Censorware Summit Take II, from The Netly News

***********

http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1173,00.html

The Netly News (http://netlynews.com)
July 16, 1997

At The Censorware Summit
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)

     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.

     This was the thrust of today's White House
censorware summit, where President Clinton sat down
with high tech firms and non-profit groups in a
private meeting to talk about pressuring the Net
community to make cyberspace childsafe through labels.
"We need to encourage every Internet site, whether or
not it has material harmful to minors, to rate its
contents," Clinton said after the meeting. Vice
President Gore was there, too, giving a quick
demonstration of how labeling works.

     Spooked by the threat of a revised Communications
Decency Act, high tech firms are seriously backing
labels for the first time. Joining Clinton in coercing
Internet users and businesses to label all their web
pages were Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos. "I threw a
gauntlet to other search engines in today's meeting
saying that collectively we should require a rating
before we index pages," Robert Davis, the president of
Lycos, told me. Translation: if you don't play ball,
and label your site, search engines will ignore you.

     As will future users of Microsoft's Internet
Explorer browser. The next version of IE will default
to displaying only properly labeled web pages,
according to Ken Wasch, the president of the Software
Publishers Association. Since many users won't turn
off that feature to reach unrated sites, many large
web sites now are facing hefty pressure to self-label.

     Other high tech firms rushed to join the
presidential limelight. Netscape promised to join
Microsoft and include label-reading software in the
next version of its browser. America Online's Steve
Case thanked Clinton for "backing industry's efforts
to make cyberspace a safer place." IBM announced a
$100,000 grant to RSACi, a PICS-based rating standard
originally designed for video games but adapted for
the Web. The industry giant also pledges to
incorporate RSACi into future products.

[...]

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
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

>      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"

On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Paul Bradley wrote:

> 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.

You mean like the WebTv boxes that run Netscape 1.x? :)  Hehehehe...  The
best thing for us to do is simply force a "Fuck You" rating on all our
pages - voluntarily rate it for sex content, foul language,
beastiality, anarchy, drug/bomb recipies, or whatever - but make the page
very useful to force people to come to the page anyway.  Easy way to take
these ratings out at the knees.


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