nobulon grilt qualty foldis rabby. Yelta-vriksha, moldin swilba.
-Yast Weldi
Coming from a future teacher I am divided on the issue of self assessment. On the one hand, students can be harder on themeselves when assessing because they know themselves better than a teacher does. They know their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the task at hand. However in every bunch you will have those few students who always give themselves an A.
The point here?
I don't think you can rely solely on the industry to do it themselves. Especially where money is involved. Like a classroom there are mostly the good students who take it seriously, but I can tell you from experience that it only takes a few bad ones and an opportunity to corrupt the rest.
Kids can hack it even easier! I mean nowdays most kids are smarter than their parents on the computer.. so if its going to be self-regulating.. that means the parents will try to regulate it themselves but of course its going to end up being regulated by the kids that they're suppsosedly trying to block beause the KID is going to be on the computer MORE than the parents so chances are they're going to figure out ways to circumvent it..
It doesn't look like this will be too useful considering most of the kids I know are more technically minded than their parents and will probably have little trouble disabling the software.
The future isn't what it used to be.
(Please excuse US centered nature of post. I have no experience with foreign ratings systems)
Self-imposed rating systems have generally worked fairly well, with the bonus that they keep Congress off of the entertanment industry's backs.
Think about the Motion Picture Ratings Board. They're completely self-created. They rate the movies according to their standards. The movie theaters voluntarily choose whether they want to carry an NC-17 or Unrated film, and all goes well. As far as I know, the under 17 w/o parent at an 'R'-rated movie isn't a law, it's just something the theaters choose to follow.
Ditto for the ESRB (the guys that handle videogames). Completely voluntary, but it helps parents make a decision. I'd rather have 'M' slapped on the front of some Zombie game than Congress telling me there will be no zombie game.
I could see this working very well for Website rating. A simple HTML extension ([rating="13"]) could be picked up by the browser, and displayed/not displayed accordingly. Simple enough. And the pr0n sites can go on to advertise "Super XXX pr0n... there isn't a rating on the books bad enough for this stuff!!"
Oh, this is pretty clear, but not necessarily good.
Optional ratings. But the free filters will likely default to automatically blocking unrated sites. After all, the goal is clearly stated that they want to convince parents to install the software, ergo, they need the ratings to have value in order to convince them, ergo unrated sites have to be put down.
So site owners have to rate. But, aha, rating incorrectly will have to be made a crime, else those illegal pornographers will rate themselves as 'kid-friendly', dontchaknowit.
After all, if there isn't a _law_ forcing honest ratings, who can trust the ratings? They'll fail otherwise.
Then, with this law, hmm... we'll need a way to handle complaints and dispute ratings. Hey, they do a good job with those domain disputes and such, use a closed board like that. Heck, use the same WIFO!
Small sites then get "Your site was reported as illegally abusing the rating scheme with inaccurate ratings. Please reply to each complaint in this 20-page form within 10 days or your domain will be revoked."
Suddenly, small sites are either a) bogged down in paperwork or b) unrated and thus blocked by most browsers.
*sigh* And don't even get me started if they decide they don't need a top ratings board, that ratings can be enforced through 'local standard', i.e. any state can file in their state court to contest your site's ratings. Suddenly, small sites get suits in any state that disagrees with the site owner's interpretation of the ratings.
Then there's the world level...
A.
Kind of like quality MPAA movie ratings. My friend's Mormon church uses the MPAA rating system as the deciding factor about whether they should see movies or not (don't see R rated movies or worse). The MPAA quality obviously is fair and legit because small-budget movies such as Run Lola Run get an R rating for NO nudity and little violence, while big budget movies are rated PG-13 for tons of violence and/or sexual innuendos.
Allowing companies to maintain their own opt-out privacy standards (in lieu of government regulation) is obviously a good choice. We all opt for opt-out rather than opt-in (I don't remember opting for that decision at all). And when their databases of customer information get hacked it is better for the consumer.
Let's not forget the RIAAs music ratings system. It's so effective in liue of goverment regulation that I often get CDs with no sticker on them that contain tons of swearing (for less known bands) and I see little stickers on albums such as Liz Phair who only swear in 1 or 2 songs. This is better for me because I can peel off the stickers and stick them on my l337 computer speakers.
By the way, this post if very sarcastic and it makes damn little sense.
Keeping
IMHO this won't go very far unless browsers integrate the codes and let the user set levels of access similar to the security levels - i.e. no porn, but online casinos are OK.
As long as you need to download a list, too many people will be too lazy to do it, or just not computer literate enough to realize that they *can* download a list.
Then again, I wonder what percentage of users 1) know that their browser has security settings and 2) how to set them.
null sig
this is actually not such a bad idea. if you think about it, porn sites don't really want kids looking at their sites, they want people with credit cards, so there is not much incentive for them to falsify their rating and make themselves appear "kid-friendly" or whatever the rating will be. in fact, sites will probably strive on very porn-intensive ratings (if they can live up to the hype). kid-friendly sites will obviously not make themselves appear not to be just that. the only problem will be the fringe sites (the article mentions gay advocacy groups), which some parents may actually not want their kids to see, but will not consider themselves to be objectionable. other instances like this will be one big problem with this system. the other is acceptance. obviously, if sites do not opt into the system, it will fail. quite an interesting proposal/experiment, though, and certainly much better than uncle sam censoring things.
With the ICRA plan, operators would rate their Web sites by filling out an online form listing types of objectionable material, such as drug promotion, gambling or particular forms of nudity.
Is it just me or would operators be less likely to rate their website in a manner which would cause people not to be able to access it?
"With the ICRA plan, operators would rate their Web sites by filling out an online form listing types of objectionable material, such as drug promotion , gambling or particular forms of nudity."
So would the handy-information-laden, 'independant' websites of pharmaceutical companies have to be black listed as well?
--- Foam weapons, real sparring: buyjin.com/diamondsword
The only mention that could possibly be of PICS is the following:
Which is so vague as to be useless. And the exclusion of any mention of the existing voluntary granular filtering system makes me wonder why they're scared of comparing themselves to it. Also I'd like to find out how this new "standard" is more specific.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, if you can't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.
[
The one useful thing I'd like to see is a bit of information overload instead of this (or in conjunction with) simple summary ratings. Some of the subscription channels such as HBO go part of the way in describing what kind of content actually exists, but I want something more in-depth.
I mean, I don't want to start looking at a site rated NC-17 just to find out it's because of language and not porn.
Now, compiling the low down on a site including number of nipples, instances of the word 'shit', rape scenes, suicides, etc will really help me sort out the more entertaining sites from the average plain janes of the web with a glance. I can imagine a feature in my web browser to warn me if a site doesn't have enough profanity, violence or sex... my goodness that would help me avoid all the boring content out there.
Oh wait, they probably want this for child filters or something of that nature.
Still, my definition of "profane" is probably different from everyone elses, so I can imagine allowing a child to view all the violence they want without any of the sex (or vice-versa for those across the pond).
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
It's amazing how quickly a teen will become computer-litterate when his parent installs a net-nanny style program. I say the more ratings the better, it encourages kids to develope their computer skills so they can bypass the filtering program and view the latest pr0n...
