From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 11:25:50 +0800
To: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Censorware Summit Take II, from The Netly News
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970716140549.18879C-100000@well.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970718183128.006f575c@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 10:58 AM 7/17/97 +0000, Paul Bradley wrote:
>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.

It's an obvious extension to CookieCutter.  It won't get you around
PICS systems that are configured to block unrated pages, or around
censorware systems that filter out naughty words, but it's still easy.

>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.

On the other hand, I predict censorware implementations that require
a specific proxy system (or prevents you from changing proxies),
you can't just point to your own decensoring proxy, and you can't
get to systems blocked by proxy.singapore.gov or imprimis.vatican.org
or be.nice.net or whomever your parent or in-loco-parentis is using.




#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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