labelling, filtering and censorship

[David Goldstein <goldstein_david@yahoo.com.au>]

Hi all

A few excerpts from stories I came across clearing out old emails on
labelling, filtering and censorship. The Economist story is currently
freely available now, but their freely available stories are only
normally freely available for a short time.

cheers
David

Stop signs on the web 
Jan 11th 2001 | SAN FRANCISCO
>From The Economist print edition 

The Internet was supposed to be all about freedom. That is why
governments want to regulate it. It is far from certain whether
freedom, or government control, will win the day

IN 1967 Roy Bates, a retired British army major, occupied an island
fortress six miles off the English coast and declared it a sovereign
nation. He was never sure what to do with his Principality of
Sealand. Now, however, the fortress may have found its calling. For
several months, a firm called HavenCo has been operating a data
centre there. Anyone who wants to keep a website or other data out of
the reach of national governments can rent space on the servers that
hum in one of the concrete pillars. 


http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=471742

A new way of censorship?

During a recent break from the office I found time to catch up on
some reading and was amazed to find myself extensively quoted in a
hard-back on obscenity. 
How did a once respectable (boring even?), local government officer
rise to such notoriety?

It all started when I was appointed to set up the Internet Watch
Foundation in 1996. As well as the prime brief to develop a hotline
and a 'notice and take down' procedure for criminal content, I was
given the secondary goal of encouraging the rating and filtering of
content. The latter referred to a specific system produced earlier
that year by the American Recreational Software Advisory Council,
called the RSACi system.

I soon found that I had stumbled across an approach to content
description that is responsive to the values of people from different
cultures and functions. The more we studied this system, the more it
appeared to offer the chance of a fundamentally different approach to
censorship of the traditional media. One more appropriate to the
emancipated democracies of the modern world. Here was an opportunity
not to be missed. 

The RSACi system and its derivatives, based on the Platform for
Internet Content Selection (PICS) protocol from the World Wide Web
Consortium, overcomes most of the main problems suffered by content
blocking systems. Their essential features are a coded label created
by the content provider and held in the headers of their site and a
decoder and filter which reads the codes and applies the user's
values, in the browser on their own PC.


http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwr/results.asp?sid=27&page=1&aid=1071&ft=&prel=current&auth=&ino=165

webwasher.com Participates in E.U. Internet Action Plan
New 'Safe Surfing Project' Aims for Filtering System Acceptable
Across EU

Paderborn, Germany and New York, NY--January 11, 2001- webwasher.com
AG, a leading developer of Internet filtering software backed by
German electronics giant Siemens, today announced it will participate
in the "World Wide Web Safe Surfing Project" (3W3S) of the European
Union. The new project - a part of the European Union's Action Plan
on promoting safer use of the Internet - aims to develop a
sophisticated and widely accepted Internet filtering system that will
block unwanted content from being downloaded over the Internet. As
one of six project partners, webwasher.com AG will provide its
expertise on efficient filtering technology. The Internet filter and
assistant WebWasher®, already used by more than 3.5 million
worldwide, will serve as a broad and competitive user platform for
the new cross-cultural filtering system. The project, which is
co-funded by the EU, began January 1, 2001.

http://webwasher.de/en/news/eu_plan.htm

SOLICITING YOUR INPUT

The National Research Council's Committee on Tools and Strategies for
Protecting Kids from Pornography and Their Applicability to Other
Inappropriate Internet Content seeks your input. We would appreciate
your answers to the following questions, and any comments you have
about our task (as described on our home page). Your responses are
entirely voluntary.

 http://www4.nationalacademies.org/deps/cstbitwsur2.nsf/datainput


=====
David Goldstein

2/3 Belmont Ave, Glen Iris, 3146
email: Goldstein_David@yahoo.com.au
phone: +61 3 9885 0601 (h)
       +61 418 228 605 (mobile)

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