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
Et toi aussi
Baswell
BTW, am I the only one wondering why Congress is turning their attention to internet censorship right now? The internet had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, and yet, they are chomping at the bit when it comes to net censorship. When will they get their grubby hands out of my life and let me decide what's best for me?
RSCA has been around, and largely ignored, for at LEAST five years. Maybe they think changing names will help...
Why? Because other country's people get a say in how it will be rating websites. I've found that the USA's rating system is MUCH more prudent than those of other countries. Case in point: 14A ratings in Canada vs R in the USA for the same movie.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for slashdot because slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for slashdot. As many of us are already aware, slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink posts flow like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Adequacy.org leader elby states that there are 7000 users of adequacy. How many users of kuro5hin.org are there? Let's see. The number of adequacy versus kuro5hin posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 kuro5hin users. Poliglut posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of kuro5hin posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of poliglut. A recent article put slashdot at about 80 percent of the crappy weblog market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of slashdot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of andover.net, abysmal sales and so on, slashdot declared bankruptcy and was bought out by goatse.cx in a hostile takeover who merged their troubled crappy weblog with slashdot. (And a hostile takeover from goatse.cx would not go over well with anyone except Cmdr Taco, Hemos, and the rest. No one else but them would want to end up like the goatse.cx guy.) As a result slashdot was flooded with goatse.cx trolls causing slashdot to lose even more marketshare. Now goatse.cx is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house. (Who else besides a charnel house like the now dead andover.net would want the corpse of the goatse.cx guy?)
All major surveys show that slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If slashdot is to survive at all it will be among crappy weblog hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, slashdot is dead.
Digital Divide? The only divide Linux can bridge is the crack of my ass, when I use it to wipe my ass clean.
This is yet more of the same. They seem to believe that if there are little labels on everything, then those things that they do not like can be blocked.
h atever, and anything else that twigs them at a given moment.)
Previous attempts at this have failed. This one will too. They will try again with yet another plan. Loop until universe ends.
TV ratings and the V-Chip were a way to "save our children", Now the groups that pushed for them are upset that noone but them are using them to block what kids see.
What these people really want is for all content *they* find objectionable to be driven off the net. (Be it porn, descriptions of anti-social behaviour, criticism of their religious beliefs, people who are not good liberals/conservitives/communists/Americans(tm)/w
They use children as an excuse. It is not the children they wish to protect, but their own fragile sensibilities.
What they do not believe in is the right to freedom of speech, freedom of thought or freedom of action for anyone other than themselves.
Childhood is supposed to be a time to train children to be adults. What happens to these kids when they get out into the unfiltered world on their own? The answers seem to be overindulgence in the things that they were forbidden to do by their parents. This leads to a bunch of self-destructive adults.
Seems to me that filters are a panecia for parents who are afraid or unable to teach their children about the real world.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The Internet content rating association has been around for at least six years that I know about. It hasn't made much headway in the last five years.
The US goverment should stay out but this self rating stuff is a joke.
Door swings both ways. I look forward to the day when I can filter out all than non offensive material and surf an internet composed purely of lude degrading pr0n.
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
I hate to say it, but government regulation is the best way to go. At the very least, porn sites in the U.S. should be compelled by law to disclose that they have potentially objectionable content on them. Perhaps some DMCA-like law should be used: force the upstream ISP or web hosting service to take the page or site offline if it is in violation of the labelling law.
Ratings systems don't hurt freedom of speech - they just help classify the speech for the end-user. Imagine if every spam message were required to have a special identifying header - wouldn't that be great? That's how Ralph Reed and friends feel about porn sites right now. Well, since every telemarketing caller needs to identify itself as such (for example), this change in the law wouldn't be a big leap but it would stop the censors dead in their tracks.
-CT
--Robert
No, a ratings system is not censorship, or a free speech issue. While it is true that ratings tend to bend the subject matter toward certain standards, that is not censorship, that is appealing to target audiences, or "selling out" for popularity or the ALMIGHTY $...
What possible reason would they have for allowing hordes of young credit cardless nonpaying folk to bog down their sites??? Though I don't know how well self rating would work (fine line between artistic nudity v.s. porn in some cases, and what would say a web site talking about contraception or abortion be rated as?) I could see some kind of "global" rating (much like the ratings we see at say, amazon.com or imdb.com for example). Tho more likely in that case what I see is some hacker type voting a few thousands times for the whitehouse.com site to rate it as a "great family site". Perhaps a central site like the bbb.org site that methodically culls through sites and assigns them a ratings (say like the ratings on TV, with various keywords assigned to each web site). Again we run into a problem, company A folds, and company B takes over the domain of company A and changes the content.....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Just my $0.02 worth
-mrbkap
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
how about kill two birds with one stone and migrate TLD's to synchronize with content ratings? Just add a .kid .xxx etc for the appropriate content, and move those two areas away from .com?
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
I have several problems with this, and they are not new or novel:
- Parents know less about the computers than the kids
- This is likely to be a Windows-only program, and most likely an IE-only program (I know, serious FUD alert, but who are we kidding here).
- Like 99% of porn sites CARE if they are filtered because they do not rate themselves (the article mentioned blocking all sites which do not provide ratings).
- Yet ANOTHER centralized, run by the big corporations 'standard' - one which is free for now, but absolutely no guarantee to play fair later. Wanna be on the web? Pay $$$ per year to our new 'Rating Compliance' group or you will be on the black list, baby!
anyway...burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
My concern is when I have to rate my website or be effectively censored. The prospect of a portal operator, a school, or anyone telling me that I should have to rate my site is chilling.
The more people that go along and adopt this, the more of a "standard" it will become. I'm afraid other non compliant sights, will be forced to either rate themselves, or loss exposure.
It also concerns me as to what the cumulative effect on more risqué sites is, as they may try to tone down potentially objectionable content to pass through the filters
At least as well as self-policing has historically in the oil/timber/mining industries!
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
We all didn't see our first dirty picture at 18, we saw it when we became so interested in it, that we hunted it. Want to prevent people from not sharing sound and video, or have control of who accesses it: never have it to begin with.
A secret best kept is known by only one.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The great thing about this system is that it lets parents draw their own line for what they want their children to be able to access, rather than having to stick to a company's prespecified block list. This avoids freedom-of-speech issues and the like that have made other systems unpopular.
How much of the web do you want your kids to see? Are you concerned about hate, but not about porn? What rating level do you think counts as objectionable? Draw your own line, for your own kids.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
By the way, this post if very sarcastic and it makes damn little sense.
/. free of grammatical errors for ~5 years.
Keeping
Last post!
Stick that in your pipe and grep it!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Rate the Internet... YAY...
How about getting all the CRAP off of TV... it used to be only 1/2 shit, now it's 80% shit IMO. Commercials and content included.
Porn sites would utilize this? Huh? the purpose of a porn site is to get as many visitors as humanly possible to earn money. Why in the hell would any sane porn site owner voluntarily do something that will REDUCE the number of visitors coming to his/her site? No. Porn sites will NOT use this system.
