Nice

[andrewducker]

Of all the stupid ideas to finish out the year with, the British government is considering age ratings for websites. I really do hope that this is the random thought of one person, rather than something serious.

Does anyone actually need me to explain why this is impossible?  Or ridiculously stupid?  Or can I take it as read?

Edit: I have nothing against self-certification. ICRA metadata is absolutely fine by me. It's just clear that it shouldn't be mandatory. Now, if it was _assumed_ by a "kid browser" that all sites were purveyors of filth, unless they self-certified as being porn-free/violence-free/etc. then I could live with that, because adults wouldn't surf with filters on. That's the only technical solution I can think of that has a hope in hell of working.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

You can take it as read. It's definitely silly season.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

nah, cos they'll make it that you have the chip and pin section of your compulsory ident card inserted at all times when you're browsing, so they'll know how old you are, and what you're looking at ...

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

Andy The Accuracy Tortoise has about as much knowledge of computing as I have of Kazakh feminist literature. Deffo silly season, but hey, there's a Daily Mail to fill!

[matgb]

Aye. Andy "ye gods look at those eyes" Burnham. Apparently, some people actually think he's attractive. No, I don't get it either.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

It is perfect Keynesian economics... everyone will be employed rating everyone else's LJ posts, MySpace pages etc.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

No, it's clearly unworkable.

I remember the last time this was dragged up in the US. We got the Communications Decency Act, the PICS labelling scheme, and the RSACi rating vocabulary. I can't speak for the CDA, but the latter two are now dead, dead, dead.

PICS used to be supported in earlier versions of IE, but it's considered obsolete. Virtually noone puts PICS labels on their sites (virtually noone ever did), and the technology itself was left in the dust of the Semantic Web (there's a technical side issue that the approach the SW eventually took made it very difficult to achieve the same expressivity as PICS, but that's a side issue).

RSAC no longer exists, having been rolled into ICRA. They still publish a vocabulary, but it's not clear whether it is used. On the plus side, it was a relatively fine-grained vocabulary that could be used to rate a site on multiple criteria (rather than the blunt instrument of the BBFC age ratings).

However, although PICS is dead, the W3C are working on a replacement (POWDER) that is compatible with the rest of the SW. It's been in development for more than a year so far, and hasn't got beyond a working draft, which isn't a particularly good sign, however (long-running working groups have a tendency to produce over-elaborate specifications that are widely implemented).

The question of how or why one should trust self-ratings, or how third party rating can be made to scale are still left as an exercise for the reader.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

Andy Burnham again. Would he even recognise a sensible and implementable policy if he saw one? So far he's argued in favour of copyright extensions (completely ignoring the findings of the Gowers review) and was the minister in charge of forcing the Identity Cards bill through parliament. Not an encouraging track record.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I have nothing against self-certification

I disagree. Although it was put forward as the solution before, I don't think that self-rating is an adequate solution because it introduces subjective bias (my rating of my own site may differ from your rating of my site), and because there's no effective guard against wilful misrepresentation.

I'm slightly reluctant to admit it, but Cory had a point in his Metacrap article^*. The HTML meta tag is useless and irrelevant from a search and information retrieval perspective, because many site owners lie about the contents of their sites (by writing misleading metadata) in order to get more hits from search engines. A key component of the success of Google is that they've ignored metadata, in effect considering only what people actually do, rather than what they say they do.

* He's reacting to some of the early hype about the Semantic Web, but throws the baby out with the bathwater. The SW vision from the Tim, Jim and Ora article in Scientific American is unrealistic, but most SW practitioners (and some of its critics) agree that machine-readable metadata is useful in well-defined communities for well-defined tasks

[matgb]

I agree with this. Never trust what users say they do, or what site creators say it is, both are likely wrong, and they may actually be trying to be 100% honest.

[andrewducker]

Hmm. I think that porn websites (for instance) are generally very happy to say "We're porn!", and that children's websites would (if there was a whitelist of them) be very happy to put themselves on said whitelist.

It wouldn't be perfect - but I don't think any system needs to be _perfect_.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

A poll carried out by the children's charity in October suggested three out of four children had been disturbed by images they had seen on the internet.

I love this. How many things did you see as a child that disturbed you without ever going near the internet?

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

The thing with politicians is I can never tell if they're being ignorant or that they're perfectly aware of the failings of their ideas but put them in manifestos anyway as a vote winner.

1. Make up a stupid yet popular law that can't possible work.
2. Get elected on back of idea.
3. Now they have to do something, so make up some silly law that has barely anything to do with the original idea/promise.

Perhaps there should be ???? and Profit! steps in there also.

Sadly I think they're both ignorant *and* aware the idea is rubbish and only useable as a vote winner. Occam's Razor sort of applies.

[blearyboy.livejournal.com]

'I Am Under 18' Button Clicked For First Time In History Of Internet

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/i_am_under_18_button

[andrewducker]

This stuff would be imposed by parents...

[blearyboy.livejournal.com]

"You've been very naughty! Go to rotten.com!"

[martling.livejournal.com]

Except it wouldn't, because the kids know far more about computers than the parents.

[andrewducker]

A factoid that is becoming increasingly less accurate as the generation of people who grew up with the PC/internet start having kids...

[martling.livejournal.com]

Yes, very good point. I wonder how that will play out.

[jccw.livejournal.com]

I don't know, the ID card thing is still way stupider than this.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

http://notnews.today.com/2008/12/27/culture-secretary-to-rate-all-websites/