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