A Non profit group, preferably some kids group, becomes the registrar for a new top level domain: .clean. If you want to register slashdot.clean you must follow the rules and you can only link to other .clean sites. Everyone builds the ability into the their browsers/OS the ability to limit visiting domains that are .clean only. Ftp downloads are not allowed. Anyone impersonating a .clean domain get's in trouble.
.clean domains and the kids group could run the dns for the entire domain. Disney and all the biggies would put forth the effort to make their sites .clean compliant, others would create .clean versions of their existing sites and others could care less.
.clean domain and create a .clean ver of my site and no one says you have to limit your PC to .clean only domains. ISP's could opt to only allow .clean stuff through their systems as added security.
.clean site and free for non profits. This kids group has .clean cops who investigate .clean infractions and remove any violators from the .clean domain using the proceeds from the business/commercial entities that pay for the .clean privlege.
.clean dns, point it to a gay bondage site I get in big big trouble.
.g .pg .pg13 .r
Uncertified ISP's could be banned from serving dns for
No one says I have to opt in to the
Make it expensive for business to get a
It's not censorship, no one has to do it. If I illegaly serve
you could even make it based one
And best of all..... I still get to look at porn.
G
Besides, the worse rating they have, the better they can say their content is. Look we have a XXX rating, the nastiest stuff on the net!
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of! If you are going to rate your own pages, you should rate them on the pages themselves. What's wrong with using Meta tags in the content itself? huH? Or even better yet, configure your server to add a special header. All that would need to be done then is agree upon the Meta tag info that filters would look for, etc.
It never ceases to amaze me the ridiculously complex sytems people come up with to solve simple problems. Sheesh.
Just my 2-1/2 cents.
Well, I really don't know what to say here. For one thing, they mention it at the bottom of the article that this has been tried before but is not widely used. The reason it has not been widely used is because most people don't know about it. For example, people call in to MSN tech support wondering how to block sites and they are told to use Content Advisor which can be found in internet options under the tools menu or in the control panel. However AOL has put its content-blocking up-front in its interface because they felt it was an important option for their customers.
Now, if you think about this sytem, yes, people could lie about the content ratings. People could also rate themselves incorrectly because they don't think they are being objectionable. It's a very subjective thing. So I think for the most part this part of the system will fail because e.g. the author of a website advocating gay-rights may not find their content to be objectionable. And in reality, it really isn't unless they are describing a specific sexual act which I think the person rating the page would realize and rate it appropriately (one would hope). Note that the same would be true for a website describing any sexual act (homo/hetero/whatever you please).
The problem is that some parents want their kids to live in ignorance and like to cry that it should be legislated-- especially after watching the latest NBC/ABC/CNN/etc. report about the dangers of the internet.
So what intrigued me most was that the software would allow you to specify to receive blacklists from organizations that you trust. This is actually a really damn cool idea and I am surprised no-one thought of it before. That is, rather than by some prepackaged software with a prepackaged blacklist that may or may not follow what you want to allow your kids to see you can setup your software to point to several organizations that independently come up with blacklists.
On the software side of things it should be possible (and I would say desirable) to write free software which can utilize these lists (and I am speaking in the GNU sense of free software). This way you are absolutely certain that your program is not doing things it shouldn't be.
On the business side of things you can make money very easily simply by charging a very modest subscribtion fee for your blacklists. You can even create your blacklists by using other orgs blacklists. For example you could collect several blacklists from either non-profit or profit organizations (which presumably you may need to pay a license fee for) and then sell the easy collection of them as one master blacklist. You could even then allow parents to select which ones they would like to have combined into their personal blacklist.
Notice that this actually sounds like a real business model... i.e. charge people a recurring fee for a recurring service. Assuming the cost of creating the blacklists or licensing them from other orgs (i.e. your costs) are less than the total revenues you make from your subscribtions then using the basic profit=revenue-cost you make a profit. Go figure, an internet company making a profit.
This also has benefits as it creates a lot of competition. I.e. if your customers find out your blacklists are crappy and are blocking things they didn't ask for they will just go to one of your competitors. Creates incentive to actually run your business properly. This competition in turn is good for the economy. Damn, funny how when you think about it if everyone follows the basic rules of capitalism then everyone wins. Obviously this is a simplistic view of things but it does at least make sense (at least in my mind).
Feel free to beat me with a clue-stick (well, don't be that harsh, just post a reply) if you feel I or others would benefit from your opinion. That is to say if all you want to say is "censorship sucks" please go away. I hate censorship as much as the next guy, but the bottom line is that we need to make things as easy as possible for parents to control what their children view so the government doesn't step in and do it for us. And one can hope that the clued-in parents will say the hell with it, do what you want, if you don't know better it's your damn problem (that was my parents attitude). However note that very few parents would like their kids to see the goatse.cx pages and that is really what most parents want to prevent and why people are crying for filtering on the internet. If a self-rating system combined with blacklists from trusted organizations who provide open blacklists can do this without requiring government intervention then I am all for it.
>How about getting all the CRAP off of TV... it used to be
>only 1/2 shit, now it's 80% shit IMO. Commercials and content
>included.
And that's exactly why they're going after the internet (although it too is arguably 80% shit). Television in this country has become so filtered that it's difficult to find anything truly "objectionable" unless you subscribe to the Spice channel. Think fast, when was the last time you saw a radical political opinion - OK, OK, a non-Christian radical political opinion - on any TV channel?
You can flip back and forth between the major networks and the talking heads are saying the same thing. CNN slants it left, Fox slants it right, but neither side makes any real commentary. The only radical opinions on TV are the ones showing up on 700 Club, but I digress. It's okay for some nut to go on TV and blame September 11th on gays and abortion, but it's not okay for someone to go on TV and criticize the government. It's okay for the religious right to proseltyze on the public airwaves, but God forbid Howard Stern says "penis."
It's quite clear that government regulation of any media ends up favoring the government and stifling anything they see as prude. The stuff they've worked so hard to keep off of television and radio now flows freely on the internet, and you better believe it scares the hell out of them. If you can't control the medium, you can't control the speech. It seems to me like they're starting to realize that the internet cannot be FCC'd, and they're moving toward scare tactics instead ("we'll be watching you, and we won't need a warrant!").
I don't like the idea of a ratings system, but if we have to have web ratings, I'd rather they come from the industry than from the government. TV would be a much more interesting phenomenon if the FCC bailed out and left the networks to regulate themselves! Of course, if we speak loudly enough and refuse to participate, we don't have to have web ratings. A product no one uses fails to be significant.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
"Kids, you need to help your parents. Show them how this software is installed. Show them how to set it up and how to select the preferred rating categories. Make your technophobe parents feel comfortable with this software. Then when they go to bed you can boot back into Linux."
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I believe the self-censorship in the US in the 1950's had a fairly dramatic effect and probably helped the demise of the small studios, (I should probably read some more of the history to back this up). The last people you want in charge of all film content are a bunch of Hollywood executives.
I think this is really a situation where you want the person that sets the standards to be someone that you can vote out of office, and not just the richest man on the board.
