Surfwatch and other Internet ratings systems

[Howard White]

riddle at is.rice.edu wrote:
>
>My own two cents: I suspect that rating systems such as Surfwatch
>(or non-proprietary, multiple-rating alternatives such as PICS) may
>prove to be *fairly* effective at screening out the most obvious
>sources of objectionable material.  However, I think they face some
>fundamental problems:
>
>   -- They do not address one-to-one communications such as e-mail.
>      (What happens when little Johnny in Cleveland starts trading
>      dirty stories or pictures with little Janie in Vancouver?)

The fundamental problem is that this kind of content has been communicated
since the beginning of human civilivation, by means to slow and expensive
(paper) or to fleeting and undocumentable (verbal) to worry our heads
about. Now, instantaneous and documentable means is available for FREE and
we're scared. We can only hope that evolution took care of any problems
this new medium of communications might cause in our modern societies a
while back (100,000 years or so), because it's truely impossible for humans
to stop behaving like humans.

>   -- They may prove easy to circumvent for bright youngsters who
>      figure out how to download their own software, access unfiltered
>      public clients, etc.

Networked minds automatically treat censorship as damage and route around it.

>
>   -- Most worrisome to me: if they *are* effective, expect the same
>      technology to be used by repressive governments to control what
>      information can be accessed by adults as well as children.

A good test case is in the works:

Subjects of the experiment - one billion humans
Censorship solution providers - the best vendors of the Unitied States & Europe
The client - the Government of the People's Republic of China

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Howard White, PC Tech Coor., Northeastern University
       <a href=http://155.33.211.90/>The Cyberspace Identity Portal</a>