[8353] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: New Internet Draft on protecting children AND free speech
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Mon Jun 5 15:33:55 1995
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 15:23:02 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: michael@junction.net
From: Michael Dillon <michael@junction.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
On Mon, 5 Jun 1995, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
> suggest that the best place for followup discussions is probably the
> rating@junction.net mailing list, since this is more or less its
> intended purpose.
Since I'm not sure if the "rating" list has been announced on www-talk,
it was started with a two-fold purpose. One was to devise a system of
ratings for the content of URL's that could be used by browsers to
make a decision on whether or not to retrieve the document. This was
intended to be more flexible and extensible than movie rating systems.
The second purpose was to design a protocol (using RADIUS as a base) to
allow browsers to have secure communication with a ratings server which
would issue a rating for a URL to let the browser know whether or not it
was suitable for retrieval. RADIUS is currently at the IETF draft stage
(4th draft) and the specification document is available at
ftp.livingston.com in /pub/radius
> Borenstein, entitled, "KidCode: Naming Conventions for Protecting
> Children on the World Wide Web and Elsewhere on the Internet Without
> Censorship".
> We look forward to any and all constructive comments. -- Nathaniel
Perhaps KidCode is suitable as a means to meet your narrow goals of allowing
WWW publishers to publish erotica and other materials in a controlled
fashion, but I think it suffers from a fundamental "real world" constraint.
It requires that a lot of work be done at the server. Server operators
must know about the Kidcode system, set up the ratings and/or seek out
ratings authorities to be rated.
It seems to me that a system of rated URL's could be developped a lot
quicker if we put all the work requirements at the point were there is an
incentive to have these ratings. Schools want filtered access to the WWW.
Parents want filtered access to the WWW. Church groups want filtered
access to the WWW. These groups are the ones who are motivated to put in
the effort and/or spend the money. Let's give them some guidance on how
they can go about it.
What I propose is that ratings be served up by special purpose "rating"
servers. These servers can be operated and/or financed by the
above-mentioned groups. It will require effort on their part to preview
and screen URL's prior to rating them but I think they are motivated to
do this effort and I think that pre-screened URL's are precisely what
parents, teachers and church authorities want to have.
Obviously, browsers will have to be modified, but this is not a major
task since there are not many browsers in existence yet and they are
continually under development. If it were as simple as having a modified
browser query a "rating" server for a yes/no decision on a URL, it would
be implemented today. However, there needs to be a more complex (but not
complicated) system for rating URL's. And it is necessary for the
transaction between the browser and "rating" server to be secure.
Parents would not be happy to find that a college student has managed to
set up a rating server to spoof an official one, and it is only a matter
of time before students at the high-school level learn about
packet-sniffing and spoofing techniques. However, there is already a
secure authentication proposal at the Internet draft stage (RADIUS) that
could be modified to allow browsers to authenticate their conversation
with "ratings" servers.
The problem we are trying to solve with rating servers is of larger scope
than the problem you have discussed in the KidCode proposal. Even if we
cannot find a way to merge both proposals into one, we should at least
agree on a common system of ratings. It is entirely possible that someday
a Web spider will crawl around collecting URL's whose KidCode appears to
meet a certain standard and present thos URL's to the screening committee
of a rating server.
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-549-1036
Network Operations Fax: +1-604-542-4130
Okanagan Internet Junction Internet: michael@junction.net
http://www.junction.net - The Okanagan's 1st full-service Internet provider