I just had this discussion today in my Internet law class. Assuming a future in which some search engines return only rated sites, and other search engines return unrated sites as well:
1. Sites would rate themselves because they perceive a benefit from doing so -- getting traffic from ratings users.
2. Sites that intentionally, blatantly misrate their content will induce complaints to ratings organizations.
3. Those sites will be reviewed, and if the complaints are accurate, those sites will be removed from the list of rated sites, and not allowed to re-rate.
4. The site would no longer be listed on search engines which deliver only rated content, while their competitors who rate their site honestly continue to be.
5. The site which misrated now has access to less traffic than sites which rate themselves correctly.
Hence: If a site owner wants to rate themselves to increase traffic, the incentive is to rate correctly, not misrate.
Jeremi - Don't wonder too much. The Internet is not TV or the movies. Sure, MSNBC, AOLTIMEWARNERCNN, DISNEYABC, and the ilk may rate themselves. But don't expect f---edcompany.com [f---edcompany.com] or stileproject.com [stileproject.com] to sign up. So, what good is a rating system?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I can see your point, but as we all know, the web is very different.
I, for one, have seen plenty of Unrated films at theaters. It's just not at AMC-type super mega-plexes (think Yahoo, Go.com, etc.). It's always been at the local "arthouse" cinema (think the small-time website that earns maybe 1,000 to 5,000 hits in a month). Sure, those small-time film makers rarely earn Lucas or Michael Bay make, but their stuff DOES get shown.
And really, haven't all the major websites pretty much dumped "adult" material altogether (with the exception of maybe pulling them up in a search)?
Hmm wouldn't the Viagara website be blocked then?
The Interactive Gaming Council, which represents gambling sites, will encourage its members to get behind the plan as well.
They like the odds...
"It's a reincarnation of a system that has been around for years with enormous financial backing, and nobody uses it," Haselton said.
That sounds sortof like CueCat
Many other solutions have been offered, from making Internet providers liable for illegal pornography that travels through their networks to creating separate kids-only or porn-only areas of the Internet.
Hmm well the only way to do that would be to have someone look at pornography all day long and determine what is illegal. I suspect that position wouldn't be vacant very often...well except for those 10 minute breaks.
"We believe that good corporate citizenship and tools that help parents make good decisions is a much better alternative than government regulation," Kenny said.
Translation: Let us good corporations raise your kids. You don't need to watch them....And while we're at it, we'll be sure to make sure they buy our products and don't do anything naughty like those evil file sharing products that steal money from Sir PaidAlot.
Previous, simpler versions of the rating system are included in some versions of Microsoft's Web browser, but there are no current plans to bundle the program into Microsoft or AOL software.
Which means 99% of the population will never see it.
//m
Australia's rating system, for example, is less prudent than that of the US (e.g. South Park is MA rather than R). The drawback is that other countried tend to have non-voluntary ratings with government-mandated restrictions.
In Australia, for example, R material must not be sold to minors no matter who accompanies them. This is the law, not the policy of theatres. In addition, sale of material which is unrated or "refused classification" is illegal in all states. Not in territories like the ACT (our equivalent of DC), though, so you can still get it via mail order thanks to the interstate commerce clause.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The examples where self-ratings have previously worked are basically the fairly centralized entertainment media of movies, music, comic books and to an extent, TV (suddenly I can't remember seeing those ratings for TV shows in a while).
I can see very large differences which distinguish these projects from something like an internet website, namely, (1) they're all done by a limited set of corporations, (2) they're all done expressly for profit, (3) they're basically all done in some class of retail outlets that can apply pressure on the manufacturers to comply or be ostracized.
Publishing on the web doesn't resemble these kinds of things, I think, even in the majority of cases to date. Anyone can publish a web site nowadays, and desire for as huge a customer base as possible is not a compelling motivation in a lot of cases.
I may be reaching, but I tend to think that the act of publishing on the web is more akin to sending a piece of postal mail, or using a photocopier to make some cheap posters or pamphlets. It's just too widespread, accessible, and low-impact for a lot of the practicioners to be concerned about being compliant with some categorization system for their website. There's no "website industry" as such to reach an agreement and take universal action in this regard, as there has been for the other self-rating programs which have to date succeeded.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I'm tempted to mark one of my math-filled theory papers as "adult content" and see if the hit count goes up.
The only reasonable way to rate anything is to have groups of people (in this age, I'll consider the de facto standard to be a website. If it's successful enough, it will one day have its own cable channel) who rate things and produce the aforementioned (in parens) website. You go to the website to see their spin. Maybe the site is religion-oriented, or maybe gay (I guess there's some overlap there, though headed in different directions.)
Anyway, before I give you all my good ideas, let me just get back to my main point: you choose someone to give you your information, and you get it. Right now, movies are rated by someone we didn't pick, but you can still visit movie review sites. I'm sure religious sites have reviews of all the various movies, why not do the same thing for websites, and advertise it as such. Heck, your church can do their own, and hand it out. They can pretend visiting porn sites is "penance".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
LOL, you were off by 2 minutes. Now THAT'S fucking pathetic.
NT
Most sites have material that falls into multiple ICRA classifications, and labelling it all just isn't going to be feasible. And when I looked a few years back at Australian sites that tried to rate themselves, most had either failed technically or clearly mislabelled themselves.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
"What part of "Congress shall make no law" do they not understand?"
What part of, "You are the dumbest motherfucker I've ever heard," don't you understand? Congress is the legislative branch of the US govt., their ONLY JOB is passing laws, NO OTHER branch does this- are you trying to say that all federal laws are violations of the Constitution? I can understand you not knowing this if you're one of those queer fag Europeans who studies US govt. in his spare time, hoping that it will somehow give you an oppurtunity to get some of that high-quality American asshole (Ha! Not a chance, froggy!) and so you don't know shit, but if you're actually a citizen of the US I don't understand how you could be so painfully ignorant, stupid, and ugly.
Where did you get that quote, anyway? Did you pull it out of your ass, or actually take a sentence fragment from the Constitution and pull it horribly out of context (as I'm willing to bet you did)? Here's a good one, Article I Section 1: All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. I'm so fucking pissed of at how stupid you are, I'm not even going to bother to make that a link to goatse.cx, which is a damn shame.
And what incentive would there be for people to use these search engines? It only took me 2 seconds to find that hole in your logic, so I'm willing to bet their are a whole lot more.
I believe (hope) that they were just ..."or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"...
abbreviating the clause which states
that shall not make any laws
Were that I say, pancakes?
How does this system handle news and current affairs sites? Some news can describe violence, sex, what-have-you. Are news sites to be off-limits to kids? Only certain parts of the news site? Which part? And who defines what is news? rotten.com calls itself "news", I think. News is in the eye of the beholder, maybe. Neo-Nazi Today newsletter? Is that more "news" or less "news" than yahoo.com? Who decides? Is there a problem if yahoo.com reports on the current war? What about a rape? On and on....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
According to my web design book, there are already rating tags. <meta name="rating" content="mature"> would mark your site as "adult" or "porn" according to the book. It's in "Web Design in a nutshell" by Jennifer Niederst (an O'Reilly book) p 101, and was published in 1999, so these tags have been around for at least two years. I imagine if you dig through the WWW Consortium's site, you'll probably find it...
