From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 19:14:29 +0800
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: Re: Censorware Summit Take II, from The Netly News
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970716140549.18879C-100000@well.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970717104711.2219A-100000@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




>      If you host a web page or publish online, be
> warned: soon your site might become invisible. Search
> engines won't index it and web browsers won't show it.
> Unless, that is, you agree to attach special labels to
> your web pages identifying how violent, sexually
> explicit, or inappropriate for kids your site is.

As I remember these systems such as PICS do not index back onto the PICS 
HQ server to find your rating, but just check HTML tags in your page. 
Also, of course, the "PICS off" part of the options will be passworded to 
prevent kids from retrieving unrated/high rated pages, so we need to find 
a way around this.

Now presumably Congress will pass a law mandating correct rating of pages, 
but we could set up a non-US site which acted as a proxy, a bit like the 
anonymizer, and when it was requested it would retrieve a page, strip 
of all current tags, and replace them with new "no violence, no sex 
etc.." tags. Clearly however this would be a *very* high bandwidth 
application, but it`s just a thought. 

To kill the bandwidth problem, maybe someone could write a local HTML 
anti-PICS proxy, so, one would load up the web browser, point it at 
http://localhost which would bring up a simple page with a box for the 
URL to retrieve, the local proxy would then use HTTP to get the page, 
strip of all existing PICS tags, insert new "no sex, no violence etc..." 
tags, and forward the page on to the browser.

However, I find it unlikely many censorous parents would have the 
foresight to ensure the kids login couldn`t install other s/w such as an 
old browser which doesn`t support PICS and would display the pages 
anyway, so it looks like the whole discussion may lead nowhere, apart 
from maybe the advantage of the new browsers other features being 
preserved in the proxy route.


        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"