Re: Content filtering

Steve George (stevegei-way.net.uk)
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 16:26:13 +0100

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Hi,

Having read the short RFC three criticism come to mind:

1) Breaking an existing system
It seems to me that the precedent is that ports are for protocols not content. Personally while I can see how the suggested system would make things easier I don't think there is sufficent weight to break the precedent. There seems little engineering merit to this when there are other ways of effecting the same solution without breaking the precedent, one example would be content rating. Although ports are not an endangered resource as such they are finite and perssonally I think the added complexity would outweigh the gain.

2) Too simple and consensual
The suggested systems primary purpose is to filter content of a sexual nature. The system itself seems so straightforward that any enterprising person could potentially avoid it. How long before someone mapped the content to an 'allowed' port through a proxy and provided this as a proxy service much like anonymizer.com - it's just too simple to be effective.

3) Too Middleclass-centric
I stumbled here a few times trying 'moralistic-centric' but anyway the underlying thing is that this RFC serves to only combat one particular type of content and ignores content which others might find offensive. It seems we are developing a fetish (excuse the pun) about sexual content and ignoring the total problem. This doesn't solve the total problem of content, isn't particularly scalable to other types of content and is driver by the provider not the consumer/client.

Just an opinion

Steve

On Wed, Sep 23, 1998 at 11:13:39AM -0800, Garbrick, Randy wrote:
> If you have an interest in the problem of filtering explicit content on
> the web, please check out this internet draft. It proposes using
> designated ports other than port 80 to provide explicit content, thereby
> making filtering a much simpler problem. Obviously, this would not
> provide a complete solution, it would only add an additional inexpensive
> tool to help with the problem.
>
>
> http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-garbrick-shtp-00.txt
>

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