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Basically the original poster is pointing out that Congress explicitly has no power to restrict the freedom of speech, et al, and yet persists in trying to pass legislation which restricts the freedom of speech. I.e. That they do something when they are told not to, in no uncertain terms.
He's framing this within a modified version of the phrase "What part of no don't you understand?" (but could've also used the anti-rape slogan, "No means no" to build upon)
But mostly since I don't care to believe that anyone could screw up something they should've learned in their Civics class so badly by accident, that you're a troll.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Why is it that porn is considered dangerous while violence, killing and destruction of any kind it considered normal...
Were you created by violence or human sexual behavior?
-- From Denmark
The main reason for having any rating system is to keep kids from seeing adult content. Read: pr0n. Well, as a person who owns several adult content sites, I sure as hell don't want kids surfing my site and sucking up my bandwidth, which I'm paying for. All moral issues aside, they don't have credit cards.
a tion" one, depending on the context of the site. As it is now, a search on either topic will usually hit on both types of sites, which is clearly unnecessary.
Some scream "Censorship!" and I agree. This is *self-censorship*, and I'm all in favor of censoring myself, as opposed to someone else censoring me. Few complain about our *voluntary* movie rating system, and those who are against it are free to release their movie without a rating and have it shown at independant movie theatres; it won't be shown in most of the chain movie theatres, just like an unrated web site may not be listed in a major search engine (the model that several web rating systems propose). No biggie; it's a choice.
I'd actually go a step further, and propose a voluntary self-categorization system in HTML headers. Few ligit (non-spam ad) sites want irrelavent accidental hits to suck up their bandwidth, so this would ensure that viewers of web sites really intended to see the content that is being sent to them. So a site with a high percentage of words like "large, breasts, squeeze" could either categorize itself in a "/adult/images/women/large_breasts" heirarchy, or a "/health/personal/women/breast_cancer/self_examin
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
Depends on whether "adult" rated sites (pr0n etc) will continue to use AVS'es or will simply move to using the ratings system.
I doubt much will change. I doubt most AVS sites use AVSes to avoid liability. Technically, you can still do that with a splash screen, an "I am not a kiddie" agreement, and OK and LEAVE buttons. The AVS system makes them money. And they probably wouldn't be as well listed if they weren't on the AVS bandwagon. Just talk to people who run pr0n sites about how much pressure they are under to run "AdultCheck" or one of its clones.
No, AVS and filterware are an industry racket that has little to do with avoiding legal liability, and everything to do with making money. I suppose a few sites might switch, but I doubt many will.
-Kasreyn
P.S. If you're wondering what my beef is with AVSes, it has to do with sites falsely advertising themselves as "free" (Piratemedia is a great example), AVSes charging 25 bucks and providing no service except extortion, and having to have a credit card (???) to prove I'm an adult.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Rating systems can be very good, as they provide a short, distilled summary of the information contained in the thing rated. And face it, given the massive amounts of information available out there, everyone (not just kids) needs help sorting out what's valuable, and what's crap. We can't read it all - you have to depend on someone else's opinions. This is the way life works, you depend greatly on others opinions and summaries of material to make a judgement about it.
The problem isn't with a rating system per se, but rather with who controls the ratings (ie, who are the raters), and what criteria they use for rating content.
In a pluralistic society, the ideal way to form an opinion is to take input from several different sources. You trust (or weigh) the opinion from each source based on how closely that source has matched previous decisions of yours, plus knowledge of how closely that source's ideals, morals, et al fit yours. You can then make a good informed judgement.
What the web needs is multiple independent rating organizations. The ALCU should be able to rate things. So should the New York Times, the Christian Coalition, the Aryan Nation, the Nation of Islam, the American Medical Association, and anyone else. There should even be an organization that allows for the Web site owner to self-rate based on that organization's posted guidelines. The only two criteria for being a Rater should be that the rating criteria be published, and that the ratings of various sites be publicly displayed. I can thus chose to accept ratings data from any parties I consider trustworthy.
The PICS system was a great proposal, and honestly, one that I think needs to have a much greater push with it. It allowed for this independent ratings network to be set up, didn't require a single centralized ratings system, and was easily parsable by any "filtering" software. It even allowed for multiple ratings from different raters for the same site.
I want PICS. If we could get the system set up, and get everything rated, it would be a whole lot easier to find stuff out there. And it would leave the choice of making informed opinions where it belonged: in the user's hands, not in the government's, not some semi-legal ratings board, and not some random corporation.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Sure, porn sites would use this system. Remember, they're in place to make money. They make money by getting people to pay them to look at their photos of doggies in latex or whatever. They do not make money when nine-year-old Billy wanders into their sites, and Billy's parents find him drooling at the latex doggies... far from it.
http://www.koehntopp.de/kris/artikel/rating_does_n ot_work/ has the detailed reasoning and background.
Regardless of what the folks at AOL and MS say, this isn't a self-rating system. It'll start out that way, no doubt, but these 'industry leaders' will soon find that if the system is used they'll have *enormous* content control over web sites.
Imagine: some vocal group of parents complain that a bisexual support site is 'pornographic'. Since the 'family values' folks at AOL/MS no doubt agree that bisexuality is sick, twisted, and un-American, they threaten that site with black-listing unless they change their rating to 'pornographic'. There may not be a whit of porn on the site, but the mere fact that so many people hate bisexuals would be enough to get the site 'reviewed' and threatened by these industry leaders. End result: one way or another the bisexuality site drops off the radar for just about every user who has the software. Or gets flooded with porn freaks looking for pics of Bisexual Babes(TM).
Another example: a particular forum with a penchant for criticizing AOL and/or MS (can't think of one off the top of my head...) always has a small number of posts that contain swearing. Why the fuck that would matter I wouldn't know, but The Committee (which incidentally has AOL and MS on the board) tells the site they have to rate themselves as containing 'adult content' or be blacklisted. Whoops, a site critical of members of The Committee also drops off the radar! Imagine that! Hey, don't complain, you sick little dickwads - they're just protecting 'family values'!
Yet another example: I used to run a personal site for friends that contained a number of different, disparate sections. One dealt entirely with bisexuality issues, another showcased the writing talent of a lady who liked to parody Xena, a third had a rather nifty Xena-site search engine, a fourth had two fully-transcribed pornographic novels ("Lauren Gisal"), yet another dealt entirely with jokes, etc. How exactly does one rate such a site? As porn because it has the two porn novels? That would effectively include every other section on the site unless I went to the trouble to separate them out. What a pain in the ass.
Oh, yeah, I can see that this rating system would be a *great* idea. If you're one of The Committee, that is.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but here is the esteemed Declan McCullagh's report on the subject. Deconstructing this 'filtering' is becoming so easy it's almost boring.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
I experimented with self-rating at my parody site of The Young and the Restless (daytime soaps). I made a self-rating system and, for a while, maintained ratings for each episode. (The stories themselves will be of no interest to anyone here who doesn't watch Y&R regularly, but the ratings system should be generally intelligible out of context.)
