Re: Last Call: <draft-nottingham-safe-hint-05.txt> (The "safe" HTTP Preference) to Proposed Standard

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Hi Yoav,
At 12:49 24-10-2014, Yoav Nir wrote:
Stephen Farrell has made some interesting points about what "safe"? might mean in other cultures. I think the failure is much closer to home, so let's assume for the sake of argument that everyone affected is mainstream American (although neither Stephen nor I are Americans). So obviously anyone would consider porn to be "unsafe"?, because we don't want the children to see it and we don't want it at work. A rabbit teaching the alphabet to kids OTOH is "safe" ([1]). But those are the easy types of content. What about political content? What about political content that is non-mainstream? Even inflammatory? Is it safe? For whom? A signal is useless if there is no agreed-upon semantic to it. Yet the draft punts on attaching such a semantic.

I think that Stephen and you raised good points. I was testing some stuff recently and I noticed that Google did not serve the same content. There are other sites which do not allow me to view some content because of my location. In the first case it is for regulatory reasons whereas in the second case it is for commercial reasons. When it comes to porn it is viewed in a country as a matter of free speech (see Free Speech Coalition). The good part about Mark's proposal is that it is closer to the user. Obviously, it is far from perfect (re. safe hint).

What about political content which is deemed illegal? Some governments might block the content. Some governments use other means to tackle that. Would the IETF standardize that? There have been proposals about interception; they did not go far.

Section 3 mentions YouTube. That is actually a perfect example of what I mean. Sites like YouTube, deviantArt, Flickr, and Wattpad, even Wikipedia provide user-generated content.How are they to decide what is and isn't "safe"?? They have several choices:

Some of the sites mentioned above monetize user-generated content. There is a commercial incentive for them to figure out the semantics of "safe". I doubt that Wikipedia would die anytime soon (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative ).

The question I would ask is whether Mark's proposal puts the user at risk. I don't see an increase in risk. The proposal does not attempt to touch encryption stuff. It might help to reduce the pressure to standardize state interception services.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy





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