My ratings system is, itself, intended as subtle parody of the concept of ratings systems. The real problem with ratings systems is that the choice of what to rate is itself political. Unless you're committed to exposing in the ratings the inherent political tensions among various users, you're either going to provide no information or you'll serve one side or the other. Toward that end, I offered both "gay" and "intolerance" ratings; I personally don't like intolerance, but I understand it's fashionable in some camps. I offered both "irreverance" ratings and "evangelism" ratings. I abhor evangelism, but I guess some people are the reverse.
But the list of things people find to dislike in others could be endless, and the question becomes: how much burden can one place on the individual site to acknowledge things people might choose to dislike? Does the Bill Cosby show get labeled as "racial"? The open-minded among us would wish this were never an issue, but to some it is. I'm not advocating catering to the audience that thinks that's a useful rating, but I'm highlighting the obvious presence of that audience to point out that any ratings system immediately confronts the political.
And what of "Darwinism"? Do we just counter with a "Evolutionism" rating, requiring every show on earth to recognize that it confronts this issue and takes a side? What if one or the other side wants to simply call their category "Common Sense"? Who gets to pick the label names? The "Pro-Life"/"Pro-Choice" people have this problem, that the opposite sides label the opponent tactically, as in "Anti-Choice"/"Pro-Abortion". Even in this world-wide war (not yet referred to as World War III) going on now, both "sides" are claiming it's Good against Evil, but they each disagree on who's playing which role.
I've also found the issue of graphics to affect things. People ask me all the time if I run an adult site. Of course I do. It's intended to be read by adults! It doesn't have any pictures of nude people, of course, but I resent being told that the generic word "adult" has been co-opted for something as narrow as it has come to mean.
For my parody, there is also the issue of subtlety. This is an article that tries to treat the issue of politics even-handedly. Does that make this a political or an apolitical article? If I mentioned Darwinism in a derisive way, does that make it anti-Darwin? What if I only did so to make a humorous or ironic point and I'm really pro-Darwin? What if I write a story that takes a pro-violence or pro-drugs position to show the dangers of violence or drugs? How do I rate that? Ratings that are mere keywords, and not "relational expressions", capture none of this subtlety. Simple keywords ("use of") is not good enough. "comparison_of(darwin,evolution)" is different than "beats(darwin,evolution)" (or vice versa). Depiction of naked bodies having sex is different in educational contexts than in erotic contexts.
Depiction of nudity can also be essential in medical contexts. Must "medical" be a "rating" in order to enable this distinction? Once you do that, is "rating" much different than "search"? What is not a rating? Perhaps the key to rating is for Google to simply add a prompt to its search box saying "Type a rating:". Then the whole Internet will be suddenly already rated.
And, finally, as a writer, I note that any ratings system that is detailed enough to really be useful can spoil storylines. If the "ratable" part is too close to the end, then rating it can spoil the ending. Consider that I have a rating for "use of Atomic Devices" in my story; now how would rating Failsafe or Dr. Strangelove with this have affected the surprise of the endings? Or rating "use of single-person self-propelled vehicles" affect your appreciation of Citi--oh, never mind.
I think self-rating is time-consuming and probably pointless in that it won't satisfy any but a few. I have concluded that community ratings are perhaps more practical, but only if the set of categories isn't fixed or there is some way for politics to express itself. I don't think Slashdot quite has the notion right because it doesn't allow multiple points of view on the same article, but I applaud their experiment in community participation and I consider it much more right than most of the other systems out there. I hope to see (and perhaps myself do) more experiments in participation. The cyber world started out to be participatory. We shouldn't let it fall back to being just like going to the movies, full of pre-packaged content fitting into neat little categories, just because we're too lazy to offer alternatives.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
All the standard opt-in vs opt-out arguments apply, plus you have three hurdles to hop before it works. Specifically, sites must:
- add metadata elements (aka "tags")...
- in the correct syntax...
- and contain a recognized vocabulary...
This relative complexity renders the probablity for success very low. Besides, it is a system to exclude web sites which contradicts the concept of publishing on the web: to be found. Thus there is a disincentive for compliance.Also, you have the problem of self-evaluation which can be troubled by different interpretations by individuals or by malicious mis-classification. ( BTW: even professional catalogers tend to overlap only about 60% on the subject of a given resource. Quality and suitability are even more subjective and thus subject to variation. ) For accuracy, third party evaluation is the way to go, which introduces the problems with staffing and other human dependencies.
The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education ran a technically similar project called SAFARI to help disseminate material, which is what the web is about. If you make the good stuff easy to find then the crap is less troublesome. You can read a a description of the methods used.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
lets rate all those sites that have the damm x10 or flag popup windows.
If they are not paying, all they are doing is eating up bandwidth which, for pr0n sites, is really expensive since they pay a premium for pr0n bandwidth.
Actually, bandwidth is usually much cheaper for us, since we buy it in bulk, and we're a lot more competitive than the non-adult ISP's.
And, there actually IS a benefit from having non-credit card holding people come in. There is plenty of money to be made on a per-impression and per-click basis. And, higher traffic often boosts a site's listing at another page, garnering it even more traffic. So really, no. Any traffic is good traffic. Porn webmasters are not going to purposely turn away ANY traffic, thus, this ratings system will fall just as flat as other previous ones. The only thing that DOES work are those NetNanny-type programs.
Well, I assumed the theory is based on voluntary cooperation from the major search engines but yes, I am sure you could find ones that don't use the system.
This is great, because now websites can say, "Look, we're providing a rating for our site, so if your kid sees it, it's *your* fault." It will work just like the V chip that nobody uses. It's there, and can be used to block objectionable material, but everyone knows it's just a ploy to keep the government off the network's backs. I say implement it immediately so we can stop wasting lawmaker's time on it, and let them get back to real work!
-D
It is fairly easy to design a script to change your rating based on who is looking. joe user (who might be a kid) gets a general content rating, but everyone from a search engine, .gov, or other investigating domain gets a pron rating.
I think most /. readers can figgure out how to do this. Of course like most filtering systems it won't work perfectly, you will always give someone the wrong rating, but it will be done, you can count on it.
Ok, so we've rated movies. Big deal. Parents let their kids see R movies all the time, and what male teenager hasn't seen a pr0n flic at his friend's house?
Ok, so we've rated games. Big deal. Parents let their kids play M rated games all the time, and what male teenager hasn't downloaded a pr0n-type game at his own house?
Ok, so we're rating web sites. Big deal. Parents'll let their kids view M rate web sites all the time, and what male teenager won't view a pr0n site in his room?
Rating content does virtually noting because everyone know that the censors are arbitrary. However, one negative effect of rating is the censorship itself. Movies have to cut back content all the time to just squeeze on less severe rating.
In spite of that otherwise lack of an effect, principle still argues against rating. Rating is essentially a for of censorship, because it tells people what to think of a movie in one letter before they talk to someone who can give them an essay of description. Any kind of censorship is bad, because it is ignorance. Because something is censored in a movie, doesn't make it go away. And of all the absurd things that Americans censor for! Why is it that American culture is so obsessed with locking sex, a fundamental aspect of life, in the closet, while it revels in killing of other human beings, which isn't necessary at all! Censorship, in America at least, because of the culture, turns movies into perversions of real life.
But, like I said, it's not like anyone will really listen to these ratings.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Porn sites, like everyone else, would prefer getting only paying customers. Filtering out accidental enterigs would, actually, be good thing for them. Or at least all such sites save for some bottom-feeding desperate clue-lacking trap-a-thons.
Every time the tech world comes out with a new toy (e.g. the internet, T.V.), people who barely understand the technology themselves have an incredible desire to regulate it and control it.
The internet is the epitome of free speech; that's it's greatest quality. Anyone can say or show anything that they please. This is what free speech is all about: the expression of thoughts and ideas. I don't understand what is so wrong with this kind of ethos that parents and government officials who know approximately "how to turn on a computer" scream for regulation.
If we regulate the internet, we condemn it to oblivion. This amazing new world which has functioned completely fine by its own, without regulation, suddenly has recieved a surge of the technlogically incompetent. These people, whose internet skills roughly equate to knowing how to click on their AOL buttons, suddenly stumble across something they don't like. "Oh no! That kind of stuff is on the world wide internet world web thing! This is evil and terrible! I must find a way to take it off so that other people aren't exposed to this horrid filth!" Has anyone else noticed that the only people who complain are those who just started using "that web thing"?
Guess what? The internet is the way it is because it came there naturally. Enough people laugh at things on College Humor to allow that website to survive. Enough people look at porn to make it a profitable business. Enough people find Something Awful's Awful Link of the Day stupid enough to keep going every day. The internet isn't THEIR world; it's yours, it's ours, it's everyone's.
These people don't understand that the internet survived simply because it was an unlimited and unrestricted venue of the freedom of speech. They don't understand that voluntary ratings, governmental regulations, emailing with threats to sue, and any other measure won't work due to the decentralized structure of the internet. It won't work because they have no idea how the internet even truly functions. It won't work because they have no idea of the history of the internet, and how it came to be how it is. This is a Good Thing(TM).
When the internet becomes as heavily regulated as T.V., it will be the incarnation of the true evil in this world that keeps showing it's face over and over again: human beings telling other human beings exactly what they can and can't fucking do.
No comment.
Hey Johnnie, if you crack the PICS system on the PC you can get to see all this P0rn.
The security on the system should be calibrated so that by the time the kid can bypass the controls they are ready for it.
It would be kinda self defeating though since the geeky kids who break the controls probably don't have girlfriends.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
All ratings so far have been self-imposed. The MPAA rates movies, the tv studios rate their shows, and the recording firms decide which albums get the explicit lyrics labels. Otherwise, an exceptionally good censorship argument could be made to the SCOTUS.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Yes, this was in the NYT a week or so back as well.
I run the paper dart site and this sends shivers down my spine. My site contains no sin, nekkid women, or other dangers to innocence, yet its contents may be objectionable to some parents. I sure as heck ain't ever gonna 'voluntarily' rate it. Which probly means I'll stop reaching some or all off my intended audience if this catches on.
I want to give people the choice over what they want to see. It's all very well saying that we should not allow the government to censor free expression, but its another thing altogether to ram content down people's throats.
A self-regulated system, if people use it properly, is an excellent idea. I don't even mind being required to put ICRA tags in by law, if it goes that way. This way, I can deliver the content I want without restriction, and viewers get to choose if they want to see it or not, and parent get to choose if their kids should see it or not. No losers.
However, there's one danger. If sites use, or forced to use ICRA tags, then it makes it more attractive for governments to force users and/or ISPs to forcably block sites that display certain tags. Have a look at Australia: I'm sure they'd love for all these off-shore (eg, USA) sites to put in ICRA tags... it'll make the Censor's job that much easier.
Bob Corn-Revere was one of the speakers at the ICRA press event. He is the noted First Amendment lawyer who represented Playboy before the Supreme Court and helped establish the legal idea that tools -- like filters or like cable boxes that limit signal bleed -- available for voluntary use are a "less restrictive means" of protecting children from "harmful to minors" material than making the material illegal.
Bob particularly reminded the press and attendees that there is a tendency in Washington to think that if something is a good idea under some circumstances, it should be made mandatory -- like CIPA made filtering mandatory for schools & libraries taking certain types of federal funding.
ICRA and the people who support it as one tool parents may want to use -- are not asking Congress to make it mandatory. They ARE however, working with the Congressional "bully pulpit" available to them since Jennifer Dunn & others are supporting their efforts, labelling their own sites, and asking others to do the same. But that's a far cry from compelling speech via use of these labels -- which would, IMO, be unconstitutional.
On PICS -- ICRA *is* a labeling system that uses PICS. It isn't trying to be the only labeling system, and the icra.org site is rated using the old RSACi and SafeSurf labels as well as the new ICRA labels. (They demonstrated this at the launch event.) Of course IRCA wants everyone to use their sites, and if they aren't reasonably successful, they aren't going to be relevent. But getting a commitment from AOLTW, MSN & Yahoo seems like a strong start.
As always always always, these are only my opinions. I don't speak for ICRA or anyone else.
Liza
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
However, I can envision a technical system that could work. In order to be effective, the system would have to use a "white list" approach as opposed to a blacklist. This would mean that all content not explicitly approved would be blocked. Under such a system, a web publisher would submit pages to a reviewing authority. If the reviewing authority decides that the page in question meets their criteria, they sign it with their public key and send it back to the publisher. Parents could then download the public keys of reviewers that they trust and place them on their keyring. The browser would only display pages that have a valid signature from one of the keys in their keyring.
A similar approach could be done site-wide via SSL. In order to get a "kid-friendly" SSL certificate from the certifying authority, the publisher would have to sign a legally-binding contract to conform to the CA's content restrictions. The site would also need to be periodically audited to ensure compliance. Again, the browser would have to refuse to connect to a SSL site that does not have a kid-friendly certificate from a CA they trust. Some arrangement would have to be made to allow for multiple CA's to sign a given site's certificate, so that the webmaster isn't locked in to using only one CA
Both of these approaches allow for parents to chose a CA that matches their views: rabid fundamentalists could use only Pat Robertson / Jerry Fallwell approved CA's, while more openminded folks could use ones that subscribe to more tolerant ideologies.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Iodized Salt may sting when placed in eyes!
If we don't put warning labels on these dangerous, horrible devices, some child, or even adult, might find out the hard way. Can we really afford to let people learn on their own?? We must educate them about the dangers of salt, or abandon this salt-shaker technology altogether! Think of the children!
Congress should make a LAW! We must protect the public from itself at all costs! They must never have to deal with the intense pain of throwing a dash of salt in their eyes because nobody told them not to!
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Here's the way I imagine it working in the future: Jane User goes to Google, enters her search query, checks either "Search Rated Sites Only" and "Search ALL Sites", and clicks "Submit".
Jane might do this because ratings allow her to "preview" the content before looking and select a site which most closely fits her desires. This is as true for pornography as any other business; if Jane is looking for hardcore gangbang action, she'll want to pick a site which rates itself as such. If she just wants a little softcore porn or even literary erotica, ratings will help her choose much more quickly than a list of unrated sites.
If you're a pornographer, it makes sense for you to rate correctly. You get more business and make more money because you more accurately convey your content. The last thing you want are people coming to your site who will chew up bandwidth but won't (or can't) pay.
Of course, Jane won't always want to search only rated sites, because there's great sites out there which will choose not to rate at all. So there will be a mix. When people want specific information from trusted sources quickly they will search rated sites; when they want to hunt a little deeper for their data, they'll search unrated sites as well.
And I thought this was going to finally be the rating system that makes sense. If you really want a totally voluntary system, you should just add a tag:
<rated=E>I don't like you,</rated=E><rated=MA> you pig$*$# SOB.. </rated=MA>
Then the browsers could be set to not show any page with content worse than a certain rating, or they could just blank out those portions of the text above the rating. A nice little system that wouldn't require any special software other than a web browser that supports it.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
By having voluntary rating systems, this is not technically censorship, its moreso an industry standard. While these standards can be shitty, it is obviously a feature that a majority of consumers in the US want. This in no way restricts people from saying want they want, it just categorizes the content of it. Of course, a responsible adult can choose to ignore these rating systems.
It is certainly a slippery slope, but I'd rather see this done in the private sector, rather than have some gumbment agency rating things..
Unless you are the original poster, I don't think you know the intent of how he may be framing the sentence. (RE: He's framing this within a modified version of the phrase "What part of no don't you understand?" (but could've also used the anti-rape slogan, "No means no" to build upon))
To prove this is not a troll, you may want to read some Supreme Court cases that deal with the first amendment. For instance, try some of the Hugo Black quotes, "...mandating "no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press," meant no law, "without any ifs, buts, or whereases" ( Beauharnais v. Illinois, 1952).
I have no idea what the original poster meant, but I doubt you do either. To most legal scholars, quoting "Congress shall make no law..." immediately connotes Hugo Black and his stand on the first amendment.
One thing I think this would be *really* useful for would be if we could wedge privacy policies into it.
I don't know about you, but I am damned sick and tired of having to search for the bloody thing on every site I visit, and then read through pages and pages of fine-point type, trying to figure out just what the heck they're saying. Image if instead, you could bring up a dialog on your browser saying that, by default, I'm willing to let a website know my IP address and browser type. If a website wants more than that when I try to load a page, they send back instead a page that lists (in some standard format) exactly what they want. I can then accept it (setting exceptions in my browser for those particular bits of info at that particular website), or I can surf elsewhere.
I cannot count the number of hours I have spend slogging through these things. Standardizing and automating these things would be a much greater service to the web than trying to decide of Slashdot should be PG or NC-17 :-)
~kThe LDS church does not take any kind of action against someone who goes to see an 'R' rated movie, they just strongly recommend against it. Why? The idea is that a drip of poison at a time won't kill you all at once, but over time? How can a person's mind etc. not be poisoned bit by bit by the crap contained in the majority of (but not all!!) 'R' rated movies, that substitute large amounts of content that is de-sensitizing, degrading, hate-filled, etc. for things like plot and character development, etc.
By the time you get to 99% of the NC-17 films (aka porn), there is usually no plot to speak of, and only the sexual degradation of women on the screen. Can anyone seriously argue that a person whose life is filled with porn considers women, etc. with the same amount of respect as someone who makes an active choice not to introduce those poisons into his/her head?
Kinda makes sense for a church that names itself after Jesus Christ -- the real name of the 'Mormon' church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- to tell it's members to oppose such things -- by essentially not financing them with movie and video rental $, don't you think?
What I am not sure of is that I want the biggest companies acting as pitch men on the issue, because I for one do not trust the big companies to play fair one bit. Does anyone really think that the MPAA and the RIAA are interested in selling quality entertainment, as opposed to controlling the playing field? Remember, two of the largest corporate interests behind both the MPAA and the RIAA are AOL Time Warner and Disney... So why should I trust them to play fair with the administration or even development of a rating system, if they do not control my content directly?
My other issues are whether or not the blacklist is open for public review and change, and finally whether a website can offer more than one type of content under a given domain name. Which is why up to this point I oppose most sorts of filtering software is the lock-in -- I have to buy into using a proprietary, non-open list maintained by a corporate interest.
Secondarily, the so-called "white list" versions of blocking software have a similar problem -- someone has to rate the site to get on the list -- with all of the issues of list distribution or centralization, etc.
You know what works best for me? and doesn't require any new software or black/white list to work? Searching via Google with their 'safe" filters on, because 99% of the porn sites out there cross refer, and so when a new domain name gets a lot of hits from the known porn referrers, Google's algorithm correctly identifies the new site as, you guessed it -- another porn site. Easy, huh? Now all I have to do is get Google's attention for my own site....
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I'm not criticizing the church's recommendation to its people that they avoid movies that contain these "poisonous" elements. I called the chuch wrong because of their faith in MPAA: that R-rated movies really must have the "poisons" that you mentioned and that the G-rated movies do not. The Mormons are being far too trusting. (And IMHO, blatantly misplaced trust is a form of irresponsibility.) Instead of making recommendations to their people based on MPAA ratings, they should be making them based on LDS ratings, where someone who understands LDS values actually watches the movies and makes a judgement call. This isn't the same thing, unless the MPAA ratings board happens to be filled with Mormons.
For example.. well, I don't know if LDA is anti-biology or just anti-degradation, but for the sake of the argument, I'll hypothesize they're just anti-degradation. Let's say a movie happens to show a booby, but there's no hint degradation involved. Heck, let's hypothesize a movie that has completely naked people with full frontal nudity, but in a plot that is otherwise completely free of anything degrading, desensitizing, or hateful. (A movie that tells a story from "The Book of Genesis" might very conceivably be like that, do you agree?) The movie would probably get an R. Likewise, Disney could easily, if they wish, inject some hidden racist hatred (or, according to certain urban legends, phallus symbols, etc) that isn't immediately apparent to MPAA ratings board (or that the board would choose to ignore in exchange for some sort of compensation), and get a G.
That's why the LDS church is wrong. I can't make good arguments against their faith in God, but anyone can trivially blow away their faith in Man.
And their mistake is the same mistake everyone's making: that it's even possible to have a centralized rating authority that makes sense for everyone. It only works if the population is homogenious. And yet, any government regulation will necessarily result in centralization of some kind. It always does.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The above article got "Funny=2, Overrated=1, Total=3." I'm well above the karma cap, so I don't get a karma boost. But users above the cap used to lose karma for any negative points on a post, even when the same post had more positive than negative moderations. That's been fixed. Thanks.
I would rather any of my eight children watched fuck movies and were influenced by them, then the usual USian violent TV trash and/or inane sitcoms and were influenced by THEM.
I would prefer no ratings at all. A description perhaps, rather like you see on the backs of books, but not a rating. I'm happy to live in a country where "Tropic of Cancer" can be found on a low-lying shelf.
Ratings that are purely informational are alright, but too much power is amassed by the ratings body for my tastes, and these things have a way of becoming censorious. (e.g. many movie theater chains AND leasors will not permit unrated or NC17 movies to be shown, regardless of the opinions of the theater management or the movie-going public)
Looking at the history of movie ratings, comic ratings, etc. I don't see that any good could come of this no matter who implements it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.